Gangster

The Penang Story Ð International Conference 2002
18-21 April 2002, The City Bayview Hotel, Penang, Malaysia

Organisers: The Penang Heritage Trust & STAR Publications
Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic

Conglomerates and The Rise of A Straits Chinese Identity in Penang
Engseng Ho
Department of Anthropology, William James Hall, Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email ho@wjh.harvard.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper will discuss how leaders of Penang Chinese society came to be vilified as
gangsters by colonial officialdom in the late nineteenth century, and how they reinvented
themselves as Anglophone Straits Chinese Babas in the twentieth. In this story of the
changing representations of an ethnic elite lies also the story of how multiethnic
conglomerates were destroyed in the creation of British Malaya. In the late nineteenth
century, powerful multiethnic alliances of Penang Chinese financier-gangsters, Indian Muslim
societies and Malay nobles competed with each other over tin mines in the peninsula. From
the Penang Riots of 1867 to the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 to the Societies Ordinance of
1890, the establishment of colonial rule over the Malay peninsula entailed the dismantling of
combined multiethnic power, and the creation of racially separate administrative categories
and interests. One curious result was the self-creation of an elite class of Malay, Indian and
Chinese Anglophone gentlemen who became increasingly divorced from political life, now
understood in racial terms, and reconvened over drinks at the clubhouse instead.
Engseng Ho, Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic 1/11

Conglomerates and the Rise of A Straits Chinese Identity in Penang
Introduction
When I was a schoolboy in Penang, my friends and I were both fascinated and
intimidated by what the locals call samseng, or gangsters. There was, for instance, a
mysticism of numbers associated with them -- sam meaning three in Cantonese, in the first
place, what the British called the Triad society. There was the khong peh, or zero eight gang.
There were other gangs, twa khong, seh khong --big zero, little zero-- who distributed among
themselves streets like jee tiau lor, sar tiau lor, or lane two, lane three, and so on. When we
got a bit older, we would steal into those streets, on our bicycles. As a boy, it seemed to me
that gangsters were the rulers of society.
Then there was the intimidation part; it also involved numbers. Someone could stop
you while you were cycling on the street and say: hey, my little brother says you beat him up
last week, what do you want to do about it? Fifty cents. No, Two Dollars. And so on. I thus
started to confuse gangsters with policemen, and didn't like them quite so much anymore.
When I got older, I was told that the people who ran the town really weren't the ones
ruling the streets -- the gangsters or the policemen. They were, rather, gentlemen playing
golf and racing horses at the Penang Turf Club. So I started to confuse them, the gentlemen,
with the gangsters. When I went to university, I found out that there was something called
research which could help clear my head of all these confusions, so I started doing research,
and haven't stopped since.

Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic Conglomerates and The

Rise of A Straits Chinese Identity in Penang
In my research, I started tracing the gentlemen to when they first appeared. The
easiest place to find them was in the clubs they frequented. The oldest of these were founded
in the decade of the 1890's: the Chinese Recreation Club (1892), Chinese Cycling Club
(1894), Young Men's Association (1896), Penang Literary Association (1890's), Old
Xaverians' Association (1906). OK, so we know when the clubs were started. But who were
their members?
Around 1880, the British official JD Vaughan wrote:
Strange to say that although the Babas adhere so loyally to the customs of their
progenitors they despise the real Chinaman and are exclusive fellows indeed; nothing
they rejoice in more than being British subjects. The writer has seen Babas on being
asked if they were Chinamen bristle up and say in an offended tone 'I am not a
Chinaman, I am a British subject, an orang putih,' literally, a white man...They have
social clubs of their own to which they will admit no native of China. At these clubs
they play billiards, bowls and other European games, and drink brandy and soda ad
libitum.." (Vaughan 1971: 2-3)
Here, we have some clues as to who the gentlemen in the clubs were. They were
Babas, identified themselves with British rule, and distinguished themselves from recent
arrivals from China, the sinkeh. Vaughan says they did not share the same clubs. Yet if we
broaden our view of what a club is, we see that Babas did share other clubs with sinkehs,
especially before the 1890's.
Surname clan associations, for example, were open to all who shared the surname.
The Khoo Kongsi for instance, was started in 1835, and one of the founders was Khoo Wat
Seng, whose descendants were Baba leaders of Penang society, and are still involved with the
kongsi. In the mid-1800's the most prominent leader of the Khoo Kongsi was also the leader
of one of the main secret societies. His name was Khoo Thean Teik, and he was leader of
both the Toh Pek Kong or Kien Tek Society, and the Khoo Kongsi. The kongsi's extensive
landholdings in Air Itam, dating from these days, are named in his honour. In these groupings,
whether you call them clubs or kongsis, were both Babas and sinkehs. Indeed, in 1867, out of
a total Penang Chinese population of about 36,000, 30,000 belonged to either the Kien Tek
society or its secret society rival, the Ghee Hin. We have these numbers because a major riot
broke out between the Kien Tek and the Ghee Hin in Penang in 1867. A commission of
inquiry was set up after the fact, and these numbers and much other useful information were
generated as a result. In its investigations, the commission identified Hokkien Babas as leaders
of the Kien Tek, which included sinkehs, and were allied with Hakkas of the Hai San society.
Their rivals, the Ghee Hin, were mainly Cantonese recently arrived from China. The
commission further observed that both the Kien Tek and Ghee Hin were allied with rival non-
Chinese groupings as well, such as the Red and White Flags, which included Malays and
Indian-Muslims. What were these rivalries and alliances about?
In the 1840's, tin was discovered in Perak on the mainland, in Larut and Klian Bahru,
or present-day Kamunting. Malay chiefs who controlled those areas would have direct
arrangements with rich Chinese financiers. In return for large sums of money, the Malay
chiefs would allow the Chinese financiers to exploit the tin deposits. The Chinese financiers,
in turn, had to gather a large labour force to work the mines. Neither the Malay nor the
British authorities at that time had a police force to control that large labour pool, nor were
they interested in doing so. That was the business of the Chinese tin miners, and their
problem. This problem was dealt with by having secret societies organize that labour. What
secret societies are is murky. Much of what has been written comes from colonial sources,
which dealt with them as a police problem. But they were more than that.
In China, sworn brotherhoods having special rituals of initiation and codes of

behaviour, communication and sanction were involved in anti-Manchu agitation. Maurice
Freedman thought of them as an alternative to state and local structures of authority. My
view is that their origins are not as important as what they became. Ng Chin Keong has
shown us that new forms of social organization, such as native-place associations, arose in
places where mobile Hokkiens congregated, starting with Amoy or Xiamen itself. Even the
Amoy dialect was a compound of what was spoken in Chiang Chew and Chuan Chew, older
and subsidiary ports up-river of Amoy. Abroad in the Hokkien diaspora, or what Ng calls the
Amoy Network, people socialized and had obligations and loyalties towards each other not on
the old bases of common land or lineage. Rather, economic enterprises, secret societies,
friendships, a shared language, all became good reasons for dealing with, and even dying for,
each other.

Thus for a mixture of reasons including linguistic commonality, indenture and debt,
contract, shared interests in an enterprise, and large doses of physical coercion, secret
societies became involved in labour recruitment and control for the new tin mines. Tan Pek
Leng has shown a direct correlation between labour control and secret society power. She says
that, "...in Penang, the richest capitalist, Khoon Thean Teik and the most powerful secret
society headman was one and the same...His depot, Chop Kim Ho, was licensed to receive the
largest number of coolies." (Tan 1979: 11)
In other words, ownership of capital, tin mining, partnership with Malay chiefs,
secret society leadership and labour control were all necessary elements of what it took to be
a leader of Chinese society in this period -- and probably beyond. And there were always
rivals for that role. As such, any analysis of conflicts, riots and secret socities from that
period will usually come up with rival but equivalent conglomerates combining the same
elements of the equation. British accounts of secret society warfare usually reduced to single
factors such as language or primeval hatreds, and did not see the composite nature of the
phenomenon. Indeed, they did not see --or show-- their own roles in the making of trouble.
Chinese secret societies were secret because Malay, Chinese and British elites were endlessly
dealing with and playing each other out, and collectively kept their machinations secret from
their respective foot soldiers.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the political economy of tin mining was a
joint Malay-Chinese affair. It was part of an old Southeast Asian pattern, in which indigenous
chiefs acquired a regular tax base without the burden of administration, by farming out
monopoly rights to foreign bidders. The sources of capital and labour in this case were
Chinese, and the products were sold to Chinese for export to China. Working with pepper
and gambier at the southern end of the Malay peninsula, Carl Trocki has succinctly identified
what he calls a European 'capture' of Chinese economy in the nineteenth century, and the
term applies as well to a 'capture' of the joint Malay-Chinese political economy of Penang-
Perak in the mid-nineteenth century. The end-result of that capture was evident by the
beginning of the twentieth century: British supplantation of Malay chiefs as the predominant
military force and beneficiary of monopoly farm revenues; British supplantation of Chinese
as controller of the labour force, as shaper of Chinese organizational life, and eventually as
both producer and market for tin. With the invention of tin cans to provision soldiers in the
American civil war, and the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, the main market for tin

shifted decisively from China to the West in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Malayan share of world output jumped from 10% to 55%.
This dramatic process of British capture was thus going on while civil disorder was laid
at the doorstep of Chinese secret society conflicts. In the colonial view of Malayan history,
the British were forced to intervene in 1874 because Chinese secret society conflict and
Malay succession disputes had become too disruptive of social order. Both had proven
incapable of ruling themselves --or each other, for that matter-- so the British were forced t o
step in.
As I understand it, the British meddled on both the Malay and Chinese sides before
1874. Professor Khoo Kay Kim has written extensively on this. On the Malay side, the
discovery of the tin mines in the 1840's changed the geography of power and competition in
Perak. Whereas downstream or hilir chiefs, sitting astride larger volumes of traffic, were
historically more powerful and captured more revenue than hulu or upriver chiefs, the
appearance of tin in the interior began to upset settled political arrangements. A period of
unusually fluid political maneuvering ensued among Malay chiefs. This provided the opening
for the British to take sides. James Birch and Frank Swettenham, the earliest British officials
there, busied themselves travelling up and down the rivers towards these ends.
This political instability created heightened risks for Chinese capital invested in tin
mining, on all sides. The fortunes of Chinese capitalists were increasingly tied to those of
their Malay chiefly allies, while the latter were alternately tempted and threatened by the
British. At the same time, over the long run, it appears that the British favoured Penang
Hokkien, Baba financiers represented by the Toh Pek Kong/Kien Teik society, over that of
the Cantonese Ghee Hins. Trocki has argued that the Melaka and Singapore Baba Hokkiens
made inroads into the Johor-Singapore-Riau pepper and gambier economy in the 19th
century with British support. I haven't studied the matter as closely, but I think a similar
alliance was in the making, as Penang Baba Hokkien financiers moved into Perak. The issue
is not simply one of comparison, but connection. Let us look at a number of places on the
Malay peninsula, which connects Singapore and Penang.
In Penang, the Ghee Hin was allied with the White Flag society, while the Toh Pek
Kongs were with the Red Flags. In urban Georgetown, each Chinese-Malay/Indian-Muslim
faction shared jurisdiction over the same part of town. The Ghee Hin and White Flag
societies were numerically superior, counting 25,000 and 3,000 members respectively. The
Toh Pek Kong and Red Flag could field only 6,000 and 1,000. However, disadvantage in
numbers was balanced by an advantage of arms in favour of the Toh Pek Kong and Red Flag.
According to the commission of inquiry into the Penang riots of 1867, the Toh Pek Kongs
were mainly Hokkiens, headed by local-born Babas. They
...number amongst their members most of the wealthy merchants and shopkeepers of
Beach Street and include also the maufacturers and sellers of firearms and
ammunition. These proprieters of firearms are bound, in times of distrubance, t o
supply the members of their society with muskets, and it was in this manner, that so
many of the Toh Pek Kongs were armed during the late riots (The Penang Riots,
1867: 6).
Distribution of firearms was a standard British technique for getting desirable

outcomes. That the Babas were the ones entrusted with the arms trade makes it clear whom
the British were supporting.
On the other hand, the "...Ghee Hins of Penang consist chiefly of the labouring and
artisan class, and are principally men from Canton." (The Penang Riots, 1867: 5, article 12).
Down the peninsula, a similar pattern of polarization was occurring. The Toh Pek
Kong society embraced the Kien Tek in Penang, Hai San in Perak and Selangor, and Ghee
Hock in Singapore. In Purcell's reckoning,
The Tokong society (Toh Pek Kong), rival to the Ghee Hin, appears in Singapore
from 1830 to 1890 as the Ghee Hock, in Penang from 1844 to 1867 as the Toh Pek
Kong, in Larut as the Hai San and throughout Malaya from 1890 to the present day
as the Sa Tiam Hui (Sam Tim Wui) or Three Dot Society (Purcell 1978: 157).
The Ghee Hin group went by the same name all over, with dialect variations in
procouncement. As in Penang, a parallel division occurred amongst Malays and Indian
Mulims in Perak, Malacca and Singapore. The White flags allied with the Ghee Hins, while
the Red Flags supported the Tokongs.

If the existence of a rivalry between two multiethnic conglomerates down the length
of the peninsula is true, it would help us explain why the period of the Larut wars in Perak
also witnessed riots in Penang and Singapore. The conflicts were particularly sharp in the
1860's, with constant fights between the Ghee Hin and Hai San in Perak, Ghee Hin and Ghee
Hock in Singapore in 1863, Ghee Hin and Kien Tek in Penang in 1867.
The story past this point is well known. The British introduce a series of increasingly
restrictive laws of increasingly wide scope over all civic associations. By the end, all of
society becomes a potential secret society.
-- The Commision of Inquiry on the Penang Riots of 1867 recommended Ordinance XIX of
1869 "...for the registration of certain societies and the prevention of unlawful assemblies."
-- This was amended to the Dangerous Societies Ordinance of 1882, to "...empower the
Registrar of Societies to refuse to register any Triad or Tokong which made itself particularly
obnoxious to him."
-- This was further modified in 1885 "...to restrict any named society to China-born
persons."
This was an attempt to prise away the Straits-born from the China-born, for former were
British subjects by birth and could not be banished.
-- The logical conclusion to this series of moves was the Societies Ordinance of 1890, when
all societies were assumed illegal until approved for registration. In other words, civic
associations were all guilty until proven innocent. In this sense, the colonial concept of a
secret society became generalized beyond Chinese society. All social organizations were
secret societies unless their books were open to the government. In this sense secret societies
had less to do with the Chinese as such and more with the government as absolute sovereign
over civic space.
While this legislative outcome of the secret society wars withdrew the civic rights of
everyone, the Penang Baba Hokkien financiers came out of the events with specific benefits.
Essentially, suppression of secret societies did not mean suppression of its leaders. The boat
had to be turned around but not rocked. Monopoly farms provided the bulk of government
revenue, as James Rush has shown for opium in Dutch Java, and Carl Trocki in British
Malaya. In both these places, an old, settled Hokkien peranakan capitalist elite enjoyed the
favour of colonial government: the Cabang Atas in Java, and the Babas in Singapore. A
similar outcome prevailed in Penang-Perak. After the Pangkor settlement of 1874, the Larut
and Kurau opium, gambling, spirits, pawnbroking and tobacco farms were for the most part
given over by Hugh Low, the acclaimed builder of indirect rule in Perak, to Khoo Thean Tek
and Chang Keng Kwee, who between them represented the allied Kien Tek-Hai San group of
Penang Hokkiens and Perak Hakkas.
Where James Birch had made British authority the laughing stock of Perak, Hugh
Low showed them all how indirect rule could work brilliantly, on the model of Sarawak's
James Brooke. Thus Low's cultivation of the Penang Baba financiers, and the 1885 ordinance
separating sinkehs from Babas in associational life, may be taken as signs that the British
were actively courting the Baba elite while repudiating their secret society affiliations.
A transitional figure in this shift may be seen in the person of Foo Tye Sin. He was
one of three Chinese considered respectable enough to sit on the commission of inquiry into
the 1867 Penang riots. He was the only non-partisan Chinese at a ceasefire conference called
by Lt. Governor Anson at the height of the Larut war. He was prototypical of the new type
of Chinese leader elevated by the British. Born in Penang, educated at the Penang Free
School, he was a partner of Koh Seang Tat, a descendant of the first Kapitan China of
Penang at the Beach Street firm of Tye Sin Tat. They were, together, two of the three
Chinese Justices of the Peace in 1874. These were the new public men of turn of the century
Victorian Penang, even though Foo Tye Sin was, according to CS Wong, "...overtly and
independent, but covertly a Hai San sympathiser."
Here, we are close to the end of our story. But in order to finish, we need to go
beyond the local context of Malaya. We need to look at Indian history to understand British
thinking in Malaya. In 1857, the Indian Mutiny was a generalized revolt which threatened t o
overthrow the British. It was a defining event for British imperialism world wide. The East
India Company, a private corporation which had carried on as a government, was dissolved
by act of Parliament, and the British government assumed rule over the colonies.
Government was more susceptible to British public opinion than the private East India
Company, and as a result a new impetus was given to bureacratic control of the colonies. The
old system of revenue farming became suspect as a form of cronyism, set up by Company
officials for their local friends, and was mired in publicly expressed moral anxieties over
opium. Direct colonial control over taxation became an unstoppable force. British public
opinion became an important factor in colonial decision-making out in the bush.
Simultaneously, native public opinion became something officials started to take seriously.
The feeling was that the mutiny had happened because British officials had lost touch with
native opinion. After the Mutiny, colonial officials took care to consult with those they
considered 'natural leaders of the people...on expanded municipal boards' (Bayly 339).
Persons of wealth, especially propertied traders (Bayly 339), had stood by them during the
mutiny, and were now enlisted as Justices of the Peace, or honorary magistrates. These were
the native classes who responded by building libraries and clocktowers, redoubling their efforts
in the study of English, and so on. Thus the battle was now joined for the formation of local
public opinion in the colonies. A category of Indian 'public men' rose to the challenge, often
lawyers who took care to record their associational and public activities, and were concerned
with archiving, precedent, documentation, and the validation of courts of law.
At the beginning of this talk, I wondered at the rise of a group of gentlemen in the
1890's in Penang, at the new literary, sports and school clubs where they imbibed brandy and
soda ad libitum, and kept apart from John Chinaman. Did they have anything to do with the
gangsters whose own clubs were finally wound up in 1890, with the Societies Ordinance?
The new direction of British policy in India, Macaulay's brainchild, directed at

cultivating a local elite capable of shaping Indian public opinion favourably towards the
British, led to the rise of new, Anglophone 'public men' in India. While many Indians assumed
this enhanced status with gratitude, others took the chance to compete with colonial
government on their own terms, in the press and other public venues. Gandhi was one of such
men, and finally beat his British tutors in the media wars. In Penang, our history is not as
dramatic, and our leaders not as grand. We got a taste of that grandeur when the nobel
laureate Rabindranath Tagore laid the foundation stone for the Hu Yew Seah society in
Madras Lane in the 1930's. If we competed with the British, it was more often than not with
horses at the Turf Club.
The gentlemen of the Penang clubs were, to my mind, made in the mould of the
Indian public men. Yet unlike their Indian models, they seem to have lost their will t o
politics. Having metamorphosed from gangsters into gentlemen, they retreated into a
narrow, legalistic formulation of identities and rights, rather than expand to include a range
of others. When I interviewed Penang Babas about the an association called the SCBA,
formed in the early 20th century, many weren't sure whether it was theStraits Chinese British
Association or the Straits Chinese Baba Association. Essentially it didn't matter, as the Babas
had become so identified with the British, even to the extent of excluding other Chinese.
Whether this was the right thing to do historically is hard to tell. That strategy worked in
Penang's sister island Singapore, where the British handed power over to another Hokkien-
Hakka alliance of peranakans. We are left with less communal violence than the Indians,
more time on our hands than the Singaporeans, and better food than both. In our continued
warm association with the British, in the gift of their language, perhaps we will finally be able
to widen our world and enlarge our hearts.


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Gangster

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The Penang Story Ð International Conference 2002

18-21 April 2002, The City Bayview Hotel, Penang, Malaysia

Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic

Engseng Ho, Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic 1/11

Engseng Ho, Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic 2/11

Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic Conglomerates and The

Around 1880, the British official JD Vaughan wrote:

In China, sworn brotherhoods having special rituals of initiation and codes of

Engseng Ho, Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic 4/11

Engseng Ho, Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic 5/11

Distribution of firearms was a standard British technique for getting desirable

Engseng Ho, Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic 7/11

The new direction of British policy in India, Macaulay's brainchild, directed at

Engseng Ho, Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic 11/11

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