The Chinese laundries have vanished, along with the fragrant smells wafting from the kitchens of restaurants like the Canton and Yangtze. Gone too are the dragon dancers and firecrackers that lit up the city streets on Chinese New Year.
The sounds and sights of a thriving Chinatown, and the hundreds of Chinese-Canadians who called it home, have vanished from Quebec City. Only the memories live on -- in a dwindling number of people.
"It was like New York: not as large, but almost as busy," recalls Benoit Woo, 53. He and his brother Napoleon are the only survivors of Quebec City's original Chinatown still to live in the district.
"Chinatown is gone, gone to heaven."
Now, steps are being taken to commemorate the neighbourhood and the people who created it. Decades after urban renewal destroyed the Chinatown in Quebec's provincial capital and scattered its residents to the suburbs and beyond, local officials say they want to mark the site of the old neighbourhood with a Chinese garden.
And members of the Chinese community are dreaming bigger. Jocelyn Toy, president of the Quebec City Chinese Association, is trying to drum up investment in Toronto and elsewhere to create a tourist district with Chinese stores, historical plaques, and an Oriental archway with bronze lions.
He said Chinese-Canadians will never return to live in Chinatown -- too many have decamped for Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver -- but at least the world can remember their passage.
"I want people to see there was a Chinese community here, and it was one of the oldest in Canada," Mr. Toy said. He recalls a Chinese quarter that took root at the close of the 19th century.
"The Chinese in Quebec City were always discreet. We felt we mustn't be seen. Now I want people to see we've been here, and we contributed to the progress of Quebec City."
Mr. Toy has his work cut out. The old Chinatown has been all but wiped off the map.
The community, in the St. Roch district downhill from the capital's spiffed-up tourist sites, was razed in the early 1970s for construction of the Dufferin-Montmorency Highway.
Today, the highway's ramps and overpasses loom over the old neighbourhood like tombstones.
The Chinese Catholic Mission has been demolished and replaced by a massive multiplex cinema. Homes were bulldozed for modern new apartments that today have no Chinese-Canadians in them. The 40 Chinese laundries that hummed with activity in the 1930s have disappeared without a trace.
About the only visible vestige of the community is Mr. Woo's home on St. Vallier Street in the old headquarters of the Chinese Nationalist Party. It still has its sign with Chinese lettering, but the paint is faded and peeling.
"There are more people in the Chinese cemetery," Mr. Woo said ruefully in front of his home, "than there are here now."
Quebec City isn't the only place in Canada to lose its Chinatown.
In the 1930s and 1940s, when Chinatowns served as enclaves for a persecuted minority, about 25 Chinese districts sprung up across Canada, in places such as Sudbury, Hamilton, Moose Jaw and Regina.
Today, fewer than a dozen survive, all in Canada's biggest cities, said David Lai, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Victoria. Chinatowns came under merciless pressure from urban development, and Chinese-Canadians became upwardly mobile and moved on.
But the demise of Quebec City's Chinatown became synonymous with the eclipsing of a community. Those who remained eventually packed up for the suburbs and dispersed to the point of near invisibility.
Today, only about 1,400 people identify themselves as Chinese in the Quebec City metropolitan area, according to the latest census figures; at 0.2 per cent of the population, it is the lowest proportion of any major city in Canada.
"Once the centre [Chinatown]was gone, there was no critical mass, no meeting point," said Walter Tom, 40.
Mr. Tom graduated in law from Laval University in Quebec City, but left for Montreal after being unable to get a job in his hometown. Today, he is a successful immigration lawyer, and his Quebec City-born siblings live in Montreal, Connecticut and London, England.
Two years ago, his father, 71-year-old Eugene, followed his children to Montreal. He had spent a lifetime putting in 15-hour days cooking spareribs and noodles in Chinese kitchens in Quebec City. Other old-timers had all died or left.
"Today, the young ones grow up and leave, and the old ones follow. People my age, they all left Quebec City. It's bye-bye."
Civic officials are gearing up to mark the city's 400th anniversary in 2008, and the occasion has become a catalyst for focusing on the Chinese community.
It comes at a time when Quebec City faces an odd demographic trend. While Canada's major cities grapple with growing diversity, Quebec City remains unique. Less than 3 per cent of its population is foreign-born, according to the 2001 census, a rate that is virtually unchanged in 40 years.
In Winnipeg, a city of similar size, 16 per cent of the population was born outside Canada (compared with 18 per cent in Montreal and 43 per cent in Toronto).
Officials are taking a second look at the former Chinatown because those massive highway ramps are being eyed for demolition, a move that would clear space for a Chinese garden or park. And Quebec City is twinned with the Chinese city of Xi'an, which has offered a Chinatown arch. Negotiations for the gift are under way, a city hall official said.
"We want to pay homage to the fact this neighbourhood once included a major Chinese community. When the city razed the neighbourhood, we forgot about them," local city councillor Pierre Maheux said. "That's important to recall in Quebec City, where you get the impression that everyone comes from the Saguenay and is white, Christian and francophone from A to Z."
Chinese-Canadians do not make up the only long-established minority eager to remind the city of its existence.
The Jewish community, which has shrunk to 150 people from about 700 in the 1950s, is also mounting a historical exhibit for the 400th anniversary.
"The idea is to show people how Jews have been part and parcel of the fabric of society here, and an important part of history," said Simon Jacobs, a British transplant who heads up the project. "People in Quebec City don't know about Judaism. The only Jews they know are the ones they see on TV."
For both communities, the clock is ticking to salvage their history before the people who shaped it are gone.
A few years ago, archeologists in the old Chinatown discovered a circular stone the size of a motorcycle tire in the earth.
It turned out to be a grinding wheel for soybeans, buried in the debris of the old Canton Restaurant. Now the wheel is on display in the neighbourhood -- one small piece of Chinatown to rise again from the ruins.