Canada prides itself on its multicultural population, but, as a remarkable collection of photographs which goes on display today in The Rotunda, Exchange Square, makes clear, there was a time when things were very different.
Beyond Golden Mountain, A Photographic Journey in Chinese-Canadian History, includes 100 photographs of the earliest Chinese immigrants to Canada, and tells, in pictures and words, the inspiring and sometimes uncomfortable tale of how they got there, and what happened to them afterwards.
The Canadian-Chinese community has deeper roots than many of other immigrant communities. The first big group to arrive came on a wooden side-wheeled steamer from San Francisco in 1858.
Many of the 500 Chinese on board had come from southern China several years before, having heard rumours about the Californian Gold Rush. There is even evidence that there was an earlier group of 50 artisans, hired by Captain John Meares, to help build up a trade in sea otter skins back in 1722.
These photographs celebrate the lives of the 1858 group and those who followed them, working as they did further south as miners, railway builders and servants. There are images of wiry, resigned labourers aboard ship, waiting to arrive, and of others toiling to build homes in the middle of nowhere.
Life was hard, and, when the railways were finished and there was no more work, non-Chinese public opinion turned, sometimes violently, against the Chinese population.
But it grew, all the same, despite racist immigration taxes and laws designed to limit the community as much as possible. Those who remained set up shops, restaurants, laundries and built small communities in the bigger towns. The pride of those early settlers is clear in the formal portraits of marriage groups and shopfronts of the time.