Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
be observed in structures throughout southern China. The addition of a freestanding rectangular open building with a broad eaves overhang is an unusual feature, perhaps serving as a kind of Javanese pendopo, the pavilion-like structure used to receive guests and provide sheltered space for work and relaxation.
Semarang today has wide, tree-lined boulevards with modern commercial and administrative buildings, narrow lanes with old shophouses, areas with large mansions for the wealthy, and smaller, yet comfortable homes in eclectic styles that were built in the nineteenth century. Along Besen Lane, in what once was the Chinese quarter, is an old shophouse that is now undergoing renovation as a gallery of Chinese art. Constructed late in the nineteenth century as a shophouse selling the well-known Frog brand of floor tile, the spacious brick building has Chinese brackets that extend the roof in the front. In addition to the wooden door, hinged into three leaves and divided horizontally into two sections so that the bottom could be kept shut while the upper left open, the shop has a rectangular panel on swivel hinges that once served as a display counter as well as a covering to secure the window at night. In addition to ventilation ports set high on the walls, there is a skywell in the back half of the building, which together with the front and rear windows kept the building quite airy. Chinese characters are still found above the doorways leading from room to room, but other of the applied ornamentation that once was found there is long gone. The upstairs area probably was used for sleeping space for employees. Across the lane is a similar two-storey shophouse. Elsewhere in Semarang, Peranakan Chinese sometimes live in nineteenth-century homes that evoke more Dutch Indische than Chinese styles. The eclectic residence of Tan Tiong Ie, which was built in 1850 a century after his ancestors arrived in Java, is featured in Part Two (pages 188–9).
Thonburi, Bangkok, and Songkhla
Siam, today’s Thailand, has a long history of overland migration and trade with southwest China. Maritime trade and migration, on the other hand, is of more recent origin, beginning before the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), and flourishing for more than five centuries spanning the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911). During most of this time, trade was carried out not only as part of a tributary system but also through the efforts of countless private traders who plied the waters in seagoing and coastal junks. The volume of trade was so great that many of these Chinese-style junks were actually built in Siam using locally available and superior teak timbers. Reciprocal trade between Siam and China—except for Siam’s export of necessities such as rice, sugar, pepper, and woods—historically was in high-value luxury commodities: elephants’ teeth, sapanwood (a medical plant and source of a reddish dye), deer hides, rhinoceros horns, sticklac resin, decorative birds’ feathers, and birds’ nests from Siam, in exchange for a range of chinaware and textiles, especially porcelain and silk, as well as other manufactured goods and foodstuffs from China.
This close-up of the gable end of a Chinese residence built in the Thonburi palace in Siam, today’s Thailand, by King Taksin after 1824 evokes the Chaozhou domestic architectural style.
By the end of the eighteenth century, an additional “commodity”—immigrant Chinese—from areas along the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong began to scout, trade, and then settle in increasing numbers at various ports along the Gulf of Siam as well as spread into the interior. Irregularly shaped and approximately half the size of the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Siam, which is a relatively shallow body of water that bleeds on its southern edge into the vast South China Sea, is bounded on three sides by land: the southern cape of Vietnam, coastal Cambodia, and the continental and peninsular portions of Siam/Thailand. An increasingly close relationship grew between Chinese merchants and Siamese aristocracy, who appointed some of the immigrants as tax farmers with monopoly rights in collecting birds’ nests, tobacco, and other commodities in exchange for a payment of silver.
At the apex of the gulf, along the banks of the lower Chao Phraya River, Chinese merchants established trading posts and residences not only at the old imperial capital at Ayutthaya but also at its successor site downstream at Thonburi on the west bank, followed by Bangkok on the east bank. The Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, which thrived from 1351 until it was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767, had a cosmopolitan capital city with a substantial Chinese immigrant population. After a lengthy siege, the grand city was burned to the ground, leaving no evidence of the residences, temples, markets, or shops of the Chinese who once lived there. Today, only magnificent stone and brick ruins remain to suggest its past splendor, much like Angkor to which it is often compared. In 1991 the Ayutthaya Historical Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Muang Boran, an open-air museum some 33 kilometers east of Bangkok, which includes both reconstructed buildings and replicas, features many structures that display Chinese influences in their construction and ornamentation.
During the nineteenth century, when grand Chinese-style homes were built along the banks of the Chao Phraya, such as this one on the right belonging to Koh Hong Lee, each family’s rice mills, storage facilities, and commercial wharf were adjacent.
After the destruction of Ayutthaya, the new monarch, Taksin, shifted the capital 80 kilometers downstream to Thonburi, a move that brought in its wake the increasing in-migration of Chinese merchants to the new capital. Taksin, called Zheng Xin and Zheng Zhao in Chinese, was born in 1734 of a Chinese father and a Siamese mother. Taksin’s father, who in Siam used the name Zheng Yong and Hai-Hong, had migrated to Ayutthaya from Chenghai in eastern Guangdong province. Conversant in the Chaozhou dialect as well as the Siamese language, Taksin served as monarch for fourteen years (1767–82). He is not only revered today in Thailand for his role in unifying Siam after the Burmese invasion, but is also celebrated in Chenghai, which takes great pride in being the ancestral home of a king of Siam. In 1782 some of Taksin’s clothing was brought back to his father’s ancestral village, Huafu, where the garments were buried in a tomb that is the focus of tourism today.
King Taksin built his Thonburi palace in 1768 on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River. The largest structure in the palace complex incorporates both a Siamese-style throne hall and a residence with many Chinese features. After King Rama I ascended the throne in 1782 and moved the capital across the river, Taksin’s Thonburi palace became known as Phra Racha Wang Derm, and was used as a residence by royal family members. The Chinese-style residences that were built there between 1824 and 1851, while having undergone considerable renovation to become modern exhibition spaces, still have gables and roofs that evoke styles reminiscent of the Chaozhou region. In 2004 the complex won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award of Merit for its restoration. This royal site today serves also as the headquarters for the Royal Thai Navy.
Well into the twentieth century, Thonburi remained much less developed than Bangkok across the river, with which it merged as a metropolitan area only in 1972. Along both sides of the river, Chinese-style residences as well as those in more eclectic styles were sited adjacent to riverside rice mills, warehouses, and berths. Thonburi and Bangkok indeed were Chinese towns in a Siamese kingdom. The home of Koh Hong Lee, the oldest rice milling Chinese family, is shown in an adjacent photograph. While this residence is no longer standing, there are a handful of nineteenth-century mansions that have, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, survived even as newer homes and commercial structures were built adjacent to them. Part Two focuses on two of these Chinese-style residences. One, which is known today as the Wanglee Mansion (pages 228–31), was identified in 1908 by Arnold Wright as the residence of Tan Lip Buoy, whose father had returned to Shantou, the port city for the Chaozhou region.
Not too far from the Wanglee mansion is the ancestral home of another Chaozhou immigrant family known today by the surname Poshyanonda, whose progenitor was Kim Lo Chair. Arriving in Siam from a village on the outskirts of Shantou sometime between 1824 and 1851, he initially lived on a wooden boat on the Chao Phraya River while supervising other Chinese workers. His home, which was constructed sometime during the last half of the nineteenth century, is a three-bay, single storey structure and a pair of flanking buildings. Known for its elaborately ornamented wooden components and