One Hundred Years' History Of The Chinese In Singapore: The Annotated Edition. Ong Siang Song

       ANNOTATOR’S PREFACE

      Song Ong Siang’s One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore began as a single chapter intended for inclusion in the two-volume work One Hundred Years of Singapore, edited by Walter Makepeace, Gilbert E Brooke and Roland St John Braddell. Makepeace had initially approached Dr Lim Boon Keng to complete this task but Lim was unable to complete it, given his multifarious civic and professional obligations. Instead, Lim recommended his old friend, Song Ong Siang to complete what he had started. In Song’s own words, he quickly ‘realised at once the futility of attempting to write a historical review or a general survey of the subject which would be of any real value to readers’ and proceeded to ‘compile a chronological history of the Chinese in Singapore covering the one hundred years’ period, on the lines of the late Mr Buckley’s Anecdotal History of Singapore’.

      Song’s choice of Buckley’s stupendous compendium as a model determined the shape of his own work. Buckley’s work had been ‘in great part a revision with many additions of a series of articles which appeared under the same title in the weekly Singapore Free Press newspaper’ between 1884 and 1887. Buckley had ‘the columns of the history cut out of the newspaper, sewn into a book, and interleaved’ before sending it off to WH Read, who sent it to James Guthrie. Both Read and Guthrie added their comments and later, other residents provided more information to Buckley for his use in the compilation. Over the course of some twenty years, Buckley’s Anecdotal History took shape. It is, as Buckley himself noted, ‘made up largely of scraps’. The same could be said of Song’s volume. He made copious and liberal use of newspapers and even called himself a ‘Compiler’ rather than an author.

      One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore was first published in 1923 by John Murray of London and then reprinted twice; first by the University of Malaya Press in 1967 and then by the Oxford University Press in Singapore in 1984. It has thus been out of print for more than 30 years, but its popularity remains undiminished. This is evinced by the astronomical sums for which the first edition of this work sells for on auction sites like eBay and antiquarian booksellers listed on abebooks.com. The copyright itself expired and went into public domain on 29 September 2011, exactly 70 years after Song Ong Siang’s death, and digitised versions of the first edition are easily available for downloading in PDF format.

      So why undertake to reissue this work, and in an annotated edition