I will admit I am a somewhat of a conspiracy theorist. I think that the way the world is run is not how we have been taught to see it.

But even if you think conspiracies are ridiculous, can you deny that social conditioning is real?

We’ve all been taught to think or do certain things. We’ve all felt the pressure to conform to our culture. We’ve all fell into the trap of stereotyping other groups, trying to fit others into a box that makes sense of them from our perspective.

This is exactly what led to the conspiracy of a secret tunnel network under Vancouver’s China town.

Say what?

Yup. And apparently, it’s the fault of Charles Dickens, you know, the old English guy who wrote a few books with minor success.

Turns out he died while he was in the middle of writing one of these books, and in the unfinished manuscript were stories of Chinese people disappearing right in their basements.

Considering the year was 1870 when this was being written, these “disappearances” fit in well with the stereotypes about Chinese people in the western world.

Chinese people were thought to be secretive and that they were hiding things from the white public, although nobody ever really specified what it was that they were trying to hide… secret family recipes for dumplings, maybe? In that case, I would understand the secretiveness, as westerners have a tendency of taking food from other cultures and watering it down.

Jokes aside, obviously this suspicion of Chinese people was unfounded and ridiculous. But nevertheless, the attitude of the day combined with Charles Dicken’s story gave the inspiration for the conspiracy that the Chinese were building underground tunnels.

Many newspapers in Vancouver during the 1900’s fanned the flames of this myth. Rumours would be would spread and published after police raids on alleged gambling dens in Chinatown would come up empty. They thought the Chinese were escaping these raids through secret tunnels.

Yeah… or maybe the police just weren’t very good at their job. Or maybe they were just targeting innocent people because they were racist. Just maybe.

Even in modern times, this myth still seems to persist.

During the 2010 Olympics media visiting from other countries would often ask about the secret tunnels.

And even one of Vancouvers iconic landmarks, the Sam Kee Building, has been on the receiving end of these tunnel rumours; apparently it has a tunnel that leads to shanghai alley, and that it was used in the past as an escape from police raids on Chinese opium dens.

The president of Jack W. Chow Insurance, which is the name of the company located in the building, says that there is an “areaway” under the building, but there is no tunnel that is connected to anything else.

Plus, Chinatowns location is just not suitable for amateur tunnel building. Being so close to false creek, it is likely that any tunnels would flood.

Even though this myth obviously has a racist past, today it’s become a pretty harmless story, and the conspiracy theorist in me loves to hear stories like this.

Even if its obviously not true, it does make life a little more thrilling and fun to imagine secret societies and underground networks.