Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
many Chinese succeeded in returning, port records of departures and arrivals reveal that two-way traffic was often substantial. Today, websites in the qiaoxiang, “hometowns of Overseas Chinese,” in Fujian and Guangdong, highlight many of the Huaqiao guju, “ancestral homes of Overseas Chinese,” most of which were built in the hundred years between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many are notable because they were built as yanglou, “foreign” in style, while most retained traditional characteristics.
The fabled Nanyang Mandarin-capitalist Zhang Bishi/Cheong Fatt Tze, whose Blue Mansion is also featured in Part Two, built this expansive manor as his retirement home in his remote home-town village in eastern Guangdong. Sadly, he died while still abroad and never lived in the house.
Even prior to a majestic home being built by a returnee, remittances usually flowed back over decades to spouses and families that led to alterations and oftentimes expansion of the original homestead. Return visits, which were surprisingly frequent for some, provided opportunities to inject new ideas about domestic architecture and life in general that already were in flux. The multigenerational aspect of these changing circumstances is shown in the pages that follow. Virtually all of these emphasize the oft-repeated family narrative of a penniless migrant who labored abroad while accumulating meager savings, but who was able to return home and live in a sufficiently commodious grand residence that accommodated many generations, all hopefully living in harmony.
These are three of nine diaolou in Zili village, which sent migrants to the United States, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
For Overseas Chinese, nothing stated success and wealth more clearly than the construction of a grandiose residence that combined traditional elements with whatever ornamentation and furnishings were au courant and that spoke the language of modernity. From the first Opium War (1839–42) for more than a century, China endured an ongoing series of convulsions, some of which were cataclysmic, that impacted the ability of the wealthy to prosper and build fine homes: domestic upheaval during the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the disintegrating Qing imperial system and its failed efforts to save itself, the actual end of the imperial system in 1911, rampant warlordism in the 1920s, the global economic crisis in the decade after 1929, the Japanese invasion from 1937 to 1945, the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, together with widespread unsettled conditions in the country, especially banditry.
During some short intervals and in isolated pockets, there sometimes was hope and optimism that the tide had changed that led to building boomlets. Partially completed homes from these periods still dot the countryside, which attest to dashed hopes and frustrated confidence. Sometimes hopefulness and optimism were accompanied by patriotic fervor on the part of Chinese who lived abroad, some of whom had the financial means to invest in railroads, real estate, factories, mines, schools, banks, and other infrastructure projects that they believed would improve their homelands.
Among the most outstanding dialou is Ruishi Lou in Jinjiang village.
Four homes, which were built in China by Returned Overseas Chinese from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, are featured in Part Two. Chen Zihong built a mansion in Bangkok, Thailand (pages 228–31), and a retirement residence in Chaozhou, Guangdong (pages 262–7). The Qiu family, who prospered in Indonesia early in the twentieth century without building fine residences there, decided to take their wealth back to China where they built two adjacent, but very different, homes in the Meixian, Guangdong countryside over a prolonged period between 1914 and 1934 (pages 254–61). Dee C. Chuan (Li Qingquan) had palatial homes in the Philippines, where his business was centered, but they no longer exist. However, his grand home on Gulangyu Island, adjacent to Xiamen, which was completed in 1926, still stands and is discussed in Part Two (pages 268–73). Dee’s interest in majestic architecture is also reflected in the towering three-storey mausoleum in Manila Chinese Cemetery that he had erected as his final home. Built in Art Deco style, with a double-tiered Chinese roof as well as interior and exterior Chinese ornamentation, his resting place has adjacent to it a residence for a full-time caretaker.
This expansive manor was constructed outside Shantou by Tan Yeok Nee, whose grand home still stands in Singapore and is shown in Part Two.
Built between 1945 and 1949 as a retirement home by Gao Jingsheng, who had become wealthy in the Philippines, the residence was abandoned as the Communists came to power.
Two other prosperous merchants, Tan Yeok Nee in Singapore, and Cheong Fatt Tze in Penang, whose homes are featured in Part Two, built grand Chinese-style manors back in their home villages. Tan Yeok Nee, who was born in the Chaozhou region of Guangdong province, began in 1870 to build a manor and ancestral hall in his ancestral village in China as a place to which he hoped someday to retire. Construction there took until 1884 to be completed, just as his new Singapore home was finished. It is not clear when Tan returned to China, but he died there in 1902. He was saddened by the fact that his sons had predeceased him, although he had surviving grandsons. Cheong Fatt Tze, also known as Zhang Bishi, whose grand residence in Penang is described on pages 128–39, built a manor in his home village in Dabu county, Guangdong (pages 274–7), as well as a handful of other grand homes throughout his trading empire, including in Batavia and Hong Kong. He was an inveterate traveler as he visited his eight wives and families. In 1916, after his death in Batavia in the Netherlands Indies, his body was returned to his native village in China for burial.
Perhaps the most extravagant and exceptional collection of the residences of Returned Overseas Chinese are those found just four hours by boat from Hong Kong. Here, in the Pearl River Delta of western Guangdong province, in the Siyi (sze yap in Cantonese) area—Four Districts of Kaiping, Taishan, Xinhui and Enping—was a major center of Chinese emigration across the Pacific to the United States and Canada as well as Southeast Asia. Nearly 2,000 multistoried residence towers, known as diaolou, survive in this area from the 1920s and 1930s, a time of great disorder, including banditry, abductions, murders, and kidnappings. Constructed of reinforced concrete, with walls some 40 centimeters thick and iron bars and shutters on windows, the towers provided a level of security that exceeded that of other traditional defensive structures. Several of the finest and most fanciful examples of dialou, built by returnees from the United States, reveal similarities and differences with those constructed in other qiaoxiang by returnees from Southeast Asia.
The Yang family manor was built in Jinjiang, Fujian, to accommodate the families of six brothers who had become wealthy in the Philippines tobacco business.
Two examples of the many villas built in the area south of Quanzhou in Fujian province by Returned Overseas Chinese from the Philippines are Yangjia dalou, the Yang family manor, and Jingsheng bieshu, the Jingsheng villa. Little is known of the families that built these expansive homes except they both made their fortunes in the tobacco business in Luzon, the Philippines. The Yang family manor includes a late nineteenth-century building that faces the more dramatic twentieth-century structure called Liuye ting, “The Pavilion for Six,” which is said to have been built with more than 170 rooms to house the families of six brothers. Gao Jingsheng built Jingsheng villa between 1946 and 1949 during a period of transition in China. With the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, a civil war raged between the Nationalists and the Communists from 1945 to 1949. When the Communists