Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
decorations are all Chinese. The embroidered wall hanging with figures representing the Three Stellar Gods, Fu, Lu, and Shou—Good Fortune, Emolument, and Longevity—was given to Tan Cheng Lock’s son, Tan Siew Sin, on the occasion of a birthday.
On the right is one of a pair of lattice windows that act as a screen filtering the view through the doors from the entrance hall into the interior. Circular stairs to the second floor rise within the alcove.
An assemblage of deities on the altar table.
Punctured by a rectangular skywell, a shaft that reaches up through the second storey, this bright space is filled with pots of ornamental palms of various sizes. The elongated wall is covered with historic photographs and horizontal commendation plaques.
Isabella Bird, the noted Victorian globetrotter who visited Malacca in the late 1870s, caught glimpses of the rising prominence of Chinese families, a milieu that Tan Cheng Lock was born into (1883: 133):
And it is not, as elsewhere, that they come, make money, and then return to settle in China, but they come here with their wives and families, buy or build these handsome houses, as well as large bungalows in the neighbouring coco-groves, own most of the plantations up the country, and have obtained the finest site on the hill behind the town for their stately tombs. Every afternoon their carriages roll out into the country, conveying them to their substantial bungalows to smoke and gamble. They have fabulous riches in diamonds, pearls, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds. They love Malacca, and take a pride in beautifying it. They have fashioned their dwellings upon the model of those in Canton, but whereas cogent reasons compel the rich Chinaman at home to conceal the evidences of his wealth, he glories in displaying it under the security of British rule. The upper class of the Chinese merchants live in immense houses within walled gardens. The wives of all are secluded, and inhabit the back regions and have no share in the remarkably “good time” which the men seem to have.
“Many of the women who lived there vied with each other for the distinction of having the finest set of jewellery, the most exquisite clothes, the best nyonya ware, and the most magnificent furniture. They also tried to out-do each other in culinary skills and beadwork—both attributes for every nyonya girl” (Tan Siok Choo, 1983: 51). Today, visitors to Malacca can experience this culture by visiting the private Baba-Nyonya Heritage Museum outfitted in an adjacent pair of nineteenth-century terrace houses. Once homes of prominent families, some properties have been refashioned as boutique hotels—Hotel Puri and Baba House Hotel—where visitors can experience the richness of Peranakan culture. Along the street is a smaller but well-restored old terrace house that has been elegantly transformed into a bed-and-breakfast called The Snail House.
Tan Cheng Lock, the Man
Tan Cheng Lock is best known in Malaysia as a statesman because of the prominent role he played with other political leaders such as Tunku Abdul Rahman and V. T. Sambanthan in negotiating independence from the British, his promotion of Malaysia as a multiethnic state, and as the founder and first president of the Malayan Chinese Association. The Tan ancestral home was the venue for much discussion about issues relating to obtaining independence from the British.
A true son of Malacca, Tan attended Malacca High School, an English-medium institution established in 1826 after the Dutch ceded the city to the British, before furthering his education at the Raffles Institution Singapore. After graduating, even before turning twenty, he was invited to stay on and teach young boys at the Raffles Institution. As one of the few Chinese in the Straits Settlements with a Cambridge School Certificate, he was a voracious reader of European literature, philosophy, and history, as well as translations into English of books about Chinese culture. Although he taught at Raffles Institution from 1902 to 1908, “he was out of his depth teaching unruly schoolboys,” according to his daughter Agnes, and was urged by his mother to look for a future in rubber, a crop and industry that in time was to flourish in British Malaya (Agnes Tan Kim Lwi, 2006: 2). With the help of his cousin as well as close friend and businessman, Chan Kang Swi, Tan Cheng Lock created several firms that ran labor-intensive plantations of the Hevea brasiliensis or rubber tree, which produced the seemingly magical elastic latex called “rubber.” Commercial planting of rubber trees had only begun in the Malay States in 1895, with soaring expansion of acreage between 1905 and 1911 to meet increasingly robust world markets, just when Tan Cheng Lock was seeking a new challenge. The United Malacca Rubber Estates, which was established in 1910, brought him some prominence, and he was appointed in 1912 as a member of the Malacca Municipal Council by the British authorities. In time, his involvement in social issues ranged from condemning the use of opium, a major source of revenue for the British in Asia, and countering the common Chinese practice of polygamy by encouraging monogamous marriages.
Tan Cheng Lock’s study is aligned along a wall adjacent to the skywell, with a plaque proclaiming “Honor Results from Actual Achievements.”
An elaborate ornamental lattice screen runs from wall to wall between the skywell and the ancestral hall.
In 1913, at the age of thirty, Tan Cheng Lock married Yeo Yeok Neo, an heiress whose father had arranged the union. Tan Cheng Lock and his wife had five children, a son and four daughters. Tan Siew Sin, Tan Cheng Lock’s only son, who was born in the Heeren Street family home in 1916, also became a distinguished public servant, serving as Malaya’s first Minister of Commerce and Industry before becoming Malaysia’s first Minister of Finance from 1959 to 1974. Four daughters, Lily (Tan Kim Tin), Nellie (Wee Geok Kim), Alice (Tan Kim Yoke), and Agnes (Tan Kim Lwi), were born into the household. Tan Cheng Lock’s attention to the teachings of Confucius is well known, especially the emphasis on the filial duty of remembering ancestors through periodic ritual. Even with Tan Cheng Lock’s business and political careers underway, according to his granddaughter, he was “relieved of the necessity of having to earn money in less salubrious ways,... [and] set about increasing his wife’s inheritance” (Tan Siok Choo, 1981: 24). Because of his civic activity, he was appointed an unofficial member of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements in 1926, and in 1933 a member of the Executive Council of that body.
Lee Seck Bin, Tan Cheng Lock’s mother, who recognized her son’s unhappiness as a teacher and urged him to consider venturing into the rubber business where he thrived.
Late nineteenth-century photograph of Tan Keong Ann, Tan Cheng Lock’s father, who is shown here wearing a mixture of clothing, including a Chinese-style jacket, a Western-style fedora and leather shoes.
Wearing Malay attire, Tan Cheng Lock is standing with his only son and three daughters.
With a three-character board above it proclaiming “Hall of Filiality,” the Tan family ancestral altar holds the ancestral tablets of three generations, including Tan Cheng Lock and his wife, Tan’s parents and their son, Tan Siew Sin. Above the altar is the ancestral portrait of Lee Chye Neo, the wife of the progenitor Tan Hay Kwan. On the left wall are images of Tan Cheng Lock’s grandparents. The furniture, brought from Hong Kong on the occasion of daughter Lily’s wedding in 1935, is a mixture of traditional Chinese forms with Western elements.
Tan Cheng Lock, the Residence
The Tan Cheng Lock ancestral residence is a notable structure replete with furnishings,