Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial | Part 2

I think it’s very important that you notice that there are 3 pairs of rocks, which are part of this sculpture. You have to look around. They’re to the east and the west of the trestle. These rocks are taken from the Rocky Mountains, from the original train route that the Chinese railway workers had to go through.  These rocks are situated in pairs and you should be able to pass through a narrow passage. They are taken from the original mountains. It was an epic struggle to remove these from the mountains. I was literally on the site and looked up to the mountains and there was a bulldozer taking down part of a mountain for this sculpture. And it was brought to this site by the Canadian Pacific Railway and it was hoisted by crane over the side of the retaining walls. I remember holding up the train traffic for the City of Toronto for a certain length of time while they craned these rocks over this retaining wall. It was quite an epic adventure. I remember hopping between railway cars to make sure which rocks were which, to be placed in their proper position, ‘cause once they were craned over, there was no possibility of them being removed to another site.

The rocks are very important to the sculpture, because they represent the nature, the difficulty of the passage that these Chinese railway workers had to construct. The railway was a cut-through the landscape and that’s what these rocks represent. They’re cut down the middle; you pass through them the same way the railway lines would pass through the wilderness. And they’re very large and they represent the kind of struggle the Chinese went through also.

On each rock there’s a little plaque made out of bronze; a little expression, which I wrote, one for each pair of rocks. You should walk around and read these simple poetic expressions.

Have you heard Part 1 yet?

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