1. 12 May 27, 2007 escape THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH www.sundaytelegraph.com.au
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Xyxyx special
Frontier
lives on
in alley
secrets
Fan tan and fortune
telling recall a golden
era, as Craig Malin
discovers in Canada.
Intrigue: A narrow alley in
Victoria’s Chinatown with
a numerical sign indicating
that some buildings had
hidden floors, enabling
families to be hidden
during the gold-rush era
HAVING your fortune told in a
crowded room can be awkward —
just ask the shell-shocked woman
on our tour of Chinatown in
Victoria, Canada.
Our group had been taken to
the Tam Kung temple — a single,
small room above a Chinatown
shop, the air thick with incense.
As we stood around a large altar,
with red-and-gold silk banners
covering the walls and ceiling, an
elderly Chinese lady offered to tell
the woman’s fortune.
The room hushed as we watched
an ancient, mystic ritual — the
tourist picked a numbered stick
from a canister and the temple
caretaker thumbed through the
yellowing, torn pages of an old
book and read out a prophecy.
‘‘Bereavement, mourning, div-
orce,’’ was all we heard the Chi-
nese woman say. Judging by the
way her voice trailed off, that
might have been the good news.
It wasn’t a great start to the
tour, but a solution was at hand:
the woman, now looking more
than a little stunned, was told she
could leave an offering of oranges
at the altar to appease the gods.
Chinatown is the edgier side of
genteel Victoria, capital of British
Columbia on the southern tip of
Vancouver Island, best known for
its beautiful Butchart Gardens.
The city is a mix of European
grace and wild frontier ways. Cap-
tain Cook was the first European
to land there, in 1778; after becom-
ing a fur-trading hub, the town was
named after Queen Victoria.
Tourists can now take tea at the
regal Fairmont Empress Hotel and
sample the finest ales at the
cricket-themed Sticky Wicket Pub.
Or, at Big Bad John’s, set your-
self down at a tree-stump table for
a stubbie of ‘‘Thirsty Beaver’’ and
browse through thousands of
mementos tourists have stapled
to the walls — from rather funny
messages to colourful undies.
While Victoria’s harbour is lined
with grand European-style build-
ings — the old-world Parliament
House, covered in fairy lights,
among them — it has a barnstorm-
ing show that never fails to stop
tourists in their tracks.
Every hour or so, there’s a huge
engine roar as a seaplane skirts
over the surrounding buildings
and makes a breathtaking plunge
to skim across the water. In these
parts, these aerobatic ‘‘taxi’’ rides
are the easiest way to reach
Vancouver, 70km to the east.
Chinatown is another reminder
of Victoria’s frontier past. The
second-oldest Chinatown in North
America, it was here in the 1850s
gold rush that 10,000 people lived
in six ramshackle blocks of shanty
huts and a labyrinth of alleys.
And the place to party back then
was Fan Tan Alley. Nowadays, the
red-brick alley — about 1m wide in
places — is lined with quaint gift
shops, replacing the opium dens,
gambling houses and brothels
that once made it so popular.
It was one of the stops on our
Hidden Dragon walking tour, and
our guide, Lancy Cho, told how
impoverished Chinese workers
came here to bet their $1-a-day
earnings on a game called fan tan.
Lancy said a win could mean
sending money back to families
in China or paying off the $500
tax for the privilege of working
on the railway or goldfields.
Her great-grandfather was
among those workers, and she
revealed how her great-grand-
mother had her feet bound — an
ancient Chinese custom to keep
women’s feet tiny.
One of the fan tan shops has a
woman’s old 8cm-long shoe on
display. ‘‘She used to walk to the
markets and could only go a
metre at a time before she’d have
to rest on a stool,’’ Lancy said.
Throughout Chinatown, there
are dozens of ‘‘two-storey’’ build-
ings with a hidden floor in the
middle: a metre-high, windowless
space where entire families lived,
hidden from authorities who put
strict limits on the number of
people in the district.
The authorities weren’t so wor-
ried about the area’s 13 opium
factories that were legally process-
ing 40,000kg of the drug a year.
Lancy stopped in another alley
where there’s a photographic dis-
play of opium scales, opium lic-
ences and the old shanty shacks.
A fascinating tour, but a word of
advice: take some oranges.
■ The writer was a guest of Tourism
British Columbia and Air Canada.
Seattle
Vancouver
Victoria
U.S.A
CANADA
Victoria,
British Columbia
Getting there: Air Canada
(1300 655 767 or
www.aircanada.com) to
Vancouver, then 30-minute
plane connection.
Stay: Hotel Grand Pacific
(www.hotelgrandpacific.com)
or Fairmont Empress
(www.fairmont.com/empress)
Tour: Hidden Dragon Walking
Tour www.oldchinatown.com
More: Tourism Canada
(www.canada.travel) and
www.hellobc.com
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