Description of Historic Place

The Cumberland Chinese Cemetery is a 0.75 hectare parcel located off Union Road southwest of the Inland Island Highway-Cumberland Road interchange in Cumberland, British Columbia. The cemetery features a sign, perimeter picket fencing, pavilion, and grave sites. The cemetery has local heritage designation through the Village of Cumberland.

Heritage Value

The Cumberland Chinese Cemetery has historical, spiritual, symbolic, aesthetic and cultural value. It provides an enduring record of Chinese Canadian settlement in the area, Chinese Canadian participation in the coal mining and railway construction industries in Cumberland and the industrial development of Vancouver Island. It also provides a record of a multicultural community that included Chinese Canadian, Japanese Canadian, and African-American workers.

Created in 1897, the cemetery is historically important as evidence of Chinese Canadian settlement on central Vancouver Island, and for the significant presence of Chinese Canadians in the area, particularly in the large miners' camp outside the site of the area's original settlement of Union, later named Cumberland.

The place also has historical importance through the investment of coal mine developer Robert Dunsmuir in Cumberland coal mining, and the formation of the Union Colliery Company in 1888. The cemetery is an important enduring link to the history of Chinese Canadian employment as coal miners and railway builders under the Dunsmuir family, and a reminder of the family's non-union labour practices that featured the prevalent use of Chinese Canadian miners and railway construction workers.

The cemetery has cultural and aesthetic value through the application of feng shui principles for siting and spatial arrangements, seen in its east-facing aspect and protection from the north by a forest of trees.

Spiritual value is found in the site's representation of the complex traditional burial practices in Chinese culture. The register of the dead, kept by the Chinese Benevolent Association, included the name of each person and their home village and province in China. Graves were marked with cedar head posts, and coffins contained information on the deceased. Bodies were exhumed after seven years, and the bones were cleaned and stored for eventual shipment back to their home in China.

The cemetery is valued for its association with the adjacent Japanese Cemetery. Together they symbolize the multi-cultural, originally segregated, and sometimes racist history of the community and province.

Designated for its significance by the Village of Cumberland in 2007, the cemetery is a place of spiritual significance for the families of the people buried there, and as a place of remembrance of the coal miners and pioneer families of Cumberland's Chinatown.

The site also has particular social value as an operating cemetery today, providing an opportunity for the community's descendants to be buried next to their ancestors, and as a venue for Miners Memorial Weekend celebrations in Cumberland, which include a ceremony and respectful remembrance.

Source: Province of British Columbia, Heritage Branch

Character-Defining Elements

Not applicable