There are two Chinatowns in downtown Toronto — one you can visit and one that only exists in old photographs. The city that grew up on Spadina Avenue was built by Cantonese migrants for the second time, after the first Chinatown was demolished under them in 1955. To understand how Cantonese Toronto works today, you have to know that story.
Downtown Chinatown, centred on Spadina and Dundas, is now the largest Chinese neighbourhood in central Canada. It is loud, cluttered, family-owned, and still — despite everything — Cantonese-first. Walk in on a Saturday morning and every fishmonger, every char siu shop, every herbal store is doing business in Cantonese before English.
The first Chinatown: The Ward
Toronto's first Chinese business was a laundry that opened at 9 Adelaide Street East in 1878. From that single storefront, a Cantonese community slowly grew in the neighbourhood then known as The Ward — a densely packed immigrant district around York and Elizabeth Streets, between Queen and Dundas. By 1911, roughly 1,000 Chinese residents lived there. Most were single men from the four Toisan-speaking counties (四邑, Sze Yup) in Guangdong, working laundries and restaurants after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway pushed Chinese railroad workers eastward.
They lived under two of the harshest anti-Chinese laws in Canadian history: the Chinese Head Tax, imposed in 1885 and raised to a punishing $500 per person in 1903, and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which effectively banned Chinese immigration until 1947. A generation of Cantonese men in Toronto could not bring wives or children.
1955: the year Chinatown was demolished
In the 1950s, Toronto decided to build a new City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square on the exact site of The Ward. Two-thirds of the original Chinatown was expropriated and razed, despite protests from the community. Cantonese business owners were displaced from the streets their families had worked for 70 years.
Most did not leave the city. Instead, they moved west — along Dundas Street, then up Spadina Avenue. And rebuilt.
The second Chinatown: Spadina and Dundas
Present-day Downtown Chinatown crystallised at the corner of Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West through the 1960s. It grew fast after 1967, when Canada replaced its old racist immigration system with the merit-based points system. Wives, children, and extended families finally arrived from Hong Kong and Guangdong to join men who had waited decades. By 1971, nearly half of the 8,000 residents in Southeast Spadina were of Chinese origin.
The 1970s and 80s brought a bigger wave: Cantonese speakers leaving Hong Kong ahead of the 1997 handover to China. Toronto Chinatown became one of the largest Cantonese-speaking diaspora hubs in North America — alongside Vancouver and San Francisco.
What makes Toronto Chinatown Cantonese
Toronto has other Chinese neighbourhoods now — East Chinatown at Broadview and Gerrard, and huge Mandarin-speaking Chinese suburbs in Markham, Richmond Hill, and Scarborough. But Downtown Chinatown remains stubbornly Cantonese in character.
Walk Spadina Avenue between Dundas and College and you get: siu laap shops with roast ducks hanging in the window, herbal medicine halls, dim sum palaces still doing push-cart yum cha on weekends, bubble tea shops, and grocery stores where the aunties will argue with you in Cantonese about which choi sum bunch is fresher. Signage is in traditional characters. The bakeries do bo lo bao and egg tarts the Hong Kong way.
The Cantonese Toronto vocabulary
多倫多
do1 leon4 do1 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: Toronto — the Cantonese phonetic transliteration.
Explanation: Cantonese has its own version of foreign city names. In Cantonese, Toronto is 多倫多 (do1 leon4 do1), London is 倫敦 (leon4 deon1), New York is 紐約 (nau2 joek3). Every Cantonese diaspora city has its own name, distinct from the Mandarin version.
Why it still matters
Cantonese Toronto is now old enough to have great-grandchildren. Third- and fourth-generation Cantonese Canadians grew up above their parents' restaurants on Spadina, then went to law school at U of T. Some stayed, some moved out to the suburbs, some came back with kids of their own who now go to Cantonese Saturday school on Beverley Street.
The neighbourhood survived a demolition in 1955. It survived the SARS crisis in 2003. It survived pandemic-era anti-Asian racism in 2020. Every time someone declares Chinatown finished, another Cantonese uncle opens a new bakery and starts selling pineapple buns to a fresh generation of homesick Hong Kongers.
That is the whole story of the Cantonese diaspora, compressed into one intersection.
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