Territorial patterns among Chinese secret societies in Singapore and peninsular Malaysia: some tentative findings
Mak Lau-fong and Aline Wong (1978) examine how Chinese secret societies in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia demarcated and contested operational territories across two distinct historical periods: the colonial Straits Settlements era and the post-independence modern era. Their central argument is that territorial patterns shifted fundamentally from occupation-based ethnic monopolization—sustained by the credit-ticket labour recruitment system—to protection-fee collection oriented purely toward maximizing economic returns from subscribers regardless of ethnicity or trade.
Summary
The article addresses a persistent methodological problem in the study of secret societies: the near-impossibility of direct observation and the resulting reliance on indirect evidence. Mak and Wong construct their historical case from three converging lines of circumstantial evidence—early street names, temple locations, and occupational-ethnic specializations—arguing that these together reveal a coherent pattern of territorial demarcation in the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements. Streets named after specific societies (Ghee Hock, Hai San, Ghee Hin) and the spatial clustering of dialect-specific temples along particular street sections are read as material traces of territorial claims. The authors ground this interpretation in the well-documented tripartite relationship among secret societies, dialect associations, and temples, where society headmen simultaneously served as community notables and temple patrons.
The second half of the article draws on intensive interviews with active and retired society headmen to document how territoriality operates in the contemporary period. Here the logic of territorial claim has changed: societies no longer protect specific occupations but instead collect protection money from small businessmen, hawkers, and operators of cinemas, brothels, and markets. The authors describe two distinct methods of claiming territory—a direct confrontational approach used by newly formed societies, and an indirect probing approach used by established societies seeking concessions from rivals. The case of Ipoh, with its grid-like street plan, is used to illustrate how five major blocks were divided among three principal society groups (Hsiao Pa Hung, Hua Chi, and Ling Pa) during the 1950s and 1960s.
The authors are candid about the tentative nature of their historical findings, acknowledging that the street-name and temple-location evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive. They argue, however, that the continuity in the underlying logic of territoriality—competition for scarce economic resources expressed through spatial demarcation—persists across both periods even as the specific modus operandi has transformed.
Key Findings
- Registration lists from 1860 and 1889 confirm that the Ghee Hin society maintained a headquarters on Rochore Road, the Hai San on Upper Cross Street, and the Ghee Hock on Carpenter Street in Singapore, corroborating the inference drawn from street names (p. 37, n. 1).
- In Ipoh during the 1950s–1960s, the town was divided into five major protected blocks controlled by three principal groups: Hsiao Pa Hung occupied the area bounded by Brewster Road, upper Laxamana Road, Green Lane, and Cowan Street, plus Market Street; Hua Chi controlled the area bounded by Hugh Low Street, Anderson Road, Brewster Road, and Cowan Street; Ling Pa protected two further areas (pp. 40–41).
- Buntong New Village near Ipoh passed through successive control: Ch’iao Hsing (1953–1957), Hung Ho (1957), and Hsiao Pa Hung (1958), illustrating the fluidity of territorial claims in outlying areas (p. 41).
- Under the pre-twentieth-century credit-ticket system, newly arrived sinkhehs (immigrant labourers) typically required at least three years of unpaid or nominal-wage labour to repay their transport debt to the employer, a mechanism that reinforced occupational monopolization by speech group (p. 40, n. 4).
- In contemporary Singapore, specific territories include: Cathay Cinema controlled by ‘329’ of the ‘36’ Society; Jalan Besar, Keong Siak Street, and Geylang Road lorongs (red-light districts) controlled by ‘24’ Society sublodges; and the Hokkien boatmen along the sea coast enrolled in the ‘20’ Society (p. 40).
- In Penang, the Hua Chi Society controlled Munteri Street and MacAlister Lane, while its sublodge Pa Hsien controlled Rope Walk, Church Street, Bishop Street, King Street, Queen Street, and Ayer Itam (p. 40).
Conclusion
Mak and Wong conclude that modernization—specifically the complexification of the economic division of labour and the assertion of direct state control over communal affairs—rendered the old model of occupation-based ethnic monopolization untenable. The secret societies adapted by reorienting their territorial claims toward locations with high volumes of economic activity (cinemas, markets, red-light districts, industrial areas), dividing these among themselves according to relative strength and mutual agreement. The authors position their combined historical-sociological approach as a modest but necessary beginning, emphasizing the under-utilized value of material traces such as street names, foundation stones, and temple inscriptions for reconstructing the history of organizations that left no formal archives.
Context
- The study draws on Mak’s earlier 1973 monograph (The Forgotten and the Rejected Community) and on primary sources including the Straits Settlements Government Gazette (1890), Cavenagh’s Despatch No. 108 (1860), and the Straits Settlements Proceedings of Legislative Council (1881), supplemented by intensive interviews with society members conducted in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia.
- Historiographically, the article extends the framework of Blythe (1969) and Wynne (1941) by introducing an ecological-territorial model borrowed from ethology (Ardrey, 1967; Van Den Berghe, 1974) and by explicitly linking the transformation of secret society functions to broader processes of colonial-to-postcolonial state formation.