was a standard public works residence built for junior civil servants in the Malay state of Perak, a state that the British claimed to “protect” on the Malay Peninsula. This was in Ipoh, the capital of Kinta, one of the richest tin mining valleys in the world and where many wealthy Chinese built their mansions. Unlike their fine homes, our small house was inspired mainly by Malay designs and was built on short stilts not more than four feet above the ground. The most striking feature was the covered corridor that connected it to the kitchen and servants’ quarters at the back of the house, some 20 yards away.
My family went on to live in houses built by the Chinese themselves. In Ipoh, the Chinese who moved up the social scale from unskilled mining and plantation laborers preferred to live in rows of shophouses beside the main streets. We had our share of living in several of these. Away from towns, there were those who followed Malay practice and built their houses on stilts. But, when they were ready to build their family homes, mostly on the edge of town, they turned to models of the traditional homes they admired in China. They also noted the work of European architects and adapted their newer homes to the need to appear fashionable.
We had the chance to live with one such upwardly mobile family and saw them transform a large Malay-type house into a new mansion. What struck me most was, the richer our host became, the more the Malay features about his house were replaced by things and shapes that were markedly Chinese or European. The overlap of Chinese ethnicity and Western modernity quickly edged out much of what was indigenous to the tropical environment.
Later, when I began to meet Southeast Asian Chinese trained in Britain and elsewhere in the West to be professional architects, I became conscious of how instinctively eclectic my host in Ipoh had been in the choices he made for his extended home. Whether in its external structure, the use of interior space, the adornments on the roof, the plan of the garden, or the selection of furniture for the public and private rooms, there was dissonance in the midst of elegance accompanied by several corners of splendid harmony. By that time, I realized that many other newly rich Chinese also displayed varying degrees of eccentric individuality that made their residences unforgettable.
Today, cautious public planners and venturesome private architects vie for the attention of new rich Chinese in every urban center. There is better appreciation of indigenous artistry, and the mixtures they offer are less whimsical and contrived. There is also brilliance surrounded by mediocrity. But overall the effect is one of confusion that the competing styles do little to minimize. It would appear that we need time to weed out the unmemorable so that, decades from now, the best of them that survive will be lovingly studied by someone like Ronald Knapp.
The houses described in this book represent some of the finest and best preserved or restored in Southeast Asia. I have visited most of those in Malaysia and Singapore and a few others in Jakarta, Semarang, Bangkok, and Manila. But Ronald Knapp has examined all of them closely. His sensitive and meticulous descriptions have opened my eyes to points of transmission and adaptation that I had missed. Altogether, the book provides a feast of colors and designs that appeals both to my interest in their histories and to my suppressed desire to have a family home of my own.
In particular, how he has described the mix of convention, sacral loyalty, and keeping up with the times captures the many layers of emotions that most sojourning Chinese experienced when they decided to settle down. By doing that, the author has opened new doors to all of us who are fascinated with the plurality of Southeast Asia. He has also enabled new generations of Chinese overseas to savor some of the delights in the lives of their transplanted ancestors.
Wang Gungwu
National University of Singapore
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
