Chinese settlement in Malacca
Victor Purcell (C.M.G., Ph.D. Cantab, M.C.S.) published this article in 1947 in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 20, Part 1). It addresses the long-standing but imprecise claim that “the Chinese have lived in Malaya for many centuries” by attempting to fix, as precisely as the available evidence allows, the date at which Chinese first made Malacca their permanent home rather than merely a trading stop. The overarching thesis is that the Chinese community in Malacca was small, demographically male, and largely reconstituted under Dutch rule after falling into decay during the Portuguese period.
Summary
Purcell opens by establishing the structural reasons why Chinese emigration to the “Nanyang” was slow: the Middle Kingdom mentality, the religious prohibition against abandoning ancestral graves, and the Ch’ing dynasty’s penal code which criminalised emigration (pp. 115–116). He then works through the documentary record chronologically, beginning with the Ming History’s account of the 1403 envoy mission and Cheng Ho’s 1408 arrival, through Ma Huan’s Ying-yai Sheng Lan (1416), which describes Malacca’s population as Mohammedan and makes no mention of a Chinese settlement, only of visiting merchant junks (pp. 116–117). The Hai Yu (1537) provides the first suggestive evidence of resident Chinese—pork-eaters distinct from the native Mohammedans—but also refers to “Merchants of Ships who live in an hotel,” implying temporary sojourn rather than permanent settlement (p. 117).
The Portuguese sources prove equally inconclusive. D’Albuquerque’s son mentions a “Kapitan China” who may have been a permanent agent, and the alleged marriage of the second Malay king to a daughter of this figure is noted but unconfirmed (pp. 118–119). Osorio’s account of Sequeira’s 1509 visit records four Chinese junks and the detailed intelligence questions his superiors demanded about the Chinese—where they lived, whether they had agents, their numbers—but the answers themselves are lost (pp. 119–120). At the 1511 conquest, five junks were in port, their captains having been detained by the Malay king (p. 120). Purcell concludes that the Portuguese and Dutch periods saw a small, declining Chinese presence, with the community effectively renewed by importations from Batavia after 1641 (pp. 120–121).
Physical evidence at Bukit China—coral tombstones of uncertain date, a dozen graves from the late Ming/early Ch’ing period, and a tablet of dubious authenticity bearing a non-existent reign name—corroborates the documentary picture of a modest community whose family records do not extend before the first half of the seventeenth century (pp. 121–123). The demographic pattern that emerges is the article’s most significant finding: the immigrants were exclusively male, who took Javanese and Malay women as wives or concubines, producing a Sino-Malay hybrid population that retained Chinese culture but spoke a creolised Malay (p. 125).
Key Findings
- 1408: Cheng Ho arrived at Malacca; Ma Huan’s later account (1416) describes the population as Mohammedan with no Chinese settlement, only visiting junks that raised a toll barrier (p. 116).
- 1511: At the Portuguese conquest, five Chinese junks were in port, detained by the Malay king; their captains offered the Portuguese intelligence and the promise of 100 junks annually under Portuguese rule (p. 120).
- 1641: After the Dutch conquest, Schouten counted a total population of 2,160 (Dutch, Portuguese, slaves, Chinese); 300–400 Chinese remained, and 33 more were imported from Batavia (p. 123).
- 1678: Governor Bort’s census recorded 852 Chinese outside the fortress and 40 inside, comprising 127 men, 140 women, 159 children, 93 male slaves, 137 female slaves, and 60 children of slaves (p. 124).
- 1750–1760: The Chinese population rose only to 2,161 by 1750, then fell to 1,390 by 1760, and increased little before the British occupation of 1795—by stark contrast with Penang (nil in 1786 to ~3,000 in seven and a half years) and Singapore (nil in 1819 to several thousand within a year) (p. 124).
- 1941: Malacca’s Chinese population stood at 92,125 out of Malaya’s total 2,380,000 Chinese (total population 5,561,000), the product of the nineteenth-century opening of immigration (p. 124).
Conclusion
Purcell’s definitive takeaway is that the early Chinese in Malacca were almost exclusively male who intermarried with local women, producing the Babas—a population with roughly equal Malay and Chinese ancestry who retained Chinese dress, religion, and custom but possessed a fundamentally “Malayan outlook” (p. 125). Had the nineteenth-century flood of immigration not occurred, he argues, there would be no “Sino-Malay problem” in modern Malaya, because the Babas had adapted perfectly to their surroundings while preserving their cultural identity.
Context
- Primary sources drawn upon include the Ming History (Book 325), Ma Huan’s Ying-yai Sheng Lan, the Hai Yu (1537), Portuguese accounts (D’Albuquerque, Osorio, Eredias, Varthema), Dutch records (Schouten, Bort, Valentijn), and physical monuments at Bukit China (coral tombstones, the Kapitan Li tablet, the Kapitan Tay grave).
- The article represents one of the first systematic multi-lingual attempts to date the origins of Chinese settlement in a specific Malayan port, and its demographic argument—that the community was small, male, and hybrid—anticipated later scholarship on the Baba-Nya population.