On Friday, April 10, the Department of Asian Studies and the Asian Library at the University of British Columbia hosted their 15th annual Harjit Kaur Sidhu Memorial Program, an event dedicated to celebrating the life of Harjit Kaur Sidhu. Harjit Kaur Sidhu was a passionate educator and advocate for Punjabi language and culture, and recognizing […]
Have you heard of Sandon, a historic former silver mining town, now known as a ghost town? If you’re traveling through the Kootenay region these days, it’s definitely one of the most popular heritage tourism sites to visit.
As you set out on a scenic wilderness drive, winding along a rugged and twisting road, you’ll eventually come upon this quiet, desolate place. Nestled high in the Selkirk Mountain Range, Sandon sits in a narrow valley built right over Carpenter Creek. Once a thriving community, the town was home to more than 5,000 people at its peak, with countless stores and businesses lining its streets.
Sandon, once known as the “Heart of the Silvery Slocan,” was founded in 1891 as a fast-growing but unplanned mining boomtown in the Carpenter Creek valley. Initially, settlers built freely without formal governance until J. M. Harris staked a legal townsite in 1892 and became a dominant figure in its development. The town was incorporated in 1898. Around this time, in the mid-to-late 1890s, residents had begun developing basic services such as a fire department, a school, and hydroelectric power, along with infrastructure like flumes, boardwalks, and civic buildings to improve sanitation and organize the growing community.
Behind this prosperity, however, was the harsh reality of miners’ lives. In the 1890s, miners in Sandon worked under dangerous conditions for low and often uncertain wages, facing frequent injury, illness, and isolation. The arrival of experienced American miners brought strong labour activism, leading to the formation of the Sandon Miners’ Union in 1898 under the Western Federation of Miners. The union fought for better wages, safer working conditions, improved living standards, and an eight-hour workday. Tensions with mine owners escalated into strikes and lockouts, bringing widespread hardship to the miners. The conflict eventually led to a compromise: miners secured an eight-hour workday but had to accept reduced wages, leaving many issues unresolved.
Despite its early success, Sandon faced major setbacks in the years that followed. In addition to prolonged labour disputes, the town was hit by a devastating fire in 1900, declining silver prices, and a population decline. These factors contributed to economic collapse, and by 1913 the town had fallen into receivership. Like many interior boomtowns, Sandon’s prosperity was short-lived. It was eventually abandoned in 1955 after the silver ran out, and a flash flood later destroyed much of what remained.
The Japanese Internment History in Sandon
Sandon’s story is about more than its mining past; it is also deeply connected to the history of Japanese internment in Canada. In 1941, nearly 22,000 Japanese Canadians were stripped of their rights, property, and possessions, and labeled “enemy aliens” following the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Of these, approximately 12,000 were forcibly relocated and incarcerated in camps across the interior of British Columbia, including Sandon. The camp in Sandon housed about 953 internees and was designated as a Buddhist community, as the wartime BC Security Commission segregated internees by religion. Sandon was chosen because of its many abandoned buildings and existing infrastructure.
Internees carried out essential labor such as repairing infrastructure, renovating buildings, and supporting wartime efforts. Despite minimal supervision due to the town’s remote location, they largely governed themselves, maintaining order and managing the camp’s daily operations. Though conditions were harsh, isolated, and winters severe (earning Sandon the nickname “Camp Hell-Hole”), the internees established a functioning community with schools, religious spaces, and cultural activities. For the first time since the town’s economic decline, Sandon was once again bustling with hundreds of residents. The camp eventually closed due to extreme weather, and most internees were relocated to nearby New Denver.
Today, as you walk through Sandon, you’ll see some restored buildings and abandoned homes – relics of its past, that tell the story of a once-booming town. You can visit the Silversmith Power & Light Generating Station, which is still in operation today, and explore a unique collection of Brill buses, featuring various models from cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and Regina. The Sandon Historical Society Museums, located in the beautifully restored Slocan Mercantile Block in Sandon, are still in operation and welcome visitors from around the world.
In celebration of Japanese author 西加奈子 Kanako Nishi’s upcoming book talk at the UBC Asian Centre on April 24th, the Asian Library presents a display featuring a selection of her works from our collection. This display spans over two decades of writing and artistic work, featuring 32 works of fiction, nonfiction, children’s storybooks, and more. […]
The Slocan History Series by Professor Emeritus Cole Harris (1936-2022) in UBC’s Department of Geography, is available in cIRcle. The series documents the social and industrial history of British Columbia’s Slocan Valley, including early settler experiences and resource development.
A key part of the project was collaboration with Harris’s family, and the article highlights how cIRcle services can provide long-term access and preservation of unique, local outputs created by our UBC community. This extends their reach beyond the physical copies, allowing researchers, students, and the public worldwide to engage with this regional history. This initiative underscores UBC Library’s commitment to open access and to preserving regional history for a wider public audience.
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Are you a UBC faculty member interested in making your research openly accessible? Please consult our Faculty and Staff Work page for information about adding your work to cIRcle, or Contact Us.
Join Dr. Christina Laffin, associate professor of Japanese literature, for a conversation with Kanako Nishi and book translator Allison Markin Powell to discuss what the translation of Nishi’s bestselling novel, Sakura, means in the context of the rising popularity of Japanese fiction among English readers.
Vaisakhi (or Baisakhi), typically celebrated on April 13 or 14, marks the spring harvest. It is a time for farmers to give thanks for an abundant harvest and pray for future prosperity. The festival is celebrated by the Sikh community in India and across the global Sikh diaspora. Vaisakhi also holds deep significance for Sikhs. […]
Travelling and tourism are prominent topics in the Chung Collection. The collection contains more than 10,000 archival items, including documents, photographs, books, and other artifacts. Many of these materials relate to travel through the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and offer fascinating glimpses into British Columbia’s history. They reveal traces of the province’s early commercial and industrial development, as well as stories of immigration and settlement in Canada. They also highlight the growth of leisure travel, especially the experience of exploring Canada by train or journeying across the world by cruise ship.
Browsing through these vintage pamphlets is like stepping back in time. They not only show the pricing and travel packages offered during that period, but also capture the excitement and romance of crossing a continent by rail or sailing to distant destinations. At the same time, the imagery and descriptions in these pamphlets reveal how people once imagined and represented different parts of the world, offering insight into the historical perspectives and cultural biases of the time.
This blog post highlights a selection of international travel promotional materials from the Chung Collection. Enjoy!
Please note that the Chung Collection may contain outdated or harmful language, stereotypes, descriptions, or imagery that reflect the perspectives of their time. Please read with historical awareness.
A Peiping sojourn
This promotional pamphlet from around the 1920s introduces Peiping, a former romanized name for Beijing, China. Its pages bring the city to life with descriptions of everyday street scenes and local traditions, from weddings and funerals to lively festivals, fairs, and markets. The pamphlet also highlights theatre performances, food, and a variety of places that visitors might explore. Together, this pamphlet offer a fascinating glimpse of how the city was presented to travelers nearly a century ago.
Here’s how it describes Peiping as a destination full of remarkable places to visit:
“If one stays in Japan, each city has its charm, its own special object of interest, but to really see Japan means traveling from one end of the island to the other, to the north – and then there is still the return. In Peiping and near Peiping are situated all the places of interest – the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs – so many intriguing spots that all description are dull as compared with the actuality.”
S/S Empress of France Mediterranean cruise de luxe : Istanbul March 1931, few notes on points visited during the excursion
This 1931 pamphlet describes a shore excursion to Istanbul during a Mediterranean cruise on the Empress of France. It offers a brief introduction to the city’s history and highlights several remarkable sites that tourists could visit while in Istanbul. You might even find inspiration for your next cultural trip to explore the prehistorical marvels of the cradle of human civilisation!
This 1964 pamphlet advertises Canadian Pacific Airlines tours in Italy. It includes detailed information on the daily schedule and tour costs. At the time, a 15-day tour of Italy from Rome to Sicily cost about 400 Canadian dollars for a single room, with hotels and meals included.
This 1930 pamphlet advertises 48 attractive escorted tours to Europe and back. It features a variety of itineraries to Hungary, with routes passing through many European countries. Every detail of these excursions was planned, from transportation to sightseeing. Take a look through the pamphlet and explore what these tour packages had to offer. Browse the price lists, discover the destinations, and imagine the experience of traveling across Europe almost a century ago!
To Australia and New Zealand by the Canadian Pacific route
This 1932 booklet advertises travel to Australia and New Zealand, and train and ship travel with the Canadian Pacific. Take a look through its pages and imagine embarking on a vintage journey across the Pacific. Travelers could board the quadruple-screw motor-ship “Aorangi” or the triple-screw steamship “Niagara” in Vancouver or Victoria and set sail toward the South Pacific. Along the way, the voyage included stops in the tropical destinations of Honolulu and the Fiji Islands. From there, passengers could continue on to New Zealand or Australia to explore beautiful cities and dramatic natural landscapes.
Explore the Chung Collection, one of the largest research collections on the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, featuring documents, maps, publications, photographs, and artifacts that illustrate CPR’s construction, steamship services, travel, and more.
Read more blog posts about Canadian Pacific Railway travel:
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To support cIRcle’s mission of open access and long-term preservation, cIRcle’s File Format Guidelines offer recommendations and suggestions on how to create accessible, stable, and usable digital files. Through this resource, we aim to help UBC community members who wish to deposit their works to cIRcle create a strong version of their materials, for use by a wide audience. Digital files created with accessibility and long-term preservation in mind contributes to increasing digital accessibility more broadly, in addition to increasing the availability and use of materials at UBC.
The creation and maintenance of accessible digital resources is a vital part of the transition to a more broadly accessible society, and it’s important to ensure that the digital resources we create are available to all users—and that said resources remain that way over the long-term.
There are important, concrete steps that can be taken to make content both more accessible and more stable into the future. While there is no universal format that can be accessible to all, there are numerous worthwhile steps that can be taken to increase the accessibility of digital materials. Read on to find out more about file formats, why they are important for cIRcle, and how you might strengthen your digital outputs.
What are File Formats, and How Do They Affect Usability?
Essentially, file formats are containers for digital content. Using a container that fails to provide equitable access, or that isn’t well suited to preservation, puts that content behind a barrier and threatens the ability to use that content in the future. Attributes that might not seem like issues at first glance can have significant downstream effects—meaning that it’s incredibly important to pay attention to file format choices.
For example, putting content in a recognized-text PDF file means that most screen readers can read it, unlike PDFs that are image-only (i.e. a PDF that has no searchable or selectable text). These types of limitations can create significant barriers for persons who are blind or visually impaired, persons who have learning disabilities, or persons with physical disabilities. Similarly, a lack of transcript for video or audio files can create barriers to access for persons who have difficulty hearing, seeing, or understanding the media contained within.
File formats can also have a significant impact on digital preservation efforts, with certain formats being less stable than others. To support our digital preservation activities, cIRcle may change the file format of submitted material during the deposit process (for example, a DOCX file may be converted to a PDF) to ensure the materials remain useable into the future. Additionally, cIRcle recommends against using proprietary file formats wherever possible, as they can pose additional challenges for long term preservation and general access by users.
Content Preparation
Small changes can make a large difference in the accessibility of materials. The cIRcle File Format Guidelines provide users with some concrete and practical steps to help them understand how to prepare their files for submission. The following examples highlight some thoughtfully created materials in cIRcle that act to make open access content more accessible to all:
When creating Academic Choices and Existential Perils : a tabletop role-playing game, the creators made sure that the PDFs had recognizable text and were in a screen readable fonts, tagged for assistive software and hardware, and had alt-text for the images within. A plain-text version in DOCX format was also provided as an additional access option for users of screen readers, or for anyone who would benefit from having a copy without the visual elements.
Additionally, the creators of the Thinking Climate Change podcast added an individual transcript for each podcast episode in a screen-readable font, with the transcript for each episode clearly noting the speaker’s name each time the speaker changes.
Accessible video deposits can include a number of elements, and the Using cIRcle to Share Community Engaged Research is one example. The creators provided a captioned MP4 file for the video itself; a tagged, readable PDF of the slides used; a copy of said slides in PPT format; and a tagged, readable PDF transcript that clearly notes the speaker’s name each time the speaker changes. The creators also ensured that all materials used a screen readable font.
Deposit Your Research
Have you reviewed our File Format Guidelines and want to submit your materials to cIRcle, or do you have further questions about how to prepare your files for cIRcle? If so, please consult our Submissions page for more information!
