Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
dotted with estuaries and riverine hinterlands straddling the equator attracted Chinese traders, sojourners, and immigrant settlers, providing them with limitless opportunities. It was not only in growing urban centers throughout the archipelago, such as Batavia, Surabaya, Bandung, Medan, Semarang, and Palembang, among many others, that Chinese sojourned or settled but also in small towns along the coasts and inland, like Banten, Tangerang, Cheribon, Gresik, Jepara, Rembang, Lasem, Parakan, Malang, Salatiga, Lawang, Solo, and Pasuruan on Java; Padang and Labuan Deli on Sumatra; Makassar on Celebes; Pontianak on Borneo; and Pangkal Pinang and Muntok on Banka. Some were visited and settled by Chinese well before the Dutch arrived, while others only flourished from the nineteenth century onwards. An intriguing and representative variety of old Chinese homes, both grand and common ones, in these locations are shown in the pages that follow in Part One and Part Two.
This grand residence, said to have been constructed in the late eighteenth century along Molenvliet in Batavia, today’s Jakarta, may have been owned by a member of the Khouw family. A pair of perpendicular wing buildings accompanied the two, possibly three, parallel horizontal structures.
Chinese, Indian, and Arab seaborne merchants used two long-distance routes early on to transit through this intricately vast archipelago between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Passage through the narrow Sunda Strait, some 24 kilometers wide, between the islands of Sumatra and Java, was regarded as difficult to navigate but more direct. The alternate route through the Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra provided a protected, yet restricted, channel some 800 kilometers long. Long-distance trade in large ships through these straits was accompanied by fleets of smaller vessels that hugged the coastline from China southward, braving the sometimes violent seas to sail not only to the Philippines but also south to more distant locations on the large island of Borneo, the oddly shaped Celebes, the Spice Islands of the Moluccas, and beyond to the Banda, Flores, and Java Seas. The far-flung, seemingly random scattering of Chinese settlements along the fringes of the South China Sea and its connecting water bodies attests to the navigational prowess and daring of Chinese seamen over long periods.
Gradually, pockets of Chinese small-scale traders, merchants, craftsmen, and peasants established themselves at the mouths of short coastal rivers or inland for security and the convenience of petty commerce. Many married local Javanese women and became Muslims; others formed local family units while retaining the full spectrum of their Chinese folk beliefs and rituals. Still others, who were of Han ethnicity but Muslim in belief in China, married local Muslim women, thus comfortably choosing their religion over the broader aspects of Chinese culture. Over time, descendants sometimes lost even awareness of their Chinese ethnicity as they assimilated. For many Chinese, they remained a very small minority in host communities, while in others their presence, even if absolute numbers were low, was prominent. For example, in Makassar in the Celebes in the eighteenth century, as many as a third of the Chinese community was Muslim, and a Peranakan Chinese mosque stood there well into the twentieth century (Sutherland, 2003a: 6).
Many shophouses and residences in Batavia, such as here in the Glodok area, fronted on a lane and were aligned along a canal in the back, circa 1890.
The equatorial climate across the archipelago fostered an abundant array of flora, fauna, and marine products that had substantial markets in coastal China. What the Chinese found and preferred was a cornucopia of raw and processed items: aromatic and preservative spices like nutmeg, cloves, and pepper; medicinal herbs and animal parts; agar-agar (a gelatinous substance derived from seaweed); animal and vegetable waxes; avian and marine delicacies such as birds’ nests and sea cucumber (also called trepan and bêche-de-mer); tortoiseshells; rattan; resins; hardwood timber; among other commodities, which were gathered or harvested in the wild. In return, Chinese monsoon traders brought back from China manufactured and processed goods such as fired earthenware, silk thread, cotton textiles, umbrellas, paper, tea, and tobacco. The gathering of natural products involved both local and immigrant labor. Feeder networks using vessels of various types and sizes brought communities of indigenous peoples into an evolving network of globalizing trade that involved not only Chinese junks but also Dutch ships.
When Dutch seafaring traders first reached the coast of northern Java in 1596, they found Chinese settlement along the lower courses of many of the streams. Unlike in the Americas where the Dutch encountered and interacted only with aboriginal or native American populations, the Dutch in Asia benefited from the additional presence of mercantile networks already set in place by countless Chinese sojourners and settlers. In the early part of the twentieth century, a French traveler offered this effusive judgment: “What would become of the European and the Dutch Government without the presence of the Chinaman in Java? A hard worker, meditative, mindful of his responsibilities, he is the linch-pin of all great public or private enterprises; to the native the necessary intermediary, the obscure but necessary cog-wheel, the middleman, the go-between, whom the European would not and Javanese could not as yet replace. One finds him everywhere; one needs him everywhere; one must therefore accept him, while limiting as far as possible, the bad effects of his role.” He preceded this with an explanation: “One finds them wherever there is money to be made; and their presence anywhere is enough to denote some known or possible source of gain” (Cabaton, 1911: 158–9).
Some of the oldest Chinese residences in Indonesia are found in the small coastal towns of the north, while nineteenth-and twentieth-century structures are best found in the major cities. Ten of Indonesia’s fine Chinese residences are presented in Part Two. Nine are spread across the island of Java, from Tangerang in the west to Pasuruan in the east: the Oey Djie San plantation home in Tangerang (pages 180–5); the Khouw family manor (pages 172–9), the Tjioe family residence, which is now the St Maria de Fatima Catholic Church (pages 186–7), in Jakarta; the Tan Tjion Ie home in Semarang (pages 188–9); Kwik Djoen Eng’s mansion, now the Institut Roncalli, in Salatiga (pages 198–201); the Siek family home, now the Prasada Mandala Dharma, in Parakan (pages 190–7); the Liem compound in Lasem (pages 202–3); the Han Bwee Kio ancestral hall in Surabaya (pages 204–9); and the Han and Thalib residence in Pasuruan (pages 210–13). The magnificent Tjong A Fie mansion in Medan in northeastern Sumatra is also included (pages 146–55).
Many portions of the wooden framework within the Souw Tian Pie dwelling survive and suggest its past grandeur.
The residence of Souw Tian Pie, whose forefathers had migrated from Fujian in 1696, was built in Batavia in the early nineteenth century. Originally it was composed of three parallel buildings and a pair of perpendicular side wings, but its overall scale has been diminished over time, first by the destruction of the tall rear building at some time in the past, second by the demolition of a wing unit in the 1980s so that a multistoried block could be built, and third by modernization of the opposite wing.
Batavia/Jakarta
In late 1596, when the Dutch arrived on the northwest coast of Java, they entered the Ciliwung River where they encountered a small village of Chinese peasants who planted rice and vegetables and made arrack, a beverage distilled from fermented sugarcane and rice. This Chinese settlement, about which very little is known, was adjacent to a trading center called in succession Sunda Kelapa and Jayakarta. Portuguese traders had visited as early as 1513 and Arab, Indian, and Chinese traders, who had come even earlier,