A Peranakan family between Singapore and Shanghai: business-making, networks and identity, 1870s‒1910s
Teddy Y. H. Sim and Sandy J. C. Liu (2015) re-examine the 1888–1889 travelogue of Li Qinghui, a Hokkien Peranakan born in Melaka, to argue that his journey across the Asian Mediterranean was not a leisurely sightseeing tour but a deliberate exercise in cultivating and consolidating business networks for his family’s shipping, trading, and financial enterprises spanning Singapore, Shanghai, and the broader treaty-port system.
Summary
The article re-reads Li Qinghui’s travelogue, published in the Singapore Chinese-language newspaper Libao (Lat Pau) in the 1880s, through an economic and business lens rather than the literary or biographical framing applied in two earlier studies. The authors contend that the itinerary—visits to international banks, mechanized factories, government offices, charitable institutions, and huiguan (trade associations) in Shanghai, as well as stopovers in Hong Kong, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagasaki, and Saigon—constituted a structured orientation programme designed to foster commercial relationships and solicit investment for the Li family’s operations. They situate this micro-level activity within François Gipouloux’s macro-concept of the “Asian Mediterranean,” showing how a single Peranakan family’s movements exemplified the broader dynamics of treaty-port commerce, where colonial powers controlled nodal points while diaspora Chinese merchants lubricated the flows of capital and commodities between them (pp. 33–36, 38–46).
The second major thread concerns identity. The authors explore how the Li family navigated multiple, overlapping affiliations: as a traditional Chinese family bound by surname and succession; as a Creole, mixed-linguistic group comfortable in English, Hokkien, Han Chinese, and Malay; as business actors operating as compradors and financiers; as political affiliates simultaneously aligned with the Qing government (through rank-purchasing and consular appointments) and the British colonial administration; as patrons of the Hokkien association network; and as cosmopolitans in a qualified sense. The authors argue that these identities were not discrete categories but fluid layers that could be activated or suppressed depending on context, and that the Peranakan’s cosmopolitanism was better understood as a “tribal cosmopolitanism” rooted in language, ethnicity, and association networks rather than the universalist detachment of Enlightenment thought (pp. 46–51).
The primary source—the travelogue itself—provides the empirical backbone, with its detailed observations of factories, banks, and social institutions. The authors supplement this with references to Song Ong Siang’s One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore, Claudine Salmon’s earlier study of the same travelogue, and a range of secondary literature on Shanghai’s commercial institutions, the Qing self-strengthening movement, and the Hokkien association network to reconstruct the business and political context in which Li’s contacts were made (pp. 33–35, 38–45).
Key Findings
- Li Qinghui departed on 7 May 1888; the trip covered Hong Kong, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagasaki, and Saigon, with the travelogue published in Libao in 1889 (pp. 38–39).
- The Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was formed in Bombay in 1853, opened a Shanghai office in 1854, and was granted a royal charter in 1857; Li was received by its director with evident deference, suggesting he was a customer of “considerable weight” (p. 39).
- Li Qingyuan was conferred a second rank in the Qing official hierarchy and a Justice of the Peace title by British colonial authorities, illustrating the family’s dual political affiliations (p. 47).
- Li Qinghui sat as a representative of the Office for Chinese Affairs, formed in February 1890, and was involved in charitable and education-sponsoring activities in both Singapore and China (p. 47).
- The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, of which the Li family were members, received official blessings from British authorities during its formation in April 1906 (p. 48).
- The Fujian association in Shanghai functioned as a contact and entrepôt centre of the Fujian business network linking northeastern and southeastern Asia, and the Li family’s access to this network was essential to their regional trading (p. 42).
Conclusion
Sim and Liu’s definitive takeaway is that Li Qinghui’s trip was a business network-cultivation exercise whose apparent leisurely surface concealed a strategic logic of relationship-building across the Asian Mediterranean. The Peranakan identity, they argue, was not a fixed ethnic or national category but a multi-layered, contextually activated set of affiliations that produced a form of “tribal cosmopolitanism”—comfortable in urban settings and cherishing international contacts, yet always anchored in language, ethnicity, and association networks rather than in any universalist political consciousness.
Context
- The primary source is Li Qinghui’s travelogue as published in Libao (Lat Pau) in the 1880s, supplemented by references to the Lee Kong Chian Library collection and the 2007 Baba Bibliography compiled by the National Library Board of Singapore.
- Historiographically, the article contributes to the intersection of Chinese diaspora network studies and Peranakan identity scholarship by applying Gipouloux’s Asian Mediterranean framework to a specific family case and by explicitly linking the network and identity literatures, which the authors note are “not always linked together or examined closely” (p. 33).