Читать книгу One Hundred Years' History Of The Chinese In Singapore: The Annotated Edition - Ong Siang Song - Страница 10

NOTE TO READERS

ANNOTATIONS

The two key objects of this annotation are to offer readers and researchers:

a.Additional biographical information on the individuals described and discussed in Song’s work.

b.Accurate references to the source material used by Song in his compilation of the work.

It is not our purpose to embark on a biographical study of every individual listed. That would create a work many times more voluminous than Song’s original. In some instances, where the personalities are described in great depth by Song, for example his good friend, Dr Lim Boon Keng, annotations are kept to a minimum with reference only to later secondary sources that provide more information or better analysis. Interested readers may pursue these references on their own and it is not the object of the editors to summarise all the arguments made in the secondary literature either.

Wherever possible, primary sources were consulted and referenced. In the many cases where primary sources did not exist in the public domain, secondary sources were consulted and every effort made to corroborate the information provided.

CHINESE NAMES

In Song’s original version, all names were only rendered in dialect and spelt out in English. No Chinese characters were used. This has long been a problem for researchers as it was very difficult to determine if Chinese sources referring to a particular individual was in fact a reference to one of the named individuals in Song’s book.

We have prepared a table of Chinese names which can be found in the opening pages of this volume to help readers to identify the various personalities listed in this volume. We opted to make a listing in tabulated form rather than to intersperse the Chinese names of individuals throughout the text wherever their names appear. This makes the text less distracting and hopefully, much easier to read as well.

All efforts have been made to locate the Chinese character names of the individuals when collating the table. These are rendered in simplified Chinese script. In quite a number of instances, an individual may be listed as having several alternative Chinese script renditions of their names. This is because they have been referred to in different permutations in different publications. Naturally, attempts have been made to verify many of these names against those found in the most authoritative sources – family genealogies, epigraphic material on tombstones, temples etc – but oftentimes, such sources simply do not exist. So, rather than arbitrarily choose one of two or more alternatives, all alternatives have been listed.

FOOTNOTES

Annotation of the text has been done by use of extensive footnotes. This enables the reader to easily cross-reference material in the text and match up the facts and events with those revealed in the annotation.

Song Ong Siang’s original footnotes have been retained but are rendered in square brackets, to indicate that those footnotes are reproduced from the original, e.g.:

3.[Song: British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca (1839)].

All other footnotes have been inserted by the annotators.

QUOTATIONS

Compared to the original version of Song’s work, there appears to be a sudden ‘increase’ in the number of quotations in this version. This is because Song tended to take entire chunks of material from newspapers and books and weave these words into his own text. All he did to separate the quoted segments from the text was to make extensive use of double quote marks to indicate these ‘merged passages’. For example, this segment from Chapter 11 was originally laid out as:

This future occasion was furnished by the Harbour Improvement scheme. The Chinese view was based on the Colony’s experience in the construction of the Singapore and Kranji Railway, through the Crown Agents, which had cost two million dollars against an estimate of half a million dollars.

“The Harbour scheme is put down at fifty million dollars. Increase this by 300 per cent, or even 200 per cent, and the Colony will have to find two hundred or one hundred and fifty millions of dollars. These alarming figures justify the agitation that the time has come when Crown Agents may – nay, must – be dispensed with.”

We have opted to separate these extensive quotations from the main text and indent them in smaller typeface so that readers are better able to identify them as direct quotations. Thus, the same segment is now laid out in the following fashion without the quote marks:

This future occasion was furnished by the Harbour Improvement scheme. The Chinese view was based on the Colony’s experience in the construction of the Singapore and Kranji Railway, through the Crown Agents, which had cost two million dollars against an estimate of half a million dollars.

The Harbour scheme is put down at fifty million dollars. Increase this by 300 per cent, or even 200 per cent, and the Colony will have to find two hundred or one hundred and fifty millions of dollars. These alarming figures justify the agitation that the time has come when Crown Agents may–nay, must–be dispensed with.

PAGINATION

Given the extent of the annotation, it would have been impossible to retain the original layout and pagination of Song’s book. Furthermore, the original had been typeset rather generously in terms of space, and thus occupies a lot more pages than it might otherwise have. This edition has been completely re-laid out. Nonetheless, the pagination of Song’s original version has been ‘retained’ with the original page number indicated by in-text references in square brackets rendered in bold typeface, e.g.:

When he was scarcely twenty-five years of age, he was established in Kling Street and afterwards in [20] Circular Road, Singapore, as a commission agent supplying the junks trading between this port and Rhio, Sumatra and the ports of the Malay Peninsula, with all …

CITATION STYLE

For this volume, we have adopted a system of citation based on a form adopted from the 4^th edition of OSCOLA (Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities) developed by Oxford University. While this system of citation was developed for legal scholars, we have found its structure to be the most logical and usable among all styles considered. Moreover, it has the advantage of accommodating proper legal citations, which Song refers to from time to time. Citations of books are self-explanatory and authors’ names are reproduced as printed. In the case of journal citations, the form adopted is as follows:

Author, ‘Title of Article’, (Year) Volume number (Issue number), Name of Journal in full and in italics, and page range, with precise page quote.

For example:

Robert Harold Compton et al, ‘An Investigation into the Seedling Structure in the Leguminosae’ (1913) 41 Journal of the Linnean Society, Botany 1–122, at 12–15.