Article

Pepper

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Pepper

Scope and Historical Definition

Black pepper (Piper nigrum) was one of the principal export crops of southern Malaya throughout the nineteenth century, cultivated in close association with gambier on plantations in Singapore and Johore. The two crops were not interplanted but allocated to separate parts of the same holding, and their management was interlocked: the almost continuous collecting of gambier foliage could be integrated with the highly seasonal cycle of pepper production, ensuring year-round employment for the labour force required to tend the vines [1, pp. 79–80]. As a general rule, pepper occupied one acre for every ten acres of gambier [1, p. 80]. The vines took approximately three years to reach maturity, after which they produced two crops annually, in December–January and in July–August [1, p. 80, n. 11]. Pepper vines passed their peak of production in their fifteenth or twentieth years [1, p. 81].

The economic significance of pepper in this region was substantial. By 1848, Singapore’s plantations produced 30,923 pikuls of pepper, and together with gambier the two crops occupied over three-quarters of the total estimated cultivated area on the island and accounted for nearly three-fifths of the total value of agricultural produce [1, pp. 78–79]. In Johore, pepper exports to Singapore rose from 56,203 pikuls in 1880 to 117,024 pikuls in 1889 [1, pp. 96–97]. The price of black pepper in Singapore rose from approximately $12 per pikul in 1880 to over $20 in 1889 [1, p. 96].

The Kangchu System and Riverine Colonisation

The cultivation of pepper in Johore was organised under the Kangchu System, a framework of riverine settlement and landholding that Jackson described as “an entirely unique and perhaps efficacious system of land-tenure and co-operative cultivation” [1, pp. 82–83]. Chinese agricultural settlers moved into Johore along the main rivers and their tributaries, establishing small villages or “river depots” known as Kangkars (literally “foot of the river” in the Teochew dialect), from which cultivation extended only from the river bank to the nearest watershed [1, p. 83]. Each Kangkar was governed by a semi-feudal Chinese headman, the Kangchu (“lord of the river”), who held the land under a surat sungei (“river document”) granted by the Malay ruler [1, p. 83]. The earliest recorded surat sungei in the Johore Archives is dated 9 October 1844, for Sungai Sekudai; the second, dated 22 October 1844, granted Sungai Tebrau to Kapitan Tan Kee Soon [2, pp. 144–145].

Trocki traced the origins of this system back to approximately 1740, when the Bugis Yang Dipertuan Muda Daeng Celak established gambier plantations worked by Chinese labourers at Riau [2, p. 132]. After the Dutch destroyed the Riau entrepôt in 1784, the Chinese planters governed themselves for over three decades, achieving a degree of economic and military autonomy that prefigured the Kangchu System [2, p. 132]. The shift of the gambier marketplace to Singapore after 1819, the removal of the British import tariff on gambier in 1835, and the exhaustion of cultivable land in Singapore’s interior together drove the migration of planters across the strait into Johore [2, p. 132]. By 1862, approximately 37 surat sungai had been issued covering 32 Kangkar settlements: 18 rivers in the Johore Straits, 19 on the Johore River, and 2 on the west coast [2, pp. 150–151].

Within each Kangkar, the actual cultivated patches were called bangsals (a term derived from Malay for “shed or lean-to shelter”), each containing a gambier cauldron and furnaces for boiling purposes [1, pp. 88–89]. Bangsals probably averaged between 10 and 50 acres, producing annually some 100–200 pikuls of gambier and 50–150 pikuls of pepper each [1, p. 89]. Each bangsal employed about nine or ten men [1, p. 89]. The Kangchu did not by custom own all the land within his Kangkar; anyone who planted with his permission was treated as having a freehold, though the land itself was of limited value given the shifting cultivation cycle [1, p. 89].

Economic Dynamics and the Credit System

The financing of pepper plantations was controlled by merchants in Singapore town. Under the “Credit Ticket System,” the passages of intending Chinese immigrants were arranged and paid by agencies who passed the cost to the employer in Malaya; the new arrival, or sinkheh, was obliged to pay off the expenses by labour, usually working for a year at reduced wages [1, p. 80]. After completing this obligation, many immigrants opened small plantations of their own, financed by Chinese shopkeepers and merchants in Singapore who claimed a proportion of future crops until the debt was discharged [1, p. 80]. By 1839, it was estimated that two out of every three plantations in Singapore were subject to such encumbrances, with advances running at high rates of interest and often made in clothes and provisions at above-market rates [1, pp. 80–81].

In 1864, Chinese merchants in Singapore claimed to have advanced over one million dollars to develop the Johore plantations, although most of this money had been borrowed originally from European merchants [1, p. 84]. At that date there were 100 gambier shops and over 200 provision stores in Singapore that relied almost entirely on the Johore trade [1, p. 84]. The Kangchu held monopolies of opium, gambling, pawn-brokering, and the sale of liquor and pork within his Kangkar, and also controlled the transportation of all exports [1, p. 84]. Tan Tek Soon noted that the traders interested in a river and the Kangchu would furnish the necessary capital between them to build a gambier tongkang of sufficient capacity to carry off the produce in fortnightly trips, and that owing to vested interests, no competition was ever permitted [1, p. 84].

The Gambier and Pepper Society (or Kong-kek), established in Singapore in 1867, served for the mutual protection of financiers and planters and for the protection of the trade between Johore and Singapore [1, p. 91, n. 73]. The society regulated prices at which produce was sold, typically about 30 per cent below actual market value [1, p. 91].

Gambier prices at Singapore fluctuated dramatically: $1.30–1.75 per pikul in January 1831, rising to $4.00–5.00 in January 1834, then falling to $0.90–1.00 by January 1849 before recovering to $2.85 by 1861 [2, p. 141]. This volatility, combined with the exhaustion of cultivable land in Singapore, was a direct catalyst for the expansion into Johore. In 1846, a letter in the Singapore Free Press from a secret society headman styled “Keeper of the Quinquangular Seal” announced that the Ngee Heng (Tan Tae Hoe) had commanded approximately 4,000 pepper and gambier planters to leave Singapore for Johore in retaliation against government plantation assessments [2, pp. 143–144].

Decline and Abolition

The “shifting” method of cultivation that underpinned pepper production proved environmentally unsustainable. Gambier was an extremely exhaustive crop, and young pepper vines would not thrive on old worn-out pepper land [1, p. 80]. A gambier plantation became exhausted in 15 years from its commencement, and the fuel supply for boiling was expected to last only about 25 years [1, pp. 80–81]. By 1836, complaints were already being made about the jungle being cut down for firewood and plantations being deserted to run to lalang grass [1, p. 81]. In Singapore, only three-quarters of existing plantations were cultivated in 1850, and it was felt that cultivation was “retrograding as the older plantations have all become exhausted” [1, p. 81].

In Singapore, the total acreage under gambier and pepper fell from approximately 11,000 acres in 1890 to 600 acres in 1912 and 75 acres in 1913, as Chinese planters shifted to pineapple growing and rubber cultivation [1, pp. 94–95]. In Johore, exports of gambier fell by over 40 per cent between 1890 and 1910, and between 1913 and 1917 the value of exports of both gambier and pepper declined by nearly 60 per cent [1, p. 97]. The Kangchu System was finally abolished by the Kangchu Rights (Abolition) Enactment of 1917, under which all remaining Kangchus were compensated financially for the loss of their former rights [1, p. 85]. By this time rubber had come to claim the main interest of Chinese cultivators in Johore [1, p. 85].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on pepper cultivation is dominated by two major studies that together provide a comprehensive account of the crop’s economic history in southern Malaya. Jackson’s 1965 article in the JMBRAS was the first systematic treatment of Chinese gambier and pepper planting in Singapore and Johore, drawing on Straits Settlements Blue Books, Annual Reports, the Singapore Free Press, the Singapore and Straits Directory (1887), maps of Johore from 1887 and 1904, and Chinese-language sources including Tan Tek Soon’s 1902 article and Siah U Chin’s 1848 contribution to the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia [1, pp. 77–105]. Jackson’s central contribution was the clarification of the Kangchu System’s internal structure and spatial logic, distinguishing between kangkar, bangsal, and the loosely used term plantation [1, pp. 88–91].

Trocki’s 1976 article extended the chronological framework significantly, tracing the system’s origins to the 1740s at Riau and demonstrating that it was not a Johore-specific phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century but the product of a long evolution [2, pp. 132–155]. Trocki was the first to use systematically the Buku Daftar Surat-surat Keterangan Berkebun (1844–1903) in the Johore Archives, which had only become available to scholars in the 1960s [2, p. 130, n. 6]. His work corrected the earlier assumption, following Coope (1936), that the Kangchu System was of limited significance, by demonstrating its centrality to the Singapore economy throughout the nineteenth century [2, p. 132].

Together, these two studies establish that pepper cultivation in the region was not merely an agricultural activity but the foundation of a complex socio-economic and political institution that shaped the development of Johore as a state and the economic geography of the Singapore–Johore corridor for over a century.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. J.C. Jackson (1965). Chinese agricultural pioneering in Singapore and Johore, 1800–1917 JMBRAS 38(1): 77–105. Read on JSTOR
  2. C.A. Trocki (1976). The origin of the kangchu system, 1740–1860 JMBRAS 49(2): 132–155.