Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
the ornately carved and richly gilded triple altar is but one one of its most outstanding features.
A second featured home, which is located across the river in what is today Bangkok’s Chinatown, was build in the late nineteenth century by Soa Hengtai, an immigrant from Fujian. Today, it is the home of Soa’s descendants who have the Thai name Posayachinda (pages 222–7).
The narrow sea-flanked region known as peninsular Siam, which is washed on the east by the Gulf of Siam and on the west by the Andaman Sea, traditionally was a crossroads area in which Indian and Chinese traditions came into contact with each other. On the west coast of the peninsula is the coastal town of Ranong, which is said to have “looked and felt like a transplanted Fukkien village, with houses, shophouses, and temples” in the nineteenth century (Aasen, 1998: 169). Here, Khaw Soo Cheang, born in Zhangzhou, Fujian, in 1797, migrated first to Penang in the 1820s with only a carrying pole to start life as a coolie, before moving to Ranong farther up the peninsular where marriage and alliances set a foundation for economic success.
During the reign of King Rama III, in 1844, he was granted tin-mining rights and opium concessions, setting in train a veritable family dynasty that thrived until 1932. In 1854, under the patronage of a Siamese family, he became governor, as did his eldest son. All four sons prospered as able administrators. Khaw Sim Bee, who became one of Phuket’s leading shipping and insurance magnates and was well known in Penang, is said to have traveled to the capital in 1901 where he “formally changed his nationality by going through the ceremony of having his queue cut off in the presence of a large gathering of princes and officials” (Campbell, 1902: 100). Although he married a Chinese woman from Penang, his family adopted the name Na Ranong, which today is known throughout Thailand. Khaw Sim Bee’s introduction of rubber into southern Thailand helped transform the economy, just as it had earlier in British Malaya and in Sumatra. Only the pillars of the Khaw family residence are still standing in Ranong, and thus there is no full sense of its scale and style. On the other hand, the cemetery Khaw Soo Cheang established for his family, was laid out according to strict Chinese fengshui principals. After he died at the age of 86 in 1882, stone guardian figures and ornamented stelae were set in place to grace his gravesite. On the east side of the peninsula in Songkhla, another Fujian immigrant from Zhangzhou prospered under similar circumstances. Wu Rang, also known as Wu Yang, migrated in 1750. His descendants built a magisterial residence in 1878, which is featured in Part Two (pages 214–21), that surpasses any other Chinese-style structure in peninsular Siam. Their family, with the adopted surname Na Songkhla, is also well known throughout Thailand.
Kim Lo Chair, a Chaozhou immigrant to Siam between 1824 and 1851, was the progenitor of the family known today by the surname Poshyanonda. His surviving three-bay single-storey home was built in the last half of the nineteenth century and is noted for its gilded altar and ornately carved wooden features.
Vietnam
From the seventh to the tenth century, the Kingdom of Champa controlled not only what is known today as central and southern Vietnam but also the seaborne trade in spices, incense, silk, and ivory between China, India, Java, and as far west as the sprawling Abbasid Caliphate with its capital at Baghdad. Hoi An, the most important Champa entrepôt along the sea lanes of the South China Sea that stretched from coastal China to the Strait of Malacca, became during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries a cosmopolitan town for Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants. Each of these nationalities left traces of their cross-cultural presence, including the well-known Japanese covered bridge, which was built in 1593.
Enterprising merchants from China set up shops and warehouses that not only looked to the seas but also traded up and down the coast and rivers within a mercantile network of increasing complexity. Along a series of narrow streets lining the Thu Bon riverbank, which were intersected at right angles by slender lanes, a Chinese quarter soon emerged in Hoi An, complete with shophouses, merchant residences, temples, ancestral halls, guild halls, native place associations, pagodas, and tombs. By the end of the 1700s, however, as the estuary of the river silted up and as the port of Da Nang 30 kilometers to the north overtook it as the new center of overseas trade, Hoi An became a rather languid backwater. Yet, while entrepôt trade diminished at Hoi An, Chinese merchants from the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou areas of southern Fujian nonetheless continued to grow, diversify, and to some degree flourish. Intermarriage with local women was common (Wheeler 2001: 34, 168).
For the past 200 years, unlike so many other Vietnamese towns and cities that suffered the destruction of warfare, Hoi An remained relatively untouched. The overall street plan seen today is much as it was when the port developed centuries ago. One, one-and-a-half, and two storey shophouses as well as merchant terrace houses constructed of wood survive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries although many were reconstructed during the nineteenth century using brick as well as wood. Pastel-colored façades and rooflines are little changed from the past, and there is only limited evidence of modern materials like concrete and corrugated metal added to the old structures of wood and tile. At the end of September 2009, Typhoon Ketsana brought three-meter-deep flooding of filthy brown water to the historic areas of Hoi An, causing levels of destruction not experienced for decades.
These two views of a restored nineteenth-century shop-house built by a Chinese immigrant in Hanoi, Vietnam, show the skywell and balcony as well as the furnishings in the reception room.
Philippines
When the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese by birth sailing under the flag of Spain, anchored in the harbor at Cebu in 1521, his intent was to claim the land for the Spanish Crown and convert the people to the Roman Catholic faith. Magellan was killed in Cebu that same year and it was decades before other Spanish conquistadors vanquished native tribes, set up defensive settlements, initiated a flourishing trade network, and began the proselytizing of Catholicism across the sprawling archipelago. Magellan’s initial discovery led to results that at the time could not easily have been foretold: East Asia’s only Christian nation and one in which the blood of immigrants from China mixed with that of natives to create a vibrant and syncretic mestizo culture. In 1543 another explorer reached the islands, naming them Felipinas, the Philippines, to honor Crown Prince Don Felipe who later was to become Felipe II de España, the Spanish monarch Philip II.
During the more than three and a half centuries that the Philippines were a colony of Spain, the Spanish only found limited riches, unlike the riches they obtained in Mexico and Peru or the spices they had sought as they journeyed towards the East Indies. However, once the Spanish had established their capital at Manila, they recognized the profits that could be made from transshipping China’s luxuries to Europe and from encouraging the immigration of Chinese laborers, traders, and artisans to the Philippines. From 1565 into the early decades of the nineteenth century, a far-flung and lucrative trading network using large sailing ships called galleons, sailed in convoys once or twice a year from Manila in Nueva España or New Spain and back. Chinese luxury goods such as porcelain, ivory, silk, precious stones, copper cash, mercury, and lacquerware, as well as spices from the Moluccas and elsewhere in the Nanyang, were amassed at Manila and then carried in galleons across the Pacific to Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast. The sailing routes depended upon favorable winds for voyages that spanned a three or four month period. From Mexico the goods were carried overland to Vera Cruz for transshipment by sea, first to Cuba and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain in annual treasure ships. In exchange, vast quantities of Mexican and Peruvian silver were transported via the Philippines to China. The route across the Pacific Ocean made it possible for the Spanish to avoid a much longer and more dangerous voyage across the Indian Ocean and around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
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