The Mystery and Mastery of Tan Yeok Nee (Part 3)

A Strange New World 

The previous post followed Tan Yeok Nee from his hometown to his first weeks and months in Malaya and then to Singapore where his fortuitous first meeting with Abu Bakar took place. It showed that anything could happen in this rapidly evolving global port city. That was, of course, precisely its appeal. Many others arrived from southern China, including those who, like Tan, identified as Teochew, but most of their stories are lost to history. In fact, considering the number of arrivals, there is a veritable void in documented information about their experiences. But it was not just the people and places who were new to Tan. Mastering how to navigate his way through the new commercial and administrative structures which he encountered was imperative.

From the Collection of the National Museum of Singapore, "View of Singapore From The Sea" was painted around 1847. A view similar to this was therefore probably what Tan Yeok Nee's first saw on arriving in Singapore.

Opium

While Tan was finding his feet and making new friends, a whole new world was flowering around him. But it was not all cherry blossom. When the topic of opium, the devilish derivative of the poppy flower, is raised today many people think of the lamentable and tragic history that occurred in the 1840s and 1850s involving Britain and China. However, China was not the only place in Asia where the drug and its trade wreaked havoc. Although on a smaller scale, the drug was of no less importance to the history of Singapore and Southeast Asia during the 19th-century, but in contrast to the situation in China, this time it was the British, (and the Dutch) and their Malay (and for the Dutch, their Javanese) associates who were trying to govern the territories that they themselves were flooding with, and profiting from, the drug. In their geographic sphere of influence the British controlled the international trade in opium. However within that sphere the Chinese were both the distributors and consumers of the drug. The opium revenue farms – the name given to the structures utilized to supply opium to the (mostly) plantation workers in the region – were therefore one of the few areas where the world of Chinese business and British administration intersected on a regular basis. 

Predating British Singapore, opium revenue farming was going on in colonial Penang and Malacca well before 1819, as well as in the Dutch East Indies and in many other places. Most of the immigrant Chinese society in Singapore, and indeed the Chinese communities in much of Southeast Asia, appear to have been structured around the opium revenue farm. The plantations where the workers and their families lived were of gambier and pepper, but revenue farm structure also extended to other resource extraction industries in the region. However, the arrival of opium in large quantities was not the catalyst that spawned the concept of the revenue farm: the same distribution structure had been utilized for many other products and by many other rulers predating the age of European colonialism in Southeast Asia. Frequently cited examples of other products and services distributed in this way included liquor, pork, prostitutes, and pawnbroking, but other more mundane day-to-day products also relied on these same distribution networks. The structures employed to manage the supply arrangements of the revenue farms were therefore all-important. From his early days Tan would have been quick to pick up that exclusivity – product and geographic exclusivity combined – were the key: this guaranteed price control and therefore profits.

Bill of goods; transaction between a trader and opium shopkeeper, 1913 (Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library, Singapore)

By 1860, the region appeared to have evolved into two colonial zones, with Singapore and The Strait Settlements under British East India Company control, the Malay states, including Johor, with varying degrees of independence from Britain, and the Riau archipelago under the influence of the Netherlands East India Company. However, when viewed through the lens of practical economic geography, trade and commerce among local communities, including the Chinese, was often conducted across the region as if borders were invisible or at least treated as mere occupational hazards by many traders. This was particularly the case with the trade involving the gambier and pepper plantations and associated products. Borders, if they even actually existed beyond the theoretical conversations of a few wishful thinkers in their respective colonial establishments, were simply ignored by many of the main business stakeholders involved in local trade. Exclusive revenue farm arrangements based on the notion of political boundaries had therefore not worked effectively: they were simply just too porous to allow exclusive domains to exist. Furthermore, geography and tradition contributed to a thriving open, single market. Outside the official arrangements for exclusive revenue farms, growing commercial interests, an itinerant population, and easy access to a highly addictive drug generated the potential for sky high profits; a potential that spiralled to the heavens.

Show Me the Money

This was the strange new world that Tan found himself in the middle of. However, it was all very well to understand the operations of the plantations in Johor and Singpore (and Riau) that seemed to be the fulcrum around which everything else revolved. This by itself would not make Tan any money. Like many other Teochew’s Tan seemed to have a natural gift for not only observing and understanding what he saw happening around him, but also how to position himself to best profit from it. He must have quickly understood, for example, that the implications of this single market for gambier and pepper were much more significant than they may at first seem. At this time Chinese plantation workers accounted for 50% of Singapore’s population and nearly all of that of Johor and Riau. A very high percentage of these plantation labourers were users of opium and the drug extracted between 50% and 70% of their wages. While the import and export of gambier and pepper accounted for only 2% of the value of total trade, the populations of their plantations generated huge revenues through domestic demand for opium and many other products too. 

Chinese platantaion workers on a mid 19th-century gambier and pepper plantation in Singapore

A Singapore gambier and pepper plantation owner in the mid 19th-cetnury

It is hardly surprising that organizational structures quickly developed to both accommodate and perpetuate the system, but also ensure that every last morsel of that potential was captured. An episode from Palace of Ghosts provides an account of how Tan explains to Abu Bakar how plantations of gambier and pepper were set up: how rights to manage tracts of land were licensed; how labour was deployed to work those plantations; and how workers were supplied with various goods and services via the revenue farm system. Tan had been the young Abu Bakar’s teacher and mentor in the ways of Chinese business, educating him on how the “kangchu” system worked and the role of the “kongsi” (a collection of merchants and financiers; today “kongsi” is the mandarin word for “company”). These business enterprises were products of their environment, designed to organize resources in the name of generating profits for their owners. They were organizations that represented, at least superficially, the business and financial interests of Singapore’s Chinese communities. 

However, their activities went far beyond what we would today understand as companies, either large corporate entities or start-up initiatives. While Tan, and many of his contemporaries, are now cast as “businessmen” on account of their being members of one or more kongsi, the meaning of the term in the context of 21st-century business parlance bears little resemblance to what it meant 170 years ago in mid-19th-century Southeast Asia. Such was the standing of the kongsi among the Chinese communities that their role went well beyond just business. Significantly, for example, the Singapore government came to treat them as the leaders and representatives of the Chinese community.

The Secret Societies

A membership certificate for the Tsung Sin Kongsi secret society in Singapore, which includes a call to topple the Qing dynasty and return the Ming dynasty to power (National Museum of Singapore)

The kongsi presided over a web of connections, loyalties, and kinships among the Chinese communities which enabled the Johor and Singapore economy to work, including and especially the whole system of plantation concessions. It permeated deeply into the social fabric of the rapidly growing population. A single kongsi might ulimately control an ecosystem consisting of a licensee, revenue farmers, financiers and investors, the plantation labour force, shopkeepers, traders, security detail and others. Sometimes different kongsi would collaborate in a joint venture. Since their members were bound by language and kinship rooted to the original homeland of their ancestors in China, this was their underlying binding force, reinforced by strict rules and codes of conduct. These organizations were known by many names, but were generally synonymous with what became known later on and euphemistically as the “secret society.”

Secret societies were self-governing organizations, independent of any kind of government or other authoritative oversight. W.H.M. Read, a leading figure in Singapore society in the mid-to-second half of the 19th century, was directly involved in quelling secret society related riots. In his 1901 book Play and Politics, he reveals some of the terms new members of a secret society would have to swear to on oath:

“You shall not reveal the proceedings of the society to any but a brother; you shall not cheat or steal from a brother or seduce his wife, daughter, or his sister; if you do wrong or break these laws, you shall come to the society to be punished, and not go to the authorities of the country; if you commit murder or robbery against a member, you shall be dismissed for ever from the society, and no brother will receive you; if a brother commits murder or robbery, you shall not inform against him, but you shall assist him to escape, and prevent the officers of justice from arresting him; if a brother is arrested and condemned, you shall do all you can to assist in his escape.”

It doesn’t take an expert in the art of governance or public administration to see how secret societies might create a problem for any aspiring government authority, at least not a Chinese one.

Written sworn oaths of members of a secret society made at their initiation ceremony (National Museum of Singapore)

These organizations have a long history of notoriety, a reputation that has fired the imagination of many an author and film director. Some historians, however, point to their role as associations created by young men who found themselves at the margins of settled society, voluntary brotherhoods organized for mutual support, which only later developed into a successful predatory tradition often at the behest of westerners wanting them to do their dirty work. Maybe. Such views challenge intuition and common sense. The secret societies, whose origins and culture were as subversive organizations focused on violently bringing down the Qing Empire in China, were the forerunner of what we know today by the more benign term as “clan associations.” The journey these organisations have made to achieve today’s status as respectable stalwarts of society is laudable, but in the 19th-century they were a law unto themselves – and they had muscle. In the 1860s and 70s, their leaders, among which Tan was to become one of the most powerful, were unassailable: very wealthy and with their hands on the levers of influence and absolute control of large segments of the population. They were not to be taken lightly.

As Tan found his feet in Singapore he started to build his web of connections, navigating through and among the unfamiliar, often intimidating communities he encountered. It would not have taken him long to realize this was a world in which he would need to very quickly learn a new and complex skillset to survive. This he quickly did. In fact it was a skillset in which he became incredibly adept and would serve him and his partners very well over the next five decades.