4 Chinese Pioneering in

Eighteenth-Century
Southeast Asia
earl A. Trocki

This chapter attempts to re-examine the history of the Chinese migra-

tion to Southeast Asia by focusing on a significant change in the pat-
terns of Chinese settlement. In essence, it appears that by the
mid-eighteenth century, a significantly new phenomenon had appeared:
this was the regular settlement of sizeable communities of Chinese
labourers in parts of the Malay world. This development had import-
ant implications for Southeast Asia as a region and for China as weIl.
Studies of the Chinese migration to Southeast Asia have been in
progress for some time, but it is only recently that scholars have been
able to focus on this historical trend. The original studies of the Chi-
nese in Southeast Asia were undertaken by colonial scholars such as
Victor PurceIl, and in the case of the Malay world, M.L. Wynne and
W.L. Blythe.1 While these studies were important contributions to the
field, all , to some extent reflected colonial categories and time frames.
A new era in the study of the Chinese in Southeast Asia began with
the work of G. William Skinner2 in the late 1950s. Skinner was one of
the first to base his account principally on Chinese and Thai sources.
In succeeding years there have been an increasing number of scholarly
works on the Chinese in the region which have made extensive use of
Chinese as weIl as indigenous Southeast Asian sources. Thus the works
of Sarasin Viraphol and Jennifer Cushman 3 in the 1970s and 1980s,
building on Skinner, have contributed to an entirely new understand-
ing of the Chinese in traditional Siam. Scholars working mainly on
China, such as Ng Chin-keong 4 and Dian Murray,5 have contributed to
our picture of the maritime world of the South China coast which sup-
plied many of the men and ships that travelled to Southeast Asia. Others,
working on the history of island Southeast Asia from indigenous sources,
as weIl as colonial archives, have also added to our understanding of
the Chinese role in the region. The writings of Wang Gungwu, Wong

83
A. Reid (ed.), The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies
© Anthony Reid 1997
84 earl A. Trocki

Lin Ken and Maurice Freedman inspired a new generation of South-

east AsianlChinese specialists. These included: Wong Tai Peng, Anthony
Reid, Heather Sutherland, Leonard Blusse, Mary Somers-Heidhues and
Barbara Andaya, to name a few.
Their work has shown us that the his tory of the Chinese in the re-
gion is much more diverse and much more intimately tied to the pol-
itical, economic and cultural lives of the indigenous peoples than was
previously believed. They offer views of Chinese activities in South-
east Asia that do not necessarily revolve around European activities.
As a result, it is now possible to draw some more informed conclu-
sions about the periodization of the Chinese migration to the region as
weIl as about the nature of Chinese settlements and their relationships
with both indigenous peoples and Europeans.
In Opium and Empire,6 I attempted to offer a scheme for the
periodization of Chinese his tory in Southeast Asia. There has not been,
to my knowledge, a systematic periodization of the history of the Chi-
nese immigration to Southeast Asia other than the tendency to force it
into the same categories, both spatial and temporal, as have already
been established for European colonial history. Victor Purcell thus di-
vided the history of the Chinese migration into three phases prior to
1942 (e.g. 1300-1800; 1800-1920; 1920-1942).7 While Purcell has not
labelled these, we may label them as folIows: pre-colonial trade and
involvement, colonial migration and late colonial migration. This
periodization appears informed largely by colonial categories rather
than any emerging from the history of the Chinese themselves. This is
not surprising since, on the whole, the ebb and flow of this history has
been pretty weIl ignored. Even Sinologists, Chinese or foreign, have
had little concern for the activities of the wandering denizens of the
South Coast, most of whom were considered criminals and rebels by
the Chinese state.
Looking simply at settlement patterns and economic activity, the
eighteenth century seems to have been an important watershed in Chi-
nese migration. Anthony Reid has suggested that the eighteenth cen-
tury in Southeast Asia might weIl be considered the Chinese century,
and there is considerable evidence to support his view. One aspect that
Reid points to was the upsurge in the long-established 'junk trade'
between the Chinese coast and Southeast Asia. This coincided with,
but was not totally the result of, the Qing pacification of South China.
The defeat of the Ming loyalist forces of Zheng Chenggong on Tai-
wan in 1683 and the subsequent relaxation of trade bans opened South
China at the height of Qing prosperity. South China became the con-