The Chiangchew Hokkiens, the true pioneers in the Nanyang
Russell Jones, a linguist and former officer of the Malayan government, published this article in JMBRAS Vol. 82 (2009), arguing that speakers of the Chiangchew (Zhangzhou) subdialect of Hokkien constituted the dominant wave of early Chinese emigration to the Nanyang from at least the fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, and that their distinct identity was subsequently absorbed into the undifferentiated category “Hokkien” and largely erased from the historiography.
Summary
The article grew out of Jones’s early-1990s project compiling Chinese loan-words in Malay and Indonesian. While working with the standard Amoy (Xiamen) reference forms, he encountered systematic phonological discrepancies in roughly 15 per cent of the Hokkien-derived loan-words that could not be explained by any known sound law. The resolution came when he introduced the Chiangchew subdialect as a discrete category: the “unexplained” forms fell neatly into place as Chiangchew pronunciations. This linguistic discovery then opened a historical question—why had a group clearly central to the early settlement of the region become invisible in the scholarly and administrative record?
Jones marshals evidence from multiple source types to reconstruct the Chiangchews’ pioneering role. Tombstone inscriptions from Banten (West Java) show that from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth, the recorded places of origin of the deceased were overwhelmingly in the Chiangchew prefecture; after the 1820s the pattern shifts toward Chuanchew. In Penang, the “Five Great Surnames” (Khoo, Cheah, Yeoh, Lim, Tan) trace their ancestral villages to specific districts within Chiangchew—Haicheng, Longxi, Nanjing, and Tongan—and Jones demonstrates that “Penang Hokkien” is, to all phonetic intents and purposes, the Chiangchew subdialect itself. Earlier Chinese sources (Ma Huan, 1416), colonial-era temple records in Batavia, and the fact that Medhurst’s 1830s Hokkien dictionary was compiled in the Chiangchew vernacular in Java all corroborate the pattern. The article also documents how the Chiangchews were “lost” from view: after Amoy was opened as a treaty port in 1842, Western lexicographers standardised on the Amoy form, official censuses subsumed all subdialects under “Hokkien,” and by the mid-twentieth century the group was scarcely mentioned even by area specialists.
A secondary thread concerns the mechanism of this erasure. Jones shows that even perceptive scholars—Purcell, Blythe, Teo Kok Seong—recorded Chiangchew phonological features in the speech of early immigrant communities without naming the subdialect, because the analytical framework simply did not include it. The “rediscovery” was thus not a matter of new primary sources coming to light but of a new linguistic lens being applied to data that had always been available.
Key Findings
- Approximately 15 per cent of Chinese loan-words in Malay derive from the Chiangchew subdialect rather than from Amoy or other Banlam subdialects (p. 40).
- In Banten, West Java, seven early tombstones (1693–1721) all record Chiangchew places of origin; of eleven dated tombs spanning 1754–1853, all from 1754 to 1823 are from Chiangchew (including Tongan) except one (1804, Chuanchew), and the final two (1823, 1853) are both from Chuanchew (p. 52).
- Franke’s study of Ambon tombstones shows that up to the late nineteenth century the recorded native places were predominantly in Zhangzhou; subsequently the composition shifted to Yongchun (Engchhun), a change Franke could not explain (p. 51).
- The great-great grandfather of Tan Cheng Lock originated from Lam-cheng (Nanjing, Chiangchew Prefecture) and migrated to Melaka in the 1770s (p. 49).
- Medhurst’s Hokkien dictionary, compiled in Batavia in the 1830s, is based on the Chiangchew vernacular; Schlegel’s four-volume Dutch-Chinese dictionary (1886–90) is likewise in the “Tsiang-tsiu” (Chiangchew) subdialect (p. 52).
- The Malay loan-word lu (for “you”) is geographically confined to the north of Amoy Island, part of Tongan, and neighbouring Chiangchew, and its presence in Malay points to early Chiangchew influence (p. 51).
Conclusion
Jones concludes that the Chiangchews constitute an early chronological stratum in the pattern of Chinese settlement across Southeast Asia, dominant from at least the early seventeenth century until they were eclipsed by later waves from other parts of Fujian and from Kwangtung by the end of the nineteenth century. Their subsequent academic invisibility was not the result of a single cause but of the convergence of several factors: the post-1842 standardisation of Amoy as the reference dialect by Western lexicographers, the administrative practice of recording all Hokkien subdialects under a single census category, and the absence of any incentive for general historians to distinguish between them. The reintegration of the Chiangchews into the historical narrative, Jones suggests, was accomplished not by new archival discovery but by the application of subdialect-level linguistic analysis to data that had long been available.
Context
- Primary evidence draws on Chinese tombstone inscriptions (Banten, Penang, Ambon, Kelantan, Melaka), clan genealogical records of the Penang “Five Great Surnames,” colonial administrative circulars on surname spelling (1923, 1949), nineteenth-century Hokkien dictionaries (Douglas 1899, Medhurst 1830s, Schlegel 1886–90), and early Chinese travel accounts (Ma Huan, 1416).
- Historiographically, the article reinserts a subdialect group into the narrative of Nanyang Chinese settlement that had been rendered invisible by the administrative and lexicographic convention of treating “Hokkien” as a monolithic category, and it demonstrates that this convention systematically obscured the earliest phase of Chinese migration to the region.