Some 30–40 men were employed as shipwrights at Nootka Sound in what is now British Columbia, to build the first European-type vessel in the Pacific Northwest, named the North West America.

If hereafter trading posts should be established on the American coast, a colony of these men would be a very valuable acquisition.The next year, Meares had another 70 Chinese craftsmen brought from Canton but, shortly after arrival of this second group, the settlement was seized by the Spanish in what became known as the Nootka Crisis, with the Chinese being imprisoned by the Spanish in the course of their seizure of Meares' property, which brought Britain and Spain to the brink of global war.

[10][page needed] Chinese merchants from New Westminster were among the first to set up shop in Gastown, the townsite that sprang up next to the Hastings Mill property which was the historical kernel of what would become the City of Vancouver.

[10][page needed][15] The San Francisco company Hop Kee & Co. commissioned the voyage of 300 Chinese gold miners and merchants on June 24, 1858; additional in-migration from California continued later in 1858 and throughout 1859.

[16] A bill calling for a $30 license fee per every half year per head was passed in the provincial legislature in 1878, making it the first anti-Chinese law in British Columbia.

[10][page needed] In 1880, Andrew Onderdonk, an American who was one of the main construction contractors in British Columbia for Canadian Pacific Railway, originally recruited Chinese labourers from California.

[26] In the late 1800s the province supported efforts by the Canadian federal government to charge a head tax[38] to discourage Chinese from immigrating to Canada.

Any remission by which the Chinese are allowed to work without paying their share to the Government will, while injuring the Crown receipts, create a great deal of hostile feeling against them by the other miners.

[31][36] The province banned Chinese and First Nations-origin persons from voting in provincial and federal elections with an amendment of the Qualification of Voters Act passed in 1872.

[45] In the period's newspaper articles, according to James Morton, author of In the Sea of Sterile Mountains, in Vancouver's initial history "anti-Chinese sentiment appeared to be unanimous".

[39] As a result, many smaller locations in British Columbia which had Chinese populations mostly of older men finally began receiving women and children.

[59] In 1983 restrictions were eased and Chinese emigration became prevalent as large numbers of people chose to leave China to study abroad, work temporarily or immigrate.

[91] People with origins from Hong Kong "have been especially notable in the flow of international migrants to British Columbia which, for all intents and purposes, has meant the Vancouver region.

[120] In Victoria the Woman's Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, Canada had established the Oriental Home and School,[121] a mission to prevent child prostitution.

The Rising China company lost influence after the Chinese began to integrate into the town by moving outside of Chinatown and learning the English language.

[136] In the 1960s Prince George also had a clan association, Zhi-de Tang (Chi Tak T'ong), described as the sole "significant political grouping" in the smaller British Columbia towns.

[136] Historically Chinese people in British Columbia, by the early 20th century, worked in canneries, logging operations, sawmills, shingle mills, and other extractive jobs.

[141] In the 1850s, the industrial development of British Columbia offered young migrant Chinese men the opportunity to seek work away from the desperation ravaging their communities as a result of Western imperialist expansion.

[141] In 1885, the Department of Indian Affairs noted Indigenous agitation over labour displacement due to increased competition with Chinese men for employment in cannery plants and private domestic services.

[144] This shift was felt less on the North Coast as Indigenous communities still lived in close proximity to the canneries and it was expensive to transport workers from the south of the province.

[146] They organized Chinese labour and supervised the workers on the job; the bosses also began to contract female Indigenous work in the canning plants.

[147] Once passages, food, and overhead were taken care of, the crews were paid in accordance with the number of cans produced, the amount of fish butchered, and the type of piece-work assigned.

[145] "Everything," was the reply of local New Westminster fisherman, David Melville, when asked in front of the British Columbia Fishery Commission what kinds of jobs the Chinese performed for the canneries.

More than this, and as its derogatory name implies, the mechanical butcher emphasized a tension in an industry where profit necessitated an interracial labour system, while the colonial ideal of the expanding European settler population called for racial homogeneity.

The desire for a quality product, paired with the remoteness of many northern canneries, ensured the persisting requirement for hand packed salmon in BC.

Union agreements which developed after the Second World War did not resolve these issues, rather they worked concurrently with racist, government immigration policy to effectively remove the Chinese from the very industry they made possible.

[165] Three Chinese language daily newspapers, Ming Pao, Sing Tao and World Journal cater to the city's large Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking population.

[58] The English language edition of the Epoch Times, a global newspaper founded by Chinese emigres, is distributed through free boxes throughout the metropolis.

[167] In the early 20th century, Chinese politicians opposing the Qing Dynasty status quo, including Sun Yat-sen, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao, visited British Columbia to obtain support for their respective political movements.

[180] British Columbia cities which host Chinese cemeteries include Cumberland, Duncan, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Prince George, Vernon, and Victoria.