Today’s Vancouver Sun Newspaper featured a story about the Chung Family’s 25,000 item collection donation to the University of British Columbia. “A National Treasure” was the term used to described this amazing collection.

It’s a real nice story of an early Westcoast family and the generous donation of their impressive art and collectibles collection to our University. And the feature piece was a beautiful large scale model ship, the Empress of Asia.

Here’s a snippet from today’s Vancouver Sun:

[...] The collection includes documents, rare books, maps, posters, paintings, photographs, silver, glass, ceramic ware and other artifacts relating to the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Asian experience in North America, and B.C. history.

Wallace Chung said he hopes the collection helps educate young people about the country’s history.

“I hope it shows people what hardships Chinese people went through before they reached the stage they’re at today,” said Chung, a vascular surgeon and professor emeritus at UBC’s faculty of medicine.

“It really tells us what it means to be a Canadian. Even though we were badly treated initially, we now have landed in a very fortunate position. That story is told in all the artifacts and documents.”

As a child, Chung was obsessed with the Empress of Asia for two reasons: it was the ship that brought his mother to Canada from China, and a poster of the luxury ocean liner hung in his father’s tailor shop in Victoria.

[...]

Here’s a link to a sampling of photos from the collection, including one of Mr and Mrs Chung, and the Empress of Asia.