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 years without pay, but with free board and lodging. Then he is given a vacation of three months to visit his family, who in the meantime have arranged his marriage for him. When he returns to his master he leaves his wife in his old home. Every three years he is allowed a three months’ vacation with pay which he spends at home.
This strategy to acquire wealth, which was pursued by territorially based lineage systems in inland China, operated as well in the coastal villages and towns of southern Fujian, and later in Guangdong. In this coastal region, embayed river ports and their hinterlands were the principal homelands for peasants, laborers, and traders who set sail in junks along the coasts and across the seas into what was for some terra incognita, but for many others parts of well-known trading networks.
Beyond the borders of imperial China, no area of the world experienced more sustained contact with Chinese or in-migration of Chinese over a longer period of time than the region referred to today as Southeast Asia, and which the Chinese have historically called the Nanyang or Southern Seas. Characterized by landmasses, peninsulas, and islands of many sizes, this is a region of great complexity and vast expanses, yet significant interdependence. Most of the maps of Southeast Asia show the region as a pendulous outlier of mainland Asia at a substantial distance from both China and India. Yet, from a Chinese perspective, the Nanyang was a sea-based region where even the most distant islands could be reached by sailing along well-known and charted routes. The maritime system within which Chinese coastal traders operated actually spanned an area greater than that of the Mediterranean Sea. Including both the East China Sea and the South China Sea, the immense maritime region stretched 5000 kilometers from Korea and Japan in the north to the Malay Archipelago in the south, and 1800 kilometers from coastal China eastward, beyond Taiwan, to the Philippines. Perhaps as many as 80 percent of the 35 million who trace Chinese ancestry and live beyond the political boundaries of China reside today in the crossroads of Southeast Asia.
Topside activity on a Chinese junk as depicted in a circa 1880 engraving.
Although this colorful view of a Fujianese junk is off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, similar vessels plied the routes throughout the Nanyang.
Arab, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese merchants arrived in the regional trading ports of Southeast Asia more than a thousand years before the appearance of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. Raw and processed silk was carried from China along the Maritime Silk Road westward through the Indian Ocean where it was exchanged for exotic items from Europe. Among the earliest concrete evidence of the direct trade between China and the western Indian Ocean was a ninth-century Arab or Indian shipwreck filled with Chinese ceramics that was