How an architect is using art and technology to preserve Toronto Chinatown’s history

Opened in the 1950s, Sai Woo was a two-storey restaurant in Toronto’s Chinatown, with a traditional Chinese banquet hall on the upper floor. Designed for wedding celebrations, the space featured a canopy with two columns, a golden dragon entwined on one and a phoenix on the other. Lazy Susans sat atop the round banquet tables.

Chinatown was also home to Charlie’s Meat and Seafood, a white-tiled butcher shop that opened in 1971. Inside was a glass display case filled with cuts of meat. On the counter stood a weighing scale and a roll of plastic bags, ready for customers.

These are two of seven much-loved Chinatown businesses and restaurants meticulously recreated by 14 architecture students from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on archival records and oral histories shared by community elders, the students built detailed miniature models of the vanished establishments.

The models help fill gaps in Toronto’s Chinatown history, much of which remains undocumented. They are on display at the City of Toronto Archives until February 2027, as part of an exhibition titled “Let’s Build a Collective Memory of Chinatown!”.

The project, which won a Heritage Toronto Award in Public History in 2025, was led by Linda Zhang, a trained architect, researcher and artist who is also an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture, and a tireless advocate for Toronto’s Chinatown. She says these places were chosen because “they are iconic”.

Chinatowns across North America are constantly under threat of redevelopment, she says, “because they’re all in downtown locations that are prime real estate”.

Zhang’s latest project took her to China’s “porcelain capital” of Jingdezhen. During a three-month residency in autumn 2025, she learned traditional Chinese ceramic techniques and how to work with the local kaolin clay used to produce some of the world’s finest porcelain.

“The porcelain is completely different,” she says. “It felt like a material that I had never encountered before, even though I’ve worked with porcelain a lot. It’s much more malleable, easier to work with and a lot less brittle.”

There, she created ceramic lucky cats and what she describes as “ancestral tablets”, imprinted with archival documents and bearing the words “Help Save Chinatown”.

Toronto Chinatown’s changing fortunes

Toronto’s original Chinatown was located in the Ward, a historically immigrant neighbourhood in the downtown core. In the mid-1950s, however, two-thirds of Old Chinatown was expropriated – without community consultation, permission or compensation – to make way for the new City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square.

“What drove that one-third to extinction was actually land speculation and speculative development,” Zhang says.

Displaced residents and businesses subsequently moved into other inexpensive parts of the city, establishing Chinatown East and Chinatown West. Zhang says both neighbourhoods remain vulnerable to redevelopment.

For her, the exhibition is part of an ongoing conversation about this vulnerability – and about how Torontonians might imagine their future.

‘Nobody cared’

Zhang was born in southern Ontario, where there were no Chinese grocery stores. Every weekend, she and her family drove for more than an hour to Toronto’s Chinatown to stock up on Chinese food.

“My only interaction with Toronto before I moved here was with Chinatown, so that was a natural kind of community and place that I gravitated towards once I arrived here [in 2018],” she says.

At the time, Zhang had just begun working as an assistant professor at the interior design school at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University). She assumed researching Chinatown’s past would be relatively straightforward.

“I was in the [City of Toronto] archives and expected that I would find things and be able to map and actually see all the buildings,” she says. “Then I realised that we basically had nothing.”

Zhang cites Sam Ching, one of the first Chinese residents on record in Toronto in 1878 and the owner of an eponymous laundry, as an example. “We have a business name in the business registry, [but] we have no idea what this place looked like,” she says. “We have an address, but there’s no documentation.

“Nobody cared. This was not considered heritage or history in Toronto, and a lot of our community was not considered part of Canadian society at the time, so it was not something that people would think to document.”

In the archives, she found only a smattering of photographs, city council minutes related to the neighbourhood, and documents such as planning applications and blueprints for the renovation of Lichee Garden Restaurant’s facade.

Taking matters into her own hands, Zhang took advantage of Ryerson University’s technological resources, including its drones. After obtaining an advanced drone pilot’s licence, she used the devices to 3D-scan Chinatown East and Chinatown West.

Just as the pandemic began in early 2020, Zhang collated the scans, digitised the documents she had found in the city’s archives and organised them in a virtual-reality archive repository that anyone could access.

It was during that time that she came across the advocacy community group Friends of Chinatown Toronto.

“We were all in the archives in the same couple of years, trying to dig up the same stuff,” she says.

Zhang also used the scans to create 99 miniature Chinatown buildings for a game she developed called Build Your Own Chinatown. The game invites two players to choose the buildings that matter to them and use their selections to spark a discussion.

“It was a way of making my 3D scans accessible to other people,” she says, “but it was also a way of asking, ‘What do we care about? What’s worth preserving?’ – as opposed to being told in the archives that none of this matters because we are not included.”

In 2020, Zhang – together with Friends of Chinatown Toronto – held a speculative-fiction writing workshop called “Chinatown 2050”. The 50 participants were asked to imagine what Chinatown might look like 30 years after the pandemic.

One story, Helen Ngo’s Hotpot Politics, is about three Chinatown activists who have superpowers and communicate telepathically over hotpot while fighting developers who claim they want to revitalise the area.

Another story, Chinatown Island, by Amy Yan, imagines Chinatown East and West being relocated to an island and transformed into a tourist attraction instead of a neighbourhood where people live and work. When a girl visits Chinatown Island for the first time, she realises it is not how she wants her culture to be portrayed.

Some of these stories were published in 2023 in the anthology Reimagining Chinatown. Zhang later adapted several of them into animated virtual-reality vignettes, which were shown at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver in 2023.

Every dollar counts

Back in Toronto from Jingdezhen, Zhang organised pop-up sales of her handmade ceramics, with proceeds going to the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust Stewardship Fund. The charity supports initiatives such as affordable housing, education and community programmes to help the neighbourhood continue to thrive.

Every contribution counts, she says, no matter how small.

“Sometimes people think nothing’s changed, and it’s kind of defeating,” Zhang says of her activism. “But [Chinese-Canadian historian] Arlene Chan always reminds us that it might feel like nothing has changed, but it’s actually so much better now than it used to be. There are so many small, incremental wins that we have had over time.”