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).
