The Mystery and Mastery of Tan Yeok Nee (Part 2)

Fresh off the Boat: New Friends in Singapore

When the youthful Tan Yeok Nee first befriended Abu Bakar at his father’s residential compound at Telok Blangah in Singapore, neither of them could have known how transformational the friendship and, later on, the partnership would become. Those days were, however, still a long way off when Tan first stepped off the boat and onto the shores of Malaya and Singapore. Among immigration societies like Hong Kong and Singapore, there so often appears to be an inverse relationship embedded in the origin stories of how staggering wealth sprouted from humble beginnings: the more successful a tycoon eventually became, the more desperately eccentric his debut in the world of business seemed to be. Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing starting out as a street vendor of plastic flowers comes to mind. However, it’s not just unique to immigrants nor to Asia: the 1960s entertainment sketch “The Four Yorkshiremen,” immortalized by England’s Monty Python off-beat comedy troupe, suggests the tendency to spin a yarn in this manner is universal. Tan was no exception and was said to have had to work off his passage expenses from China toiling in a tin mine in what was then the remote backwater Malay state of Pahang. 

A photograph of Istana Lama at Telok Blangah thought to have been taken sometime before 1862. It was the residence of Abu Bakar as a boy and may have been the location where he and Tan Yeok Nee first met

Arriving in the late 1840s, Tan’s Singapore origin story may be a yarn that was quite literally spun, as he supposedly spent his first months knocking on doors and peddling bolts of cloth. He somehow managed to land his “deal-of-the-century” at the Temenggong of Johor Daeng Ibrahim’s (Abu Bakar’s father) residential compound at Telok Blangah, becoming the household's regular supplier of fabrics. It was his big break. The business relationship spawned a friendship between the fellow teenagers Tan and Abu Bakar. Regardless of the veracity of the exact circumstances, an unbreakable bond of friendship formed. Tan remained at Abu Bakar’s side as a trusted adviser and partner during Johor’s economic boom years in the 1860s and beyond. He even married a cousin of Abu Bakar’s immediate family and became known among them as “fan consort,” meaning that he effectively joined Abu Bakar’s family, rather than his new wife joining his own family as tradition would normally dictate. He went on to witness Abu Bakar’s meteoric rise from Temenggong in 1860 to Sultan in 1886 and attended the fabulous opening ball at Istana Tyersall in 1895. Tan was the brains behind Johor’s early development, the creation of its agricultural foundation, its resulting population boom and, eventually, a viable, sustainable economy inextricably linked to that of Singapore. In answer to the question “where did all the money come from?” (link to previous post by this title https://palaceofghosts.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-seeds-of-prosperity-where-did-all.html) it was, at least in the 1860s and 1870s, largely down to on-the-ground efforts of Tan in Johor.

View of the Temenggong's village at Telok Blangah in the 1870s from the Collection of the National Museum Of Singapore

The most frequently perused, hurriedly written, and often cursory potted biographies of Tan obscure the character of an intriguing individual and, perhaps, a disquieting history of his life and times. The glib labels of “planter” and “businessman” conceal a far more complex and fascinating story of the economic and commercial dynamics that were shaping Singapore, Johor, and the immediate region during his lifetime. These were transformational currents of development that profoundly influenced the evolution of the embryonic communities and economy. At the same time powerful socio-political forces, such as colonial expansion (British and Dutch), mass immigration from mostly southern China, and, of course, the underlying and enduring fabric of the Malay world ensured that the world into which Tan Yeok Nee stepped was an ever changing and unpredictable one.

Chinese Migration and the Information Void

Tan was not alone on his long voyage, nor was his a one-off example of a boatful of migrants from China. Unchecked and undocumented emigration to Southeast Asia had been commonplace for centuries before Tan arrived in the region. Tan was one of many tens of thousands that fled China’s Guangdong province, more specifically the communities known as the Teochew from the province’s eastern extremities. Many Teochew began leaving China after the First Opium War of 1839-1842. Undocumented immigration continued to rise during the ten years of the Taiping Rebellion in China, beginning in about 1850, and the famine that preceded it in the mid to late 1840s. Research done by the China Science and Technology Group in 1994 indicates their descendants across Southeast Asia include five million in Thailand, 800,000 in Malaysia and Indonesia, 500,000 in Singapore, 300,000 in Vietnam, and 200,000 in Cambodia, as well as a further 300,000 in the US, 150,000 in France, and 100,000 in Canada.

The region of the Teochew culture within China's Guangdong province

The growing Chinese population in Southeast Asia in the 19th-century was the critical backdrop to Tan’s own fortunes. As the ever increasing numbers from Guangdong, as well as other places in China, descended on Singapore, Johor and Riau, the flow of people created stress fractures among the existing, but still embryonic, Chinese communities trying to establish themselves there. In their formational stage, especially in places like Singapore, they had little capacity to absorb such large numbers and lacked resources and infrastructure to scale up in order to accommodate the relentless influx. There is little documented information as to exactly what happened: that many suffered great hardship is certain. But the amazing success of Singapore and Johor today tells us that there must have been an important and meaningful prelude that eventually led to success, one that spanned centuries rather than a few decades. 

Tan’s success took place within, and because of, the context of emerging Chinese communities specifically, and the evolution of a more broadly evolving society in general. Yet while we can see the outcome, the path which people like Tan took to establishing himself is less clear, at least in its detail. Piecing together fragments and scraps of information in an attempt to form the basis of an untold history is a challenge, an adventure for the mind to be sure, but a challenge nevertheless. Evidence that Chinese immigration to the region took place goes back to at least as far as the origins of the 15th and 16th-century Peranakan of Malacca and elsewhere. It would be untrue to say that nothing at all exists in terms of historical information. Partial information of the business activities of Chinese communities exists. For example, there are detailed British government records of revenue received from the concessions awarded by the British government in Singapore – the so-called revenue farms – over a sustained period of time, but there is little else. Carl A. Trocki, one of Southeast Asia’s leading historians, points out that virtually nothing was recorded by the Chinese themselves during most of the nineteenth century. 

Probably as a result of there being little in the way of primary research materials, there is an almost total lack of systematic study of the Chinese during the early years of their settlement in Southeast Asia. Trocki laments that what little raw data exists has not been fully utilized, nor has its value been exhausted. Complete revenue farm contracts or documents are mostly non-existent, official government records or otherwise. Other anecdotal information that exists is usually only the result of a particularly rancorous dispute and newspaper articles which may shed some light are sporadic and rare. However, according to Trocki, even this has not been thoroughly explored     .

When considering the life and times of Tan, we are left, then, with an unusual situation. It is not in dispute that there was a thriving and industrious Chinese community within which Tan was one of the few whose hands were on the levers of control. That Tan, unlike his contemporaries, was also elevated to the highest ranks of Johor’s Malay hierarchy, is also beyond any doubt. However, how this all happened is murky at best. Furthermore, what exactly happened during the course of his subsequently managing the levers of control, in terms of interests held and activities undertaken, is also draped in shadow. 

Putting together an account of Tan’s life and times is therefore often a matter of conjecture. An understanding of the context can indicate what most likely happened based on the principle that the most obvious explanation for an outcome is, in most cases, probably what did actually happen. Moreover, although there may well be missing documents and other evidence, we know who the decision makers and stakeholders were, and judging by the outcomes that transpired and were visible for all to see, there were clearly agreements, compromises, show downs, or other forms getting to a result that were organized and undertaken in the course of events. A bit of informed imagination is required to take a best guess at populating some of the blank spaces on the canvas. Although filling in the occassioinal blanks remains conjecture the full story remains, as we shall see, well worth telling.