Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp

built in Penang a contrasting pair of mansions that share many underlying themes. One special feature of Chung Keng Quee’s home, as will be discussed later, is that he had a spacious private ancestral hall built adjacent to his home. Constructed as the nineteenth century came to a close, these grand residences evoke the styles of the late Victorian era during a period of increasing global interdependence when eclectic decorative arts styles were in fashion throughout the world. Significantly, in the case of homes discussed in this book, there was a concomitant resurgence of pride by well-to-do Chinese in the culture of their ancestors. For many, it was essential that craftsmen from China were “imported” to design and fabricate multifarious forms of applied ornamentation and furnishings in order to assure authenticity, even as they sought fixtures and art works from Europe to express modernity.

      This rundown shophouse along Thalang Road in Phuket was restored recently as China Inn Café & Restaurant.

      Deteriorating and restored buildings, each of which remains imposing and said to be in Sino-Portuguese style, are found throughout Phuket.

      In spite of material success, international fame in his adopted home-land, and the building of an opulent Chinese-style residence in Penang, Cheong Fatt Tze also constructed a grand manor in his hometown in Dabu, Guangdong province (pages 274–7), but sadly died before he could retire there. Chung Keng Quee did not follow that route, leaving behind children in Malaya who were more comfortable with life in a British colony. Kee Lai Huat, a pioneering planter of sugarcane and manufacturer of brown sugar, founded Sungai Bakap, a town in Province Wellesley. Here, in a rambling compound of residences and an ancestral hall, which he hoped would become the permanent abode of his descendants who would live together harmoniously, he declared his Chineseness (pages 120–7).

      Sumptuous eclectic residences were built as well in Phuket and Medan during this period, which reveal clearly their economic and social linkages with Penang. With wealth acquired first from tin mining and smelting and later from rubber plantations, Tan Ma Hsiang, whose Thai name was Prapitak Chyn Pracha, built in 1904 what is called in Thailand a Sino-Portuguese villa with obvious elements blending generic Western architectural forms and Chinese elements (pages 140–5). Between 1895 and 1900, Tjong A Fie constructed an opulent mansion in the thriving town of Medan on Sumatra in the Netherlands Indies (pages 146–55). A fine example of architectural eclecticism, Tjong’s mansion mixes fashionable European-style furnishings and fine arts with centuries-old styles of Chinese furniture, altars, and ornamentation in a striking brew of material modernity.

      Selangor

      While Malacca and Penang trace their roots to early Chinese seaborne trading, the prosperity of areas in between, today’s Perak, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan, came only in the mid-nineteenth century with the boom in tin mining that was spurred by global demand. Up to that time, fluctuating economic conditions in the agricultural, commercial, and even the tin 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