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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

THE task of preparing an account of the Chinese in Singapore for the hundred years from the 6th day of February 1819, mainly from a historical and chronological point of view, has been a difficult and laborious one in consequence of the paucity of data, records and references bearing on the Chinese inhabitants of this island, especially during the early decades.

To think of the Chinese in Singapore, we must let our minds go back far beyond the founding of this Settlement by Sir Stamford Raffles. Long before the advent of Europeans into the Malayan regions, the Chinese had migrated westwards and southwards from their homes in search of knowledge and in quest of the exotic products of the tropics. ‘That an early intercourse existed between China and the islands of the Asiatic Archipelago’, says Crawfurd,¹ … is certain, but there is, at the same time, no ground for ascribing a very remote antiquity to it. In the ancient language, literature and monuments of Java, the only country of the Archipelago boasting of an ancient civilisation, there is certainly no allusion whatever to China or the Chinese. There is, however, other evidence which attests an intercourse of many centuries. Ancient Chinese coins have been discovered in various parts of the Archipelago: and as these, with the exception of those of Java, are known to have been [2] the only coined money of the Archipelago before the arrival of

Europeans, they are sufficient to prove the existence of the intercourse. Thus, several coins were dug up in 1827 from the ruins of the ancient Malay settlement of Singapore, said to have been founded in 1160 and destroyed by the Javanese in 1252. These coins have been deposited in the Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society and bear the names of Emperors whose deaths correspond with the years of our time, 967, 1067 and 1085.²

It is, however, on record that in AD 414 Fa Hsien,³ the celebrated Buddhist pilgrim, returned to China via Ceylon, the Straits of Malacca and Java. From about this time onwards, the Chinese continued to visit the Malayan regions in increasing numbers. They were highly respected by the natives and succeeded in inducing the rulers of these regions to send tributes to the Emperors of China. The annals of the Middle Kingdom are full of records of missions from the princes of these little-known States.

In 1408 and in 1412 a tour of the Chinese settlements in Malaya was conducted by the illustrious eunuch and statesman of the Chinese Court, popularly known to every Chinese throughout Malaya as Sam-po-kung.⁴ Tradition says that he remained in Malacca for some time, learning Malay and performing miracles, to the astonishment of the natives, whose ruler agreed to send tribute to the Dragon Throne. There are now in Malacca, quite close to the town – the old well, alleged to have been used by him, and the little memorial temple with appropriate inscriptions cut on stone, telling of his sojourn in Malacca. Sam-po-kung is evidently a name to conjure with among the illiterate classes. The miracles which he performed to save his countrymen from the perils of their travels in unknown lands are among the marvels of romance, illustrating in a striking way one of the factors in the genesis of a myth. … [3]

The Chinese in Malaya did not at first attempt to form permanent colonies, but always at the end of each trip returned home in their junks when the monsoon changed. In course of time these itinerant traders found it convenient to marry the women of the country in which they had established business houses. The native wives were useful as housekeepers and saleswomen, keeping the shops going while their husbands returned to China for further shipments of goods. While the boys born of Malayan mothers in those far-off days were repatriated for education in China, the girls were left behind, but were never allowed to marry the natives of the country. Thus, in the course of a few generations, the new-comers from China found a growing population of native-born Chinese females in all the flourishing trading centres which the energy and the enterprise of the early pioneers had called into existence.

By the time of the Dutch inroads into the Malayan regions the Chinese had firmly established themselves in Java, in Bali, in the Moluccas, in Acheen and in the Malay Peninsula. Trengganu, for instance, has had for a considerable period an indigenous Chinese population interbreeding among the local Chinese and the new immigrants from China. In Rhio and Penang, the same process of marrying Malay wives to found families had produced the same results. The children spoke a new patois of Chinese in each locality, with a liberal admixture of Malay words peculiar to each Malayan region.

In Malacca, however, where the Chinese had formed a continuous colony for about six centuries, the womenfolk had entirely dropped the use of Chinese, while the Malacca-born Chinese males only acquired the Hokien dialect colloquially for the purposes of trade, though the sons of the rich were always duly provided with a Chinese teacher to teach them the hieroglyphic writings of their fathers, and the sacred writings of their sages. The growth of the local population of native-born Chinese continued to increase steadily through the Portuguese and Dutch occupations. Up till the early part of the nineteenth century, the local Chinese families used to take considerable interest in the arrival of the junks from China, for these not only brought new [4] goods, but welcome batches of eligible sons-in-law for the daughters who could not marry the natives of the country. While the boys were fewer in number than the girls, they could, when grown up, and often did, take Malay girls to be their wives, and the Chinese girls had either to marry the Chinese of mixed parentage or the immigrants from China. In this way the Chinese families steadily increased in number and became a permanent population of the peninsula, since, in the vast majority of cases, the connection with China was sooner or later severed. For all practical purposes these locally-born Chinese became the natives of the Malayan States, having lost touch with China in every respect, except that they continued to uphold Chinese customs, and to practise, in variously modified forms, the social and religious practices of their forefathers.

This was the condition of the permanent Chinese population when the British appeared on the scene. In reality, a new race had been created by the fusion of Chinese and Malay blood. While the Chinese traditions and conventions have been more or less scrupulously observed, and there has been visible, to the inexperienced, little outward change, there have existed in reality fundamental differences that have increased in the course of years. Though these Chinese peranakans (or local-born men), as the Malays call them, are to all intents and purposes Chinese, from a superficial acquaintance with them and their mode of life, they have developed such distinct social qualities and have shown so many characteristic ethnic and anthropological aspects that they constitute a class by themselves. Since the British occupation, through the influence of English education, the line of cleavage has become more evident. The forces that are at work shaping the destiny of this important branch of the Sino-Malayan race continue to operate throughout the length and breadth of the Malayan region. The characteristics of this people – whether in Netherlands India or in British Malaya – are identical, showing that the fundamental qualities of the parental races have been preserved; but, owing to the great difference between the British and the Dutch systems of government and education, [5] the social, political and educational conditions of the British and Dutch Chinese peranakans exhibit remarkable qualitative variations, to the advantage of the Chinese born and bred under the aegis of the British flag.⁵

With this necessary historical introduction, we will now proceed with the subject of this work.

1The first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography carries the following article on Crawfurd by Robert Kennaway Douglas:

Crawfurd, John (1783–1868), orientalist, was born on 13 Aug 1783, in the island of Islay, where his father had settled as a medical practitioner. He received his early education in the village school of Bowmore, and in 1799, at the age of sixteen, he entered on a course of medical studies at Edinburgh. Here he remained until 1803, when he received a medical appointment in India, and served for five years with the army in the North-west Provinces. At the end of that time he was, most fortunately in the interests of science, transferred to Penang, where he acquired so extensive a knowledge of the language and the people that Lord Minto was glad to avail himself of his services when, in 1811, he undertook the expedition which ended in the conquest of Java. During the occupation of Java, i.e. from 1811 to 1817, Crawfurd filled some of the principal civil and political posts on the island; and it was only on the restoration of the territory to the Dutch that he resigned office and returned to England. In the interval thus afforded him from his official duties he wrote a ‘History of the Indian Archipelago’, a work of sterling value and great interest, in 3 volumes, 1820. Having completed this work he returned to India, only, however, to leave it again immediately for the courts of Siam and Cochinchina, to which he was accredited as envoy by the Marquis of Hastings. This delicate mission he carried through with complete success, and on the retirement of Sir Stamford Raffles from the government of Singapore in 1823, he was appointed to administer that settlement. In this post he remained for three years, at the end of which time he was transferred as commissioner to Pegu, whence, on the conclusion of peace with Burma, he was despatched by Lord Amherst on a mission to the court of Ava. To say that any envoy could be completely successful in his dealings with so weak and treacherous a monarch as King Hpagiydoa would be to assert an impossibility; but it is certain that Crawfurd, by his exercise of diplomatic skill, accomplished all that was possible under the conditions. In the course of the following year Crawfurd finally returned to England, and devoted the remainder of his long life to the promotion of studies connected with Indo-China. With characteristic energy he brought out an account of his embassy to the courts of Siam and Cochin-China in 1828, and in the following year a ‘Journal’ of his embassy to the court of Ava, which reached a second edition in 1830 (2 vols). Among his other principal works were A Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language, in 2 vols (1852), and A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries (1856); in addition to which he published many valuable papers on ethnological or kindred subjects in various journals. Endowed by nature with a steadfast and affectionate disposition, Crawfurd was surrounded by many friends, who found in him a staunch ally or a courteous though uncompromising opponent in all matters, whether private or public, in which he was in harmony or in disagreement with them. For many years Crawfurd was a constant attendant at the meetings of the Geographical and Ethnological Societies, discussing authoritatively all matters connected with Indo-China. He unsuccessfully contested, as an advanced radical, Glasgow in 1832, Paisley in 1834, Stirling in 1835, and Preston in 1837. Crawfurd died at South Kensington on 11 May 1868, aged 85.

See Leslie Stephen (ed), Dictionary of National Biography, Vol 13 (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1888), at 60–61.

2[Song: Crawfurd’s Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Archipelago (1856), p. 94]. John Crawfurd, A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands & Adjacent Countries (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1856), ‘China’, at 94.

3Faxian (337–c422 CE) was a Buddhist monk who travelled from China to India on foot, visiting many sacred Buddhist sites along the way. He recorded his journeys in his A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. See A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (AD 399-414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline, translated and annotated by James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886).

4Sam Po Kong is the nickname for the famous Ming admiral Zhenghe , or Cheng Ho (1371–1433), who commanded seven massive expeditions involving numerous treasure ships to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and East Africa between 1405 and 1433. A well in the grounds of the San Bao Temple – supposedly dug by Zhenghe and his men – at the foot of Bukit Cina is the well referred to in this passage. See Edward L Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (London: Pearson, 2006).

5[Song: Dr Lim Boon Keng in Present-Day Impressions of the Far East, pp. 876–7]. See, Lim Boon Keng, ‘The Chinese in Malaya’ in W Feldwick (ed), Present-Day Impressions of the Far East and Prominent and Progressive Chinese at Home and Abroad: The History, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources of China, Hong Kong, Indo-Chyina, Malaya, and Netherlands, India (London: The Globe Encyclopedia Company, 1917) 875–882, at 876–877.