New Westminster Historic Chinese Cemetery

The site of the New Westminster Historic Chinese Cemetery is located within an area bounded by present day Eighth and Tenth Avenues, east of Eighth Street in New Westminster, British Columbia. The site is now underneath and encompassed by a portion of New Westminster Secondary School at 835 Eighth Street, a lawn, parts of a grass recreational field and an asphalt parking lot.

The cemetery at New Westminster has historical, cultural, social, scientific and spiritual significance as an important example of a large Chinese Canadian cemetery that represents a once-significant Chinese presence in the city, now built over and hidden beneath a portion of New Westminster Secondary School.

Known by various names including New Westminster Public Cemetery, Douglas Road Cemetery and Potter's Field, the cemetery is significant for its representation of the significant Chinese Canadian presence in the founding years of the city, until about 1920. This is represented in part by New Westminster's Chinatown, a booming center for Chinese Canadian merchants equipping workers in key industries such as mining, railroad construction, logging and fish processing. New Westminster itself was important to the rest of the province, as the provincial capital (briefly), and as the second port of immigration after Victoria.

The New Westminster Chinese cemetery illustrates the historical practices of segregating Chinese Canadian and other burials. Originally it was part of a city burial ground that served all of New Westminster's citizens - with various religious denominations separated within it - but by 1870 the social structure of the place began to change. The swampiness of the ground compelled the Anglican church and more prosperous Euro-Canadians to relocate to the new Fraserview cemetery in Sapperton, leaving the Douglas Road location to be used by First Nations, Chinese, Japanese and Indo Canadians, the poor, prisoners and the mentally ill.

The site is symbolic of the erasure of the Chinese Canadian presence in New Westminster and across the province. In the 1930s, Douglas Memorial Park was created on the site in recognition of early European pioneers exclusively. Chinese, Japanese and South Asian Canadian grave markers were removed and sometimes used as construction materials. In the 1950s, construction of New Westminster Secondary School began, making this site a memorial to the discriminatory and racist values of the time.

At the time of the creation of Douglas Memorial Park, Chinese graves had already been exhumed and bodies prepared and shipped to China, in keeping with the spiritual values and traditional burial practices of Chinese culture. Businesses in New Westminster's Chinatown were often responsible for the exhumation, cleaning and shipping of these human remains to China.

Scientific and archaeological values are high at this cemetery, because investigations using electromagnetic mapping and ground penetrating radar profiling have suggested locations of possible gravesites beneath the surface.

The Historic Chinese Cemetery site is a reminder of the significant and vital Chinatown that once existed in New Westminster, which has similarly disappeared. It also provides an accessible site for the commemoration of a painful history which should not be forgotten.

Source: Province of British Columbia, Heritage Branch

Not applicable.