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To many loyal readers' surprise, on 3 October 1992, the front page of Tai Hon Kong Bo ... (Chinese Times) announced the suspension of publication. The reader would wait in vain for its suspension to be lifted: the announcement marked a full stop to the daily's many decades of publication. Indeed, it had been the longest-operating Chinese diaspora newspaper in Canada. Noticeably, the paper's subhead records its inauguration year as 1907, an error that was sustained until the final day of publication.1
Launched in Vancouver in the first decade of the twentieth century by Chee Kung Tong ... (the Chinese Freemasons), a leading Chinese community association, Tai Hon Kong Bo is one of the most dynamic of the Chinese diasporic media in Canada. Witnessing critical times in the twentieth century, Tai Hon Kong Bo recorded key historic events that deeply affected Chinese life in Canada: the head tax, the Xinhai Revolution, the two world wars, the Chinese Immigration Act, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, and so on. During its more than eighty-year run, the newspaper maintained a dual focus, paying attention both to local community welfare (contextualizing Chinese immigrants' transcultural and transnational life experience into its daily reports) and to the national affairs of both the host and heritage countries (responding to broader social and political events and issues with strong local and community importance). Reflected in the pages of this daily newspaper is the long and complicated history of the acculturation of Chinese immigrants into multicultural Canada. As the newspaper navigates between emerging ideas of Canadian multiculturalism and traditional Chinese cultural values, Tai Hon Kong Bo offers a unique model of transcultural media practice. Yet, despite its importance as a rich primary source for studies of the Chinese diaspora, the early publication history of Tai Hon Kong Bo has up until now remained unclear; the date of its first appearance, controversial. This article aims to clear up the long-standing confusion regarding the year Tai Hon Kong Bo was launched and its affiliation with another early Chinese diaspora newspaper, Wa-Ying Yat-Po... (Chinese-English Daily Newspaper), the first Christian newspaper in the Chinese language published in Canada. The purpose is not only to restore Wa-Ying Yat-Po's position in the print history of...