Great Peranakans: Fifty Remarkable Lives

Peranakan Chinese arrived in Singapore as soon as the British established the port in 1819. More waves of immigration soon followed. The wealthiest and most powerful Chinese merchants were Hokkien-speaking Peranakans from Malacca. From the beginning, philanthropy established certain families as community leaders, a fact recognized by the British.

 

Tensions between the Hokkien and Teochew communities led to riots in 1854, and the British government depended on Peranakan leaders to settle these disputes. These activities led the British to appoint Chinese to the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements to help govern the colony.

 

Peranakans initially worked for the large British trading companies as intermediaries, since they could speak Chinese dialects, Malay, and also English. They later set up their own companies to supply Chinese workers, grow gambier and other commodities, and run shipping companies. Several wealthy Peranakans purchased the government monopolies of opium, which proved to be extremely profitable.

 

 

Tan Kim Seng was a merchant and philanthropist active in both Malacca and Singapore. He was educated at a private Chinese school in Malacca, and also learned English and Dutch. Malacca was ruled by the Netherlands until 1824, and Dutch was the language of government. This fluency in the two colonial languages of the region greatly helped his business, Kim Seng and Company, which he founded in Singapore in the 1820s.

 

In February 1852, a grand reception inaugurated the Kim Seng go-down on Battery Road. Remarkably, the occasion was described in Household Words, a London weekly edited by Charles Dickens. Impressed with the business acumen of Chinese traders, the anonymous correspondent was even more struck by the way the Chinese, Indian, European, Muslim, Jewish, Parsi, and Eurasian traders happi­ly mixed at Tan Kim Seng’s ball, facilitated by wine, hookahs, and opium.

 

In 1854, Tan Kim Seng started the Chui Eng Si E 翠英书院 (Academy of Flourishing Talent), known in English as the Chinese Free School, one of Singapore’s first Chinese-language schools. 

The eldest son of Tan Tock Seng, Tan Kim Ching inherited much of his father’s social standing, although it was rumoured that he was also head of a network of secret societies and was accused of keeping slaves. As president of the Hokkien Huay Kuan from 1860, he had great authority in the Hokkien community – for example, by signing marriage certificates. He expanded his father’s rice business through new connections with Vietnam and Thailand. He also founded the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company with the purchase of the steamships Siam and Singapore in 1863. He became a justice of the peace and joined the municipal council. When the Duke of Edinburgh visited Singapore in 1869, Tan Kim Ching presented an address in Chinese and English expressing the loyalty of the Chinese community. He also purchased several imperial Chinese titles.

 

He had especially close connections with the Thai kings, developed through his trading connections. He was the first Thai consul in Singapore, and apparently introduced the governess Anna Leonowens to the Bangkok court in 1862. In her memoirs, which became the source for The King and I, she writes: “The Siamese Consul at Singapore, Hon. W. Tan Kim-Ching, had written strongly in my favor to the Court of Siam …”. Tan Kim Ching named his residence on North Bridge Road “Siam House”, and hosted King Chulalongkorn in 1890.

Opium overlord and conspicuous donor, Cheang Hong Lim has left a problematic legacy. He greatly expanded his father’s opium monopoly and protected his mar­ket with the help of secret societies, one of which he may have headed. He also smuggled opium to avoid taxes. The opium trade was legally sanctioned, indeed encouraged by the colonial government, but Cheang Hong Lim’s enhancement of his position was illegal. He was too influential to arrest, however, and as a British subject could not be deported. Philip Kuhn describes him as a “ruthless business­man” who “bought and ingratiated his way into both the colonial and the Chinese status systems and acquired honorary titles in both.”

 

Cheang Hong Lim’s public generosity deflected attention from these less savoury activities. In 1923, Song Ong Siang could recall him as “one of the most public-spir­ited Chinese citizens of his time” and claimed that he spent $100,000 aiding the poor. He built the Cheang Wan Seng Free School (1875) and the Cheang Hong Lim Market (1882). He was also responsible for one of Singapore’s first public gardens, established in 1876 and still known as Hong Lim Park. Cheang Hong Lim received official colonial recognition as a justice of the peace and member of the Legislative Council. 

Official positions - A handful of powerful Peranakans held all the important government positions open to the Chinese, namely membership on the Legislative Council, the Municipal Commission, and the Chinese Advisory Board. These positions were simply rotated among a small number of men. Each of them also led the Straits Chinese British Association, an organization devoted to reforming and modernizing the Chinese community. In contrast, Chinese remained excluded from the civil service until 1934, when Asians were permitted to take a few low-level government jobs. Education - The offer of the Queen’s Scholarship to study at a British university encouraged more students to remain in school to compete for the honour. Peranakans led the foundation of the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School in 1899 and the establishment of a medical school for Malaya in 1905.

 

Honours - In 1877, the Chinese government established a consulate in Singapore, which sold imperial titles. Worried by China’s interest in the Straits Chinese, the British also began to grant titles to Peranakans. In 1936, Song Ong Siang became the first Straits Chinese knight, followed by Tan Cheng Lock in 1952.

Tan Jiak Kim was educated privately and, like many Peranakans of his time, was fluent in English, Malay, and Hokkien. He joined Kim Seng and Company, the business founded by his grandfather, Tan Kim Seng, and run by his father, Tan Beng Swee. He succeeded them in leadership positions in the Chinese community, serving on the Straits Legislative Council, the Municipal Commission, and the Chinese Advisory Board. In 1900, he was one of the founders of the Straits Chinese British Association.

 

Strongly pro-British, Tan Jiak Kim helped organize the Straits Chinese volun­teer division and gave generously to the British military, included $19,200 for a fighter aircraft that bore his name. He attended the coronation of George V in 1911 as a representative of the Straits Settlements (illus.). Unfortunately his pregnant wife, Ang Geok Yan, died at the Hotel Metropole in London during the visit; she took $45,450 worth of jewellery to London. In 1912, Tan was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), and he proudly wore this decoration and the 1911 coronation medal, even on informal occasions.

 

The remarks of Singapore’s colonial secretary on Tan’s retirement in 1915 sum up the British regard for upper-class Peranakans: “The position and authority of Mr. Tan Jiak Kim made him for many years the spokesman and the representative of the largest section of the population of this Colony … and I can say that I never met anyone who was a more loyal subject of the King.” C. W. Darbishire noted that leaders like Tan “are broadminded enough to grasp the Western point of view and to weld it easily and smoothly with the Eastern point of view …” 

Lee Cheng Yan established a general trading company, Lee Cheng Yan and Company, in 1858, soon after arriving in Singapore. The firm later moved into finance, property, and shipping. Lee worked closely with European companies and was reported to have been the first Straits Chinese to visit Britain on business. In 1890, together with Tan Jiak Kim and Tan Keong Saik, he founded the Straits Steamship Company, the first joint Singapore-European shipping enterprise.

 

Like many prominent Peranakans, Lee was a justice of the peace and a member of the Chinese Advisory Board. He supported Chinese-language education by start­ing the Hong Joo Chinese Free School and donating to the Gan Eng Seng and Tao Nan schools. He also publicly displayed loyalty to the British monarchy by raising money for Victoria Memorial Hall and attending Edward VII’s memorial service in London in 1911.

 

Lee Cheng Yan owned four European-style mansions in Singapore, three endowed with grand English names. The furnishings in Magenta Cottage, his main residence on Killiney Road, were eclectic. He is the father of Lee Choon Guan.

The great-grandson of Tan Tock Seng, Tan Boo Liat succeeded his ancestors as a leader of the Hokkien Huay Kuan and the Thian Hock Keng temple. He was also a trustee of the Anglo-Chinese School until 1896 when attempts to convert students to Christianity led to the resignation of the Chinese trustees (including Tan Jiak Kim) and the withdrawal of many students. In 1899, he helped found the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School.  Tan Boo Liat had strong international connections. Like his grandfather Tan Kim Ching, he had commercial interests in Thailand and was honoured with a royal title. Like many Peranakans, Tan Boo Liat was loyal to the British Crown. He attended the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, and was a founding member of the Straits Chinese British Association. In addition, he supported Sun Yat-sen and was president of the Kuomintang in Singapore.

 

Golden Bell Villa along Pender Road was built in 1909 as Tan Boo Liat’s res­idence. The name Golden Bell is the translation of his grandfather’s name, Kim Ching. Sun Yat-sen once stayed at the house, which inspired the play Emily of Emerald Hill by Stella Kon, Tan Boo Liat’s great-granddaughter.

Chan Kim Boon translated Chinese literary works into Malay, making ancient Chinese fables accessible to audiences who were unable to read Chinese. Born in Penang to a merchant family, Chan studied at the Fuzhou Naval School before mov­ing to Singapore in 1872 to work in the firm Aitken and Rodyk as a bookkeeper and cashier. Chan was fluent in English, Malay, and Chinese.

 

The first translations into Malay of Chinese classical literature were published in the 1880s in Batavia (Jakarta), and by 1889, similar translations were issued in Singapore, often using the same general titles as the Dutch East Indies versions. The most successful of these is Chan Kim Boon’s translation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a tale set in the second and third centuries. Titled Sam Kok 三国, the Malay version appeared in a series of thirty illustrated volumes, issued be­tween 1892 and 1896. Chan carefully added historical explanations, sometimes in English, and included the Chinese characters for names and titles. Moreover, the issues were like magazines, as they contained news reports, amusing stories, and correspondence in English. His translations of Water Margin 水浒传 (1899–1902) and Journey to the West 西游记 (1911–13) also appeared in serial format.

 

Readership of these books stretched across the Malay Archipelago and included romanized-Malay readers, not just Peranakans familiar with Baba Malay. The pop­ular success of these series encouraged other translators, including Pang Teck Joon, Chek Swee Liong, and Tan Beng Teck.

Oei Tiong Ham joined Kian Gwan, the company started by his father, Oei Tjie Sien. He took over the firm and greatly expanded it into the Oei Tiong Ham Concern. Although it was a conglomerate of many trading activities, much of its profit in the 1890s was from opium trading. He owned the opium monopolies in Semarang, Surakarta, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya, until the Dutch colonial government took over the monopolies in 1904. Oei later acquired a number of sugar cane plantations and mills, and by 1900 his company was the leading sugar producer in the Dutch East Indies. The Oei Tiong Ham Concern grew to become the largest Chinese-owned company in Asia. Its holdings included several newspapers in Java. In 1961, the company was nationalized by the Indonesian government.

 

In 1896, the Dutch colonial government appointed Oei majoor (major) of the Chinese community in Semarang. He owned the Semarang Steamship Navigation Company and in 1912 purchased the Heap Eng Moh Steamship Company of Singapore, and merged the two firms. The company director, Lee Hoon Leong, was the father of Dr Lee Choo Neo and the grandfather of Lee Kuan Yew. In 1920, Oei moved permanently from Semarang to Singapore. He donated $150,000 to Raffles College and in 1910 the land for the Tao Nan School, which opened its new building in 1912 (it is now the Peranakan Museum).

 

At Oei Tiong Ham’s death, there was much speculation about the full extent of his wealth, with some rumours suggesting that he was worth 200 million guil­ders ($140 million), although a more plausible estimate of his estate is about $50 million. As his will was litigated in Singapore’s courts, there were stories that he had moved to Singapore to escape certain Dutch taxes and inheritance laws. Oei’s second daughter, Hui-lan, married the Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo and carved her own multicultural life as a nyonya, Chinese diplomat’s wife, and New York socialite.

Tan Teck Neo was the daughter of businessman Tan Keong Saik, who helped the Methodist missionary Sophia Blackmore set up a girls’ school, in part because he wanted his daughters properly educated. She married Lee Choon Guan in 1900; she was his second wife.

 

Mrs Lee Choon Guan supported a number of women’s causes, including schol­arships for Chinese midwives and an endowment for the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School. In 1914, together with other prominent nyonyas such as Mrs Tay Lian Teck and Lee Choo Neo, she founded the Chinese Ladies’ Association, now called the Chinese Women’s Association. Mrs Lee Choon Guan served as its first president. Intended to improve the lives of Chinese women, the association at first gave classes on domestic skills like sewing and cooking, but it later took on charitable caus­es such as a women’s rescue home and a British warplane. Mrs Lee opened her Magenta Cottage for the association’s classes and events.

 

During the First World War, Mrs Lee went to southern India to help with welfare work for British troops, and was active in the Red Cross. In 1918, she was the first Chinese woman to be made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). 

Lee Choo Neo was Singapore’s first female physician. She broke away from the tra­dition of the cloistered nyonya, and used her privileged position to take advantage of social reforms.

 

Lee was the daughter of Lee Hoon Leong, a Peranakan from Semarang who managed Oei Tiong Ham’s shipping company in Singapore. Educated at the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School and Raffles Girls’ School, she was the first Straits Chinese woman to obtain a Senior Cambridge Certificate in 1911. She studied at the King Edward VII Medical School in Singapore, and became the city’s first Chinese female doctor in 1920. These were remarkable achievements considering the gener­al Chinese cultural expectation of women’s roles. Lee was concerned with women’s welfare and in 1925 served on an official committee examining laws governing Chinese marriage in the Straits Settlements.

 

In 1913, while still in medical school, Lee Choo Neo wrote an article for The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, titled “The Chinese girl in Singapore”. She described the life of a Straits-born Chinese girl as “freer and less irksome than that of her sister in China” but dull: “Its monotony is intolerable.” Girls were only expected to learn sewing and cooking, since these were requirements for marriage. Formal education for girls was generally deemed “a waste of money”, while work was regarded as “in­decent and disgraceful” because it exposed women to the public gaze. Dr Lee ended the article with optimism, hoping that increasing acceptance of women’s education would be of great advantage – not least because educated wives would give husbands less reason to escape the home. Isolation of women, she wrote, “inevitably results in their becoming stupid, ignorant, possessed of no commonsense.” The eloquent article gave voice to a way of life that had been rarely described.

 

Lee Choo Neo took an interest in Malay drama. In 1912, she co-directed (with the artist Low Kway Soo) and acted in a three-act comedy, Mustapha, which she also wrote, presented at a Red Cross benefit in Victoria Theatre. Her brother, Lee Chin Koon, was the father of Lee Kuan Yew.

The self-taught artist Low Kway Song portrayed prominent members of society in Singapore and Malaya. A member of the Singapore Amateur Drawing Society from 1911, he organized and participated in exhibitions in Singapore and Malacca. In 1912, he opened a studio on Stamford Road, and moved to Orchard Road in 1920. Called the Empire Studio, the firm was a popular source for painted portrait photographs (see essay by Daphne Ang). In 1918, he became the cartoonist for Eastern Illustrated Review. His brother Low Kway Soo was also a noted artist who painted Tan Jiak Kim and Loke Yew, but he later went to medical school to pursue a different career.

 

Low Kway Song made portraits of Sun Yat-sen, Malaysia’s first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, business tycoon Aw Boon Haw, and Peranakans such as Tan Beng Swee and Tan Cheng Lock. He was reportedly the first Singapore artist to receive a four-figure sum for a commission, the portrait of Oei Tiong Ham in 1927.

 

Low Kway Song met his wife Chan Yew Neo, a Singapore Peranakan, in Bangkok while he was working there, and they married in 1910. In 1939, he helped to revive a Malay-language Methodist service in Malacca. His paintings of Christian images survive in churches in Malacca. Low Kway Song also excelled in the performing arts. He was a founding member of the Merrilads Musical and Dramatic Association, a popular Peranakan performing group which started in 1923. Fluent in Baba Malay and English, he was called Merri Papa. All the female roles were performed by men, and during Chinese New Year, the company would perform in Peranakan wedding costumes. Low’s play in Malay, The Fortune Teller, was first staged in 1926 at the Happy Valley, and then repeated over twenty times at other venues such as the Star Opera and New World.

The first Chinese from Malaya to receive a British knighthood, Song Ong Siang was highly erudite and deeply committed to reforming the Chinese community in the Straits. That he was also among the most pro-British of all Peranakans embodies the complexities of Singapore’s transition to the modern world.

 

The second Chinese Queen’s Scholar, Song Ong Siang studied law at Cambridge University. On his return to Singapore, he established the law firm Aitken and Ong Siang with his fellow-Queen’s scholar James Aitken. In 1894 Song started the first romanized Malay newspaper in Singapore, the Bintang Timor, although the project lasted only a year. In partnership with Lim Boon Keng, Song spearheaded several progressive initiatives, especially the Straits Chinese Magazine, the Straits Chinese British Association, and the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School.

 

Song served on the Straits Legislative Council and represented the colony at Edward VII’s coronation in 1902. He was a proud member of the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force, in which he became captain. When he married Helen Yeo in 1907, it was the first military wedding of a Chinese officer in Singapore, and he was given a military funeral when he died in 1941.

 

His father, Song Hoot Kiam, had converted to Christianity, a faith Song fol­lowed. Song was an elder of the Straits Chinese Church (later renamed Prinsep Street Presbyterian Church) for forty-one years, and the president of the Chinese Christian Association.

The life of Lim Boon Keng encompassed many of the diversities and complications of the early twentieth century in Singapore. He studied medicine in Britain, en­tered Singapore politics, and invested in banking. Most important, he advocated for educational and political reforms in both the Straits Settlements and China. His approach was one of embracing compromise: political change within the British colonial structure and a neo-Confucianism that stressed a respectful moderniz­ing of traditions. Lim might be considered an emblem of the Peranakans around 1900. Fluent in Malay, English, but less so in Mandarin, Lim moved comfortably in British, Chinese, and Peranakan societies, and he personally embraced Christianity and Confucianism.

 

The first Chinese to be awarded the Queen’s Scholarship, Lim Boon Keng stud­ied medicine at University of Edinburgh, from which he graduated with first-class honours in 1892. Like a number of prominent Peranakans of his time like Tan Jiak Kim and his friend Song Ong Siang, he joined the Straits Legislative Council, be­came a justice of the peace, and was given a British honour, in his case an OBE.

 

Lim Boon Keng took on a number of important causes in the 1890s. Together with Song Ong Siang and Tan Boo Liat, he founded the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School in 1899.  Just before the opening of the school, Lim wrote that the school “met with a great deal of opposition and criticism, the bitterness of which only those who have worked so hard for its success, can fully speak.” Lim’s wife gave Chinese lessons to the entering class of thirty.

 

Lim Boon Keng and Song Ong Siang started the Straits Chinese Magazine in 1897, and helped to found the Straits Chinese British Association. Lim advocated that the Chinese embrace the modern world while retaining their traditional cul­ture. He condemned opium use, gambling, and prostitution. Peranakans were not spared. In an article of 1909, “Race deterioration in the tropics”, Lim thought that the mixed blood of the Peranakans had led to “extravagant habits, vice, distaste for work, eccentricity, excesses, and recklessness”. The campaign against opium was an important personal issue for Lim Boon Keng, since much of his family’s fortune came from opium, his father and grandfather having run Cheang Hong Lim’s opium monopoly. The opium trade was encouraged by British colonial policy in Asia, and they derived vast profits from the trade – over $5 million in 1914 in Singapore – nor was there social censure on opium profits in the nineteenth century. In 1898, well after the death of his father, Lim began his campaign against opium by accusing the British of profiting from the vices of the Chinese.

 

Lim Boon Keng was also concerned with reform and education in China. He sup­ported Sun Yat-sen. Beginning in 1921, he served as president of Amoy University (Xiamen University), which was founded by his friend Tan Kah Kee. Some Chinese students were displeased with the prominent role of an overseas Chinese, and Lim was ridiculed for giving lectures on Confucianism in English. During this period, Lim published a translation of the ancient poet Qu Yuan’s 离骚, The Li Sao: An Elegy on Encountering Sorrows, with a preface by Rabindranath Tagore.

 

The growing independence movements in Southeast Asia led to more compli­cations in identity, many of which are addressed in Lim’s sophisticated satirical novel of 1927, Tragedies of Eastern Life: An Introduction to the Problems of Social Psychology, which is set in a fictional multicultural Malayan town. 

Political activism - In the aftermath of World War II, many of Singapore’s emergent leaders were drawn from the English-educated Peranakan community. While some chose to continue to work closely with the British for gradual change, others were inspired by independence movements. Peranakan women were pioneers in the women’s rights movement, and assisted in the passing of the Women’s Charter. Banks and reconstruction - Peranakans helped restore Singapore’s economy, which had been devastated by the war. For example, local banks offered liberal loans to allow old businesses to resume and new ones to set up. In the 1960s, commercial banks also helped finance economic development for Singapore’s new industries. Arts and popular culture - The Straits Chinese reform movement of the early 20th century associated

Peranakans with leisure and lavish excess. Since colonial times, the community was actively involved in the cultural sector, particularly in music, theatre, and entertainment. After the war, amateur musical and dramatic societies remained popular among the Peranakans.

Tan Chin Tuan was the son of Tan Cheng Siong, general manager of the Oversea- Chinese Bank. Tan went to the Anglo-Chinese School; his plans to study law in England were cut short by the death of his father. At seventeen, he became a junior clerk at the Chinese Commercial Bank, and worked his way to assistant manager, as well as manager of Eastern Realty, the bank’s property arm. In 1932, the Chinese Commercial Bank merged with Ho Hong Bank and Oversea-Chinese Bank to form Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), and Tan became assistant man­ager in charge of properties. During the Second World War he was promoted to managing director of OCBC at age thirty-four, with responsibility for protecting the bank’s assets outside of Japanese-occupied territory, and for registering the new head office in Bombay. He became chairman of the bank in 1966.

 

While in Bombay, Tan joined with Tan Cheng Lock and Tan Siew Sin to found the Overseas Chinese Association, which lobbied the Colonial Office for the in­dependence of Malaya and citizenship for immigrants.1 Tan worked closely with the colonial government for gradual self-government. He served as a Municipal Commissioner in 1939 and was appointed to the Advisory Council of the British Military Administration in 1945. He was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1946, and from 1948 to 1955 was the representative of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce. In 1951 he became the deputy president of the Legislative Council, the highest political rank held by an Asian under colonial rule. In 1951, he was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1969, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia decorated him with the order of Panglima Setia Mahkota.

 

Tan was responsible for OCBC’s far-sighted strategy of investing in blue-chip companies during periods of uncertainty. He subsequently became chairman of four of the largest companies in Singapore: Fraser and Neave, Great Eastern Life Assurance, Malayan Breweries, and Straits Trading. He was also chairman of Eastern Realty Company, Overseas Assurance Corporation, Wearne Brothers, Raffles Hotel, and Robinson and Company. He established the Tan Chin Tuan Foundation in 1976 to support charitable causes. 

Born in Malacca, Goh Keng Swee was the first cousin once removed of Tan Cheng Lock. In the late 1930s, he joined the colonial civil service in the War Tax Department. He later completed a PhD at London School of Economics. While in London, he started the Malayan Forum with a group of students from Singapore and the Straits, and forged close ties with Lee Kuan Yew and Toh Chin Chye.

 

Goh joined the People’s Action Party in 1956 and won the Kreta Ayer seat in the 1959 general election. When he conducted social surveys for the colonial civil service, Goh learned of the deplorable living conditions and poverty of many Singaporeans, particularly in densely populated areas such as Chinatown, which was largely made up of Cantonese-speaking labourers and domestic servants. He became minister of finance in 1959, an ideal platform from which to begin to rectify these conditions.

 

The only trained economist in the new government, Goh devised the State Development Plan (the only one in the history of Singapore), in which he laid out a long-term blueprint for Singapore’s economic development. Many of the in­stitutions he created remain important today, including the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, and the Economic Development Board, which was intended to attract foreign investment. He also began construction of the Jurong Industrial Estate in swamp land, a project called “Goh’s Folly” by critics.

Said to have left “his fingerprints on virtually every aspect of public policy for 25 years from mid-1959”, Goh served as minister for finance, defence, education, and as deputy prime minister. Lee Kuan Yew said: “of all my Cabinet colleagues, it was Goh Keng Swee who made the greatest difference to the outcome of Singapore”.

 

Although he held his parliamentary seat until he retired in 1984, Goh was not a dynamic campaigner. Lee Kuan Yew recalled, “Keng Swee was dreadful; with a first class mind, he prepared his speeches meticulously, but delivered them in a dull monotone, mumbling, reading from a script, and looking bored.”

 

Goh was a keen golfer who achieved a hole-in-one three times. Ismail Abdul Rahman, the Malayan foreign minister, encouraged Goh and Lee Kuan Yew to take up the game. Golf allowed politicians to discuss sensitive matters in an informal setting. For example, it was after a golf game that Malaysian deputy prime minister Abdul Razak first intimated to Goh that he was thinking of separating Singapore from Malaysia.

 

When relations between Malaysia and Singapore began to deteriorate in 1965, Goh secretly negotiated the separation with Abdul Razak and Singapore’s law min­ister, Eddie Barker. This process was kept secret from the British and members of the Singapore cabinet who had strong emotional ties to Malaysia, namely S. Rajaratnam and Toh Chin Chye.

Lim Kim San was the first chairman of Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB), the government department created in 1960 to rapidly build public housing.

 

Both of Lim’s parents were from Sumatra, and his mother’s family from Bengkalis (Riau province) included a number of Chinese kapitans. Lim Kim San was educat­ed at the Anglo-Chinese School and Raffles College, and graduated with a diploma in economics in 1939. During the Japanese Occupation, he was twice detained and tortured by the military police. He later helped run his family’s rubber, commod­ities, salt, and gasoline businesses, and also took over his father-in-law’s sago and pawnshop interests. He invented a machine to produce sago pearls efficiently, and made his first million by the age of thirty-four.

 

He joined Singapore’s civil service in 1959 as a member of the Public Service Commission and chaired the Housing and Development Board from 1960 to 1963. Both were voluntary positions. Looking back on this, Lim called this a case of “fools rushing in where angels fear to tread”, but he was also deeply struck by the extreme poverty he had witnessed. In the three years under his leadership, the HDB built more than 26,000 flats, more than its predecessor, the Singapore Improvement Trust, had built in thirty-two years. Low-cost housing units were required not only to resettle squatters, but also for the 15,000 made homeless by the catastrophic Bukit Ho Swee fire in 1961. Home ownership was introduced in 1964 to allow lower income families to buy flats.

 

In 1962, Lim was the first person awarded the Order of Temasek. The follow­ing year, he was elected to parliament, and headed in succession the ministries of national development, finance, defence, education, and environment, until his retirement in 1981. Lim was regarded as a shrewd and intuitive judge of character, and in the 1980s was the talent scout for the People’s Action Party, heading the final selection panel for candidates.

Lee Kuan Yew was the eldest son of Lee Chin Koon and Chua Jim Neo. His paternal grandfather, Lee Hoon Leong, was the attorney of Oei Tiong Ham and managed his affairs in Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew’s maternal grandfather, Chua Kim Teng, was a Peranakan Hokkien.

 

Lee attended Raffles Institution but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1946, he went to study law at the London School of Economics, but transferred to University of Cambridge the following year. In London he became involved in the Malayan Forum, and this growing political involvement landed him and Goh Keng Swee on the Special Branch’s watch list. While in Britain, Lee campaigned for his friend David Widdicombe, the Labour Party candidate for Totnes, Devon.

 

Lee said that his decision to become a lawyer arose from purely pragmatic considerations: his parents had encouraged him to adopt a profession “or I’d run the risk of a very precarious life”. Lee chose law because he did not like medicine, and wanted to be self-employed rather than work as an engineer in a company.

 

He and his wife Kwa Geok Choo joined the Singapore law firm of Laycock and Ong; he campaigned for John Laycock, his employer and a leader of the Singapore Progressive Party, in the 1951 Legislative Council election. He took on a number of high-profile labour union cases, and became legal advisor to unions, clan associations, and students, including a group of students from University of Malaya who had been arrested for sedition for their publication Fajar; and Chinese Middle School students who had protested against the National Service Ordinance. These were all potential political supporters, many of whom were from the Chinese-educated majority. He later founded the law firm Lee and Lee, with his wife and brother Kim Yew.

 

Lee joined the Peranakan-dominated Straits Chinese British Association in the hope of launching a political party from it, but the idea was resisted by the leaders of the association. Instead, in 1954, Lee led the formation of the People’s Action Party (PAP) and became its first secretary-general. One of three party can­didates to contest the Legislative Assembly election of 1955, he won the Tanjong Pagar constituency. In 1959, the PAP won a spectacular victory of 43 out of the 51 seats, and Lee became Singapore’s first prime minister, a position he held until November 1990.

 

Lee fought for merger with Malaya in 1961, an initiative which split his party, leading to the formation of the Barisan Sosialis in July 1961. When Malaysia was formed in September 1963, Lee became one of fifteen Singapore representatives in the new Malaysian parliament. However, relations between the two sides dete­riorated rapidly; community tensions and political acrimony were only quelled by Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965.

 

Lee Kuan Yew never publicly declared himself a Peranakan, since his chief con­cern for the nation was to foster a collective sense of unity and national identity that would surmount ethnic, racial, or communal divisions. Shortly after becoming prime minister, he specifically rejected being called Peranakan in a parliamentary ex­change with Mrs Seow Peck Leng. Nonetheless, his wife Kwa Geok Choo said: “Both Kuan Yew and I come from Peranakan families, speaking no Chinese, not even dialect.” Lee’s mother had published a Peranakan cookbook in 1974, and his sister Monica reported that he missed his mother’s excellent cooking.

Chua Seng Kim (Mrs Seow Peck Leng) was Singapore’s first female opposition member of parliament. She was the founding president of Singapore Women’s Association, a position she held for thirty-seven years (1954–91).

 

Educated at Singapore Chinese Girls’ School and Raffles Girls’ School, she taught at Telok Kurau English School and was principal of Cantonment School (1954–58). She was the first female secretary and vice-president of the Singapore Teachers’ Union, and led the battle for the entry of married women teachers into the government’s new Education Service Scheme. She founded the Siglap Girls’ Club to serve the needs of underprivileged girls, which later became the Singapore Women’s Association. Singapore’s first woman opposition politician, Mrs Seow represented Mountbatten for the Singapore People’s Alliance from 1959 to 1963. In September 1959, she told the Legislative Assembly that a new Malayan nation should depend on local-born, English-educated “Peranakans who, though comprising several races, for various reasons, some because of intermarriage, have decided to make Singapore their homeland.” Moreover, she stressed the distinctiveness of their cul­ture; Peranakans have “in the course of over 100 years developed a language, liter­ature, drama, songs and dances, traditions, customs, costumes, hair styles, cuisine, games and religion of their own”. This “synthesizing” culture should be a model for a multiracial state. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew responded that he would not like to be known as “peranakan” if the term meant foreigners locally born, but would prefer the concept “the people of Malaya”.

 

Mrs Seow proposed legislation to outlaw polygamous marriages. This led to the passing of the Women’s Charter in 1961. The abolishment of polygamy had the effect of making wives partners in marriage with full rights to social and economic protection. This liberated and empowered Singapore’s women. During her time as a member of parliament, she proposed the establishment of centres that would advise the poor, as well as the formation of more youth clubs. In 1965, she retired from politics to devote herself entirely to social work.

Maggie Lim née Tan was the first woman to win the prestigious Queen’s Scholarship. After qualifying as a doctor in London, she became a public health officer in Singapore and campaigned to raise awareness of birth control. In battling tradi­tional conceptions of women’s roles, she paved the way for a generation of Singapore women to fight for equal rights.

 

Lim was the daughter of businessman Tan Kwee Swee, and a seventh-generation descendant of Tan Tock Seng. As a result of earning six distinctions in the Senior Cambridge Examinations while studying at Raffles Girls’ School, she was admitted in 1929 to the all-male Raffles Institution to prepare for the Queen’s Scholarship, which had only just been opened to women in 1923. The first female recipient of the prestigious scholarship, Lim attended the London School of Medicine for Women and then practised at the Royal Free Hospital. In 1939 she became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

 

Upon returning to Singapore in 1940, Lim became a public health officer. During the Japanese Occupation, she moved to the Endau Settlement in Johor, where she helped run a hospital while maintaining supply lines to the Malayan People’s Anti- Japanese Army.

 

After the war, she resumed her public health work. Lim specialized in maternal and child health, and was particularly concerned with the issue of couples having more children than they could afford. In 1949 she joined the newly founded Family Planning Association of Singapore and was responsible for recruiting doctors, rec­ommending forms of contraception, and helping to manage clinics. Her advocacy of birth control faced significant religious hostility.

 

When the People’s Action Party won the election in 1959, she persuaded the government to embark on an ambitious educational programme on family plan­ning, which toured community centres in 1960. Within a few years, the number of visitors to the Family Planning Association’s clinics doubled. Lim was appointed head of the Ministry of Health’s maternity and child welfare department in 1963, and succeeded Benjamin Sheares as president of the Family Planning Association. When the ministry established a board to assume most of the association’s work in 1965, Lim retired as president. She then worked abroad, including at the University of Hawaii’s School of Public Health and East-West Center.

 

Lim married Lim Hong Bee, also a Queen’s Scholar. In Britain, Hong became a left-wing political activist and the unofficial representative of Malayan Communist Party. He was banned from University of Cambridge “for devoting too much time to radical anti-Japanese agitation and too little to traditional English law”. He co-founded the Malayan Democratic Union in 1945. In 1947 he started the Malayan Monitor, a magazine supporting communism, and in 1949 attended the World Festival of Youth and Students in Budapest as the Malayan representa­tive; he ran into Goh Keng Swee and Lee Kuan Yew on the way there. Although Maggie Lim herself was apolitical, in 1951 their house was raided and she was ar­rested by colonial officials in order to pressure her exiled husband. The couple had two daughters; their marriage was later dissolved.

 

Maggie Lim’s brother, John Tan Thoon Lip, received the Queen’s Scholarship a year before she did. He read law at St John’s College in Cambridge. John was one of the first two Asians to join the Straits Settlements Civil Service, where he rose within the legal service to become registrar of the Supreme Court in 1952.

Born into a prominent Peranakan family, Kwa Geok Choo was one of the eight chil­dren of Kwa Siew Tee and Wee Yew Neo. She attended the Methodist Girls’ School, and although her studies were interrupted by the war, she won the prestigious Queen’s Scholarship to read law at the University of Cambridge, where she graduat­ed with first-class honours, the first Asian woman to do so.

 

In December 1947, she quietly married Lee Kuan Yew in England. Upon return­ing to Singapore in 1950, they joined the law firm Laycock and Ong. In 1955 they started their own practice, Lee and Lee, in partnership with Lee’s younger brother, Kim Yew. The firm grew into one of the largest in Singapore and Kwa remained a practising conveyancing lawyer over the next forty years.

 

Lee Kuan Yew wrote: “My great advantage was I have a wife who could be a sole breadwinner and bring the children up. That was my insurance policy. Without such a wife, I would have been hard-pressed.” She is often credited as a moderating influence on the fiery Lee, as well as possessing an intuitive judgement of charac­ter. Lee observed: “She had an uncanny ability to read the character of a person. She would sometimes warn me to be careful of certain persons; often, she turned out to be right.”

 

As a founding member of the People’s Action Party, Kwa helped draft the party’s constitution. Although she attended the first organizing meeting, she was subse­quently excluded from the party’s inner circle. In 1965, she prepared an important clause in the Separation Agreement to guarantee Singapore’s water supply from Johor after separa­tion from Malaysia. Kwa was a keen advocate for women’s rights in Singapore and ensured that the issue formed part of the People’s Action Party’s agenda. In her only party political broadcast, on Radio Malaya in 1959 during the general election campaign, Kwa refuted the notion that women are inferior to men, and urged women to vote for the five women candidates of the party. She helped draft the Women’s Charter of 1961, which provided for monogamous marriages, protected women against physical abuse, and guaranteed financial protection in divorce. She also supported the removal of gender discrimination in salaries, and argued for the importance of women in the workforce and in public life.

Goh Soon Tioe was a pioneer in the development of classical music in Singapore. Born in Padang, Sumatra, he came to Singapore at the age of thirteen to study at the Anglo-Chinese School. Goh only started violin lessons at fifteen but showed great promise, and in 1932 left for Switzerland to join the Conservatoire de musique de Genève, where he studied for three years. During his time there, he was award­ed the “Premier Prix” in each annual exam. Goh also subsequently trained under Alfred Marchot at the Royal Academy of Music in Brussels.

 

In 1954, Goh founded the Goh Soon Tioe String Orchestra. In the 1950s and 1960s he ventured into concert promotion by bringing internationally renowned musicians to perform in Singapore. However, he was not able to continue organiz­ing these concerts, as he observed, “costs are heavy and work is hard”.

 

At his studio above a garage in Oldham Lane and later in his home in Balmoral Crescent, he taught many of Singapore’s musical prodigies, including violinists Lynnette Seah and Lee Pan Hon, pianists Seow Yit Kin and Melvyn Tan, and con­ductor Choo Hoey. Goh was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal in 1963 in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the music scene in Singapore.

Sylvia Kho was the best known bridal designer in Singapore from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Born Wong Sien Moy in Kanching near Kuala Lumpur to rubber plan­tation owner Wong Yat Hin and his wife Chia Kim Siew, Kho learned sewing and beadwork from her Peranakan mother. By the age of nine she could design, cut a pattern, and sew. She studied at the Methodist Girls’ School in Singapore. Upon graduation, she trained as a nurse, and worked at the Singapore General Hospital until the outbreak of the Second World War. She left Singapore for Semarang to join her fiancé, Kho Hock Chiao. There, she took lessons at a school run by a Dutch couple in cooking, baking, and dressmaking.

 

Upon her return to Singapore in 1946 she started a home business making bridal headdresses and corsages. Eager to provide a complete bridal service, she went to the United States, Britain, France, and the Netherlands to take courses in make-up, hairdressing, and silk-flower making. She opened her first boutique in Tanglin Shopping Centre in 1968, working with five tailors she trained personally, and twenty seamstresses who worked from home. Kho was always present at fittings and would cut the material herself. Her wedding dresses were made of luxurious laces and fabrics which she procured herself on trips to America and Europe. Her customers were mostly brides of wealthy businessmen, politicians, and royalty from regional families.