Anti-Asian mob attacks Chinese and Japanese districts of Vancouver

Who: The Asiatic Exclusion League, formed in Vancouver in August 1907 by the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, according to the historian Henry Tsang. Its first meeting on 12 August drew 400 white men, and the mayor and several councillors were founding members. The people attacked were Chinese and Japanese residents, but Asian immigration as a whole was the League's target: Wikipedia says 2,049 Punjabi Sikhs were among 11,440 new arrivals by the end of October 1907, and the Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada says the violence seen at Bellingham was repeated in Vancouver a few days later.

What: On Saturday 7 September a crowd gathered at the Cambie Street Grounds and marched to City Hall with banners reading "A White Canada for Us". Tsang puts the crowd at City Hall at 25,000 to 30,000; the Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2) estimates about 9,000 in the mob. About 9 pm the crowd moved into Chinatown and attacked shops and homes. It then went to Powell Street, the Japanese district, where warned residents beat it back with bricks, stones and weapons. Tsang says about two dozen off-duty police officers and the fire brigade could not stop the mob.

No deaths were documented. Wikipedia counts at least 19 arrests, and Tsang says only five attackers were convicted, with sentences of one to six months. The violence died down on Monday morning; Chinese associations then called a general strike until Wednesday. Ottawa sent William Lyon Mackenzie King, then Deputy Minister of Labour, to hold a Royal Commission; TC2 says $26,000 was paid to Chinese victims and $9,000 to Japanese victims, and Tsang gives almost $27,000 and over $9,000. Wikipedia says Punjabis were targeted at first and fought off white mobs, but Tsang does not mention South Asians, so that point rests on Wikipedia alone.

Where: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from the Cambie Street Grounds to City Hall, then into Chinatown and along Powell Street.

Why it mattered: It came in the year South Asians lost the vote. In March 1907 a bill was introduced in the British Columbia legislature to disenfranchise natives of India not of Anglo-Saxon parents, and in April a change to the Municipality Incorporation Act denied South Asians the Vancouver vote and, by default, the federal vote, according to South Asian Canadian Heritage. The Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada says Sikhs were shut out of politics for the next forty years. Pier 21, the Canadian Museum of Immigration, says Canada's continuous journey rule responded to anti-Asian sentiment after the Vancouver violence of September 1907. The order itself was issued on 8 January 1908, and the Sikh gurdwara on West 2nd Avenue in Vancouver opened the same month.