The Binding Tie: Chinese Intergenerational Relations in Modern Singapore

1. From Temasek to the Republic of Singapore: A Historical Overview

1 From Temasek to the Republic of Singapore A Historical Overview It is difficult to make sense of present-day Singapore without some knowledge of its history. Singapore was under British colonial rule between 1819 and 1963. Historical and archeological records of precolonial Singapore are scarce, but they do suggest that settlements in the area date back at least six hundred years prior to 1819. The earliest reliable references to the small island come from the fourteenth-century Javanese work Nagarakertagama, where it is referred to as Temasek. The name Singapore derives from the Malay word singapura, which means “lion city.” The word singapura appears in a Malay Annals story about a Sumatran prince who saw a creature on the island he mistook for a lion (although lions are not found in Southeast Asia), and changed the place name to Singapura. Today, it is this legendary lion—often rendered in the shape of a merlion, a figure with the head of a lion and the body of a fish—that has become a national symbol of Singapore.1 Precolonial Temasek, or Singapura, over time fell under the rule and influence of various polities, such as the Sumatra-based empire of Srivijaya, the Javanese empire of Majahapit, and the Kingdom of Malacca. When the Portuguese seized Malacca in 1511, the Sultanate relocated to Johore on the southern end of the Malaysian mainland and later to Riau. Singapore remained an outpost of the Sultanate until 1819, when Sir Stamford Raffles and his party landed on the swampy mangrove banks of the Singapore River. It is impossible to get any clear figures for the precolonial population of Singapore, but by the time of British colonization the existing settlement was estimated to consist of only a few hundred Chinese and Malays (Lim 1991, 3–6). While Britain gained a firm foothold in India in the eighteenth century, it was the Dutch who dominated insular Southeast Asia. The British breakthrough in the Orient came with their acquisition of Penang in 1786, followed by Stamford Raffles’s establishing an outpost 20 : chapter 1 at Singapore in 1819. Subsequently, in 1824, an Anglo-Dutch treaty was signed whereby the Dutch transferred control of Malacca to the British in exchange for Bencoolen in Sumatra. The formation of the Straits Settlements —Singapore, Penang, and Malacca—in 1826 cemented the British hold over Malaya (Wong 1991, 21). The Straits Settlements continued to be administrated under India until 1867, when they became a separate Crown Colony. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century British rule gradually expanded to peninsular Malaya (Turnbull 1989, 76). The annexation of peninsular Malaya, together with the opening of the Suez Map 1.1 Singapore and Southeast Asia from temasek to the republic of singapore : 21 Canal in 1869 and the development of steamships, established Singapore as a key port in the East-West trade. Its geographical location made it an excellent entrepôt, a hub of the sea routes between the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China. The scarcity of natural resources and local export goods (except for sago products, gambier, and pepper) was compensated by Singapore’s entrepôt trade, and from the 1870s onward its economic development was fueled by an increasing demand for tin, rubber, and petroleum exports from the Malayan region. the migration of chinese to singapore The high demand for labor in the entrepôt attracted people from the wider region. Large numbers arrived from the surrounding Malay world and India, but they were soon outnumbered by the massive inflow of Chinese migrants. Chinese had been trading and even settling in Nanyang (Southeast Asia) several centuries before the Europeans, albeit in small numbers. Malacca, in particular, maintained close contacts with China from the fifteenth century onward (Purcell 1967, 17–18; Pan 1994, 21–22).2 The first Chinese to move to Singapore after 1819 were primarily merchants and/or cultivators of gambier or pepper from Malacca and elsewhere in the region. This group of local-born Chinese—known as “Straits Chinese” or “Baba Chinese”—differed both economically and culturally from the labor migrants arriving in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By and large, the Straits Chinese emphatically distinguished themselves from the sinkeh (“newcomer” in Hokkien). Unlike the labor migrants, who mainly derived from the poor peasantry, the Straits Chinese had long been settled in Southeast Asia and had adopted many features of local Malay culture, including the...