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Tim Wong keeps the keys to a gate at the top of a staircase inside an old Vancouver Chinatown building. The 80-year-old also keeps many of its stories, some of them unwritten anywhere, going back over 100 years in city history.

Follow Wong up another two flights of stairs, and he unlocks one door and then another, until there is a room that feels like some kind of undiscovered time capsule for its rows of framed, black-and-white photos hanging one after another across a wall. They are mostly of Chinese men in suits.

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This is just one room inside the Wong’s Benevolent Association on Pender Street, but there are similar, if less organized, troves in other Chinatown buildings.

Many have been gathering for years with no one much bothered about them.

But real estate wheeling and dealing for land and buildings in Chinatown has sparked a heated debate over what in the area should be protected or developed. Out of this, some owners of designated heritage buildings in Chinatown have been encouraged with grant money to restore their properties.