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The streetside entry to the Kee Ancestral manor, Sungai Bakap, Malaysia, in the early twentieth century.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOJOURNERS AND SETTLERS

Migration has been a recurring theme throughout Chinese history, continuing to the present at significant levels. The dynamic relationship among push and pull factors has long motivated both the destitute as well as the adventurous in China’s villages and towns to uproot themselves in order to move to locations within China and throughout the world in search of opportunities. Settling on a new place to live by building a home, which Chinese called dingju, has always resulted from a complex combination of individual resolve, cultural awareness, and financial resources. Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia examines the products of these decisions and actions, the surviving eclectic residences of Chinese immigrant pioneers and many of their descendents who, for the most part, flourished in their new homelands while living in dwellings reminiscent of those in China. This book presents the eclectic nature of their residences in terms of style, space, and materials. A companion volume will focus on the full range of objects enjoyed by Peranakan families within their architectural spaces or settings—the rooms—of their terrace houses, bungalows, and mansions as well as the layers of ornamentation around and about these residences. It is clear that these families were proud of their Chinese heritage.

The maintenance of that which is familiar while adapting to new circumstances is a recurring theme in Chinese history. The pushing out from core areas into frontier zones, indeed the sinicization of both landscapes and indigenous peoples, is a dominant part of China’s historical narrative. While complete families and whole villages in China sometimes migrated without ever going back to their home villages, there also was a tradition of sojourning in which fathers and/ or sons left with the expectation of only a temporary stay away before returning home. In Chinese history, merchants and financiers from the Huizhou and Shanxi areas, especially, epitomize the concept of sojourning. The resigned sentiments of this concept for a sojourning merchant and dutiful household head from Huizhou can be sensed in the note: “Those like us leave our villages and towns, leave our wives and blood relations, to travel thousands of miles. And for what? For no other purpose but to support our families” (Berliner, 2003: 5). Like those from Huizhou and Shanxi, traders, peasants, and coolies from the southeast coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong sojourned and settled in far-flung places, including Southeast Asia.

This engraving shows the various types of boats plying the waters along the north coast of Java. Clockwise: Javanese prahu; Chinese junk; coastal fishing boat; and Javanese junk.

Reified by scholars as “mobility strategies,” sojourning, whether in metropolitan regions of China itself or to a distant outpost in Southeast Asia, was for most traditional families a well thought out and logical traditional practice that heightened aspirations, providing enterprising families with opportunities for diversifying sources of income and acquiring wealth. Sojourning took many forms. In the fifty years from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, for example, some 25 million peasants from the densely populated North China plain provinces of Hebei and Shandong traveled seasonally to the relatively sparsely populated areas of Manchuria in order to open up for cultivation what were essentially virgin lands. They were called “swallows” or yan by their kinfolk because of the seasonal rhythm of their sojourn (Gottschang and Lary, 2000: 1). G. William Skinner, in his presentation of mobility strategies in late imperial China, provides a contemporaneous description of the Hu family’s approach to sojourning that involved not only trade in salt and porcelain but also finance and foreign trade (1976: 345):

When a family in our region has two or more sons, only one stays home to till the fields. The others are sent out to some relative or friend doing business in some distant city. Equipped with straw sandals, an umbrella and a bag with some food, the boy sets out on the journey to a place in Chekiang [Zhejiang] or Kiangsi [Jiangxi], where a kind relative or friend of the family will take him into his shop as an apprentice. He is about 14 years old at this time. He has to serve an apprenticeship of three years without pay, but with free board and lodging. Then he is given a vacation of three months to visit his family, who in the meantime have arranged his marriage for him. When he returns to his master he leaves his wife in his old home. Every three years he is allowed a three months’ vacation with pay which he spends at home.

This strategy to acquire wealth, which was pursued by territorially based lineage systems in inland China, operated as well in the coastal villages and towns of southern Fujian, and later in Guangdong. In this coastal region, embayed river ports and their hinterlands were the principal homelands for peasants, laborers, and traders who set sail in junks along the coasts and across the seas into what was for some terra incognita, but for many others parts of well-known trading networks.

Beyond the borders of imperial China, no area of the world experienced more sustained contact with Chinese or in-migration of Chinese over a longer period of time than the region referred to today as Southeast Asia, and which the Chinese have historically called the Nanyang or Southern Seas. Characterized by landmasses, peninsulas, and islands of many sizes, this is a region of great complexity and vast expanses, yet significant interdependence. Most of the maps of Southeast Asia show the region as a pendulous outlier of mainland Asia at a substantial distance from both China and India. Yet, from a Chinese perspective, the Nanyang was a sea-based region where even the most distant islands could be reached by sailing along well-known and charted routes. The maritime system within which Chinese coastal traders operated actually spanned an area greater than that of the Mediterranean Sea. Including both the East China Sea and the South China Sea, the immense maritime region stretched 5000 kilometers from Korea and Japan in the north to the Malay Archipelago in the south, and 1800 kilometers from coastal China eastward, beyond Taiwan, to the Philippines. Perhaps as many as 80 percent of the 35 million who trace Chinese ancestry and live beyond the political boundaries of China reside today in the crossroads of Southeast Asia.

Topside activity on a Chinese junk as depicted in a circa 1880 engraving.

Although this colorful view of a Fujianese junk is off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, similar vessels plied the routes throughout the Nanyang.

Arab, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese merchants arrived in the regional trading ports of Southeast Asia more than a thousand years before the appearance of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. Raw and processed silk was carried from China along the Maritime Silk Road westward through the Indian Ocean where it was exchanged for exotic items from Europe. Among the earliest concrete evidence of the direct trade between China and the western Indian Ocean was a ninth-century Arab or Indian shipwreck filled with Chinese ceramics that was excavated in 1998–9 off Beitung Island between Sumatra and Borneo (Flecker, 2001: 335ff). Moreover, beginning in the eighth century, residential quarters called fanfang for foreign traders from Western Asia were located in Chinese port cities, including Guangzhou (Canton) in Guangdong and Quanzhou (Zaytun) in Fujian as well as farther north in Ningbo (Mingzhou) and Hangzhou in Zhejiang. Exotic commodities such as ivory tusks, gold, silver, pearls, sandalwood, kingfishers’ feathers, pepper, cinnabar, amber, and ambergris, among many other precious goods, found their way to China from the distant lands via the southern sea trade.

In time, the polities within the Southeast Asia region increasingly were brought within the Chinese tribute system that peaked during the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century. Zheng He, the Muslim Chinese mariner who carried out seven fabled expeditions between 1405 and 1433, traversed the region, reaching some forty destinations that stretched from the Horn of Africa eastward along the southern, southeastern, and eastern shores of Asia. Over the following centuries, many of the ports visited by Zheng He became hubs for Chinese trading networks as well as sites for Chinese settlement and development. Even today, many of these places recall in their historical narratives the visits by Zheng He six centuries earlier.

The South China Sea as well as the East China Sea to its north had well-charted and well-traveled routes—a veritable maritime system of trade routes—that linked small and large ports across a vast region.

Sometimes sojourning resulted simply because Chinese traders were forced to stay for many months at a time at distant emporia waiting for the seasonal shifting of the monsoon winds. Indeed, over the centuries, the seasonal reversal of monsoonal winds was critical in establishing the trade patterns of Chinese traders. From September to April, the winds blew from the northeast to southwest carrying sailing ships from China southward. From May to September, the flow was reversed with the arrival of the southwest monsoon. Following these same routes, Arab traders took as long as two years for a round trip to China. From the fifth to the twelfth century, “the skippers trusted—when venturing out of the sight of land, to the regularity of the monsoons and steered solely by the sun, moon and stars, taking presumably soundings as frequently as possible. From other sources we learn that it was customary on ships which sailed out of sight of land to keep pigeons on board, by which they used to send messages to land” (Hirth and Rockhill, 1911: 28). By the twelfth century, maritime navigation improved with the introduction of a “wet compass” or yeti luojing, a magnetic piece of metal floating in a shallow bowl of water. Zhao Rukua, also known as Chau Ju-kua, a customs inspector in Quanzhou during the Song dynasty, chronicled in his book Zhufan Zhi (Records of the Various Barbarous Peoples) the places and commodities known to peripatetic Chinese during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was in this way that Chinese sojourners and settlers populated distant lands in increasing numbers as both sojourners and settlers. Their tales of prospects and opportunities no doubt infiltrated the outlooks and hopes of others in their home village.

The greatest flow of Chinese migrants by sea occurred from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. While Wang Gungwu describes four overlapping out-migration patterns from southern China to Southeast Asia, only two will be discussed (1991: 4–12). Huashang, Chinese traders/merchants/artisans, comprised the dominant and longest lasting pattern. Huashang during the early periods generally settled down and married local women even when they had a wife in China. As their businesses became more profitable, other family members might leave China and join them. Some Huashang returned to China, according to the rhythm of trade, chose a spouse, and then maintained separate households for their different families. The Huashang type of migration pattern was employed especially by Hokkien migrants from southern Fujian to the Philippines, Java, and Japan; the Hakka on the island of Borneo; and those originating in the Chaozhou region of northeastern Guangdong province. It is both a fact and a curiosity that the Huashang pattern of migration had been practiced for many centuries within China.

Huagong were Chinese contract workers who arrived between the 1850s and the 1920s, usually as sojourners who intended to earn money and then return to their home villages to live out their remaining days. Unskilled contract workers were usually referred to as coolies, an English loanword whose roots reside in many Asian languages, including the Hindi word for laborer, qūlī, and the Chinese term kuli, meaning “bitter work.” Huagong especially played important roles in the opening up of rubber and palm plantations in Sumatra as well as tin mines and plantations along the Malay Peninsula. Substantial numbers of Chinese contract workers/coolies or Huagong also migrated to North America and Australia where they worked as laborers in mining enterprises and in railway construction. As opportunities arose, some of those who arrived as coolies or traders eventually became storekeepers or artisans, while others became farmers or fishermen. Patterns of settlement and return, living and working, varied from period to period. Indeed, as described by Anthony Reid, “It is the curious reversals of the flow southward, periodically running evenly, occasionally gushing, sometimes tightly shut, more often dripping like a leaking tap, that provide the rhythm behind the historical interaction of China and Southeast Asia” (2001: 15). While many other broad and complex topics—the history of migration, reputed business acumen and entrepreneurship, acculturation and assimilation, as well as tortuous issues relating to loyalty and nationality—are important and worthy of study, they will not be explored in this book.

Descendants of both Huashang and Huagong are found today throughout the countries of Southeast Asia where popular lore as well as the memories of descendant families trumpet tales of once penniless males who came to “settle down and bring up local families” (Wang Gungwu, 1991: 5). Through what is called chain or serial migration, pioneers arrived first, then sent information about new opportunities to those back home, which then spurred additional migration from their home villages. The ongoing arrival of related individuals helped maintain connections between the original homeland and new locations. Indeed, for many, their hearts remained back in China, and they saw themselves as Chinese in a foreign land. Yet, circumstances often meant that dreams of returning home were thwarted, and sojourners became settlers, forced to “bear hardship and endure hard work,” chiku nailao, as the common phrase ruefully states it, dashing their prospects of “a glorious homecoming in splendid robes,” yijin huanxiang, also yijin ronggui, as someone who had made off well and could have a proud homecoming. To do otherwise, according to Ta Chen, “his unrecognized distinctions might be compared with a gorgeous costume worn by its proud owner through the streets on a dark night” (1940: 109).

While this book highlights the homes of Chinese who had done reasonably well in the places they ventured to, it is important to keep in mind that most Chinese and their descendants lived and continue to live in much more modest homes in these places. Significant numbers of arrivals and their descendants, of course, never broke the debilitating chains of poverty, living on as an underprivileged underclass, the hardworking but powerless who dreamed of a better future that was never realized. Coolies, peasant laborers, rickshaw pullers, trishaw pedalers, pirates, fisherfolk, even prostitutes and slaves, lived in the back alleys, on the upper floors of commercial establishments, and on sampans along the banks of streams without ever “settling down” or dingju (cf Warren, 1981, 1986, 1993, 2008). Voiceless in life, they left illegible traces of their subsistence lives.

Old gravestones, such as these found along the sprawling slopes of Bukit Cina (Chinese Hill) in Malacca, Malaysia, which is the largest Chinese cemetery outside China, indicate the name of the ancestral village of the deceased.

Homelands in China

While it is common for outsiders to describe migrants from China in terms of the province of their origin, most migrants, in fact, traditionally identified home as a smaller subdivision, as a county or village. In southeastern China, river basins and coastal lowlands, circumscribed by surrounding hills, mountains, and the ocean, formed well-understood units of local culture and identity, shared cultural traits that were affirmed with the population speaking a common dialect. For Chinese, the awareness of origins in terms of a native place has traditionally been as significant as consciousness of the connections to forebears via their surname and lineage. Indeed, old gravestones and ancestral tablets memorialize place-based identity even when the deceased was many generations removed from the family’s homeland. Children and grandchildren born in an adopted homeland, moreover, inherit the native place of their immigrant parents and grandparents. Native-place associations, called tongxiang hui, and lineage or clan associations, tongxing hui, traditionally served as ready reminders of the two most meaningful relationships Chinese individuals had with their broader world. The place-name origins of migrants thus signify more than a link to an administrative division, more than a reference to a mere location. Rather, native places connote a shared cultural context that clearly separates one migrant group from another.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, a majority of the emigrants from China originated from Fujian, a province with a rugged coast-line and a tradition of building boats for fishing and seafaring. The encyclopedic Shan Hai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), an eclectic two-millennia-old compendium of the known world, states: “Fujian exists in the sea with mountains to the north and west”, Min zai haizhong, qi xibei you shan. With limited arable land to support a growing population, the Fujianese turned to the neighboring sea, using small boats for fishing and seagoing junks for distant trade to the Nanyang where they exchanged manufactured wares for food staples. “The fields are few but the sea is vast; so men have made fields from the sea” is how an 1839 gazetteer from Fujian’s port city of Xiamen viewed the maritime opportunities afforded its struggling population during the last century of the Qing dynasty (Cushman, 1993: iii).

Referred to collectively as Hokkien, the local pronunciation of the place-name Fujian, the homelands of migrants can be readily subdivided in terms of at least three main dialects found in areas to the south of the Min River in this complex and fragmented province. Called Minnan or “south of the Min River” dialects, each is a variant of the others and is centered on one of the area’s three major ports: Quanzhou, Xiamen, and Zhangzhou. Although the three dialects are mutually intelligible to some degree, and are spoken in geographic locations that are relatively near to one another, the speakers of these dialects traditionally have seen themselves as belonging to distinct local cultures with dissimilar mores. In neighboring Guangdong province, another source region for significant numbers of migrants to the Nanyang, are other dialect-based communities: Chaozhou (Teochew, also Teochiu) and Hainan hua (Hainanese), which are also in the family of Minnan dialects, as well as Kejia (Hakka) and, farther west, those who speak Guangdong hua (Cantonese). One characteristic shared by all of these groups is that they occupy areas either adjacent to or connected by short rivers reaching the Taiwan Strait that connects the East China Sea and the South China Sea.

These simple plans reveal the characteristic forms of residences found throughout Fujian. The white areas indicate the variety of tianjing, skywells that open up the buildings to air, light, and water.

Elongated two-storey urban residences in Guangdong include multiple skywells, narrow corridors, steep stairs, and stacked rooms.

Along the Fujian–Guangdong coast, there are countless areas that are known in the vernacular as qiaoxiang, literally “home township of persons living abroad.” The term qiaoxiang was used in the nineteenth century to apply not only to sojourners, temporary residents who were abroad, but also to those who had been away for generations. Those Chinese who left China were referred to as Huaqiao, a capacious term often translated as “overseas Chinese,” but essentially meaning “Chinese living abroad.” “Overseas Chinese” itself historically has been a descriptor of considerable elasticity, applying not only to those temporarily abroad but also to those who are Chinese by ethnicity but have no actual connection with China. Guiqiao, indicating those Chinese who returned from abroad, and qiaojuan, indicating the dependants of Chinese who are abroad, are expressions still heard today. Qiaoxiang, as “emigrant communities,” traditionally were bound by social, economic, and psychological bonds in which emigration became a fundamental and ongoing aspect of country life. While poverty and strife may have induced earlier out-migration, over time migration chains create a tradition of going abroad that propels outward movement. In some ways, overseas sites arose as outposts of the qiaoxiang itself, linked to it by back and forth movements of people and remittances of funds to sustain those left behind. Indeed, as Lynn Pan reminds us, “emigrant communities are not moribund. The men might be gone but, collectively and cumulatively, they send plenty of money back. Many home societies have a look of prosperity about them, with opulent modern houses paid for with remittances by emigrants who have made good abroad” (2006: 30).

As later chapters will reveal, individual qiaoxiang are linked with specific locations in Southeast Asia, indeed throughout the world. Emigrants from the Siyi or Four Districts of Guangdong province on the west side of the Pearl River, for example, favored migrating to the goldfields and railroad construction opportunities in California. Farther east and clustered around the port of Shantou, once known in English as Swatow, those who spoke the Chaozhou dialect sailed to Siam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Kejia or Hakka from the uplands beyond Shantou, and accessible to it via the Han River, spread themselves widely. The area between Xiamen and Quanzhou, more than other areas in Fujian, fed the migrant streams throughout Southeast Asia. Jinjiang, once a county-level administrative area just to the south of the port of Quanzhou, not only looms large as the homeland of countless migrants throughout Asia, it is the ancestral home of over 90 percent of those of Chinese descent in the Philippines. Each of these distinct qiaoxiang areas is noted for its own variant forms of vernacular architecture, which explains in at least a limited sense many of the differences in the residences built by migrants in their adopted places of residence. The section below highlights some of the common features among these vernacular traditions, while later chapters will reveal some of the differences.

Old Homes Along China’s Coast

Chinese dwellings throughout the country share a range of common elements even as it is clear that there are striking regional, even sub-regional, architectural styles. Given China’s vast extent, approximately the size of the United States and twice that of Europe, it should not be surprising that there are variations to basic patterns that have arisen as practical responses to climatic, cultural, and other factors. While there is no single building form that can be called “a Chinese house,” there are shared elements in both the spatial composition and building structure of both small and grand homes throughout the country. In addition, Chinese builders have a long history of environmental awareness in selecting sites to maximize or evade sunlight, capture prevailing winds, avoid cold winds, facilitate drainage, and collect rainwater. Details of these similarities and differences are considered at length in some of my other books (Knapp, 2000; 2005).

Adjacent open and enclosed spaces are axiomatic features in Chinese architecture, whether the structure is a palace, temple, or residence. Usually referred to in English as “courtyards” and in Chinese as yuanzi, open spaces vary in form and dimension throughout China and have a history that goes back at least 3,000 years. Courtyards emerged first in northern China and then diffused in variant forms as Chinese migrants moved from region to region over the centuries. The complementarity of voids, apparent emptiness, and enclosed solids is metaphorically expressed in the Dao De Jing, the fourth-century bce work attributed to Laozi: “We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel: But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not” (Waley, 1958: 155).

While sometimes what is considered a courtyard is simply an outdoor space, a yard, at the front of a dwelling, a fully formed courtyard must be embraced by at least two buildings. Two, three, or four structures along the side of a courtyard create an L-shaped, inverted U-shaped, or quadrangular-shaped building type. Nelson Wu called such a composition a “house–yard” complex, with the encircling walls creating an “implicit paradox of a rigid boundary versus an open sky” (1963: 32). The framing of exterior space by inward-facing structures arranged at right angles to and parallel with the fronts of other buildings creates configurations that are strikingly similar to the character 井, a well or open vertical passage sunk into the confining earth. The proportion of open space to enclosed space is generally greater in northern China than in southern China, fostered by the desire to welcome sunlight in the north but to avoid its intensity in the south. As a result, courtyards found in southern homes are usually much smaller than elsewhere in the country.

Chinese in southern China use the term tianjing to describe open spaces within their dwellings, whether they are fairly large or indeed even mere shafts that punctuate the building. The term tianjing is usually translated into English as “skywell” or “airwell,” terms that are especially appropriate in multistoried structures where the verticality of the cavity exceeds the horizontal dimension. Atrium-like tianjing are found in Ming and Qing dynasty residences throughout central and southern China, including along the coastal areas. Tianjing evacuate interior heat, catch passing breezes, shade adjacent spaces as the sun moves, and lead rainwater into the dwelling where it can be collected. Adjacent to skywells, which are relatively bright compared to enclosed darker rooms, “gray” transitional spaces such as shaded verandas are common in Fujian and Guangdong. In order to reduce humidity levels that effectively lower the apparent temperature felt by the body, architectural devices such as open-faced lattice door panels, half-doors, and high-wall ventilation ports are employed in southern houses to enhance ventilation. Throughout Southeast Asia, where the sun is elevated in the sky year round and ambient temperatures are high, it is not surprising that immigrants from southern China continued to use tianjing in their new homes. Many examples will be shown in the chapters that follow.

Throughout southern Fujian and eastern Zhejiang, manors with front-to-back halls and perpendicular wing halls represent the typical fully developed residential form. This residence of the Zhuang family is located in the Jinjiang area of Fujian province.

Where building lots were restrictive and space was at a premium, Chinese builders traditionally adjusted the dimensions and shapes of their structures. In urban areas, narrow residences adjacent to each other along a street were constructed as long structures with small skywells punctuating the corridor-like receding building. Where it was possible to construct a more extensive residence, either narrow or broad parallel structures were constructed alongside a wider central unit. Over time, if wealth and family circumstances allowed, additional side-to-side wing units were added. Examples of this modularity and replication of enclosed and open spaces can still be seen throughout Fujian and Guangdong, indeed throughout China.

The Tan Tek Kee Residence, Jinjiang

Migrants who departed Fujian and Guangdong were generally poor, leaving behind family homes that were simple and unremarkable. In some cases, however, where the family already had a home and migration by a son was part of a family’s strategy to further increase its wealth, there was usually hope that improvements in the residence would take place as remittances came from abroad. In the early twentieth century, travelers in the region noted the presence of emigrant communities because of the superior quality of the dwellings. Ta Chen states that these fine homes, traditional and modern, were “the most effective way to express one’s vanity.” Moreover, “an effective display of pride does not mean only a large house, but it has to have evidences of taste and culture. This may be supplied either by modernity or, on the contrary, by an ostensible show of liking for those things which traditionally stand for refinement.... The ideal of ‘complete happiness’... is not in fact anything new the emigrants bring back with them from abroad, but embodied in the folkways of the countryside. What they do contribute is financial ability to gratify these tastes and, sometimes, innovations which produce curious contrasts between old and new in the homes and the furnishing of homes” (1940: 110–11).

While there is no “typical” home of a migrant, the residence discussed below illustrates the dynamic nature of space in a fully formed residence of a family who sent their son to the Philippines. The dwelling expresses what Chinese broadly considered a fine home for harmonious family life during the late imperial period. It exhibits well the layout and materials of a traditional Fujian dwelling, as well as reflecting aspects of family organization, ways of living, and ritual requirements in one of China’s preeminent qiaoxiang in Jinjiang county to the south of Quanzhou. Because of deterioration over the past half-century and lack of documentation, however, it is not possible to ascertain with certainty the specific changes brought about by the remittances from their successful son.

This expansive residence was built sometime during the latter half of the nineteenth century either by the father or grandfather of Tan Tek Kee, who was born in the family home in 1900. Family lore recalls that Tan Tek Kee’s forebears themselves had migrated southward from Henan province in northern China, perhaps an explanation for the fact that descendants have been tall compared to their neighbors. Tan Tek Kee’s father is said to have gained fame and perhaps some modest wealth from his fishball business. Fishballs, made from minced fish mixed with other ingredients, are still a distinctive component of cuisine in Fujian, whether served in noodle soups or deep-fried, skewered, and served with various sauces. Raised by his elder brother and sister-inlaw, Tan Tek Kee married at the age of thirteen or fourteen before being sent to the Philippines in 1914 or 1915 with family friends surnamed Cheng, who served as his surrogate parents. Working first as a cook, then a courier, and then later a manager, he branched out on his own in the 1930s, even as he made many return trips to his family’s Jinjiang home and his birthplace. According to family custom, he retained some rights to the residence, which was sufficiently roomy so that the multigenerational families of his surviving siblings lived comfortably. The father of ten children, two of whom were adopted, Tan Tek Kee over time amassed sufficient resources to bring his wife to Manila where he died and was buried in 1966.

Resembling the typical architectural pattern seen on the previous page, the residence of Tan Tek Kee, also in Jinjiang, is much as it was during the late nineteenth century.

At one time, the home was a solitary structure surrounded by rice paddies, but as can be seen in the bird’s-eye view photograph, new-style multistoried structures have encroached upon it, diminishing to some degree not only its tranquility but also heightening its sense of being forlorn. Like other residences of this type, it was built with an overall rectangular shape, which could be considered square if one includes the walled open space in front. While its overall form remains today intact, renovation and dilapidation have altered its original appearance. In terms of the composition of its spatial elements, the three-bay central structure, with a generous square tianjing between the entry hall and the ancestral hall, has a pair of perpendicular structures that complete the quadrangular core. A second pair of parallel, perpendicular two-storied buildings was added to complete the layout. Each of the outer wings, called hucuo, is separated from the core building by a narrow longitudinal tianjing running from front to back, which could be entered directly from the outside via a doorway. Indeed, it would have been these two side entries that would have been used on a daily basis in the past, rather than the recessed central entryway, with its elegant didactic ornamentation.

From just inside a magnifi-cent entryway, which abounds in carved stone and brickwork, this view is across the first skywell looking towards the first hall.

Cut granite slabs, some of which are carved, were used throughout the residence for the foundation, steps, sills, and columns. Granite or huagangshi, a coarse-grained igneous rock known for being more durable than marble, was used in the core building. Readily available in the nearby mountains of the province, yet considered an expensive building material, granite has traditionally been employed as a building material in temples and fine residences throughout central and southern Fujian. (Today, parenthetically speaking, Fujian is a major source for polished granite countertops used in modern kitchens and bathrooms throughout the world.) The sunken entryway was created using interlocking vertical and horizontal pieces of granite of different dimensions. At the base of the entry portico, as well as inside the core structure, granite was used as flooring. After crossing the raised granite threshold, a visitor will note that the middle bay, including the full tianjing, is covered completely with granite dimension stone. Along the sides, granite slabs were used only to frame areas that were covered with kiln-fired red tile flooring. As the view from the entry hall through the tianjing to the main hall reveals, the tianjing was sunken, with drains to lead rainwater out of the home. Just beyond the tianjing and in front of the main hall, the level of the flooring was elevated to express the hierarchical importance of the hall.

Set upon carved granite bases, square granite columns with auspicious couplets carved into them, were placed around the tianjing. Atop each of these stone columns was fitted a short wooden column, linked together by mortise-and-tenon joinery, to lift the wooden framework supporting the roof. The horizontal and vertical wooden members as well as the elaborate wooden bracket sets still comprise an important ornamental aspect of the house that complements the hard stone beneath the feet. No room was designed to have more richness than the main hall, which was surrounded with solid wooden walls and sturdy hardwood columns. Sadly and tragically in recent years, the ridge beam that supported the roof rotted and fell to the floor, bringing down with it the wooden purlins, rafters, and roof tiles, and leaving the room open to the elements. What once must have been an imposing family altar with ancestral tablets atop it, has been replaced by a low table with a small collection of old photographs and votive pieces with a triple mirror above.

Throughout this region of Fujian, the exterior walls of many dwellings are constructed of either slabs of cut granite or composed only of red bricks, hongzhuan, made of local lateritic soils and fired in nearby kilns. The ancestral home of Tan Tek Ke, on the other hand, was constructed using both granite and red brick as structural and ornamental building materials. From a distance, the red brick of the façade and sidewalls appears to be laid with common bonds, yet on closer inspection it is clear that all of the red brick in the façade was used to serve ornamental purposes, with a number of different motifs. Adjacent to the entryway, the thin red bricks were decorated with a zigzag pattern of dark lines, which appear to have been painted on the bricks before they were fired. Surrounding each of the four granite windows are thin red bricks in a modified herringbone pattern with a box bond. Unlike Western bricklaying patterns, where stretchers vary to create named bonds, this Chinese pattern utilizes the wider top or face of the brick and the narrow header, which is darkened, to create the pattern. Carved bricks and tiles in geometric and floral patterns were also arrayed as a frame around the block of herringbone patterned bricks. Carved human figures were inset in five locations on each of two walls, but most are still obscured by a coating of white plaster. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, these carvings were plastered over as a precaution in order to prevent their destruction, but only several have been restored.

Granite, a widely available building material in the Quanzhou area, is used not only for flooring but also for columns and the bases of columns and is carved into ornamental panels.

Seven slender granite slabs are employed here to create one of the windows along the front wall, which is covered with thin red bricks.

Although the residence is generally in good condition, one area of serious damage resulted from the collapse of the main beam supporting the roof above the ancestral hall, which then opened the area to chronic water damage.

Along each side of the skywell, the eaves are supported by an assemblage of timbers, some of which are elaborately carved.

The gaze of a visitor approaching a residence of this type is drawn to the upswept ridgeline above the entry hall at the center of the complex, which is matched by a more impressive, and slightly higher, one on the main hall behind. This type of graceful ridgeline is called the yanwei or “swallowtail” style partly because it is upswept and tapered, but mainly because it is deeply forked at its tip. Each of the adjacent perpendicular buildings was constructed with a lower upswept ridgeline, with shed roofs that framed the sides of the central tianjing. These created a pair of flat rooftop terraces, which were accessible from below using stairs, outdoor spaces that once provided a place for quietude to enjoy the breeze in the evening or the moon at night. The relatively gentle pitch of the roofs was governed by the spacing ratio between the beams and struts that supported the roof purlins. Arcuate roof tiles, which appear like sections of bamboo, were used to cover the roofs. Today, the roof of one of the outer wing structures is undergoing renovation and currently only has a tar paper surface, which is held in place by bricks. What once was its symmetrical double on the other end of the house has been altered significantly with the removal of the original second floor and its replacement by a “modern” higher structure with a flat roof.

Traditional residences such as this have significantly declined in number over the past half-century, not only because of the disinterest of descendants and lack of maintenance but also because of deterioration due to age, dilapidation, and abuse. After 1949, especially during the class struggles associated with Land Reform, both land and housing were confiscated from landlords and merchants before they were redistributed to poor peasants. As a result, many grand residences, which represented the patrimony of Chinese living abroad, came to be occupied by destitute local families whose interest was more in shelter than preservation. While the 1950 Land Reform Law stated that ancestral shrines, temples, and landlords’ residences “should not be damaged,” and together with the “surplus houses of landlords... not suitable for the use of peasants” be transformed into facilities for “public use” by local governments, most began a process of corrosive decline that was accelerated during the transition to communes, which began in 1958. During this period, in which there was a craze for collectivized living, stately structures representative of China’s glorious architectural traditions—residences, ancestral halls, and temples—were transformed into dining halls, workshops, administrative headquarters, and dormitories, among other group-centered uses for the masses (Knapp and Shen, 1992: 47–55). Moreover, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a decade later, there was frenzied activity throughout the country that brought about the smashing and burning of ancestral altars and tablets, including substantial amounts of applied ornamentation handed down from the past. Ornamental and ritual elements made of wood, clay, and porcelain suffered the greatest loss, while those made of stone and brick managed to survive in significant numbers.

During what is known as the Reform and Opening-up Period in the decade after 1979, Overseas Chinese as well as local families, whose property in China had been confiscated during “the high tide of socialism” after 1949, were invited to apply for its return. Descendants from all over the world, including Southeast Asia, some of them generations removed from those who built the old homes, traveled to China in search of their family legacy. Families thus were able to assess what had been lost and what remained, while contemplating what to do with the property they once thought had been lost. Many stately old residences were quickly cleared of non-family members who occupied them, were cleaned of grime, and were repaired. In some cases, where furnishings had been removed and stored, they were returned, but in most cases furniture was not recoverable. Some families were able to reclaim their material links to their past, passing the structures on to family members still living in China. In other instances, overseas families provided funds for the restoration of a grand home with the title transferred to a governmental body or organization that promised to open the home as an historic site. The Chen Cihong manor shown on pages 262–7 is an example of this type of effort.

When the ancestral home of Tan Tek Kee was fully returned to the family, it had been stripped of all of its furniture and had suffered badly from lack of maintenance. The ritual heart of the residence in the main hall was derelict, with all of the tangible material elements long gone, and only faded memories remain. What once had been exquisite compositions of fine furnishings, ritual paraphernalia, paintings, and other art works, all had been lost. In recent years, the collapse of the central ridgepole above the altar opened the heart of the dwelling to water damage, which has accelerated its deterioration since resources have not been expended to make necessary repairs. The residence today is owned by descendants of Tan Tek Kee, who now must struggle with decisions about its preservation. While most of them today live comfortably beyond Fujian in the Philippines and Hong Kong, they have put forth substantial funds in an effort to both maintain and restore the patrimony of their forebear. Making decisions within an extended family about allocating resources and how the burden should be shared is not easy. Without the daily life and periodic ritual of the family that once occupied this fine home, and who gave it life, the structure today is a melancholy shell of its former splendor. Today, only a caretaker and his family now occupy the rambling old dwelling in order to keep it clean and protect it from vandalism while distant family members ponder its future.

New Homelands in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia, like other major realms of the world, as discussed above, is diverse and fragmented in terms of its physical and cultural geographies. The region can be divided fundamentally into two contrasting subdivisions: an Asian mainland that extends south from China, and an array of large and small islands that includes the world’s most extensive archipelago. Volcanic peaks, mountain spines, rugged coastlines, long rivers, short rivers, deltas, mangrove swamps, rich soils, and virgin forests are but some of the line-up of physical features that indigenous people and immigrants have adapted to.

It is likely that the Tan Cheng Lock residence on the right and the narrower residence on the left, which share an architectural style, were built at the same time in Malacca, Malaysia. Perhaps they were originally owned by a single family who later sold the units to different families.

Much of what we know of Chinese migration in Southeast Asia is fragmentary, with ebbs and flows guided both by imperial policy and individual decisions made by resourceful seaborne traders. During the Song dynasty in the twelfth century, the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and throughout the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644, Chinese trading communities of various sizes and compositions emerged at scattered port locations throughout the islands and peninsulas in the Nanyang. Over time, what once were scattered and isolated became tied into commercial networks. The arrival of Europeans, first as traders and then as colonialists, as well as Japanese, brought about competition and rivalries even as Chinese traders flourished and arriving Chinese settlers increased in number. Enterprising Chinese immigrants, as later chapters of this book will reveal, commercially exploited the profuse variety of flora and fauna as well as minerals and metals, resources providing work and a modest livelihood for countless contract laborers and bountiful wealth to a smaller number of migrants from China. The plantation cultivation of rubber, coffee, sugar, and spices, in addition to the collection of birds’ nests from caves in the wild and exotic flora and fauna from the biodiversity-rich ecosystems, played key roles in these transformations. The sections that follow will examine the dispersal of Chinese migrants, emphasizing the disparate character of history and geography of various settlement sites, as a prelude to the featured residences in Part Two.

Malacca

In the area clutched between the Malacca River and the Strait of Malacca, a casual visitor sees old buildings lining the narrow streets that appear on the exterior to be quintessentially Chinese. Indeed, Chinese characters arrayed above the lintels and windows and on the door and shutter panels, as well as the bulbous red lanterns hanging beneath the eaves, all seem to proclaim that this neighborhood has deep roots as a place of settlement by Chinese immigrants and their descendants, perhaps even to the earliest days of Malacca. Looking more closely at the exteriors, however, one also observes Dutch-period architectural features, Victorian glazed tiles, eclectic façades of uncertain age and origin, Chinese protective amulets, rooflines that span East and West, among other elements that confound the observer’s judgment. Glimpses through the doorways of hotels, restaurants, shops, even residences, seem to affirm that the occupants are principally Chinese in origin.

Those fortunate to be invited into homes along the lanes see that many are quite similar to the shophouses and terrace homes found in towns in southern China in that they have prominent skywells—small courtyards—that open up the interiors to light and air. In many of these residences, moreover, there is an abundance of antique Chinese and Western furniture, a proliferation of symbolic Chinese ornamentation, a mélange of curios, art works, and bric-a-brac from China as well as Europe, and an occasional architectural detail that appears odd in a Chinese home. It is a fair to ask: what can old residences like these tell us of the lives, aspirations, and tastes of the Chinese, and others, who have occupied them?

These buildings and these streets in Malacca indeed are more than they seem at first glance. On closer examination, one is able to see a multifaceted and layered history of successive occupancy by different groups, with the Chinese being but one prominent part, over five centuries from the 1500s to the present. Historical geographers call the succeeding stages of human inhabitation of a location over intervals of historic time “sequent occupance.” The coming and going of a group, which entails using and abandoning areas and buildings, is a dynamic process of creating and modifying to meet different cultural norms. Indeed, any of the residences that appear to be Chinese are, in fact, transformed artifacts representing both added and deleted elements when compared to what was inherited from others. To help understand similarities and differences, Malacca needs to be looked at in terms of different temporal and spatial scales.

At one scale, there is a sequence represented by the successive arrival in Malacca of different nationalities, some more powerful than others, but each leaving significant imprints on the landscape. Once a small and remote fishing village inhabited by indigenous Malays, Malacca began to develop as a port in the fourteenth century under the leadership of Parameswara, a Srivijayan prince from Sumatra. The Portuguese arrived in 1511, surrendering control to the Dutch in 1641 for a century and a half of development, before passing the region to the British in 1795, with a Dutch interlude again from 1818 to 1824, at the end of which the Dutch returned Malacca to the British in exchange for territory in Sumatra. Each of these occupancies was overlain by the arrival, presence, and activity of Muslim Arabs, Hindus from the Gujarat and Tamil regions of today’s India, and, of course, Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong provinces. All of these interacted with indigenous Malays. Moreover, the rise of Penang in 1786 and Singapore from 1819 onwards was accompanied by Malacca’s slipping in importance as a trading center with its relegation to a relative backwater. One result of this new status was that the layout of the town and its solid buildings, which passed from one group to another, were for the most part not destroyed but survived to be occupied and were then transformed by different residents.

As will be seen with later examples, the entryway of many Chinese homes differs little from temples in terms of form and ornamentation, such as Malacca’s Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, whose origins go back to the 1640s and is Malaysia’s oldest Chinese temple.

The expansive three-bay structure of the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple is made possible because of an elaborate wooden structural framework. This is a view towards the main and side altars.

Built early in the twentieth century on the northern outskirts of Malacca, in Tranquerah, this narrow terrace residence houses a multigenerational family. The façade is richly decorated with stucco patterns and calligraphic ornamentation. Just inside the entryway is a round table with a formal grouping of furniture with mother-of-pearl inlay. Beyond this area is a sky-well framed with fluted columns, which are painted to match the façade.

After having been used as a storehouse for antiques for thirty years, this two-storey terrace house along Heeren Street in Malacca was purchased in 2003 by a couple who have restored it and opened it as a bed-and-breakfast inn.

Between the early nineteenth and the twentieth century, Singapore shop-houses were transformed in height and width as well as style.

When the Portuguese arrived, they constructed a pentagonal fort on the south side of the Malacca River, while some joined Gujaratis and Tamils on the north bank where they lived in simple dwellings built from easily available materials such as timbers, mud, and thatched nipa palm called attap. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, successful merchants began to build more substantial houses in an area that was favored by cool breezes from the sea and came to be called Kampung Belanda or “Dutch Village.”

After disastrous fires that accompanied the Dutch siege in 1641, in addition to constructing residences and other buildings in Malacca’s administrative and commercial center, the Dutch laid out along the north side of the river a somewhat rectangular street plan with two major roads running parallel to the coast, which were intersected by minor ones. In this area, increasingly wealthy Dutch and other settlers constructed brick and stone homes with their backs aligned along the sea and their fronts along a road called Heerenstraat or “Gentlemen’s Street,” which was later renamed Heeren Street by the British. In time, multistoried residences, which were narrow in the front and elongated as they receded towards the water, were built, then no doubt modified from time to time to meet changing needs. Similar, but generally less grand homes were built along Jonkerstraat, an inland road parallel to Heerenstrat. While some of the elements of these evolving houses drew upon experiences the Dutch had in colonies elsewhere in the tropics, the residences also reflected the designs known to Chinese masons and carpenters who did much of the actual construction using common building practices in use in China. The intersecting of Dutch and Chinese patterns in the organization of space, building structure, fenestration and roofing of many residences along these narrow old roads is indisputable yet still, to some degree, remains a puzzle.

The successive arrival of Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonialists and the roles played by Indian and Chinese mercantile immigrants brought about Malacca’s transformation into one of the region’s most important entrepôt by virtue of its strategic location on the Strait of Malacca. The multicultural heritage of Malacca has bequeathed not only a remarkable vitality to an arguably significant historic city but also a mixed assemblage of heritage buildings. The destruction of old buildings, unbridled land reclamation, construction of high-rise buildings, and inattention to traffic management, all in pursuit of short-term commercial gains, have contributed to diminishing Malacca’s frayed multicultural past. While the preservation of Malacca’s exceptional material heritage remains imperiled, significant elements of the city’s Chinese heritage remain.

The recently restored Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, whose origins go back to the 1640s, and Bukit Cina (Chinese Hill), an expansive cemetery that dates to the mid-fifteenth century, both exemplify the rich links between China and the Malay Peninsula. Marriage and concubinage involving males from China and local women gradually brought about a distinct community known as Peranakan Chinese, whose porcelain, cuisine, clothing, architecture, language, and literature are prominent aspects of their culture. Peranakan Chinese residences in Malacca as well as in Singapore and Penang, the original three Straits Settlements, include not only eclectic terrace homes, which are also called town-houses, but also ornate villas and mansions.

Four Malacca residences are featured in Part Two, which together provide insights into the historical, geographical, architectural, and social aspects of life in Malacca from the eighteenth into the early parts of the twentieth century. The restored shophouse at No. 8 Heeren Street (pages 42–5), which once served as a kuli keng, literally “the quarters where coolies live,” provides a simple spatial template for the succession of larger homes built later. No Peranakan Chinese Malaysian is better known than Tan Cheng Lock, whose ancestral home, also on Heeren Street (pages 46–57), reveals Dutch features plus multiple layers of Chinese and Western influences. Two buildings associated with the Chee family are discussed: one was built in 1906 to memorialize Chee Yam Chuan, the notable forebear of the lineage (pages 58–63), and another the late nineteenth-century residence of Chee Jin Siew (pages 64–9) that provides a glimpse of a substantial home that has undergone only limited restoration. While each of the townhouses, shophouses, and villas in Malacca is unique, they share common aspects that can be gleaned from looking at their façades, floor plans, and ornamentation.

Singapore

Cities like London, Rome, Paris, and Beijing, and even younger cities such as New York and Singapore, are veritable museums of changing architectural styles in which old residences and other structures encapsulate in their physical forms the dynamic nature of individuals, families, and communities. Scattered homes and buildings together tell the story of each city’s evolution and, to some degree, national history in microcosm, from humble beginnings to their flourishing as commercial or governmental centers. Old residences, in particular, help tell the story of once prominent families, even the whole era in which they lived, giving contemporary visitors an opportunity to experience, within the confines of four walls, how life was lived in times past. Through the massing of architectural form and structure as well as building style, including external features and interior spaces, the tempo and character of daily life of times past can be made understandable for the curious visitor. Furnishings and ornamentation point toward what a family valued, providing windows into understanding what their hopes and aspirations for themselves and sometimes even their descendants. This is as true of the homes of the wealthy as it is for those struggling to find a place of modest comfort for their families.

Established by the British East India Company in 1819 on the site of a fishing village on an island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the trading post that became Singapore emerged in the nineteenth century as a strategic hub of British commercial and military power in Asia. Sir Stamford Raffles, acknowledged as the founder of Singapore, outlined early on a town plan some three kilometers wide along the sea and two kilometers inland, with priority on creating efficient docking and unloading facilities along the Singapore River. In order to forestall the emergence of disorderly settlements, a plan was proposed that created a segregated layout defined by ethnic subdivisions: a European Town, a Chinese Campong, Chulia Campong for ethnic Indians, Campong Glam for Malays, and an Arab Campong. “Campong” is the Anglicized form for the Malay word “kampong,” which means a hamlet or village. As an entrepôt that welcomed traders, planters, and coolies, Singapore subsequently thrived with the arrival of immigrants from China, India, Malaya, and elsewhere, in addition to a significant number of enterprising Peranakan Chinese from Malacca and Penang.

This view across the rooftops of Singapore’s Telok Ayer area, the heart of Chinatown, in 1870 reveals the nature of urban shophouses at the time.

In the early years, in addition to Chinese merchants and artisans, Chinese peasants arrived in increasing numbers to open areas to the north and west of the port city for the production of gambier and pepper, which, as we will see, contributed to the wealth of Chinese businessmen resident in Singapore. An 1879 survey of the manners and customs of Chinese in the Straits Settlements tallied some 200 different occupations pursued by immigrant Chinese. While the intent of many Chinese newcomers was to return to China, many settled in the new homelands. “Many did not go back to China,” according to Victor Purcell, “because... they were too poor, but some did not return because they were too rich and dared to leave their property and their interests” (1965: 254).

Many of the early dwellings inhabited by Fujian and Guangdong immigrants in the Chinese Campong were flimsy Malay-type structures raised on stilts above the marshy ground. In time, this area expanded over four phases from the 1820s into the 1920s into what today is known as Chinatown, a robust commercial and residential district of eclectic shophouses of various designs. Paradoxically, Singapore’s “Chinatown” is but a single neighborhood in a country that is predominantly populated by the descendants of immigrants from China.

The elongated Singapore shophouse, which has been called an Anglo-Chinese vernacular form by Lee Ho Yin, provided working and living space for merchants, artisans, and service-oriented firms (2003: 115). Over the years, shophouses evolved in terms of relative scale while maintaining features such as the linear covered veranda known as the “five-foot way” and the presence of at least one interior skywell. Built contiguously in blocks separated by party walls, there is a lively rhythm to the columns, pilasters, shutters, and ornamentation of the façades of adjacent Singapore shophouses, with elements that are Chinese, European, and Malay.

Early in the twentieth century, some Chinese in Singapore constructed raised bungalows along the sea coast that resemble Malay rumah panggung.

The spacious raised veranda on the home shown above is a comfortable place throughout the day.

Constructed in 1896 by Goh Sin Koh, a timber and shipping merchant, and demolished in the the 1980s, this residence was the last expansive manor in Singapore in the architectural style of southern Fujian.

The eclectic style of the multifunctional Singapore shophouses in Telok Ayer, the heart of Chinatown, was in time carried over to their cousin, the purely residential structures called terrace houses or townhouses. By the later decades of the nineteenth century, as increasing numbers of new migrants arrived from China, Chinatown became overcrowded and unhealthy. Some Chinese merchants began to consider moving beyond their place of livelihood to more residential neighborhoods that were being developed, first in areas adjacent to Chinatown and before long elsewhere across the island. Nearby areas along Neil Road, Blair Road, Spottiswoode Park, and River Valley Road, then in the Emerald Hill area, once a nutmeg plantation, and later in the Joo Chait and Katong areas in the eastern part of Singapore, all became new centers of Chinese residential life. In these areas, a mélange of building types, predominantly shophouses and terrace houses, took root in varieties that defy easy summary (pages 80–9). As other Chinese families moved to the eastern section of the island early in the twentieth century, some built raised bungalows that evoke the Malay-style rumah panggung along the seacoast. Constructed on piles with a broad veranda and abundant fenestration, the design of these bungalows allowed air to move under and through them, thus increasing comfort for those living within. In addition, the possible flooding during high tides was mitigated by elevating the residence.

Several terrace houses are presented in detail in Part Two. Among the most interesting is the multistoried Wee family residence on Neil Road (pages 90–101), which was initially built as a two-storey structure between 1896 and 1897 that was subsequently raised to three storeys. More than a century old, this residence provides not only entry into the lives of an old Singapore family but also provides a template for understanding the layout and use of a typical terrace house. In 2008, after a successful restoration, the residence was opened as the Baba House Museum. Other terrace residences in the Emerald Hill, Blair Flat, and River Valley Road areas are also featured in Part Two.

During the nineteenth century, a coterie of tycoons, merchants with extraordinary wealth and power, emerged in Singapore. One of the most celebrated was Hoo Ah Kay, usually referred to as Whampoa (Huangpu) after his place of origin in Guangdong and the name of his father’s firm, Whampoa & Co. Whampoa was described as the “most liked Chinaman in the Straits,” “a fine specimen of his countrymen; his generosity and honesty had long made him a favorite,” and “a very upright, kind-hearted, modest, and simple man, a friend to everyone,” who was known for his “sumptuous entertainments” (Buckley, 1902: 658–9). He acquired a neglected garden on Serangoon Road about four kilometers outside town, where he built a “bungalow,” a magnificent country house, as well as an aviary and “a Chinese garden laid out by horticulturalists from Canton,” which became a “place of resort for Chinese, young and old, at the Chinese New Year” where “the democratic instincts of the Chinese would be seen, for all classes without distinction would mix freely and show mutual respect and courtesy” (Song, 1923: 53–5). Whampoa gained fame also for the dinners he hosted that included Westerners and Chinese at the estate he called “Bendemeer,” the name of a river in Persia mentioned in a poem written in 1817 by Thomas Moore that was popular at the time. There appears to be no record of how Whampoa referred to the garden in Chinese.

Although this photograph was taken in the early twentieth century, all of these shophouses along Chulia Street in Penang were built much earlier, in the nineteenth century.

Tan Seng Poh, Seah Eu Chin, Wee Ah Hood, and Tan Yeok Nee, among other wealthy nineteenth-century Chinese businessmen built between 1869 and 1885 what Singaporeans once called the Four Mansions. Tied to one another to homelands in the Chaozhou area of eastern Guangdong province, they built Chinese-style mansions that survived well into the twentieth century. Today, only the residence of Tan Yeok Nee, the subject of a chapter in Part Two (pages 70–9), remains.

In the 1980s during urban redevelopment in the Kampong Bugis area, the last grand courtyard residence in Singapore in the architectural style of southern Fujian was demolished along Sin Koh Street, which itself was obliterated. This expansive red brick residence, with its swallowtail roofline, which is reminiscent of the home of Tan Tek Kee in Jinjiang discussed above, had been built in 1896 by Goh Sin Koh, a timber merchant who also was in the shipping business. Although records are incomplete, Goh’s grand home at some point was transformed into an ancestral hall for his family and others from their home village in Fujian. The only surviving images of this sprawling and derelict residence were taken in the late 1970s when the building was being used to store lumber.

Penang, Medan–Deli, and Phuket

Penang and Medan–Deli, one on the Malay Peninsula and the other on the island of Sumatra on opposite sides of the funnel-shaped Strait of Malacca, as well as Phuket along the Andaman Sea farther north, have a history of economic and social interdependence. Hokkien traders and settlers reached all three areas in the distant past, well before the late nineteenth century when the numbers of Chinese arrivals increased substantially. In 1786, after the British naval officer Francis Light negotiated with the Sultan of Kedah to cede Pulau Penang, the island of Penang, to the East India Company as a dependency of India for the annual payment of £1,500, Penang began its transformation from being a mere maritime roadstead to a thriving commercial center. Penang began to thrive first, serving as a kind of “mother settlement” that helped spawn and then sustain distant satellites commercial towns like Phuket and Medan–Deli and inland areas on the mainland, such as Sungai Bakap, and in the northern portions of the island of Sumatra where plantation economies thrived.

Legions of Chinese, especially from Fujian but also other areas of China’s southeast coast, as well as Indians, Malays, and Europeans quickly transformed the developing townscape of George Town, named in honor of King George III, and, once it was ceded in 1798, the fertile plains of Province Wellesley, named in honor of the Governor-General of India, across the harbor on the mainland. Indeed, within months of Light’s initial transaction, he was already remarking that “Our inhabitants increase very fast—Chooliahs (Tamils), Chinese, and Christians; they are already disputing about the ground, everyone building as fast as he can.” Eight years later, he boasted (“Notices of Pinang,” 1858: 9; quoted in Purcell, 1965: 244):

Early shophouses in the coastal Sumatran town of Tanjungpura, which was connected to Medan by a railway.

Not too far from the Deli River, the Guandi Temple (Temple to Guan Gong), which was built in the late nineteenth century, has the same structure and layout as a southern Fujian house.

The Chinese constitute the most valuable part of our inhabitants; they are men, women, and children, about 3,000, they possess the different trades of carpenters, masons, and smiths, are traders, shopkeepers and planters, they employ small vessels and prows and send adventures [sic] to the surrounding countries. They are the only people of the east from whom revenue may be raised without expense and extraordinary efforts of government.... They are indefatigable in the pursuit of money, and like the Europeans, they spend it in purchasing those articles which gratify their appetites. They don’t wait until they have acquired a large fortune to return to their native country, but send annually a part of their profits to their families. This is so general that a poor labourer will work with double labour to acquire two or three dollars to remit to China. As soon as they acquire a little money they obtain a wife and go on in regular domestic mode to the end of their existence.

The “Chinese Quarter” in Medan early in the twentieth century reveals wooden shophouses on the right side of the road and masonry ones, most likely built later, on the left.

This Malay-style residence, which is elevated on wooden posts and roofed with attap, was constructed for use by the Chinese supervisor of a plantation in Deli, circa 1885.

Late in the eighteenth century, well before Chinese began to arrive in significant numbers, Light had already seen the potential value of Phuket in Siam, today’s Thailand. Using Phuket’s common name at the time, he commented that “Junk Salong 45 miles long and 15 broad, is a good healthy island, has several harbours where ships may careen, wood and water safe in all seasons, but it will be six or seven years before it is sufficiently cleared and cultivated to supply a fleet with provisions, it is exceedingly rich in tin ore and may be fortified at a small expense; it belongs to Siam. The inhabitants tired of their slavery are desirous of a new master” (“Notices of Pinang,” 1858: 185). Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, shophouses in the style of those built in Penang as well as mansions in what is called Sino-Colonial style were constructed in large numbers in Phuket.

The northeastern coast of Sumatra, which lay across the Strait of Malacca opposite Penang, had received only limited visits by Chinese traders who previously only focused on the potentiality of sites along the east coasts of the strait. Some had come to Laboehan (Labuan) at the mouth of the Deli River, which had been the seat of the Sultan’s power; but there is little evidence of early Chinese settlement there. However, once the Dutch proclaimed their territorial claims to northern Sumatra in 1862, setting in train the opening of the area to large-scale plantation agriculture organized by a variety of European and American firms based upon export crops such as tobacco, rubber, coffee, and oil palm, there was an extraordinary demand for coolie labor that could only be satisfied by immigrants. At first coolies were brought from Penang and Singapore before hundreds of thousands were recruited directly from China and Java using intermediaries who resided in Penang. Because of the insalubrious environment at Laboehan, a decision was made to build a modern planned town at a site called Medan, some 10 kilometers inland, which was connected by rail to the port at Laboehan. By 1917 Medan was described as the “queen city of the island of Sumatra,” “a charming city, brisk and bustling in its business quarters, surrounded by pretty suburbs, with a sanitary system equal to that of any English town. It has two fine hotels, a railway station of handsome architecture, a racecourse, a palatial club, sports ground for football and land tennis, a cinema theatre, and all the modern attributes of an up-to-date centre” (quoted in Buiskool, 2004: 6). Even the Sultan of Deli built an imposing istana or palace, which was designed by a European architect, in Medan.

While Penang began to lose some of its prominence after Raffles founded Singapore in 1819, its role as a regional center continued to expand, especially after it was joined with Malacca and Singapore in 1826 to form the Straits Settlements. Initially, Penang was the capital of this far-flung network governed by the East India Company, but in 1832 the rapidly developing Singapore eclipsed Penang as the seat of government. In 1867 the tripartite Straits Settlements commercial entity became a Crown Colony under direct British colonial administration. Through strategic alliances, which were often based on Chinese dialect relationships, business increasingly was transnational, going beyond the British Straits Settlements to the Netherlands Indies, Siam, Burma, as well as ports in eastern India and southern China. Interestingly, not all of the linkages were by sea. Transpeninsular overland trade routes from Pattani, Nakhon, and Songkhla on the east coast of southern Siam linked Penang on the west coast to Bangkok’s thriving commerce. Merchandise was carried by caravans of elephants in five days along easy pathways that formed a kind of land bridge, a “vein of commerce” of enormous utility, the length of which came to be known as the “Kedah Road” (King, 2002: 96–7).

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there were as many as 200 Chinese merchants “plying the seas and accumulating wealth” in the region straddling the Strait of Malacca and beyond, with Penang as the hub (Wong, 2007: 107). The so-called “Penang’s Five Major Hokkien Clans,” Bincheng Fujian wu da xing—Tan, Yeoh, Lim, Cheah, and Khoo—especially, were major players in developing the regional, indeed even transnational enterprises involving tin mining, revenue farming, coolie recruitment, and shipping. Diversifying into the wholesaling and retailing of staple foodstuffs, daily needs, and furnishings made in China and Europe not only met but also stimulated demand by consumers and brought wealth to merchant families. The prosperity generated from these economic activities altered expectations about housing, hygiene, comfort, and education, among other aspects of modernization, in areas where immigrants from Europe, China, India, and elsewhere mixed.

This rambling mansion on Krabi Road in Phuket was built in the middle of the twentieth century by Phra Phitak Chyn Pracha, a Sino-Thai who made his fortune from tin.

As the population swelled in Penang, Phuket, and Medan, shophouses of various types were built and rebuilt to meet the evolving commercial and service needs of residents along newly planned streets that spread beyond the town core. Sumptuous residences and government buildings, some of which were quite grand, as well as Christian churches, also increased in number. As affluent merchants gained wealth from plantation agriculture, mining, and shipping in the mid-to late nineteenth century, bungalows and mansions of substantial proportions and eclectic styles were also built in each of these regions. In addition to the broad range of residential structures, Chinese settlers also continued to renovate existing or build new Daoist and Buddhist temples, which universally were modeled after those in their hometowns in China. Buildings to meet the needs of their thriving clan associations, usually called kongsi, also increased in number. Bricklayers and carpenters from China arrived to erect many of these structures, some of which were constructed using fired bricks and roof tiles carried as ballast on trading ships outbound from China. Because of the richness of the hardwood forests in Southeast Asia, timber was usually sourced locally.

In the sections that follow, examples of each of these housing types are presented. In Penang, a late nineteenth-century shophouse associated with the peripatetic efforts of the revered Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen, is presented as typical of a building typology of great significance (pages 114–19). Chung Keng Quee, one of the principal tin magnates of the Straits Settlements (pages 102–13), and Cheong Fatt Tze, an extraordinary multinational entrepreneur who amassed fortunes from mining, plantation agriculture, banking and shipping (pages 128–39), built in Penang a contrasting pair of mansions that share many underlying themes. One special feature of Chung Keng Quee’s home, as will be discussed later, is that he had a spacious private ancestral hall built adjacent to his home. Constructed as the nineteenth century came to a close, these grand residences evoke the styles of the late Victorian era during a period of increasing global interdependence when eclectic decorative arts styles were in fashion throughout the world. Significantly, in the case of homes discussed in this book, there was a concomitant resurgence of pride by well-to-do Chinese in the culture of their ancestors. For many, it was essential that craftsmen from China were “imported” to design and fabricate multifarious forms of applied ornamentation and furnishings in order to assure authenticity, even as they sought fixtures and art works from Europe to express modernity.

This rundown shophouse along Thalang Road in Phuket was restored recently as China Inn Café & Restaurant.

Deteriorating and restored buildings, each of which remains imposing and said to be in Sino-Portuguese style, are found throughout Phuket.

In spite of material success, international fame in his adopted home-land, and the building of an opulent Chinese-style residence in Penang, Cheong Fatt Tze also constructed a grand manor in his hometown in Dabu, Guangdong province (pages 274–7), but sadly died before he could retire there. Chung Keng Quee did not follow that route, leaving behind children in Malaya who were more comfortable with life in a British colony. Kee Lai Huat, a pioneering planter of sugarcane and manufacturer of brown sugar, founded Sungai Bakap, a town in Province Wellesley. Here, in a rambling compound of residences and an ancestral hall, which he hoped would become the permanent abode of his descendants who would live together harmoniously, he declared his Chineseness (pages 120–7).

Sumptuous eclectic residences were built as well in Phuket and Medan during this period, which reveal clearly their economic and social linkages with Penang. With wealth acquired first from tin mining and smelting and later from rubber plantations, Tan Ma Hsiang, whose Thai name was Prapitak Chyn Pracha, built in 1904 what is called in Thailand a Sino-Portuguese villa with obvious elements blending generic Western architectural forms and Chinese elements (pages 140–5). Between 1895 and 1900, Tjong A Fie constructed an opulent mansion in the thriving town of Medan on Sumatra in the Netherlands Indies (pages 146–55). A fine example of architectural eclecticism, Tjong’s mansion mixes fashionable European-style furnishings and fine arts with centuries-old styles of Chinese furniture, altars, and ornamentation in a striking brew of material modernity.

Selangor

While Malacca and Penang trace their roots to early Chinese seaborne trading, the prosperity of areas in between, today’s Perak, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan, came only in the mid-nineteenth century with the boom in tin mining that was spurred by global demand. Up to that time, fluctuating economic conditions in the agricultural, commercial, and even the tin mining sectors, which had absorbed Chinese immigrants and who had worked side by side with Malays since the eighteenth century, frustrated the region’s development. Indeed, contemporary records underscore periodic impoverishment and hardship. For example, “In 1829,... Sultan Abdullah asked the Resident Councillor of Penang to induce Chinese ships to visit Perak annually to buy elephants, for this would provide a great relief to the distressed inhabitants.” What had been a “trickle of Chinese labourers into the mining areas was beginning to develop into a flood” by the middle of the nineteenth century, with resourceful Chinese entrepreneurs breaking the tin mining monopoly once held by Malay ruling chiefs (Khoo, 1972: 33, 51). The subsequent development of the Larut and Kinta tin deposits in Perak and then those in the Klang Valley of Selangor brought great wealth to the region. The overlapping interests and intraregional financing of tin mining, like other commercial endeavors, operated within networks of Chinese entrepreneurs spread rather widely but linked by dialect and native place associations. In Selangor, tin mining expanded quickly between 1874 and 1905, first with investment by Chinese from Singapore and Penang, and then by locals such as Yap Ah Loy, Loke Yew, and Yap Kwang Seng, each with an idiosyncratic rags-to-riches story, who became wealthy from tin mining as well as diverse other interests, built grand mansions, and were community leaders noted for their philanthropic endeavors.

Until 1980, when textbooks in Malaysia anointed Raja Abdu’llah of Klang as the reputed founder of Kuala Lumpur in 1857, Yap Ah Loy, who had arrived a few years later, had generally been recognized as the founder of the town that was eventually to become the national capital (Carstens, 2005: 38–9). In the mid-nineteenth century, Kuala Lumpur was merely a tin miners’ camp, a frontier outpost of squatters, a “great Chinese village,” according to Isabella Bird (1883: 117), and “consisted almost wholly of wooden, attap or mud houses, arranged in the haphazard manner which had resulted from its rapid and unplanned growth” (Jackson, 1963: 117). After a fire in 1881, which is said to have been started by an overturned oil-lamp in an opium den and consumed the prevalent attap and timber homes, as well as civil unrest that decimated Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, a major property owner, financed the rebuilding of the town. Bricks and tile from kilns amidst the clay pits of what now is known as Brickfields, which were owned by both Yap Ah Loy and Yap Kwan Seng, helped transform the town into a level of permanence not seen previously. Yap Ah Loy lived in a splendid mansion amidst gardens with his family in Kuala Lumpur before he died at the age of forty-eight. During the last decade of his life, Yap Kwan Seng and his family occupied an interconnected set of three-storey terrace houses on Pudu Street in the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. When Yap Kwan Seng died in 1901, he left “a family of fifteen sons and ten daughters, and estates valued at several million daughters” (Wright and Cartwright, 1908: 898).

While neither of the residences of Yap Ah Loy or Yap Kwan Seng is still standing, the residence of Loke Yew, which was begun in 1892 and finished in 1904, survives and is featured in Part Two (pages 156–63). Constructed on the site of an earlier home built in the1860s by Cheow Ah Yeok, Loke Yew’s mansion is an eclectic structure that mixes European and Chinese elements in addition to modern conveniences. Loke Yew’s new home was the first private residence in Kuala Lumpur with electricity for interior lighting. East of Kuala Lumpur and not too far from the tailings of old tin mines and amidst groves of coconut palms, is the recently restored home of Tan Boon Chia, who was born in China in 1892 and migrated as a young man to Selangor to join his father. Prospering rather quickly, he set out to build a mansion that was completed in 1918 when he was only twenty-six years of age. He died just thirteen years later, in 1931, after which his sons and their families, who continued his tin mining enterprises, lived in the house. However, his family abandoned the residence when the Japanese invaded in 1941. Over the next half century, the once grand home became a derelict building with broken windows and a leaking roof before its restoration was undertaken a mere half decade ago. Tan Boon Chia’s grand residence is celebrated in Part Two (pages 164–71).

Indonesia

While those of Chinese descent have been a highly visible minority in Indonesia, it is not easy to weave a comprehensive narrative that captures the dynamic nature of their in-migration and settlement in terms of temporal scope and spatial extent. This is compounded by the incompleteness of the written record and material remains concerning the presence of Chinese traders and settlers in Srivijaya and Majapahit, the two great kingdoms that spanned the period from the seventh through the end of the fifteenth century, and later throughout the region during the age of commerce with the arrival of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC).

In terms of spatial extent, Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world, comprising 17,500 islands spanning 5000 kilometers from west to east, one-eighth the circumference of the Earth, and nearly 2000 kilometers from north to south. Both large and small islands dotted with estuaries and riverine hinterlands straddling the equator attracted Chinese traders, sojourners, and immigrant settlers, providing them with limitless opportunities. It was not only in growing urban centers throughout the archipelago, such as Batavia, Surabaya, Bandung, Medan, Semarang, and Palembang, among many others, that Chinese sojourned or settled but also in small towns along the coasts and inland, like Banten, Tangerang, Cheribon, Gresik, Jepara, Rembang, Lasem, Parakan, Malang, Salatiga, Lawang, Solo, and Pasuruan on Java; Padang and Labuan Deli on Sumatra; Makassar on Celebes; Pontianak on Borneo; and Pangkal Pinang and Muntok on Banka. Some were visited and settled by Chinese well before the Dutch arrived, while others only flourished from the nineteenth century onwards. An intriguing and representative variety of old Chinese homes, both grand and common ones, in these locations are shown in the pages that follow in Part One and Part Two.

This grand residence, said to have been constructed in the late eighteenth century along Molenvliet in Batavia, today’s Jakarta, may have been owned by a member of the Khouw family. A pair of perpendicular wing buildings accompanied the two, possibly three, parallel horizontal structures.

Chinese, Indian, and Arab seaborne merchants used two long-distance routes early on to transit through this intricately vast archipelago between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Passage through the narrow Sunda Strait, some 24 kilometers wide, between the islands of Sumatra and Java, was regarded as difficult to navigate but more direct. The alternate route through the Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra provided a protected, yet restricted, channel some 800 kilometers long. Long-distance trade in large ships through these straits was accompanied by fleets of smaller vessels that hugged the coastline from China southward, braving the sometimes violent seas to sail not only to the Philippines but also south to more distant locations on the large island of Borneo, the oddly shaped Celebes, the Spice Islands of the Moluccas, and beyond to the Banda, Flores, and Java Seas. The far-flung, seemingly random scattering of Chinese settlements along the fringes of the South China Sea and its connecting water bodies attests to the navigational prowess and daring of Chinese seamen over long periods.

Gradually, pockets of Chinese small-scale traders, merchants, craftsmen, and peasants established themselves at the mouths of short coastal rivers or inland for security and the convenience of petty commerce. Many married local Javanese women and became Muslims; others formed local family units while retaining the full spectrum of their Chinese folk beliefs and rituals. Still others, who were of Han ethnicity but Muslim in belief in China, married local Muslim women, thus comfortably choosing their religion over the broader aspects of Chinese culture. Over time, descendants sometimes lost even awareness of their Chinese ethnicity as they assimilated. For many Chinese, they remained a very small minority in host communities, while in others their presence, even if absolute numbers were low, was prominent. For example, in Makassar in the Celebes in the eighteenth century, as many as a third of the Chinese community was Muslim, and a Peranakan Chinese mosque stood there well into the twentieth century (Sutherland, 2003a: 6).

Many shophouses and residences in Batavia, such as here in the Glodok area, fronted on a lane and were aligned along a canal in the back, circa 1890.

The equatorial climate across the archipelago fostered an abundant array of flora, fauna, and marine products that had substantial markets in coastal China. What the Chinese found and preferred was a cornucopia of raw and processed items: aromatic and preservative spices like nutmeg, cloves, and pepper; medicinal herbs and animal parts; agar-agar (a gelatinous substance derived from seaweed); animal and vegetable waxes; avian and marine delicacies such as birds’ nests and sea cucumber (also called trepan and bêche-de-mer); tortoiseshells; rattan; resins; hardwood timber; among other commodities, which were gathered or harvested in the wild. In return, Chinese monsoon traders brought back from China manufactured and processed goods such as fired earthenware, silk thread, cotton textiles, umbrellas, paper, tea, and tobacco. The gathering of natural products involved both local and immigrant labor. Feeder networks using vessels of various types and sizes brought communities of indigenous peoples into an evolving network of globalizing trade that involved not only Chinese junks but also Dutch ships.

When Dutch seafaring traders first reached the coast of northern Java in 1596, they found Chinese settlement along the lower courses of many of the streams. Unlike in the Americas where the Dutch encountered and interacted only with aboriginal or native American populations, the Dutch in Asia benefited from the additional presence of mercantile networks already set in place by countless Chinese sojourners and settlers. In the early part of the twentieth century, a French traveler offered this effusive judgment: “What would become of the European and the Dutch Government without the presence of the Chinaman in Java? A hard worker, meditative, mindful of his responsibilities, he is the linch-pin of all great public or private enterprises; to the native the necessary intermediary, the obscure but necessary cog-wheel, the middleman, the go-between, whom the European would not and Javanese could not as yet replace. One finds him everywhere; one needs him everywhere; one must therefore accept him, while limiting as far as possible, the bad effects of his role.” He preceded this with an explanation: “One finds them wherever there is money to be made; and their presence anywhere is enough to denote some known or possible source of gain” (Cabaton, 1911: 158–9).

Some of the oldest Chinese residences in Indonesia are found in the small coastal towns of the north, while nineteenth-and twentieth-century structures are best found in the major cities. Ten of Indonesia’s fine Chinese residences are presented in Part Two. Nine are spread across the island of Java, from Tangerang in the west to Pasuruan in the east: the Oey Djie San plantation home in Tangerang (pages 180–5); the Khouw family manor (pages 172–9), the Tjioe family residence, which is now the St Maria de Fatima Catholic Church (pages 186–7), in Jakarta; the Tan Tjion Ie home in Semarang (pages 188–9); Kwik Djoen Eng’s mansion, now the Institut Roncalli, in Salatiga (pages 198–201); the Siek family home, now the Prasada Mandala Dharma, in Parakan (pages 190–7); the Liem compound in Lasem (pages 202–3); the Han Bwee Kio ancestral hall in Surabaya (pages 204–9); and the Han and Thalib residence in Pasuruan (pages 210–13). The magnificent Tjong A Fie mansion in Medan in northeastern Sumatra is also included (pages 146–55).

Many portions of the wooden framework within the Souw Tian Pie dwelling survive and suggest its past grandeur.

The residence of Souw Tian Pie, whose forefathers had migrated from Fujian in 1696, was built in Batavia in the early nineteenth century. Originally it was composed of three parallel buildings and a pair of perpendicular side wings, but its overall scale has been diminished over time, first by the destruction of the tall rear building at some time in the past, second by the demolition of a wing unit in the 1980s so that a multistoried block could be built, and third by modernization of the opposite wing.

Batavia/Jakarta

In late 1596, when the Dutch arrived on the northwest coast of Java, they entered the Ciliwung River where they encountered a small village of Chinese peasants who planted rice and vegetables and made arrack, a beverage distilled from fermented sugarcane and rice. This Chinese settlement, about which very little is known, was adjacent to a trading center called in succession Sunda Kelapa and Jayakarta. Portuguese traders had visited as early as 1513 and Arab, Indian, and Chinese traders, who had come even earlier, continued to arrive seasonally. It was not until 1619 that the Dutch destroyed Jayakarta, which had a population of about 10,000, on the west bank. In its place, they created both a fortification on the right bank at the mouth of the river and began to lay out a colonial town surrounded by a wall and moat.

By 1650 the planned settlement of Batavia, with more canals than streets, became a commercial emporium for regional and global trade. Its ordered ground plan was filled in with administrative buildings, offices, churches, residences, bridges, wharfs, and godowns, collectively a cosmopolitan center for a thriving Asian commercial enterprise, with separate quarters for Javanese, Chinese, and others from islands near and far. Chinese traders, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and laborers who dredged the canals and constructed buildings, arrived in increasing numbers in search of opportunity. They had been permitted to live within the walled city, where their shops sold silks, lacquerware, porcelain, tea, and other products from China. Outside the walls, they engaged in market gardening for the residents of the town and built ships. Their numbers varied from year to year. In 1699 the number of Chinese reached 3,679, followed by 2,407 freed slaves called Mardijkers, 1,783 Europeans, 670 mixed race people, and 867 classified as others. Between 1680 and 1740, the population of Chinese doubled in Batavia (Blussé, 1986: 84).

Tensions that arose with the increased numbers of Chinese immigrants led to stringent Dutch regulations to control them and plans to remove them en masse to Ceylon. Following on the heels of an uprising by Chinese, whose passions were fueled by rumors, a senseless massacre of perhaps 5,000 Chinese in 1740, the survivors either fled to other locations in Java or returned to China. The massacre is well documented and memorialized in a visually striking mid-eighteenth century engraving of their residences being burned to the ground. A census after the riot revealed that the total Chinese population had dropped to just 3,431: 1442 traders and merchants, 935 peasant farmers, 728 working in sugar mills and as woodcutters, and 326 as artisans (Lohanda, 1996: 16). Chinese eventually returned to Batavia but settled in an area outside the southern wall known as Glodok, which is today at the heart of Jakarta’s Chinatown. Yet, from early on, the Chinese, many of whom were Peranakan, dominated the commercial life of Batavia, even surpassing other groups in population. Leonard Blussé indeed describes Batavia as a “Chinese colonial town under Dutch rule” (1981: 159ff).

There is little evidence that remains in Jakarta of the presence of Chinese in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of significance is the grave, the yin zhai or “residence of the dead” in contrast to the yang zhai or “residence of the living,” of Souw Beng Kong, also known as Souw Bwee Kong, the first Kapitan China of Batavia, who was selected by the Dutch to settle disputes, carry out an annual census, collect various taxes, manage benevolent associations such as cemeteries and hospitals, and participate in Dutch civil entities. All the while, he gained wealth and experience as a building contractor, shipbuilder, leaseholder, and proprietor of a gambling house. Appointed in 1619, Souw had previously served as Kapitan of the Chinese community at Bantam, which had been a thriving port on the Sunda Strait to the west of Batavia for the spice trade with Europe from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century when its harbor silted up.

Souw Beng Kong’s career reveals the expansive nature of life for some Chinese as they moved easily throughout the broader region in pursuit of opportunities. In addition to his move from Bantam to Batavia, Souw Beng Kong, who the Dutch called Bencon, left Batavia in 1635 for Zeelandia in Taiwan, a Dutch colony since 1624, where he recruited peasants from Fujian to fulfill the Dutch desire for agricultural development there. Perhaps as many as 50,000 Hokkien peasants, traders, and craftsmen made the sea journey to Taiwan by the end of Dutch rule there in 1662 (Hsu, 1980: 16–17). When Souw Beng Kong died in 1640, he was buried in the countryside outside Batavia, an area that today has been swallowed up by the city. His grave was lost until 1909 and restored in 1929, then at some point, strangely, the gravestone was incorporated into the interior of a slum dwelling. In 2008 the Souw Beng Kong Foundation removed the structure and restored the gravesite to both acknowledge and memorialize his role in supporting early Chinese migrants to Java.

No Chinese residences from the eighteenth century remain in the city, but there are some from the nineteenth century, a period when many fine Chinese-style homes were built in Glodok. Late nineteenth-century photographs provide us with glimpses of the façades of the large residences as well as shophouses that may have been built in the later part of the eighteenth century. Three mansions were built near each other along the fashionable Molenvliet West, alongside older Dutch mansions and hotels, by members of the Khouw family. Of these three, only one, which was constructed in either 1807 or 1867, survived well into the twentieth century. Its tortuous journey from being threatened with destruction multiple times to miraculous survival in a fragmented condition is detailed in Part Two (pages 172–9).

In Semarang, the grand nineteenth-century mansion of Be Ing Tjoe was called Tong Wan or “Eastern Garden” as well as Gedung Goelo or “Sugar Mansion.”

Semarang

Now the largest city in Central Java, Semarang not only once was a natural harbor like other small ports along the northern coast that vied with each other for Chinese traders, it is a location that claims to have a storied past linked to visits by Zheng He in 1406 and 1416. The often told tale is that Ong King Hong, Zheng He’s second in command, was so ill aboard ship during one of the visits that the fleet dropped anchor in the harbor. After coming ashore and locating what has since become a fabled cave, Ong King Hong was left behind with a squad of men and sufficient provisions to support them. Zheng He then sailed on while Ong and his men settled down with local women, cleared land and raised crops, in what eventually became a small Chinese village along the narrow plain. After building some small craft, the community increased its prosperity with active trading along the coast. Ong, like Zheng He, was a Muslim who committed efforts at spreading Islam while at the same time revering Zheng He, who was enshrined as Sam Po by Ong by his followers. In time, according to the well-known tale, Ong placed a small statue of Sam Po (Zheng He) in the cave to be venerated for his greatness. The isolated cave evolved into a shrine known to locals as Gedong Batu or “Stone Building.” Those of Chinese descent revere the Sam Po Kong Temple, which has expanded in recent years far beyond the cliff face, and is the focus for an annual festival that links those of Chinese descent with their illustrious forebear.

Wang Ta-Hai (Ong Tae-Hae), a Hokkien who had lived a decade in Batavia, Pekalongan, and Semarang, published a book in 1791 of his experiences in and impressions of Java that was reprinted several times in the mid-nineteenth century: “Semarang is a district subject to Batavia, but superior to it in appearance. Its territory is more extensive, and its productions more abundant. Merchant vessels are there collected and its commerce is superior... the fields are fertile and well-watered, and the people rich and affluent; whence it may be considered the crown of all those lands. With respect to climate, the air is clear and cool, and thus superior to Batavia; the inhabitants are seldom troubled with sickness, provisions are reasonable and easily obtained... the manners of the people are so inoffensive that they do not pick up things dropped in the roads; and the laws are so strictly enforced, that men have no occasion to shut their doors at night’ (1850: 7–8).

While Semarang had a Chinatown, the boundaries of life were said to have been more fluid than in other towns and cities across Java. After several centuries of immigration and intermarriage, the Peranakan Chinese community generally divided into two groups, one of which preserved its Chinese identity and used the Sam Po Kong Temple as its anchor, while the other, who had adopted Islam, became Javanese in culture. Still others blended the two approaches. These divisions can be seen in several residences lived in by successive generations of those of Chinese descent.

None of the nineteenth-century grand manors remain in Semarang. Preserved only in several photographs are the residence of Tan Tiang Tjhing, called Gedung Goelo or “Sugar Mansion,” built in 1815, and the home of Be Ing Tjioe and his son Be Biauw Tjoan, which was built around 1840 along the Semarang River. Each had a tripartite layout, with a set of three parallel buildings with a pair of perpendicular wing structures. Since it was not common for the front building of a residence to be two storeys tall, it is possible that the front building actually served commercial purposes as offices for the enterprises in which the Tan and Be families were involved. This type of dual use can be observed in structures throughout southern China. The addition of a freestanding rectangular open building with a broad eaves overhang is an unusual feature, perhaps serving as a kind of Javanese pendopo, the pavilion-like structure used to receive guests and provide sheltered space for work and relaxation.

Semarang today has wide, tree-lined boulevards with modern commercial and administrative buildings, narrow lanes with old shophouses, areas with large mansions for the wealthy, and smaller, yet comfortable homes in eclectic styles that were built in the nineteenth century. Along Besen Lane, in what once was the Chinese quarter, is an old shophouse that is now undergoing renovation as a gallery of Chinese art. Constructed late in the nineteenth century as a shophouse selling the well-known Frog brand of floor tile, the spacious brick building has Chinese brackets that extend the roof in the front. In addition to the wooden door, hinged into three leaves and divided horizontally into two sections so that the bottom could be kept shut while the upper left open, the shop has a rectangular panel on swivel hinges that once served as a display counter as well as a covering to secure the window at night. In addition to ventilation ports set high on the walls, there is a skywell in the back half of the building, which together with the front and rear windows kept the building quite airy. Chinese characters are still found above the doorways leading from room to room, but other of the applied ornamentation that once was found there is long gone. The upstairs area probably was used for sleeping space for employees. Across the lane is a similar two-storey shophouse. Elsewhere in Semarang, Peranakan Chinese sometimes live in nineteenth-century homes that evoke more Dutch Indische than Chinese styles. The eclectic residence of Tan Tiong Ie, which was built in 1850 a century after his ancestors arrived in Java, is featured in Part Two (pages 188–9).

Thonburi, Bangkok, and Songkhla

Siam, today’s Thailand, has a long history of overland migration and trade with southwest China. Maritime trade and migration, on the other hand, is of more recent origin, beginning before the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), and flourishing for more than five centuries spanning the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911). During most of this time, trade was carried out not only as part of a tributary system but also through the efforts of countless private traders who plied the waters in seagoing and coastal junks. The volume of trade was so great that many of these Chinese-style junks were actually built in Siam using locally available and superior teak timbers. Reciprocal trade between Siam and China—except for Siam’s export of necessities such as rice, sugar, pepper, and woods—historically was in high-value luxury commodities: elephants’ teeth, sapanwood (a medical plant and source of a reddish dye), deer hides, rhinoceros horns, sticklac resin, decorative birds’ feathers, and birds’ nests from Siam, in exchange for a range of chinaware and textiles, especially porcelain and silk, as well as other manufactured goods and foodstuffs from China.

This close-up of the gable end of a Chinese residence built in the Thonburi palace in Siam, today’s Thailand, by King Taksin after 1824 evokes the Chaozhou domestic architectural style.

By the end of the eighteenth century, an additional “commodity”—immigrant Chinese—from areas along the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong began to scout, trade, and then settle in increasing numbers at various ports along the Gulf of Siam as well as spread into the interior. Irregularly shaped and approximately half the size of the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Siam, which is a relatively shallow body of water that bleeds on its southern edge into the vast South China Sea, is bounded on three sides by land: the southern cape of Vietnam, coastal Cambodia, and the continental and peninsular portions of Siam/Thailand. An increasingly close relationship grew between Chinese merchants and Siamese aristocracy, who appointed some of the immigrants as tax farmers with monopoly rights in collecting birds’ nests, tobacco, and other commodities in exchange for a payment of silver.

At the apex of the gulf, along the banks of the lower Chao Phraya River, Chinese merchants established trading posts and residences not only at the old imperial capital at Ayutthaya but also at its successor site downstream at Thonburi on the west bank, followed by Bangkok on the east bank. The Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, which thrived from 1351 until it was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767, had a cosmopolitan capital city with a substantial Chinese immigrant population. After a lengthy siege, the grand city was burned to the ground, leaving no evidence of the residences, temples, markets, or shops of the Chinese who once lived there. Today, only magnificent stone and brick ruins remain to suggest its past splendor, much like Angkor to which it is often compared. In 1991 the Ayutthaya Historical Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Muang Boran, an open-air museum some 33 kilometers east of Bangkok, which includes both reconstructed buildings and replicas, features many structures that display Chinese influences in their construction and ornamentation.

During the nineteenth century, when grand Chinese-style homes were built along the banks of the Chao Phraya, such as this one on the right belonging to Koh Hong Lee, each family’s rice mills, storage facilities, and commercial wharf were adjacent.

After the destruction of Ayutthaya, the new monarch, Taksin, shifted the capital 80 kilometers downstream to Thonburi, a move that brought in its wake the increasing in-migration of Chinese merchants to the new capital. Taksin, called Zheng Xin and Zheng Zhao in Chinese, was born in 1734 of a Chinese father and a Siamese mother. Taksin’s father, who in Siam used the name Zheng Yong and Hai-Hong, had migrated to Ayutthaya from Chenghai in eastern Guangdong province. Conversant in the Chaozhou dialect as well as the Siamese language, Taksin served as monarch for fourteen years (1767–82). He is not only revered today in Thailand for his role in unifying Siam after the Burmese invasion, but is also celebrated in Chenghai, which takes great pride in being the ancestral home of a king of Siam. In 1782 some of Taksin’s clothing was brought back to his father’s ancestral village, Huafu, where the garments were buried in a tomb that is the focus of tourism today.

King Taksin built his Thonburi palace in 1768 on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River. The largest structure in the palace complex incorporates both a Siamese-style throne hall and a residence with many Chinese features. After King Rama I ascended the throne in 1782 and moved the capital across the river, Taksin’s Thonburi palace became known as Phra Racha Wang Derm, and was used as a residence by royal family members. The Chinese-style residences that were built there between 1824 and 1851, while having undergone considerable renovation to become modern exhibition spaces, still have gables and roofs that evoke styles reminiscent of the Chaozhou region. In 2004 the complex won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award of Merit for its restoration. This royal site today serves also as the headquarters for the Royal Thai Navy.

Well into the twentieth century, Thonburi remained much less developed than Bangkok across the river, with which it merged as a metropolitan area only in 1972. Along both sides of the river, Chinese-style residences as well as those in more eclectic styles were sited adjacent to riverside rice mills, warehouses, and berths. Thonburi and Bangkok indeed were Chinese towns in a Siamese kingdom. The home of Koh Hong Lee, the oldest rice milling Chinese family, is shown in an adjacent photograph. While this residence is no longer standing, there are a handful of nineteenth-century mansions that have, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, survived even as newer homes and commercial structures were built adjacent to them. Part Two focuses on two of these Chinese-style residences. One, which is known today as the Wanglee Mansion (pages 228–31), was identified in 1908 by Arnold Wright as the residence of Tan Lip Buoy, whose father had returned to Shantou, the port city for the Chaozhou region.

Not too far from the Wanglee mansion is the ancestral home of another Chaozhou immigrant family known today by the surname Poshyanonda, whose progenitor was Kim Lo Chair. Arriving in Siam from a village on the outskirts of Shantou sometime between 1824 and 1851, he initially lived on a wooden boat on the Chao Phraya River while supervising other Chinese workers. His home, which was constructed sometime during the last half of the nineteenth century, is a three-bay, single storey structure and a pair of flanking buildings. Known for its elaborately ornamented wooden components and friezes around its entry and two courtyards, the ornately carved and richly gilded triple altar is but one one of its most outstanding features.

A second featured home, which is located across the river in what is today Bangkok’s Chinatown, was build in the late nineteenth century by Soa Hengtai, an immigrant from Fujian. Today, it is the home of Soa’s descendants who have the Thai name Posayachinda (pages 222–7).

The narrow sea-flanked region known as peninsular Siam, which is washed on the east by the Gulf of Siam and on the west by the Andaman Sea, traditionally was a crossroads area in which Indian and Chinese traditions came into contact with each other. On the west coast of the peninsula is the coastal town of Ranong, which is said to have “looked and felt like a transplanted Fukkien village, with houses, shophouses, and temples” in the nineteenth century (Aasen, 1998: 169). Here, Khaw Soo Cheang, born in Zhangzhou, Fujian, in 1797, migrated first to Penang in the 1820s with only a carrying pole to start life as a coolie, before moving to Ranong farther up the peninsular where marriage and alliances set a foundation for economic success.

During the reign of King Rama III, in 1844, he was granted tin-mining rights and opium concessions, setting in train a veritable family dynasty that thrived until 1932. In 1854, under the patronage of a Siamese family, he became governor, as did his eldest son. All four sons prospered as able administrators. Khaw Sim Bee, who became one of Phuket’s leading shipping and insurance magnates and was well known in Penang, is said to have traveled to the capital in 1901 where he “formally changed his nationality by going through the ceremony of having his queue cut off in the presence of a large gathering of princes and officials” (Campbell, 1902: 100). Although he married a Chinese woman from Penang, his family adopted the name Na Ranong, which today is known throughout Thailand. Khaw Sim Bee’s introduction of rubber into southern Thailand helped transform the economy, just as it had earlier in British Malaya and in Sumatra. Only the pillars of the Khaw family residence are still standing in Ranong, and thus there is no full sense of its scale and style. On the other hand, the cemetery Khaw Soo Cheang established for his family, was laid out according to strict Chinese fengshui principals. After he died at the age of 86 in 1882, stone guardian figures and ornamented stelae were set in place to grace his gravesite. On the east side of the peninsula in Songkhla, another Fujian immigrant from Zhangzhou prospered under similar circumstances. Wu Rang, also known as Wu Yang, migrated in 1750. His descendants built a magisterial residence in 1878, which is featured in Part Two (pages 214–21), that surpasses any other Chinese-style structure in peninsular Siam. Their family, with the adopted surname Na Songkhla, is also well known throughout Thailand.

Kim Lo Chair, a Chaozhou immigrant to Siam between 1824 and 1851, was the progenitor of the family known today by the surname Poshyanonda. His surviving three-bay single-storey home was built in the last half of the nineteenth century and is noted for its gilded altar and ornately carved wooden features.

Vietnam

From the seventh to the tenth century, the Kingdom of Champa controlled not only what is known today as central and southern Vietnam but also the seaborne trade in spices, incense, silk, and ivory between China, India, Java, and as far west as the sprawling Abbasid Caliphate with its capital at Baghdad. Hoi An, the most important Champa entrepôt along the sea lanes of the South China Sea that stretched from coastal China to the Strait of Malacca, became during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries a cosmopolitan town for Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants. Each of these nationalities left traces of their cross-cultural presence, including the well-known Japanese covered bridge, which was built in 1593.

Enterprising merchants from China set up shops and warehouses that not only looked to the seas but also traded up and down the coast and rivers within a mercantile network of increasing complexity. Along a series of narrow streets lining the Thu Bon riverbank, which were intersected at right angles by slender lanes, a Chinese quarter soon emerged in Hoi An, complete with shophouses, merchant residences, temples, ancestral halls, guild halls, native place associations, pagodas, and tombs. By the end of the 1700s, however, as the estuary of the river silted up and as the port of Da Nang 30 kilometers to the north overtook it as the new center of overseas trade, Hoi An became a rather languid backwater. Yet, while entrepôt trade diminished at Hoi An, Chinese merchants from the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou areas of southern Fujian nonetheless continued to grow, diversify, and to some degree flourish. Intermarriage with local women was common (Wheeler 2001: 34, 168).

For the past 200 years, unlike so many other Vietnamese towns and cities that suffered the destruction of warfare, Hoi An remained relatively untouched. The overall street plan seen today is much as it was when the port developed centuries ago. One, one-and-a-half, and two storey shophouses as well as merchant terrace houses constructed of wood survive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries although many were reconstructed during the nineteenth century using brick as well as wood. Pastel-colored façades and rooflines are little changed from the past, and there is only limited evidence of modern materials like concrete and corrugated metal added to the old structures of wood and tile. At the end of September 2009, Typhoon Ketsana brought three-meter-deep flooding of filthy brown water to the historic areas of Hoi An, causing levels of destruction not experienced for decades.

These two views of a restored nineteenth-century shop-house built by a Chinese immigrant in Hanoi, Vietnam, show the skywell and balcony as well as the furnishings in the reception room.

Philippines

When the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese by birth sailing under the flag of Spain, anchored in the harbor at Cebu in 1521, his intent was to claim the land for the Spanish Crown and convert the people to the Roman Catholic faith. Magellan was killed in Cebu that same year and it was decades before other Spanish conquistadors vanquished native tribes, set up defensive settlements, initiated a flourishing trade network, and began the proselytizing of Catholicism across the sprawling archipelago. Magellan’s initial discovery led to results that at the time could not easily have been foretold: East Asia’s only Christian nation and one in which the blood of immigrants from China mixed with that of natives to create a vibrant and syncretic mestizo culture. In 1543 another explorer reached the islands, naming them Felipinas, the Philippines, to honor Crown Prince Don Felipe who later was to become Felipe II de España, the Spanish monarch Philip II.

During the more than three and a half centuries that the Philippines were a colony of Spain, the Spanish only found limited riches, unlike the riches they obtained in Mexico and Peru or the spices they had sought as they journeyed towards the East Indies. However, once the Spanish had established their capital at Manila, they recognized the profits that could be made from transshipping China’s luxuries to Europe and from encouraging the immigration of Chinese laborers, traders, and artisans to the Philippines. From 1565 into the early decades of the nineteenth century, a far-flung and lucrative trading network using large sailing ships called galleons, sailed in convoys once or twice a year from Manila in Nueva España or New Spain and back. Chinese luxury goods such as porcelain, ivory, silk, precious stones, copper cash, mercury, and lacquerware, as well as spices from the Moluccas and elsewhere in the Nanyang, were amassed at Manila and then carried in galleons across the Pacific to Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast. The sailing routes depended upon favorable winds for voyages that spanned a three or four month period. From Mexico the goods were carried overland to Vera Cruz for transshipment by sea, first to Cuba and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain in annual treasure ships. In exchange, vast quantities of Mexican and Peruvian silver were transported via the Philippines to China. The route across the Pacific Ocean made it possible for the Spanish to avoid a much longer and more dangerous voyage across the Indian Ocean and around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.

To facilitate this trade, the number of Chinese living in the Philippines, not counting transient merchants and traders, increased to more than 15,000 by the beginning of the seventeenth century (Schurz, 1939: 27). Until the 1750s, Chinese junks and Chinese traders were necessary to acquire, move, and dispose of cargo from China destined for Manila. Within the century afterwards, not only was Manila thriving but regional centers like Vigan and Cebu were also drawn into profitable trading system involving not only China but also the United States and England. Export commodities included items in great demand in China, such as mother-of-pearl, birds’ nests, tortoiseshells, salted fish, ebony, rice, and black pepper, as well as those destined for markets beyond Asia: sugar, tobacco, coffee, and the newly popular fiber plant abaca. Well before Westerners took an interest in it, Chinese traders had sought out abaca, a light, strong, and durable plantain fiber used to make rope, string, fishing nets, and textiles. Grown only in the southern region of the Philippines, abaca, one of only a few economically important native plants in the islands, became the most important export product of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.

The home of Celestino Chan in the Binondo area of Manila was constructed before 1880, a certain fact since the structure has a base of volcanic tuff, a building material that was forbidden to be used after the disastrous 1880 earthquake. As with other large residences in the Philippines, the understory served many functions: a vestibule or zaguan that provides access to the broad stairway leading to the expansive upstairs residential area, a place for vehicles as well as spaces for storage and a well.

For much of the Spanish colonial period, Chinese immigrants were thought to be immune to conversion to Catholicism and other aspects of Hispanic culture, unlike the more receptive indigenous people. This led initially to cultural pluralism as an element of colonial policy in which there were distinct communities of Spaniards, Chinese immigrants, native indios, and mestizos of varied compositions. Over time, however, the differences became less distinct. During the Spanish colonial period, this tiered system of legal classification of different “races” was used for purposes of administration and taxation. Those of pure Chinese ancestry were called sangley, derived from the Chinese term changlai meaning “frequent visitor,” or other terms. “Within a few years after the Spanish conquest, the relations between the Chinese and the Spaniards fell into a pattern of distrust and latent hostility” (Wickberg, 1965: 8). Mestizo de sangley was used to refer to persons of mixed Chinese and indigenous ancestry. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the boundaries separating Spaniards, some of whom were actually of Mexican descent, Chinese sangleys, and native indios increasingly became blurred because of intermarriage and conversion. Accompanying these transformations was the rise of both pure Chinese and hispanized Chinese mestizos to economic and social prominence. The Spanish viewed the sangleys and Chinese mestizo as cultural minorities, yet the actual number of Chinese always exceeded the number of Europeans in the Philippines. Today, the word Tsinoy, also Chinoy, is the general term used to describe Filipinos with a Chinese heritage.

Discrimination, uprisings, and massacres of Chinese populate the historical narrative of the Philippines during the colonial period. In Manila, Chinese were controlled with the establishment of a distinct quarter called Parian, which was an enclave outside the walls of Intramuros, close enough for the Spanish to benefit from their labor yet sufficiently distant for the purposes of security. Non-Christian Chinese were forced to live in the Parian ghetto, and were only permitted through the Puarta del Parian, one of the seven gates into Intramuros. Although Parian also were created in other towns, Chinese traders and settlers were able to skirt the colonial efforts at controlling them by seeking opportunities throughout the archipelago, a dispersal that contributed to the emergence of the widespread mestizo culture that characterizes the Philippines.

Cebu City’s Calle Colon, which is named after the navigator Christopher Columbus, is said to date to 1565. In this photograph, taken in 1910, it is lined with wooden shophouses.

Religious conversion of all those living in the Philippines to Catholicism was clearly an overall objective, a consequence of the close association of State and Church in the colonial enterprise. While some Chinese were receptive to the incorporation of elements of Catholicism into their own fundamental syncretic beliefs, others saw baptism as a “shrewd business move.” “Besides reduced taxes, land grants, and freedom to reside almost anywhere, one acquired a Spanish godparent, who could be counted upon as a bondsman, creditor, patron, and protector in legal matters” (Wickberg, 1965: 16). The absence of Chinese women contributed to marriage with indio women and the bearing of mestizo children. Raised by their indio mothers, children accepted Catholicism and perhaps even the Spanish language but without identifying themselves as “Spanish.” Depending on the interest and efforts of their Chinese father, some of whom also maintained a family in China, attitudes and practices that were Chinese were consciously or subconsciously adapted by their children.

This late sixteenth-century painting indicates that the word Sangley comes from the Chinese word changlai, meaning “frequent visitor” in Hokkien.

Unlike in the Dutch and English colonies farther south, Chinese in the Philippines did not establish the type of independent associations of kinsmen called kongsi that spurred the opening of tin mines and rubber plantations. Some Chinese gained wealth as recruiters of coolie laborers and as contractors for government monopolies, such as that controlling the importation and distribution of opium. Most, of course, merely maintained their families with modest incomes from small shops that retailed whatever was needed, or used their hands and simple tools to work tin, wood, leather, iron, among other materials, into useful and marketable objects Rather, Chinese in the Philippines principally acquired wealth through wholesale and retail trade.

A bahay na bato residence, which dates to 1830, is described on pages 240–7. Located in Vigan in the Ilocos region along the northwestern coast of Luzon, the Syquia mansion has a distinguished lineage and is maintained as a heritage residence in a town in which some Chinese immigrants who married local women from élite families established an upper-class lifestyle. A much smaller, simpler, and earlier residence, the Yap–Sandiego residence in Cebu, in the Visayan region of the central Philippines, is illustrated on pages 248–53. Resemblances among the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century bahay na bato as both residences and commercial establishments throughout the Philippines are well noted by Fernando N. Zialcita and Martin L. Tinio (1980: 29ff, 212ff).

Tjong A Fie, a worldly entrepreneur whose eclectic mansion for one of his families in Medan on Sumatra is featured in Part Two, constructed this manor near that of his brother for the family he maintained in China.

Residences from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are not common in the Philippines, and many of those surviving from earlier times are deteriorating because of indifference and neglect. Those still standing have somewhat miraculously endured earthquakes and war, while now suffering the abuse of poor residents who know nothing of their historical significance. Wandering the crowded streets and side lanes of Binondo, it is easy to spot buildings with obvious historical character that have fallen into decay through lack of maintenance with only hasty repairs that are unsympathetic with the original character of the structures. Interest in preservation in the Philippines emphasizes monuments, landmarks, and historically important sites, including a wealth of ecclesiastical architecture of great significance. Interest in the preservation of common dwellings is only now emerging.

Overseas Chinese Houses in China

In villages throughout Fujian and Guangdong today, it is possible to see countless structures that affirm that Chinese who once emigrated from their home villages indeed were able to realize their dream of one day returning to build a grand residence, “a glorious homecoming in splendid clothes.” While it is not possible to know with full assurance how many Chinese succeeded in returning, port records of departures and arrivals reveal that two-way traffic was often substantial. Today, websites in the qiaoxiang, “hometowns of Overseas Chinese,” in Fujian and Guangdong, highlight many of the Huaqiao guju, “ancestral homes of Overseas Chinese,” most of which were built in the hundred years between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many are notable because they were built as yanglou, “foreign” in style, while most retained traditional characteristics.

The fabled Nanyang Mandarin-capitalist Zhang Bishi/Cheong Fatt Tze, whose Blue Mansion is also featured in Part Two, built this expansive manor as his retirement home in his remote home-town village in eastern Guangdong. Sadly, he died while still abroad and never lived in the house.

Even prior to a majestic home being built by a returnee, remittances usually flowed back over decades to spouses and families that led to alterations and oftentimes expansion of the original homestead. Return visits, which were surprisingly frequent for some, provided opportunities to inject new ideas about domestic architecture and life in general that already were in flux. The multigenerational aspect of these changing circumstances is shown in the pages that follow. Virtually all of these emphasize the oft-repeated family narrative of a penniless migrant who labored abroad while accumulating meager savings, but who was able to return home and live in a sufficiently commodious grand residence that accommodated many generations, all hopefully living in harmony.

These are three of nine diaolou in Zili village, which sent migrants to the United States, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

For Overseas Chinese, nothing stated success and wealth more clearly than the construction of a grandiose residence that combined traditional elements with whatever ornamentation and furnishings were au courant and that spoke the language of modernity. From the first Opium War (1839–42) for more than a century, China endured an ongoing series of convulsions, some of which were cataclysmic, that impacted the ability of the wealthy to prosper and build fine homes: domestic upheaval during the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the disintegrating Qing imperial system and its failed efforts to save itself, the actual end of the imperial system in 1911, rampant warlordism in the 1920s, the global economic crisis in the decade after 1929, the Japanese invasion from 1937 to 1945, the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, together with widespread unsettled conditions in the country, especially banditry.

During some short intervals and in isolated pockets, there sometimes was hope and optimism that the tide had changed that led to building boomlets. Partially completed homes from these periods still dot the countryside, which attest to dashed hopes and frustrated confidence. Sometimes hopefulness and optimism were accompanied by patriotic fervor on the part of Chinese who lived abroad, some of whom had the financial means to invest in railroads, real estate, factories, mines, schools, banks, and other infrastructure projects that they believed would improve their homelands.

Among the most outstanding dialou is Ruishi Lou in Jinjiang village.

Four homes, which were built in China by Returned Overseas Chinese from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, are featured in Part Two. Chen Zihong built a mansion in Bangkok, Thailand (pages 228–31), and a retirement residence in Chaozhou, Guangdong (pages 262–7). The Qiu family, who prospered in Indonesia early in the twentieth century without building fine residences there, decided to take their wealth back to China where they built two adjacent, but very different, homes in the Meixian, Guangdong countryside over a prolonged period between 1914 and 1934 (pages 254–61). Dee C. Chuan (Li Qingquan) had palatial homes in the Philippines, where his business was centered, but they no longer exist. However, his grand home on Gulangyu Island, adjacent to Xiamen, which was completed in 1926, still stands and is discussed in Part Two (pages 268–73). Dee’s interest in majestic architecture is also reflected in the towering three-storey mausoleum in Manila Chinese Cemetery that he had erected as his final home. Built in Art Deco style, with a double-tiered Chinese roof as well as interior and exterior Chinese ornamentation, his resting place has adjacent to it a residence for a full-time caretaker.

This expansive manor was constructed outside Shantou by Tan Yeok Nee, whose grand home still stands in Singapore and is shown in Part Two.

Built between 1945 and 1949 as a retirement home by Gao Jingsheng, who had become wealthy in the Philippines, the residence was abandoned as the Communists came to power.

Two other prosperous merchants, Tan Yeok Nee in Singapore, and Cheong Fatt Tze in Penang, whose homes are featured in Part Two, built grand Chinese-style manors back in their home villages. Tan Yeok Nee, who was born in the Chaozhou region of Guangdong province, began in 1870 to build a manor and ancestral hall in his ancestral village in China as a place to which he hoped someday to retire. Construction there took until 1884 to be completed, just as his new Singapore home was finished. It is not clear when Tan returned to China, but he died there in 1902. He was saddened by the fact that his sons had predeceased him, although he had surviving grandsons. Cheong Fatt Tze, also known as Zhang Bishi, whose grand residence in Penang is described on pages 128–39, built a manor in his home village in Dabu county, Guangdong (pages 274–7), as well as a handful of other grand homes throughout his trading empire, including in Batavia and Hong Kong. He was an inveterate traveler as he visited his eight wives and families. In 1916, after his death in Batavia in the Netherlands Indies, his body was returned to his native village in China for burial.

Perhaps the most extravagant and exceptional collection of the residences of Returned Overseas Chinese are those found just four hours by boat from Hong Kong. Here, in the Pearl River Delta of western Guangdong province, in the Siyi (sze yap in Cantonese) area—Four Districts of Kaiping, Taishan, Xinhui and Enping—was a major center of Chinese emigration across the Pacific to the United States and Canada as well as Southeast Asia. Nearly 2,000 multistoried residence towers, known as diaolou, survive in this area from the 1920s and 1930s, a time of great disorder, including banditry, abductions, murders, and kidnappings. Constructed of reinforced concrete, with walls some 40 centimeters thick and iron bars and shutters on windows, the towers provided a level of security that exceeded that of other traditional defensive structures. Several of the finest and most fanciful examples of dialou, built by returnees from the United States, reveal similarities and differences with those constructed in other qiaoxiang by returnees from Southeast Asia.

The Yang family manor was built in Jinjiang, Fujian, to accommodate the families of six brothers who had become wealthy in the Philippines tobacco business.

Two examples of the many villas built in the area south of Quanzhou in Fujian province by Returned Overseas Chinese from the Philippines are Yangjia dalou, the Yang family manor, and Jingsheng bieshu, the Jingsheng villa. Little is known of the families that built these expansive homes except they both made their fortunes in the tobacco business in Luzon, the Philippines. The Yang family manor includes a late nineteenth-century building that faces the more dramatic twentieth-century structure called Liuye ting, “The Pavilion for Six,” which is said to have been built with more than 170 rooms to house the families of six brothers. Gao Jingsheng built Jingsheng villa between 1946 and 1949 during a period of transition in China. With the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, a civil war raged between the Nationalists and the Communists from 1945 to 1949. When the Communists gained control of Fujian in 1949, defeating the retreating Nationalists, Gao Jingsheng abandoned his new home and returned to the Philippines. For much of the following half century, the residence remained empty, suffering little damage except for Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution slogans.

Those homes built in China by Returned Overseas Chinese in the twentieth century underscore the fervor of their attachment to the native soil of their ancestral homeland and the enduring dream of multigenerational residency, a large family living together. Most of their residences incorporate Chinese as well as Western elements and thus are more than mere yanglou. While there are clearly conservative building elements and practices, it is easy also to see innovative and foreign aspects. The willingness to use modern construction materials, even when they needed to be imported, was accompanied by a willingness to adapt to changing fashions and evolving aesthetic preferences.