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
