Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp

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):