Rebuilding starts on Lytton's Chinese History Museum

The rebuilding of one of Lytton’s key cultural institutions has finally begun

The rough outlines of the Lytton Chinese History Museum’s future have begun to emerge. And if all goes to plan, the museum’s founder and operator, Lorna Fandrich, hopes to re-open the award-winning heritage facility this fall.

The museum and more than 1,000 artifacts that told the story of Chinese workers and immigrants and their contributions in the BC Interior were destroyed in 2021. After a long wait, rebuilding work finally began last week. And while there’s a lot more to do, hundreds of new artifacts await thanks to the donations of organizations, individuals, and Chinese Canadian families from around the province.

The Joss House

The building that originally housed the Lytton Chinese History Museum was less than a decade old when it burned during the cataclysmic fire that destroyed the village in 2021. But the property it sat on had a much longer history.

The museum was the brainchild of Fandrich, whose family runs Kumsheen Rafting Resort, the largest business in the area. As the museum’s website describes, Fandrich and her husband had bought an empty lot in the village in 1980. They soon learned the site had previously been home to a “Joss House”—a communal house used for both housing and spiritual purposes a hundred years prior.

“It served as a guest house, community meeting space, and a place of religion,” the museum’s website explains. “Quan Yin (the Goddess of Mercy) and Shen Nong (the God of Agriculture) were among the deities honored there.”

The wooden building fronted Lytton’s Main Street and included an altar and statues of various gods.

The website continues: “The interior of the Joss House was divided into three useful spaces: the main area where the altar and statues resided, a smaller room that served as a guest room, and a small caretaker’s quarters. When the two entrance doors were opened, the altar that housed the deities was clearly visible from the street.”

The building was constructed around 1880, but as railway construction ended, the region’s Chinese-Canadian population—and the use of the house—declined.

Fandrich first learned about the lot’s history from a full-page 1933 news story in The Province titled “Gods In a Lytton Woodshed.”

You can read the original story in a PDF here, or in text form here.

The story describes how an Italian railroad man, Signor Taverna, had first attempted to buy the building in 1901, saying the property was owned by the government because its owners had no deed. Over the next 20 years, he repeatedly applied to take possession of the property, saying the existing structure was an eyesore and falling down. Finally, in 1928, Taverna was given the governmental go-ahead to buy the lot, the building, and its contents. He paid just $42.

But though Taverna had argued the building had been forgotten, the news of its sale triggered renewed interest in the site, and its contents—the Joss House still housed the altar and statues that had been installed there decades earlier. According to The Province, the consul-general for the Chinese republic said the building’s contents were worth $3,000, and that it belonged to the Chinese Benevolent Association.

The sale was completed anyway. According to the news article, Taverna considered selling the statues, but declined to do so. “He is not sure that he owns them,” the article says. “He came by them lawfully enough, he feels. But then, a god or goddess is not anyone’s property.”

(Fandrich said she has not yet been able to track down what, exactly, became of the building’s contents.)

• • •

As Fandrich learned about the history of the lot she had purchased, she began to sketch out a plan for a museum that would tell the story of the Chinese immigrants that helped shape Lytton and the surrounding area.

In 2016, she began construction on the museum. That same year, the Joss House site was granted provincial heritage status. That brought a certain level of credibility that the museum built upon over the ensuing years. In 2019, two years after the museum opened, it received a Heritage BC Award for outstanding education and awareness. The citation by the jury noted that the museum told the “once-unknown stories” of the Chinese community, using a large collection of artifacts to “reconstruct what was lost.”

Two years later, the museum itself was gone.

Rebuilding

The 2021 fire left a heap of rubble where the museum once was. In its foundation, included a heap of bricks, and metal shelves that once held artifacts telling the story of the Interior’s Chinese community. A smattering of artifacts were rescued, though some were covered in covered with a layer of glass from shelves that had melted, twisted and sagged to coat the pottery that survived.

Soon after the 2021 fire, Fandrich declared her intention to rebuild—and to create a new exhibit around a large pot that had survived but bore the scars of the inferno.

She had insurance on the building. But like many others in town—including her daughter, who lost a cherished local café—insurance money would be insufficient to fully rebuild.

But Fandrich still saw the need for a museum like the one she had created: an institution specifically dedicated to explaining the lives, work, and contributions made by Chinese communities in the BC Interior.

"I still think people need to hear about the Chinese story in this area,” she told CBC in 2021.

Fandrich wasn’t the only one who thought so.

Fandrich isn’t of Chinese descent. And when she started plotting out her museum, she wasn’t quite sure how an institution created by someone with no direct ties to the Chinese community would be received. But she soon found that Chinese-Canadian communities and others in BC were happy that someone was working to preserve the memories of people who had played a pivotal role in the province’s history.

“They’re welcoming that somebody’s telling their story,” she told The Current in an interview last Friday.

The museum wasn’t a kitschy roadside facility designated to lure weary tourists out of their cars. Fandrich created a digital archive—one that would prove incredibly useful—of each of the museum’s 1,600 archives. And the building included a research area that was separate from the public collection and designated for students, researchers, and writers.

In 2021, just before the fire, the museum was awarded the Drs. Wallace B. and Madeline Chung Prize from the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC. The award honours “important contributions to the collecting and safeguarding of historical objects significant to Chinese Canadian history.”

The aftermath of the fire also demonstrated the value of the museum—not just to locals but to people hundreds of kilometres away.

Fundraising campaigns raised tens of thousands of dollars to rebuild the museum and its collection, with much of the money coming from Chinese-Canadian organizations in the province. Chinese-language videos on YouTube and social media told the story of Lytton, the museum, and the fire that had ravaged it. In March of 2022, more than a dozen members of the Canada Chinese volunteer Association and Foundation travelled to Lytton to meet Fandrich and present her with a cheque for $51,500.

Chinese Canadian families, along with other BC historical organizations, have also donated around 600 artifacts to help rebuild the Lytton museum’s collection. Most of those aren’t of the same age as those artifacts that were lost, Fandrich said, and few come from the local area. But they are similar to those that had been used locally and will still allow Fandrich to tell the story of the Chinese people who contributed to Lytton and the surrounding area.

“Although they won’t be from Lytton and Lillooet, Ashcroft, Quesnel, like they were before, in all railway camps and mining camps, they were importing the same Chinese stuff,” Fandrich said.

Although Fandrich quickly declared her intention to rebuild in 2021, she says the donations she has received since were critical in allowing her to actually follow through. Given the insufficient insurance, she said, she faced a shortfall that ran into the six-figures. The donations and support have helped fill that gap and bring the museum back to life.

“They wanted to keep going,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t have [rebuilt] if I didn’t get those donations.”

Still, having a plan and artifacts and money was one thing. But getting permits was another. As The Current has extensively covered, Lytton’s rebuilding has been plagued by delays linked to bureaucratic, meteorological, technical, and archeological issues.

By last year, the village site had finally been cleared, and most lots had been filled to a flat-level with gravel. Rebuilding started to look possible. By the fall, residents across town started to hear rumblings that additional—and potentially incredibly costly—archeological work would be necessary for many properties. The last six months have seen some of those issues resolved. Many property owners are avoiding digging basements that might trigger more archeological delays and costs.

The museum, Fandrich said, will have a basement—the previous structure’s basement was a dedicated space for the use of researchers, historians, and writers. But because the museum had been built just recently, Fandrich said it’s relatively easy to delineate the area occupied by the destroyed museum’s basement and not dig beyond that. Still, it took until this spring for Fandrich to get the go-ahead to proceed without more archeological work.

The future

Earlier this month, Fandrich received a building permit, and last Tuesday the museum’s Facebook page posted a video of an excavator on site. By Friday, a basement-shaped hole was evident. Blue fencing around the site included a sign identifying the property as the home of the Lytton Chinese History Museum.

Fandrich said she is “mostly excited,” though everybody in Lytton is fully aware of how optimism can turn sour.

“I just wanted to get started,” she said. “I’ll feel less anxious about it once the basement is in and the backfill is in. After that, it’s just building. The building part will be simple compared to what we’ve been through.”

In 2022, with Lytton still a wasteland of burned out buildings, the provincial government suggested that homes would be built by the following fall. That never happened. But this spring, there is finally some action—though still not a lot. Next door to the museum, a neighbour’s new house is taking shape, with roof trestles expected imminently. The house will be the first completed in the village since the 2021 fire. Several other homes are also being built, but most of the village site remains barren and flat.

Fandrich hopes to have her museum finished by the middle of August. If that happens, she says she might be able to re-open in September.

And in Lytton, re-opening the museum isn’t just about re-opening a museum, even one that tells an important story.

“The big deal is that it’s one more building going up on the street, which encourages everybody in Lytton and [will] maybe encourage more people to think about building.”