Penang Hokkien - History of a Forgotten People

There is a saying that winners get to write history. I want to add to that. It's not only the winners but those who are literate. If you know how to read and write, you are the one who get to tell your side of the story. In present-day China, there is much talk about resurrecting the Maritime Silk Road. To resurrect it means there was once a network of trading routes that emanated out of China, and like a tangled web, crisscrossed the South China Sea, the Straits of Malacca, and even the Indian Ocean. These routes have been traced to two ports in southern China, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou, both in Fujian Province, the homeland of the Hokkien people.

For hundreds of years, it was the Hokkien who controlled China's maritime trades. They were the seafarers and merchants. Why? Because their home province is mountainous, forcing its people to live in isolated pockets, which resulted in a multitude of variants to their spoken language. They would visit different ports to trade.

At these ports, they often formed satellite families, taking on local wives and fathering children. This is in addition to the main family they have in Fujian Province. So it was the case in Malacca, where they were able to establish a hybrid group of people, who maintained Chinese culture but spoke the Malay language. Despite their wealth and despite their culture, the Hokkien people were unable to impart one vital ingredient: their language. They were always on the move, going from port to port, and never staying in one spot long enough to teach their language to their offsprings. They left the role to their local wives to raise the children, and as the local wives spoke Malay, so too did the children. That this group of people spoke Baba Malay offers an insight into the role of women: the one who rocks the cradle determines the language of the baby.

These Hokkien merchants, if they were from Quanzhou, would speak the Quanzhou variant of Hokkien. And if they were from Zhangzhou, then the Zhangzhou variant. Nevertheless, they were able to keep logs of their commerce, pay taxes, and communicate with the bureaucrats, or mandarins, because they were not illiterate. They could communicate using a common written language that was the glue that held the disparate peoples of China together.

That language is known as Literary Chinese. Children of the merchant class had the privilege of learning it, right up to the 21st century, for it was the key to communication across China. The Hokkien merchants might not even call it Literary Chinese. Today, when you hear people talking about "Old Hokkien" or "Written Hokkien", that's the language. The reason it is known as such is that while the language is in one common form across China, the pronunciation is in the Hokkien literary reading if it is read by the Hokkien. So, as far as the Hokkien merchants are concerned, it was Written Hokkien. This is a different language from Spoken Hokkien, the colloquial language that they spoke on the daily basis, and their descendants continue to use in presently day Penang.

Despite having written so much about the Hokkien mercantile group, this story is not about them. They were not illiterate, so they were able to write and record everything they did. There is however another group of people who were not so fortunate. They were illiterate and they had no way to pass on their story. Today, we will unravel their story.

To do that, we go back to 17th century China. That was a turbulent period in Chinese history. After tottering for a few decades, the Ming Dynasty finally collapsed in 1644 and was replaced by the invading Manchus with the Qing Dynasty. Although it happened in faraway Beijing, the repercussions eventually rippled into Fujian Province. One by one, Chinese provinces fell easily to Manchu rule. But when they arrived in Fujian Province, the Qing army faced resistance.

I had mentioned that the Hokkien people were seafarers who controlled the Maritime Silk Road, but of course not all Hokkien people were merchants. There were ordinary folks, fishermen, shopkeepers, food hawkers. They did not need to communicate in writing. They were the illiterate class. But when the war came, they became pawns in an unwilling stage between Manchu forces and Ming loyalists.

After a particularly fierce battle, the Qing army succeeded in ousting the Ming rebels who fled to Taiwan. To ward off further attacks from the rebels under Zheng Chenggong, and to prevent the locals from aiding them, the Qing authorities issued a decree to clear the coast of southern China, moving the entire coastal population inland. These people were forced out of their homes into areas that did not welcome them.

It was during this upheaval that a wave of Hokkien and Teochew refugees decided to leave Fujian Province to settle in different parts of Southeast Asia. They were the 17th-century boat people. We do not know exactly when they left, for they fled in the dead of night, secretly, and being illiterate, they could not record their own history even if they had wanted to. These were not the merchant class, but they paid the seafarers for their passage with their entire life savings. Unlike the merchants, which were entirely men, the refugees included men, women, children, and at times, even livestock. In other words, they uprooted themselves and were transported across the South China Sea. Many never made it, but those who did arrive in Vietnam, some in the Philippines, some in Borneo, the Teochews headed north to Bangkok, while a group that spoke the Zhangzhou variant of the Hokkien language arrived in the southern part of the Isthmus of Kra. I am not sure exactly where, it could be on the east coast, at Nakhon Si Thammarat, or the west coast in Kedah, but eventually they would populate the area, living in relative harmony with the Malays and the Siamese.

There was only a slim window of opportunity for the refugees to flee, after which, the Qing authorities sealed all the ports, and trade on the Maritime Silk Road came to a stop. A generation would pass before the Kangxi Emperor lifted the ban on trade, allowing Hokkien merchants to leave Fujian Province for trade.

Unfortunately, the pioneers who settled in this region were illiterate, so no record existed of what had transpired between the time they fled their homeland and the return of the merchants. What we do know is that having their connection to China severed, and effectively living in isolation, the refugees began to assimilate with the local population, adopting local culture as well as a local interpretation of their cooking. They experimented with new ingredients to replace items not available in the tropics, using rice flour for example in place of wheat flour. Interaction with the Malays also enabled an exchange in words, with some moving from Hokkien to Malay and some from Malay to Hokkien.

The refugees managed to do something which the earlier merchant class failed: they managed to keep their language intact. Unlike the early merchants, whose children grew up speaking a creolized form of native language called Baba Malay, the children of the refugees continue to speak the Zhangzhou variant of Hokkien. This was possible because of the presence of Hokkien-speaking women among them. Having arrived in large numbers, often as whole families, they were able to retain the use of their language.

The reopening of Fujian ports enabled a new generation of Hokkien merchants to visit the Malay peninsula. At each port of trade, they discovered that there were already Chinese settlers who spoke Hokkien. These Hokkien settlers smoothen the reentry of the merchants, providing them with ready infrastructure to resume trade. But while the merchants were able to read and write Literary Chinese, the Hokkien settlers were largely illiterate. Their language had remained oral the whole time. So it fell on the merchant to keep records and write history.

While the merchants' recorded history acknowledges the existence of Chinese settlers in the Lam3 Hai4, as regions of the South China Sea were called, we only knew written history from the merchants' perspective. So we read that it was the merchants who established trade, the merchants who founded new settlements, and the merchants who brought their language to this region. In other words, the merchants took credit whenever they could, and they did. As far as the merchants were concerned, the offsprings of the refugees were illiterate, and their history was of no consequence. What the merchants left out was that, without those refugees, the Hokkien people would have remained sojourners and not permanent settlers in Southeast Asia.

When Penang Island was established by Captain Francis Light, the early settlers were swift to populate it. This would not have been possible had not the Chinese already settled in Kedah. By then, they have morphed to be known as the "Lau33 Khek3", or old-timers, and eventually, became known as the Baba Nyonya of Penang. They differed from the Peranakans of Malacca in that they continued to speak the Zhangzhou-variant of Hokkien, albeit with a good number of Malay loanwords. Being born in the Malay peninsula, they had no affinity to China, so when it became necessary for them to become literate, they chose to learn English rather than Literary Chinese.

By the 19th century, the advent of tin mining mixed with further upheavals in mainland China brought a new influx of migrant refugees to the Malay peninsula. These newcomers, called the Sin3 Khek3, would outnumber the Baba Nyonyas, but by then, the Baba Nyonyas had positioned themselves as the upper crust of local society. So while they were few in numbers, they were able to ensure that the Zhangzhou-variant of Hokkien continued to be used in Penang, even in the face of an influx of new arrivals from Xiamen and Quanzhou, along with smaller numbers of Teochew, Hakka, Taishanese, Cantonese and Hainanese peoples.

The Baba Nyonya group did not see a need to learn Literary Chinese unless they had trading relations with China. They preferred British education and would send their children to Penang Free School, Saint Xavier's Institution, and Convent Light Street. Their display of Britishness extended to how they would name their homes. It was the merchant class that continued the use of Literary Chinese, holding classes for their own children to learn Literary Chinese, a move that would not change until the 21st century, when Modern Mandarin enable one language to have both spoken and written form to be taught to all Chinese peoples.

There are still Baba Nyonya people in Penang. They continue to practice the culture that makes them Baba Nyonya. But alas, they could not trace their history all the way back to the original refugees, for the early history has long been lost. The legacy of those refugees is the language that was accepted by all the Chinese people, regardless of where in southern China they came from, the language that we know today as Penang Hokkien.

Read also Penang Hokkien Vocabulary

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