Vancouver: The Story & the Numbers

Most cities are founded on a river crossing or a gold vein. Vancouver was founded on a bet — several of them, stacked. That a talkative steamboat captain's whisky barrel could conjure a town out of a sawmill's edge. That a railway could be talked into ending here. That a settlement which burned to the ground nine weeks after incorporating could be worth rebuilding before the ashes cooled. Every bet paid. But to start the story in 1886 is to skip its longest chapter.

🛶 Ten thousand years before the city

The shores of Burrard Inlet belong, in every sense that predates paperwork, to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples — salmon nations whose villages, middens and stories are older than Rome. One of those villages, X̱wáý̓x̱way, stood inside what is now Stanley Park; its feast-shell middens were thick enough that early road-builders paved with them. When Captain George Vancouver sailed HMS Discovery into the inlet in June 1792 and gave the charts his name, he was — as the local joke goes — roughly ten millennia late to the discovery. The city today formally acknowledges it stands on unceded territory: land never signed away by treaty. The nations are not historical footnotes; they are landowners, developers and cultural forces in the modern city — and the oldest stories on this coast are theirs, some retold in our Legends of Vancouver.

🥃 A saloon, a fire, a railway

The short version of the founding: in 1867 John 'Gassy Jack' Deighton offered mill workers a barrel of whisky to build him a saloon, and 'Gassy's Town' materialized around it — the brick district still called Gastown. The colonial government tidied the name to Granville; the Canadian Pacific Railway untidied everything by choosing the spot as its Pacific terminus. On 6 April 1886 the city incorporated — renamed Vancouver at railway boss William Van Horne's insistence, because a name already on the world's charts sold tickets. Nine weeks later the Great Fire deleted the entire wooden town in well under an hour. The survivors held a council meeting in a tent and started over; the first transcontinental passenger train rolled in on 23 May 1887, and the bet was won. From about a thousand people to a global port city in one human lifetime.

🌏 Who actually lives here

Modern Vancouver's defining statistic isn't its skyline or its rain — it's this: 54% of Metro Vancouver residents identify as visible minorities, and roughly half the region grew up speaking something other than English at home. The 2021 Census counts about 512,000 residents of Chinese origin (19.6% of the region — one of the great Chinese communities outside Asia, anchored by a Chinatown founded in the 1880s) and about 369,000 of South Asian origin (14.2%) — the Punjabi Market on Main Street is one of North America's oldest South Asian commercial districts, and Surrey's Vaisakhi parade draws hundreds of thousands, among the largest outside India.

Honesty requires the hard chapters too: the head tax on Chinese migrants who built the railway's most dangerous miles; the 1914 Komagata Maru, a ship of 376 mostly Sikh British subjects anchored in this harbour for two months and turned away; the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians whose Powell Street neighbourhood never recovered. The city has formally apologized for all three. Today's Vancouver — where a quarter of the city is of Chinese heritage, where Punjabi is heard in the Legislature, where the sushi rivals Tokyo's and the dim sum needs no qualifier — was built by the very communities the old city tried to keep out. That reversal is the real story of the place.

⚓ The city that Hollywood, Greenpeace and the ocean built

The numbers that run the modern city: Canada's largest port moves roughly $300 billion in goods through Burrard Inlet and the Fraser; Hollywood North keeps more film crews working than anywhere in North America outside LA and New York; and the mildest big-city climate in Canada lets the same person ski a local mountain and walk a beach in the same afternoon — the geography that keeps Vancouver a fixture in global liveability rankings even as it tops the un-affordability ones. Two facts locals drop with equal pride: Greenpeace was founded here in 1971 in a Dunbar living room, and Chinatown's Sam Kee Building at 1.5 metres deep is certified the world's shallowest commercial building — a landlord's spite made architecture. Both, in their way, very Vancouver: stubbornness with a view.

📊 The numbers, at a glance

Population and origin figures: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population.

❓ Vancouver basics — FAQ