by the US Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation and the Ford Foundation (“Historical Discovery”).
TAN CHENG LOCK RESIDENCE
MALACCA, MALAYSIA
Late 1700s with subsequent changes
One residence along Malacca’s Heeren Street, today renamed Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock, provides an opportunity to unravel on a different scale some of the many layers of history and culture that have enlivened Malacca over the past three centuries. Tan Cheng Lock, a fifth-generation descendant of an eighteenth-century immigrant from China and a distinguished twentieth-century statesman whose leadership led to the establishment of an independent Malaysia upon the departure of the British, was born in 1883 at No. 59 Heeren Street. This residence had been acquired in 1875 by his grandfather, Tan Choon Bock, who willed it on his death in 1880 to Tan Keong Ann, his son and Tan Cheng Lock’s father. No reason is given in the grandfather’s will as to why the house was granted to the third son rather than his elder brother. In the preceding eight decades, the residence had passed through numerous hands before coming into the ownership of the Tan family, who have continued to maintain it for nearly a century and a half since then as their “ancestral” home. Today, the residence, renumbered No. 111, is important not only for its age and layered provenance but also for its historic association with an important man and his family.
Surviving probate records show that there was already a residence on this site in 1797, and extant title deeds, which are remarkable in their detail, trace each of the transfers during the nineteenth century. In 1801 the widow of Daniel Roetenbeek, Silviana de Graca, inherited the property upon his death, and then in 1804 gave the property to her son-in-law, Johann Anton Neubronner, a German, whose widow then inherited the property in 1815. It was owned by the Neubronner family until 1849 when the home was bought at auction by a Chinese named Yeo Hood In, a Malacca-born property owner then living in Singapore. The house was then resold in 1864 to Tan Loh Seng. In 1875, as mentioned above, the property was purchased by Tan Choon Bock, who had become quite wealthy as a pioneer in the tapioca and gambier business as well as being the founder of a major steamship company.
This date, 1875, is fully a hundred years after the arrival of Tan Hay Kwan, an immigrant from Nanjing county in Zhangzhou prefecture near the port of Xiamen in Fujian province, who is the progenitor of the lineage that was to produce Tan Cheng Lock. As a trader with his own junk who followed the alternating seasonal winds of the monsoon from his base in Malacca, Tan Hay Kwan’s commercial activity ranged widely, to Makassar in the Celebes, Bandjarmasin in Borneo, Rhio at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, nearby Penang and distant Australia, as well as the southeast coast of China (Agnes Tan Kim Lwi, 2006: 2; Tan Siok Choo, 1981: 20). Nothing is known of Tan Hay Kwan’s residence in Malacca or elsewhere, nor that of his son, nor even the home or homes that Tan Choon Bock lived in before 1875 when he purchased the late eighteenth-century property we now regard as the family’s ancestral home. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, affluent Peranakans, the offspring of Chinese and indigenous marriages, as well as recent arrivals from China who had the financial wherewithal, purchased many of the old Dutch merchant residences in Kampung Belanda (Dutch Village), thus transforming the area into a veritable Chinatown that has endured to the present day. There are no formal records of what renovation or rebuilding took place over these decades along the streets of the old Dutch town. Physical evidence, however, provides proof that some houses were merged and expanded. Others were modified in one way or other to accommodate family and commercial needs as well as carriages and horses.
The Tan Cheng Lock residence shares an architectural style with a building on its left. Both were built at the same time and were likely originally owned by a single family, who later sold the units to different families.
A close-up of the painting above the altar showing General Guan Gong, who is said to personify many virtues—courage, honor, integrity, justice, loyalty, and strength—and Zhang Fei, another loyal warrior and his comrade of the Three Kingdoms period.
Those writing about the old residences in Malacca sometimes point to purported Dutch architectural influences, perhaps to provide incontrovertible “proof ” of Dutch origins and dates for buildings. These include the use of iron wall-anchors, archways, stone corbels, fired bricks and roof tiles, recessed cupboards, even steep staircases (De Witt, 2007: 145–9). While Dutch building traditions very well may have employed them, most of these architectural elements also have been a part of the repertoire of building practices in southern China, not only with residences but also with temples and palaces. Traditional masons and carpenters in China and those who migrated, as with vernacular builders elsewhere in the world, were fundamentally pragmatists who would alter their materials and methods to meet local conditions. In Malacca, it is certain that the inherited building conventions brought from the varied homelands of immigrants, including Dutch and Chinese, were adapted to local conditions, factors that were facilitated by the overlap of common ways of doing things. Moreover, as wealthy Chinese acquired older homes once occupied by the Dutch and other Europeans, they frequently employed craftsmen from China to make modifications that expressed not only the practical needs of the Chinese occupants but also to embellish them with the types of calligraphic and pictographic ornamentation found in finer homes in China. In addition, Peranakan culture thrived in the fine residences along Heeren Street as the Victorian era came to an end, a time when new layers began to be added to the homes that not long before had been dressed in Chinese adornment. Now, floor and wall tiles imported from England, mirrors and glass from Italy, prints and objets d’art from throughout Europe, and furniture of many styles, including the increasingly popular Peranakan brown-and-gold carved teak furniture gilded in gold leaf, which was made locally rather than imported, were added. Even as these changes in the material culture of the residences were taking place, the observance of Chinese rituals continued during annual celebrations such as the New Year and the festivals related to rituals for the dead, such as Qingming (Clear and Bright) on the fifteenth day after the vernal equinox, and Zhongyuan (Hungry Ghost Festival) on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month.
Dominating the entrance hall is an altar table with images of various deities as well as a painting of Guan Gong and Zhang Fei. The characters yiqi above the altar translate as “righteousness.”
The spacious vestibule-like sitting room is just beyond the entrance hall. While the tables and chairs in this room are Western in style, the wall decorations are all Chinese. The embroidered wall hanging with figures representing the Three Stellar Gods, Fu, Lu, and Shou—Good Fortune, Emolument, and Longevity—was given to Tan Cheng Lock’s son, Tan Siew Sin, on the occasion of a birthday.
On the right is one of a pair of lattice windows that act as a screen filtering the view through the doors from the entrance hall into the interior. Circular stairs to the second floor rise within the alcove.
An assemblage of deities on the altar table.
Punctured by a rectangular skywell, a shaft that reaches up through the second storey, this bright space is filled with pots of ornamental palms of various sizes. The elongated wall is covered with historic photographs and horizontal commendation plaques.
Isabella
