Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
the collapse of the central ridgepole above the altar opened the heart of the dwelling to water damage, which has accelerated its deterioration since resources have not been expended to make necessary repairs. The residence today is owned by descendants of Tan Tek Kee, who now must struggle with decisions about its preservation. While most of them today live comfortably beyond Fujian in the Philippines and Hong Kong, they have put forth substantial funds in an effort to both maintain and restore the patrimony of their forebear. Making decisions within an extended family about allocating resources and how the burden should be shared is not easy. Without the daily life and periodic ritual of the family that once occupied this fine home, and who gave it life, the structure today is a melancholy shell of its former splendor. Today, only a caretaker and his family now occupy the rambling old dwelling in order to keep it clean and protect it from vandalism while distant family members ponder its future.
New Homelands in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, like other major realms of the world, as discussed above, is diverse and fragmented in terms of its physical and cultural geographies. The region can be divided fundamentally into two contrasting subdivisions: an Asian mainland that extends south from China, and an array of large and small islands that includes the world’s most extensive archipelago. Volcanic peaks, mountain spines, rugged coastlines, long rivers, short rivers, deltas, mangrove swamps, rich soils, and virgin forests are but some of the line-up of physical features that indigenous people and immigrants have adapted to.
It is likely that the Tan Cheng Lock residence on the right and the narrower residence on the left, which share an architectural style, were built at the same time in Malacca, Malaysia. Perhaps they were originally owned by a single family who later sold the units to different families.
Much of what we know of Chinese migration in Southeast Asia is fragmentary, with ebbs and flows guided both by imperial policy and individual decisions made by resourceful seaborne traders. During the Song dynasty in the twelfth century, the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and throughout the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644, Chinese trading communities of various sizes and compositions emerged at scattered port locations throughout the islands and peninsulas in the Nanyang. Over time, what once were scattered and isolated became tied into commercial networks. The arrival of Europeans, first as traders and then as colonialists, as well as Japanese, brought about competition and rivalries even as Chinese traders flourished and arriving Chinese settlers increased in number. Enterprising Chinese immigrants, as later chapters of this book will reveal, commercially exploited the profuse variety of flora and fauna as well as minerals and metals, resources providing work and a modest livelihood for countless contract laborers and bountiful wealth to a smaller number of migrants from China. The plantation cultivation of rubber, coffee, sugar, and spices, in addition to the collection of birds’ nests from caves in the wild and exotic flora and fauna from the biodiversity-rich ecosystems, played key roles in these transformations. The sections that follow will examine the dispersal of Chinese migrants, emphasizing the disparate character of history and geography of various settlement sites, as a prelude to the featured residences in Part Two.
Malacca
In the area clutched between the Malacca River and the Strait of Malacca, a casual visitor sees old buildings lining the narrow streets that appear on the exterior to be quintessentially Chinese. Indeed, Chinese characters arrayed above the lintels and windows and on the door and shutter panels, as well as the bulbous red lanterns hanging beneath the eaves, all seem to proclaim that this neighborhood has deep roots as a place of settlement by Chinese immigrants and their descendants, perhaps even to the earliest days of Malacca. Looking more closely at the exteriors, however, one also observes Dutch-period architectural features, Victorian glazed tiles, eclectic façades of uncertain age and origin, Chinese protective amulets, rooflines that span East and West, among other elements that confound the observer’s judgment. Glimpses through the doorways of hotels, restaurants, shops, even residences, seem to affirm that the occupants are principally Chinese in origin.
Those fortunate to be invited into homes along the lanes see that many are quite similar to the shophouses and terrace homes found in towns in southern China in that they have prominent skywells—small courtyards—that open up the interiors to light and air. In many of these residences, moreover, there is an abundance of antique Chinese and Western furniture, a proliferation of symbolic Chinese ornamentation, a mélange of curios, art works, and bric-a-brac from China as well as Europe, and an occasional architectural detail that appears odd in a Chinese home. It is a fair to ask: what can old residences like these tell us of the lives, aspirations, and tastes of the Chinese, and others, who have occupied them?
These buildings and these streets in Malacca indeed are more than they seem at first glance. On closer examination, one is able to see a multifaceted and layered history of successive occupancy by different groups, with the Chinese being but one prominent part, over five centuries from the 1500s to the present. Historical geographers call the succeeding stages of human inhabitation of a location over intervals of historic time “sequent occupance.” The coming and going of a group, which entails using and abandoning areas and buildings, is a dynamic process of creating and modifying to meet different cultural norms. Indeed, any of the residences that appear to be Chinese are, in fact, transformed artifacts representing both added and deleted elements when compared to what was inherited from others. To help understand similarities and differences, Malacca needs to be looked at in terms of different temporal and spatial scales.
At one scale, there is a sequence represented by the successive arrival in Malacca of different nationalities, some more powerful than others, but each leaving significant imprints on the landscape. Once a small and remote fishing village inhabited by indigenous Malays, Malacca began to develop as a port in the fourteenth century under the leadership of Parameswara, a Srivijayan prince from Sumatra. The Portuguese arrived in 1511, surrendering control to the Dutch in 1641 for a century and a half of development, before passing the region to the British in 1795, with a Dutch interlude again from 1818 to 1824, at the end of which the Dutch returned Malacca to the British in exchange for territory in Sumatra. Each of these occupancies was overlain by the arrival, presence, and activity of Muslim Arabs, Hindus from the Gujarat and Tamil regions of today’s India, and, of course, Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong provinces. All of these interacted with indigenous Malays. Moreover, the rise of Penang in 1786 and Singapore from 1819 onwards was accompanied by Malacca’s slipping in importance as a trading center with its relegation to a relative backwater. One result of this new status was that the layout of the town and its solid buildings, which passed from one group to another, were for the most part not destroyed but survived to be occupied and were then transformed by different residents.
As will be seen with later examples, the entryway of many Chinese homes differs little from temples in terms of form and ornamentation, such as Malacca’s Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, whose origins go back to the 1640s and is Malaysia’s oldest Chinese temple.
The expansive three-bay structure of the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple is made possible because of an elaborate wooden structural framework. This is a view towards the main and side altars.
Built early in the twentieth century on the northern outskirts of Malacca, in Tranquerah, this narrow terrace residence houses a multigenerational family. The façade is richly decorated with stucco patterns and calligraphic ornamentation. Just inside the entryway is a round table with a formal grouping of furniture with mother-of-pearl inlay. Beyond this area is a sky-well framed with fluted columns, which are painted to match the façade.