By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
Canada’s oldest Chinese print shop closes at 6 p.m. Friday, after 106 years in business.
By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
Canada’s oldest Chinese print shop closes at 6 p.m. Friday, after 106 years in business.
Owner Hilda Lam and her family have spent the last year selling off a century’s worth of equipment and ephemera at Ho Sun Hing Printers, which operates out of an art deco building at 259 East Georgia in Vancouver.
Many of the presses the company owned were antiques, and attracted interest from boutique printers across North America.
“All the machines are gone, except for that Linotype over there that’s broken down,” Lam said. A buyer was expected this week to take it away.
Art collector Bob Rennie picked up four sets of Chinese lead type, which have 8,000 characters for each font. A buyer in Victoria bought a framed photo of the late Chinese Nationalist party leader Chiang Kai-shek that used to hang upstairs.
But there is plenty of stuff still for sale, from printer’s stamps to uncut sheets of lead and ancient oak desks.
The business is closing because there isn’t enough of a market for the high-end printing the company specialized in. At 81, Lam also wants to retire. So she put the building on the market last year, and it sold for $1.65 million.
The company was started by Lam Lat Tong, who left his job as a railway cook to start the Ho Sun Hing Rubber Stamp shop in Vancouver in 1908.
At the time, Chinatown was only a few blocks along Pender and Westminster (now Main), and most of its residents were bachelors who lived in rooms above Chinatown’s businesses.
Chinese immigrants after 1885 had to pay a head tax to immigrate to Canada, which meant both Lam Lat Tong and his son Fong Lam paid it. (In China, the family name comes first, in Canada it was flipped around.)
The company’s first location was at 205 East Pender. In 1920 the company moved to 438 Main, and two years after that relocated to 258½ East Pender, where it operated until the company moved to its present location in 1963.
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