Take me away: Victoria puts the ‘British’ in B.C.
A proper British tea, Fan Tan Alley, a bedazzled Parliament and a castle named Craigdarroch. Welcome to beautiful Victoria, British Columbia.
Once a simple fort for fur trading, Victoria is now the elegant capital of British Columbia. It took the Canadian Pacific Railway tearing through the wilderness to bring a new concept of leisure travel to the wild west of Victoria in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And nothing brought in those leisure travelers more than the elegant railway hotels like Victoria's Empress.
Built between 1904 and 1908, The Empress Hotel is a French Château-inspired beauty inside and out. There are 400 guest rooms, the Palm Court with a Tiffany-style stained glass ceiling, the Crystal Ballroom with 10 dazzling 8,000-piece chandeliers, and the Bengal Lounge, decked out in Colonial Indian Style. Legend has it that there was no sign above The Empress for years, with the reasoning that if "one didn't know where it was, one shouldn't enter."
The Empress was built to impress the royals, and it did. Queen Elizabeth and King George VI visited in 1939, and the VIP guest list was a who's who of the early 20th century, including Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling — who had a restaurant named after him — and Shirley Temple.
The main event at The Empress is the Afternoon Tea. The nibbles are fit for any famished princess: a selection of tea blends, and a Tea Tier that includes strawberries with Empress cream, smoked salmon and herb cream cheese pinwheels, cucumber sandwiches with saffron, cognac pork pâté on sun-dried tomato bread, and for dessert, devil’s chocolate and pistachio Battenberg and lemon curd meringue tarts.
Afternoon Tea certainly didn't start here at The Empress, but it does carry on the tradition set by the Duchess of Bedford back in the 1850s, who was feeling rather faint around 4 p.m. every day having to wait until dinner. Why was dinner so late in the evening? We have the invention of indoor electric lighting to thank for that. So the four o'clock-ish meal of Afternoon Tea was born. And here at The Empress, more than a century later, you will sip from the same china pattern designed for the Queen and King's visit in 1939.
As you sip and gossip, gaze out the window across the Inner Harbour to Victoria's other architectural jewel: the British Columbia Parliament Buildings. They're lit up at night with 3,560 twinkly lights, looking just like a fairy tale castle. The lights were a special gift for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee visit in 1897, at a time when electricity was still fairly new. These beautiful twinkly lights were meant to resemble jewels in the night sky.
Victoria's Chinatown began around 1858, when Chinese immigrants moved to the Pacific Coast region during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. Today, there are still more Chinese buildings here than anywhere else in Canada. And in between all those buildings is a hidden labyrinth known as Chinatown's "Forbidden City," a network of alleyways and courtyards hidden behind storefronts, once only known to the Chinese residents here. And the most historic part of the Forbidden City is Fan Tan Alley.
Fan Tan Alley is where many of the illegal gambling dens were in the 1800s. There were secret entrances, and more importantly, secret escapes, for when the police came through. Fan Tan Alley is the narrowest commercial street in North America, only 3 feet wide at its narrowest, which made it conveniently tricky for the police: They could only enter single-file during raids.
Another Victoria jewel is a castle built for a Scottish coal miner, who sailed halfway around the world to make his fortune. In 1850, Robert Dunsmuir was only 25 years old when he and his pregnant wife boarded a ship that took 191 days to sail from Scotland to Victoria. That grueling journey was worth it, as Dunsmuir went on to become richest man in Western Canada as a coal baron, railway founder and politician here in Victoria.
And what does the richest man in Western Canada need? An awesome castle. Craigdarroch Castle is known as a “bonanza castle,” a term given to mega-mansions built for the nouveau riche with money to burn. Its architectural style is a bit of a bonanza too, a mishmash of French, Spanish and Italian Romanesque on the outside and Scottish Baronial on the inside, with luxurious wood paneling everywhere you look. There's also a really cool Escher-esque stairway, leading up through the four stories and 25,000 square feet.
The name Craigdarroch translates to "rocky oak place," and today it is known simply as "Canada's Castle." Craigdarroch Castle stands proudly upon its hill as a symbol of the industrial era entrepreneurial spirit, and the Victorian elite who elevated Victoria to the elegant city it is today, in what was once the wild west of Canada.
