Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
1619 that the Dutch destroyed Jayakarta, which had a population of about 10,000, on the west bank. In its place, they created both a fortification on the right bank at the mouth of the river and began to lay out a colonial town surrounded by a wall and moat.
By 1650 the planned settlement of Batavia, with more canals than streets, became a commercial emporium for regional and global trade. Its ordered ground plan was filled in with administrative buildings, offices, churches, residences, bridges, wharfs, and godowns, collectively a cosmopolitan center for a thriving Asian commercial enterprise, with separate quarters for Javanese, Chinese, and others from islands near and far. Chinese traders, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and laborers who dredged the canals and constructed buildings, arrived in increasing numbers in search of opportunity. They had been permitted to live within the walled city, where their shops sold silks, lacquerware, porcelain, tea, and other products from China. Outside the walls, they engaged in market gardening for the residents of the town and built ships. Their numbers varied from year to year. In 1699 the number of Chinese reached 3,679, followed by 2,407 freed slaves called Mardijkers, 1,783 Europeans, 670 mixed race people, and 867 classified as others. Between 1680 and 1740, the population of Chinese doubled in Batavia (Blussé, 1986: 84).
Tensions that arose with the increased numbers of Chinese immigrants led to stringent Dutch regulations to control them and plans to remove them en masse to Ceylon. Following on the heels of an uprising by Chinese, whose passions were fueled by rumors, a senseless massacre of perhaps 5,000 Chinese in 1740, the survivors either fled to other locations in Java or returned to China. The massacre is well documented and memorialized in a visually striking mid-eighteenth century engraving of their residences being burned to the ground. A census after the riot revealed that the total Chinese population had dropped to just 3,431: 1442 traders and merchants, 935 peasant farmers, 728 working in sugar mills and as woodcutters, and 326 as artisans (Lohanda, 1996: 16). Chinese eventually returned to Batavia but settled in an area outside the southern wall known as Glodok, which is today at the heart of Jakarta’s Chinatown. Yet, from early on, the Chinese, many of whom were Peranakan, dominated the commercial life of Batavia, even surpassing other groups in population. Leonard Blussé indeed describes Batavia as a “Chinese colonial town under Dutch rule” (1981: 159ff).
There is little evidence that remains in Jakarta of the presence of Chinese in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of significance is the grave, the yin zhai or “residence of the dead” in contrast to the yang zhai or “residence of the living,” of Souw Beng Kong, also known as Souw Bwee Kong, the first Kapitan China of Batavia, who was selected by the Dutch to settle disputes, carry out an annual census, collect various taxes, manage benevolent associations such as cemeteries and hospitals, and participate in Dutch civil entities. All the while, he gained wealth and experience as a building contractor, shipbuilder, leaseholder, and proprietor of a gambling house. Appointed in 1619, Souw had previously served as Kapitan of the Chinese community at Bantam, which had been a thriving port on the Sunda Strait to the west of Batavia for the spice trade with Europe from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century when its harbor silted up.
Souw Beng Kong’s career reveals the expansive nature of life for some Chinese as they moved easily throughout the broader region in pursuit of opportunities. In addition to his move from Bantam to Batavia, Souw Beng Kong, who the Dutch called Bencon, left Batavia in 1635 for Zeelandia in Taiwan, a Dutch colony since 1624, where he recruited peasants from Fujian to fulfill the Dutch desire for agricultural development there. Perhaps as many as 50,000 Hokkien peasants, traders, and craftsmen made the sea journey to Taiwan by the end of Dutch rule there in 1662 (Hsu, 1980: 16–17). When Souw Beng Kong died in 1640, he was buried in the countryside outside Batavia, an area that today has been swallowed up by the city. His grave was lost until 1909 and restored in 1929, then at some point, strangely, the gravestone was incorporated into the interior of a slum dwelling. In 2008 the Souw Beng Kong Foundation removed the structure and restored the gravesite to both acknowledge and memorialize his role in supporting early Chinese migrants to Java.
No Chinese residences from the eighteenth century remain in the city, but there are some from the nineteenth century, a period when many fine Chinese-style homes were built in Glodok. Late nineteenth-century photographs provide us with glimpses of the façades of the large residences as well as shophouses that may have been built in the later part of the eighteenth century. Three mansions were built near each other along the fashionable Molenvliet West, alongside older Dutch mansions and hotels, by members of the Khouw family. Of these three, only one, which was constructed in either 1807 or 1867, survived well into the twentieth century. Its tortuous journey from being threatened with destruction multiple times to miraculous survival in a fragmented condition is detailed in Part Two (pages 172–9).
In Semarang, the grand nineteenth-century mansion of Be Ing Tjoe was called Tong Wan or “Eastern Garden” as well as Gedung Goelo or “Sugar Mansion.”
Semarang
Now the largest city in Central Java, Semarang not only once was a natural harbor like other small ports along the northern coast that vied with each other for Chinese traders, it is a location that claims to have a storied past linked to visits by Zheng He in 1406 and 1416. The often told tale is that Ong King Hong, Zheng He’s second in command, was so ill aboard ship during one of the visits that the fleet dropped anchor in the harbor. After coming ashore and locating what has since become a fabled cave, Ong King Hong was left behind with a squad of men and sufficient provisions to support them. Zheng He then sailed on while Ong and his men settled down with local women, cleared land and raised crops, in what eventually became a small Chinese village along the narrow plain. After building some small craft, the community increased its prosperity with active trading along the coast. Ong, like Zheng He, was a Muslim who committed efforts at spreading Islam while at the same time revering Zheng He, who was enshrined as Sam Po by Ong by his followers. In time, according to the well-known tale, Ong placed a small statue of Sam Po (Zheng He) in the cave to be venerated for his greatness. The isolated cave evolved into a shrine known to locals as Gedong Batu or “Stone Building.” Those of Chinese descent revere the Sam Po Kong Temple, which has expanded in recent years far beyond the cliff face, and is the focus for an annual festival that links those of Chinese descent with their illustrious forebear.
Wang Ta-Hai (Ong Tae-Hae), a Hokkien who had lived a decade in Batavia, Pekalongan, and Semarang, published a book in 1791 of his experiences in and impressions of Java that was reprinted several times in the mid-nineteenth century: “Semarang is a district subject to Batavia, but superior to it in appearance. Its territory is more extensive, and its productions more abundant. Merchant vessels are there collected and its commerce is superior... the fields are fertile and well-watered, and the people rich and affluent; whence it may be considered the crown of all those lands. With respect to climate, the air is clear and cool, and thus superior to Batavia; the inhabitants are seldom troubled with sickness, provisions are reasonable and easily obtained... the manners of the people are so inoffensive that they do not pick up things dropped in the roads; and the laws are so strictly enforced, that men have no occasion to shut their doors at night’ (1850: 7–8).
While Semarang had a Chinatown, the boundaries of life were said to have been more fluid than in other towns and cities across Java. After several centuries of immigration and intermarriage, the Peranakan Chinese community generally divided into two groups, one of which preserved its Chinese identity and used the Sam Po Kong Temple as its anchor, while the other, who had adopted Islam, became Javanese in culture. Still others blended the two approaches. These divisions can be seen in several residences lived in by successive generations of those of Chinese descent.
None of the nineteenth-century grand manors remain in Semarang. Preserved only in several photographs are the residence of Tan Tiang Tjhing, called Gedung Goelo or “Sugar Mansion,” built in 1815, and the home of Be Ing Tjioe and his son Be Biauw Tjoan, which was built around 1840 along the Semarang River. Each had a tripartite layout, with a set of three parallel buildings with a pair of perpendicular wing structures. Since it was not common for the front building of a residence to be two storeys tall, it is possible that the front building actually served commercial purposes as offices for the enterprises in which the Tan and Be families