One Hundred Years' History Of The Chinese In Singapore: The Annotated Edition. Ong Siang Song
Abdullah has given an account of the flight of twenty-seven female slaves from the Sultan’s harem, and their appearance at the police office to lay their complaints. They were young and pretty, but had all been cruelly treated. ‘One opened the clothes on her back to show the marks of the rattan cane, others had marks of having been hung up, others of burnings with pitch, others complained of being punished by fasting and nakedness.’55 Mr Crawfurd allowed them to go where they liked: ‘so some went with the policemen, some to the Klings, others to the Chinese, and a few of them to the houses of the Europeans, just wherever they could get food and clothing’.56
Mr Crawfurd wrote on the 10th January 1824 to the Supreme Government on this and other subjects, and remarked that whilst among the followers of the Sultan and Temenggong the proportion of women to men was two to one, among the free settlers this proportion was even more than inversed, and in the case of the [25] Chinese the disproportion was so great that there were at least eight men to every woman. Looking, however, at the census tables given above, the proportion of Chinese males to Chinese females at that time must have been at least twelve to one. Even at the present day, judging from the 1911 census, there are, among the immigrant Chinese population, something like four men to every woman, although among the Straitsborn Chinese to every 100 males there are 113 females.
Towards the close of the year 1824 for the first time some riots occurred among the Chinese, in which several persons were killed and wounded. There is no reason to believe that these riots had any connection with the operations of secret societies, since such societies did not come before public notice until six years later. It is quite conceivable that among the very earliest immigrants into Singapore there were some members of the Triad Society (or ‘Thian-ti-hui’) as political refugees, and, according to Mr JD Vaughan,57 ‘it is said that some Europeans, on the first settlement of Singapore, who lived far away from the town beyond the protection of the police, joined the society for protection.’58 It was, however, after the lapse of more than twenty years from this date that the next Chinese riot broke out, and so we pass on.
On the 20th April 1826, out of fifty-one leases – the earliest of the existing titles to landed property in Singapore issued in exchange for location tickets to those residents who had cleared and built on lands comprised on such tickets – twenty-two were registered in favour of Chinese. Tan Che Sang secured five and Si Hoo Keh59 four titles to land in Commercial Square and Malacca and Telok Ayer Streets, while Choa Chong Long, and Kiong Kong Tuan got a title each to land in Commercial Square and Yeo Kim Swi a title to land in Malacca Street. Two months later ten more leases [26] were issued to Chinese for lands in Boat Quay and Circular Road. In 1827 not less than 199 leases were given to Chinese inhabitants comprising lands situate at Market Street, Philip Street, Telok Ayer Street, Church Street, China Street, Pekin Street, Kling Street, Circular Road, Amoy Street, Cross Street, High Street, Japan Street and South Bridge Road. In the following year eighty-four leases went to more Chinese residents who had built houses in Beach Road, North Bridge Road, Chinchew Street, Nankin Street, China Street, Hokien Street and Macao Street. Most of the lessees’ names are unfamiliar or untraceable, but besides the names of Choa Chong Long, Tan Che Sang and Kiong Kong Tuan, who were already registered landowners, there began to appear the names of men like Tan Tock Seng, Yeo Hood Ing (or Hooding), Yeo Ching Hai and Tan Oo Long, who became prominent citizens in the later history of Singapore.
In 1827 Mr Prince,60 the Resident Councillor, sent round a circular to the natives pointing out the advantages of education, and calling upon them to co-operate in opening schools. Whether at this time or before it the Chinese residents had established any educational institutions or sent their children to Malacca or Penang for their education, we are unable to say: but two years later the Rev GH Thomsen, a German missionary, reported that there was a Cantonese school at Kam pong Glam of twelve boys, and another at Pekin Street of eight boys, while there was a Hokien school at Pekin Street of twenty-two boys.
In the same year the attention of Government was drawn to the great increase of Chinese vagrants in the town, which state of affairs was remedied by their being given an allowance of rice for one year and being sent into the interior to clear jungle.
In June 1828 the first Criminal Sessions were held in Singapore by Mr Fullerton, the Governor of Penang, Malacca and Singapore (incorporated in 1826 as one Settlement), and Mr Murchison,61 the Resident Coun-[27]cillor of Singapore Station. There were twenty-seven indictments presented to the Grand Jury, of which six were found for murder. Two of the prisoners charged with this capital offence were convicted – one Kling and one Chinese – and they were hanged on the 26th June 1828.
1[Song: British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca (1839)]. See TJ Newbold, Political and Statistical Account of the British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca (London: John Murray, 1839), Vol 1, at 279. Thomas John Newbold (1807–1850) joined the British East India Company in 1828 as ensign in the 23rd regiment of the Madras Light Brigade and rose to the rank of Captain in 1842. He spent three years in the Straits of Malacca where he interacted regularly with the native chiefs of the Malay Peninsula. He accumulated materials for several papers which he published in the Asiatic societies of Madras and Bengal and which he subsequently compiled and used in the writing of his two-volume Political and Statistical Account of the British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca. See William Albert Samuel Hewins, ‘Newbold, Thomas John’ in Sidney Lee (ed), Dictionary of National Biography, Vol 40 (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1894), at 314–315.
2The Temenggong Sree Maharajah was an official of the former Johor royal court with sovereignty over Singapore and a number of northern islands in the northern part of the Riau Archipelago. Loosely speaking, he was a kind of minister in charge of justice, defence, police and markets. See Carl Trocki, Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore 1784–1885, 2 ed (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007), at 21 & 24. At this time, the Temenggong was Abdul Rahman who was in office from 1806 till his death in 1825. Abdul Rahman had moved to Singapore island from either Riau or Bulang (Pulau Bulan near Batam) in 1818.
3[Song: Medical Topography of Singapore, vol iii, Logan’s Journal (1848)]. See Robert Little, ‘An Essay on Coral Reefs as the Cause of Blakan Mati Fever and of the Fevers in Various Parts of the East, Part I: On the Medical Topography of Singapore, Particularly on its Marshes and Malaria’ (1848) 3(8) Journal of the Indian Archipelago & Eastern Asia 449, at 472.
4Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1797–1854), better known as Munshi Abdullah was a literary pioneer of Arab-Indian descent. Born in Malacca, he was the fifth and sole surviving child of Sheikh Abdul Kadir. Abdullah was proficient in English, Arabic, Tamil, Hindi and Malay and was an acclaimed translator and teacher. Indeed, it was his many students who called him munshi or munsyi, meaning ‘teacher’. His many writings made him famous and won him the epithet, ‘Father of Modern Malay Literature’. In 1810, when Raffles arrived in Malacca, he hired Abdullah as an interpreter and in the course of his travels with Raffles, became a keen observer and recorder of everyday life and events. His book, the Hikayat Abdullah (1843) is an autobiographical account of his life and observations. See generally, AH Hill, The Hikayat Abdullah (1955) 29(3) Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Song used the 1874 translation by John Turnbull Thomson – JT Thomson, Hakayit Abdulla: Translations from the Hakayit Abdulla (bin Abdulkadar), Munshi, with comments (London: HS King, 1874).
5Major William Farquhar (1774–1839) was the first Resident and Commandant of Singapore. A career soldier with the British East India Company, Farquhar first came to the Straits when he was Chief Engineer in an expeditionary force that captured Malacca from the Dutch in 1795. From 1803 to 1818 he was Resident of Malacca, and from 1813 to 1818, also concurrently its Commandant. Farquhar was on the verge of returning to Britain when he was summoned to join Raffles in his expedition to find a new trading post ‘in the Eastward’ and was with Raffles when the expedition landed in Singapore in January 1819. Raffles appointed Farquhar the first Resident and Commandant of Singapore in 1819. However, the two men were to have many fundamental differences over the next few years and in 1823, Raffles relieved