Then & NowPelt and road: how trade with China was smoothed with furs from British Columbia

Vancouver has been a popular emi­grant destination for Hong Kong Chinese for decades, and migration to Canada’s west coast accelerated in the 1980s and ’90s as the territory’s 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty loomed. Many Hong Kong residents scrambled to obtain a foreign passport, then decamped for home almost as soon as their “back-pocket insurance policy” had been issued.

The large-scale influx into Canada – and Vancouver, in particular – was not without teething problems; to some wits, the scenic British Columbia city became known as Van Kong, or Hong-couver, due to its size­able Hong Kong Chinese migrant population.

But how many of Hong Kong’s passport-bearing “Canadians” know that their scenic, rule-of-law respecting, Anglosphere bolt-­hole, safely situated on the other side of the Pacific, became a British territory in the first place as a direct result of burgeoning 18th-century trade links with China? And the particular commodity sourced from there? Sea otter pelts.

A key problem for traders attempting to establish commercial links with China was finding something Chinese consumers actually wanted, and could afford to purchase in sufficient quantities to make their importation economically viable.

In addition, trade goods had to be something China was not in a position – either through lack of natural resources, an inappropriate primary production climate, or want of technology – to manufacture domestically.