Chinese people have been in south-east Asia for two thousand years since the Han Dynasty and some settled largely as traders, fisherman and pirates. Chinese involvement in government in South-east Asia, however, probably only started in the 14th century.
Early Chinese involvement in South East Asian governments
The first named person in Sabahan history that I could find and probably the first named Chinese anywhere in Malaysia was Ong Sum Ping, a Yuan Dynasty official who landed in Sabah on a reconnaissance mission and was stranded after the fall of the dynasty back in China. He ended up in the court of the Sultan of Brunei, where he became a trusted aide. Ong Sum Ping is now commemorated in a road name in Brunei but nowhere remembered in Malaysia, despite his stories apparently getting twisted into Kadazandusun mythology stories. I will discuss this in a much later article another time.
Following mass migration of Chinese into Southeast Asia from the end of the 18th century, Chinese communities were quick to organise themselves and manage their own affairs where ever they were. Interestingly, they set up several republics out of Hakka mining communities in western Kalimantan. Most of these republics are rather socialist in nature with three-tiered representational governments. The British reported the population to be 130,000 by 1820s. I would caution, though, that although described as republics, they are not sovereign state republics like what we have today. They were more likely, autonomous extensions of China.
The longest lasting of these was the Lanfang Republic, sometimes touted as the first republic in South East Asia. It elected thirteen directly-elected presidents during its existence 1777-1884. It had excellent relations with neighbouring Malay sultanates and also had its own militia, although it relied on Ching Dynasty protection as a tributary state to deter the Dutch. Eventually, the Dutch formally took over the territory in 1912 after the Ching Dynasty fell. The defeated Hakkas then moved to Sumatra, Sarawak, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, among whom was said to be the maternal grandfather of Lee Kuan Yew’s mother. In Sarawak, many of their descendants can be found around the town of Bau, just over the border from Pontianak.
Chinese autonomy in Malaya
In Malaya, Chinese communities were largely autonomous when they were established as neither the Malay rulers nor the British had the inclination or the capacity to govern what they saw as a transient population. The Chinese communities therefore ran their own social support systems, including schools, medical and social welfare. Security was provided by gangs, which eventually became available for hire for succession wars in the Malay states.
Chinese secret societies in Malay
We should not think of gangs as mafia groups preying on a victim community. In China, they were properly speaking, secret societies and were instrumental in organising resistance to the Ching imperial government. In Malaya, secret societies were protectors of the Chinese communities for which each community had to pay protection money, which they mostly deemed as not much different from the taxes levied by government officials. Secret societies normally operated openly. The Hakka Hai San secret society, for instance had its headquarters in Beach Street, the main commercial centre of colonial Penang.
Secret society leaders in that era saw themselves as community leaders. Dominant secret society leaders were sometimes acknowledged as representatives of the various Chinese communities or clans in that town whenever the local Malay ruler or the British needed somebody to liaise with. In larger towns or regions, one such dominant secret society leader was appointed as the Kapitan Cina. Yap Ah Loy was the third Kapitan Cina of Kuala Lumpur.
A Hai San veteran of the Selangor Civil War, Yap Ah Loy was later known as the man who first developed Kuala Lumpur, rebuilding much of Kuala Lumpur out of bricks after a particularly devastating storm (the bricks were laid out to dry in fields that became known as Brickfields), its first school and that tapioca flour mill in Petaling Street, which became the basis of its name in Cantonese. He also set up a small police force, cleaned up the town to improve its hygiene & health, built roads and the first prison in Selangor. Essentially, he was the mayor of the town – a gang leader maybe, but not necessarily a gangster.
It should also be understood that in contrast to Chinese organisations which organised along clan or business interest lines, secret societies can mobilise and organise across the entire community. This was one reason why Yap Ah Loy could organise Kuala Lumpur as successfully as he did. Eventually, with the increased migration of women into Malaya, the ‘excess men’ conditions that secret societies thrived on eroded and secret societies began losing their grip on Chinese communities in Malaya. Many continued to exist for decades on but with dual membership in political parties or being at the service of business associations.
Greater British, lesser Chinese administration
The British never like secret societies: after all, the disruption they caused to the British tin trade was the reason why the British had to intervene in Perak and Selangor in the first place. The British accepted them as a necessary evil as secret societies controlled Chinese economic life in the mid-nineteenth century. As Chinese society in Malaya matured with the more balanced sex ratio, clan and business organisations started take over the role of secret societies, particularly after the British banned secret societies in 1890. With the ban, secret societies slowly reverted into the gangs that we have today.
The kapitan system, derived from that in the Malaccan sultanate, was pretty much replicated all over Malaya, Sarawak and the Dutch East Indies, with some other non-Chinese communities having their own kapitans. The Kapitan Cina became key allies of colonial powers, particularly where colonial powers and resources were limited. As British rule deepened, though, the scope of the authority of British Residents expanded at the expense of those of the kapitans. Eventually, the position became an honorary one before it was finally abolished in Kuala Lumpur with the death of the last kapitan, Yap Kwan Seng, in 1902. The post died earlier in Kuala Lumpur as the British claimed the town as the capital of the Federated Malay States, but elsewhere, it lived on for some time, with the last in Perak until 1935.
British regulations further eroded the autonomy of Chinese institutions such as schools and newspapers from the first two decades of the 20th century, with the Education Registration Enactment 1920 and close monitoring by British authorities of political activities spilling over from China. Centralisation of government continued apace into the 1930s and the nightmare of Japanese occupation left little space for Chinese participation in government in Malaya.
Kuomintang in Malaya
Chinese politics in Malaya basically mirrored that in China. In the first decade of the 20th century, much political activity centred around gathering support and funding for the republican cause. Sun Yat Sen himself made several visits to Malaya, the first of which was in 1905. In his 1910 visit to Penang, he set up the South-east Asian headquarters of the Tongmenghui, the forerunner of the Kuomintang and also founded Kwong Wah Yit Poh, today the oldest Chinese newspaper anywhere outside of China. That visit in 1910 was for the famous Penang Conference, where the Chinese Revolution was planned for the following year. Today, there is a Sun Yat Sen trail organised by the Penang Heritage Trust, starting from the Sun Yat Sen Museum in Armenian Street.
Most of the Chinese in Malaya were from southern China, where people are naturally suspicious of rulers from the north. By late 1920s, Chinese politics in Malaya grew more fractious, and communist supporters started to break away from Kuomintang Malaya branch. The Communist Party of Malaya was founded in 1930, enjoying a year of public activity before being promptly banned by the British. This split the Chinese community politically, pitting conservative Chinese business interests against left-wing socialists, mirroring the situation in China.
Aside from anti-Japanese guerrilla activities during the war, Chinese first ventured into national political action with their opposition to the Anglo-Umno constitutional negotiations, which we discussed in the previous article.
Straits Chinese
With the establishment of Singapore in 1819, the British administration invited many Peranakans in Malacca to move to Singapore to help build the city. This led to the establishment of the Peranakan community in Singapore. It should be noted that the Peranakan community in Malacca predated the arrival on the British, having been there since the fifteenth century. Being part of the merchant class in Malacca for several centuries, they have accumulated much capital to take advantage of favourable business opportunities under the British. Peranakan merchants became the middle-men between global British trading houses and small Chinese retailers in towns and primary industries in the hinterland. Its educated base also placed Peranakans as professionals in strategic positions in the colonial economy.
Peranakans in all three Straits Settlements, known as Straits Chinese, were generally very closely identified with the British, being educated in English, adopting many English business & social practices and are often seen in Western dressing. As a result, Peranakans were also sometimes known as the King’s Chinese. This contrast with some of the more recent Chinese arrivals who brought with them the strong anti-British antipathy born out of their humiliating experience from the opium wars.
Under the British, Peranakans were generally bilingual, speaking Malay at home and English in official business. Some learnt Chinese dialects from the more recent Chinese arrivals and this positioned them as intercessors between the Chinese community and the British administrators, both in business and governmental affairs.
In the process of learning vernacular, some Straits Chinese became at least partially resinised. At the same time, they shared many common attributes with the Anglophiles of the Malay ruling elite. Thus, being partially resinised and English-speaking but still retaining many of its Malay Peranakan traits, they became natural cultural and political intermediaries between the Chinese community, Malay leaders and British administrators.
The SBCA
In 1896, the Chinese Philomathic Society of Singapore was set up, bringing together like-minded upper and upper-middle class Peranakan men. You can tell by the name that this was a very British kind of society. In 1900, many of the members set up the Straits Chinese British Association (‘SBCA’), with a much broader scope for cultural promotion and a role as the voice of the Peranakan community. The SBCA also became the forum by which new ideas developing in much of the rest of the world were discussed. Many SCBA members became role models of Peranakan society and to a lesser extent, the broader Chinese community.
A few months after the SBCA was set up in Singapore, a branch was established in Malacca and in 1920, another branch followed in Penang. The SCBA were very much Englishmen keen to pledge loyalty to the British crown and in 1901, an infantry unit was set up for local defence in Singapore. Being more visible in their anti-Japanese defence efforts than the more underground Kuomintang sympathisers in Malaya, and being seen by the British as ‘one of us’, some Peranakan leaders were evacuated with the British during the Second World War.
After the war, though, most of Straits Chinese political actions moved beyond the SBCA to more overtly political groupings like AMCJA and MCA. Though small in number in terms of membership in MCA, in pretty much the same proportion of Straits Chinese in the larger Chinese population, SBCA were proportionately more represented at the national level leadership of MCA. In fact, the first four presidents leading MCA for the first quarter century of its existence were Peranakan. With the shift of Straits Chinese political activity to MCA, the SBCA reverted to being a cultural organisation and renamed Singapore Chinese Peranakan Association in 1964.
These two organisations, the Malaya branch of Kuomintang born out of the Tongmenghui, and the SBCA, became representatives of two strands of the Chinese community in Malaya. One was Chinese-educated Sinocentric representing the very vernacular working class & business interests and aiming to preserve as much of the Chinese identity as possible in the national identity of their Malayan home. The other was English-speaking, Western-orientated representing a middle class schooled in an affinity to the British Crown, and recognising the need to negotiate & compromise with the Malaya outside the Chinese community in order to build their common home.
Though a few were able to bridge the two strands, there was the inevitable tension arising when both strands cooperated to work for the emerging pan-Chinese consciousness. In many ways, the early history of MCA was the story of managing this tension.
Today, Chinese Peranakan are more commonly known as Babas, the women being known as Nyonyas. The term Peranakan tend to be used today to encompass non-Chinese Peranakans including the Indian Chitti, Arabs, and more broadly, the Portuguese and other Eurasians. There is a Peranakan Museum in Singapore which does a good job tracing the heritage of various Peranakan communities. In Singapore, the Arab Peranakan community maintains a separate existence while in Malaysia they are counted as Malays.
The Baba community today spans Singapore, Malacca, Penang and Phuket. Culturally, Singapore Babas share essentially similar culture with Malaccan Babas while Penang Babas have slight differences in cuisine and décor. There are still a few Baba houses left in Phuket and it is recommended to visit them before they disappear – if you are able to pull yourself away from beaches on holiday.
Formation of MCA
By early 1948, the Chinese merchant class began to have second thoughts about AMCJA’s alliance with PUTERA. The British just ignored the 1947 Hartal and nothing speaks of bankruptcy of patronage like being ignored by the government. The conservative Chinese community were also unhappy with some of PUTERA’s influence on the People’s Constitution which they deemed too Malay-centric. Pulling their support for the second hartal did nothing to alleviate their uneasiness over a lack of direction to deal with a rapidly changing environment: unfavourable citizenship criteria under the Federation of Malaya, an emerging Malay body that gave a united voice to Malay nationalistic demands, a restive communist movement about to erupt into insurgency, a British administration without adequate funds for post-war reconstruction, and the anti-communist war in China not going well for the Kuomintang they supported. It just wasn’t a good time.
The appointment of the clear-sighted Henry Gurney later that year as the British High Commissioner provided an impetus to the community of Chinese business leaders in Malaya. Gurney realised that the fight against the communists required the races working in concert. For that, he needed a strong Chinese voice, first, as an anti-Communist option for the Chinese that will help organise Chinese anti-communist efforts. He also needed a strong counterweight to Umno, which at that time was in the ascendant and in a highly confident mood. He understood that the two communities must be represented by parties that are equally strong for there to be a viable partnership in the anti-communist front. I am not sure though that at this point, Gurney’s very practical point of view extended as far as an independent Malaya.
There was no shortage of Chinese organisations in Malaya at that time and Gurney aimed to build on this. Chinese organisations in Malaya were highly organised into umbrella groups that can run into multiple tiers. The Associated Chamber of Commerce which sponsored the 1947 Hartal, for instance, was an umbrella group of Chinese chambers of commerce in each state, which are themselves were coalitions of local trade guilds. Likewise, clan associations, organised around a surname, often consolidated into dialect associations. The Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall brought together various Chinese clan and cultural associations, some of which are themselves umbrella bodies. It was only natural that the more expedient way to form a broad pan-Chinese representational body is to add another layer on top of these associations and umbrella bodies.
MCA inaugural meeting
On 27 February 1949, 300 representatives from 72 Chinese organisations met at the inaugural meeting of MCA, sponsored by all 16 Chinese members of the Legislative Council. A national Working Committee was formed with Cheng Lock as its protem chairman and included the more familiar names (familiar to many as road names if not as figures of our country’s story) of HS Lee, Leong Yew Koh, Yong Shook Lin, Tan Siew Sin and Khoo Teik Ee, who were the prime organisers.
Meetings at national level were held in English as Mandarin has not yet become entrenched as the medium of instructions in Chinese schools to be the lingua franca among the broader Chinese community; and the heads of business associations spoke largely in dialect. At the national level, members at least spoke some passable English and maybe Malay to deal with government officials but I don’t think any of them wanted to speak Malay at an MCA meeting. Minutes were in English with translations prepared for those who can only read Chinese.
Further down the organisation, the language of meetings was the prevailing dialect of the state or region. Also, as you go down the organisation, the dominance of the professional middle class, the English-educated and the owners of big businesses at the national level gave way to the working class, the Chinese-educated and owners of small businesses and petty shopkeepers. You would also find more members of secret societies, who joined due their dual membership in Chinese business guilds.
For the analysis of the initial make up of MCA leadership, I am indebted to Hong Pek Koon and her excellent work, The Development of the Malayan Chinese Association.
Parallels with Umno
Note that MCA was called an association as it was initially not set up as a political party, although Henry Gurney may have an eventual political role in mind for it. Much like Umno, the initial mission of MCA was more focussed on social welfare and much of MCA work centred around helping prevent individual Chinese from being deported to China as the British pursued those suspected of having communist sympathies. Umno was similarly founded as an organisation, not a political party but for different reasons. Umno had to avoid being seen as competing with Malay rulers in the political sphere and so took pains to avoid being seen as a political party. I am not sure why it took more than two years for MCA to declare itself a political party but I suspect it spent the time building confidence of Chinese merchant classes in the political process after the failure of PUTERA-AMCJA.
Much of the early welfare work of MCA was funded by a social welfare lottery. Interestingly. the success of MCA lottery inspired Umno to start its own lottery in 1953. There was also a lottery run by the government Social and Welfare Board until the 80s. Interestingly also, the British ended the MCA welfare lottery, on the basis that ‘no political organisations in this country should be allowed to become too strong or too powerful financially’, a non-principle in the age of Barisan Nasional rule in independent Malaysia. The Umno lottery, though, continued to run until 1969.
By 1951, the mission grew to alleviating the social and financial effects of those displaced by the Briggs Plan to move vulnerable Chinese communities near the jungle into new villages. A quarter of the Chinese population in Malaya were relocated from the edge of the jungle to which they fled during the Japanese occupation, but left them vulnerable to communist predation for food and recruits. This work brought many MCA Anglophiles face-to-face with the negative effects of British policy in Malaya.
There were other parallels between Umno and MCA in the early years. Both were umbrella bodies as they were both set up as urgent requirements, albeit in different circumstances and gathering existing organisations into umbrella bodies were the most expedient way to set up representational bodies for their respective communities. Both eventually evolved into unitary organisations, with a strong centre as the source of patronage.
Both also faced tension between an Anglophilic elite in leadership positions overseeing vernacular mass organisations, that are more communally-centric the lower down the organisation you go. Eventually this tension in both parties resolved into a nationalistic narrative that appeals to the masses but overseen by a more professional leadership that has a wider supra-communal agenda for the nation beyond the narrower communal narratives they espouse. That in itself, created a different tension which is still with us today.
The four Englishmen
Tan Cheng Lock
The natural leader in Gurney’s vision for Chinese representation cannot be any other than Tan Cheng Lock. There probably isn’t any Chinese Malayan who the British ranks higher with only Onn Jaafar being of similar distinction. The British saw him as experienced, being on the Legislative Council since 1923, and very importantly sincere. They also considered him the only Chinese with the stature to stand up to Onn.
Cheng Lock was born in 1883 into the Peranakan community in Malacca. At a time when Chinese migration into Malaya was still growing, he was already a fifth generation Malayan, whose family preceded the British in Malaya. He was from a wealthy family but his grandfather was rather eccentric and did not trust any of his four sons with the wealth that he has built up. The grandfather put all his money into a trust which paid out what was basically a survival allowance for his family members and this trust ran for so long that it actually outlived Cheng Lock himself.
As a result, Cheng Lock grew up in a wealthy house but with little money. Although he did well in school, there was not enough funds to send him to study law in Britain and he became a school teacher at his alma mater, Raffles institution in Singapore in 1902. Teaching did not suit him and after six years he moved on to a post as an assistant manager in a rubber company back in Malacca.
Political career
At the age of 29, he was appointed to the town council of Malacca. When the first world war came around, Cheng Lock resuscitated and led an infantry unit of the Straits Settlement Volunteer Corps. Demonstrating his leadership, he was soon elected President of the Malacca SBCA and was appointed to the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements at the age of 40. By 1933, he was on the Straits Settlement Executive Council. These public offices positioned him as a voice not just of the Peranakan community but the broader Chinese community at large.
In 1931, together with the other SBCA chairmen of Singapore and Penang, he petitioned the British authorities for direct elections of Malayans into the Legislative Council, probably the first such proposal raised. In this, they succeeded in getting the British to open up the civil service to Asian Malayans, the first step in Cheng Lock’s quest for Malayanisation of the government. In his speeches, Cheng Lock often came back to the phrase, ‘for all who made Malaya their home’, a phrase that became common in Malayan constitutional discussions.
He also championed socially progressive causes such as Chinese vernacular education and in particular rejected a British proposal to make Malay the sole medium of instructions other than English of free primary education in Malaya. I find it interesting for a partly resinised Straits Chinese who grew up in a heavily Malaynised culture not wanting Chinese Malayan children to be Malaynised but to be Malayanised. That distinction and debate went that far back.
More importantly, he referred to a united Malaya in a 1926 speech, probably the first such public reference by a Malayan. In the years that followed, he articulated a Malayan identity that transcended race & religion and a Malayan government elected all communities even if loyal to the British Crown. Ideas such as self-rule were very much still considered progressive in 1920s Malaya, born out of the idea of self-determination popularised by American president Woodrow Wilson during the post-first world war peace treaty negotiations.
After the Japanese invasion, Cheng Lock and his family evacuated with the British and spend the entire war in India. In India, he linked up with leaders of other Chinese communities from all over South-East Asia, in particular in Indonesia and Borneo. With them, he set up the Overseas Chinese Association (‘OCA’) in 1942, not to be confused with the better-known Japanese-sponsored association of the same name set up to collect financial ‘gifts’ for the Japanese military administration in occupied territories. The Colonial Office in London unfortunately did not reply to Cheng Lock’s letter to them, which was interesting in that it outlined the intention of Malayan members of the OCA to set up a Malayan Chinese Association on return to Malaya to aid British authorities in post-war rebuilding.
By the time Cheng Lock returned to Malaya, he was already very much the senior statesman among Malayans at the age of 62. He recognised that Chinese Malayans can only participate in the prosperity of a self-governing Malaya by being citizens, and for that they need to be transfer their identification from China to Malaya. In 1948, he attempted to set up the Malayan Chinese League but failed from a lack of support from Chinese associations. For that the network of HS Lee was need.
Lee became the ideal complement to Cheng Lock. At his age (he was already touching 70 by the time the Kuala Lumpur municipal elections took place), Cheng Lock was not expected to get involved in the day-to-day workings and campaigns of the independence struggle but rather held himself above the political fray, intervening and lending his credibility when required. The younger and more energetic Lee took on more of the work of organising and adding his network among Chinese associations to Cheng Lock’s political network outside of the Chinese community.
The last 10 years of his life from the founding of MCA were dedicated towards paving the path to Malayan independence. Much of the stories have been told in the other articles and I will not repeat them here. In 1959, Cheng Lock lost in the MCA presidential elections to the more Chinese nationalistic Lim Cheong Eu demanding official language status for Mandarin. MCA politics were already moving away from his pan-Malayan vision to a narrower communal narrative even before his death. He retired and passed on the mantle of to his son, Tan Siew Sin, who became president of MCA and succeeded Lee as the second finance minister of independent Malaya in 1959. Cheng Lock died in 1960 at the age of 77 in an independent Malaya he did more than any other Chinese to help create,
HS Le
Henry Lee Hau Shik was born into an upper-class Chinese family in Hong Kong at the turn of the century. His grandfather came from a family of Imperial officers in the Ching Dynasty and his father was a wealthy businessman. Lee studied economics and law in Cambridge, where he met the future King George VI.
It was also in Cambridge that he met and married an English girl, with whom he had two sons. Unfortunately, on returning home, the classic mother-in-law & daughter-in-law rivalry intervened and they divorced. Lee later remarried a modest Chinese girl more to his mother’s liking, with whom he had seven more children. After his studies, he worked in government and banking.
In 1924, Lee visited Malaya on holiday and ended up staying in the country after buying a tin mine. He became very involved in clan associations and the business community in Malaya. At one point, he was even President of Kuen Cheng Girls School, presumably where his daughters were educated. His many posts in Chinese organisations in Malaya and his many business interests furnished him with a wide network that made him the go-to guy if you needed to get something done in pre-independence Malaya.
When the Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, Lee’s family was ardently pro-Kuomintang and Lee himself organised fundraising in Malaysia. Being the loyal British subject, Lee also set up the civil defence force in Kuala Lumpur. Unsurprisingly, Lee and his family were evacuated with the British from Singapore to India with the British defeat in Singapore.
In India, Lee met Chiang Kai Shek in Calcutta and later moved to Chungking, China to serve in the Kuomintang army. Interestingly, Lee held dual commissions as a colonel, both in the Chinese army in Burma and in the British Army in India, and serving as liaison between the two. This was where his loyalties as a Chinese born in Hong Kong and as a British subject in Malaya met.
After the war, he returned to Malaya to rebuild his businesses but the Emergency intervene. Ever the ardent anti-Communist, Lee became heavily involved in anti-Communist efforts including setting up an anti-Communist newspaper, the China Press, which is still in print today. To the communists, Lee was the archetypal running dog of the British and he was one of the Chinese leaders with a sum on his head. This follows on from the $60,000 the Japanese apparently put on his head during the war.
1949 was the start of the turning point in Lee’s loyalties. Lee was quite involved in organising welfare & cultural organisations to be the anti-Communist front in Selangor, and it was natural he became one of the three co-founders of MCA. Later that year, the Kuomintang was defeated in China and moved to Taiwan and that chapter of Lee’s life started to close, but slowly. Like some other Kuomintang members in MCA who saw MCA as a vehicle for the Kuomintang to reclaim mainland China, Lee seemed to continue to refer to China as our country and Malaya as this country. His position in MCA though gave him the stake in Malaya, culminating in his part in the 1952 Kuala Lumpur municipal elections we saw in the previous article. From then on, Lee’s focus was on the Chinese community in Malaya.
Again, I will not go through the stories of Lee’s involvement in the independence struggle that are covered elsewhere. His importance is reflected in the fact that he was the sole Chinese signatory on the independence agreement with the British, having been one of two Chinese who travelled to London as part of the Malayan government negotiating team in 1956.
Following the 1955 General elections, Lee was appointed to the first Tunku cabinet as a minister of transport, the first in a long string of Chinese transport ministers in Malaysia. In that cabinet, the critical post of minister of finance remained held by a British official and it was only on Independence Day that a Malayan was appointed to the post. That Malayan was HS Lee, the first Minister of Finance of Malaya. Ill-health intervened, however and in 1959, he relinquished the position to Tan Siew Sin, Cheng Lock’ son.
His other works continue, though, and he held the post of chairman of the Olympic Council of Malaya, being an avid sportsman. In 1966, he founded the Development and Commercial Bank, which went on to become the fourth largest bank in Malaysia in 1997, when it became one of the component banks that merged into RHB Bank.
After his death in 1988, Kuala Lumpur High Street, then known as Jalan Bandar, was renamed Jalan HS Lee in his honour. I should caution though the Lee Rubber Building on that road, and now a luxury hotel, has nothing to do with HS Lee, being built by a different Lee and has its own interesting story as a building. More could have been done, though, to remember this very remarkable Chinese Englishman who became a Malayan, living his most exciting life to the fullest.
Leong Yew Koh
Of the three co-founders of the MCA, Leong Yew Koh was the least known and also probably the least English of the three. Born in 1988 as the son of a Perak tin miner, he worked his way through to an economics degree at the prestigious London School of Economics and was later called to be a barrister at Inner Temple London. That was probably the only part of his life that was English and he returned to Malaya to practice law in Ipoh until 1932, when his Chinese roots called him back to China where he had his primary education. He served the Chinese government in various capacities, including in several various overseas Chinese postings.
When the Japanese invaded Malaya, Yew Koh was sent to set up the Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Army (‘OCAJA’), not to be confused to the similarly known Singapore Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army, which was tragically decimated in the 1942 defence of Singapore. The OCAJA was anti-Communist and as such, was the anti-argument that all anti-Japanese guerrillas in Malaya were communists. Yew Koh held the position of a Kuomintang major-general, equivalent in rank to one who commanded a division of 10 to 20,000 soldiers in a regular army. After the war, he continued his anti-Communist efforts, being appointed to the Legislative Council of Malaya to bolster the number of anti-Communist Chinese on the council
In 1949, he became one of the three co-founders of MCA, in which he served as its first secretary-general. It was in an MCA meeting in December that year that he survived a grenade attack launched by communists, owing his life to a blood transfusion that day. After the 1955 general elections, he won his seat in Ipoh and was appointed to the first Tunku cabinet as the health minister, the first in a long line of Chinese health ministers in Malaysia.
On independence, he was appointed the first governor of Melaka, a position he held until 1959 when he became justice minister in the federal cabinet. Politicians normally move from active politics to become the governor of a state but Yew Koh made the opposite journey, probably because of pressures to appoint a Muslim governor. Still, his short tenure as the only non-Muslim head of a Malaysian state belied the common mythology that only a Muslim can hold such a position.
In 1962, his wife of 55 years passed away and her death pretty much devastated him. He visited her grave at the Catholic Cemetery in Cheras weekly to pray until eventually, he himself passed away seven months after her death in January the following year. The cortège from his home to St John’s Cathedral was said to be 3km long and he was finally laid to rest next to his beloved wife.
This was another man with a fascinating life, serving two countries and laying foundations for a third. More than the other two co-founders, his life fascinated me as it was overshadowed by tragedy. The first of his three daughters died in infancy and was laid to rest with a beautiful tombstone at Cheras Cemetery. And at the end of his life, in which he had achieved so much, he was just a lonely old man who brought an empty and broken heart to his wife’s grave every week. It is sad that there is so little is written about his life.
The fourth Englishman
The fourth Englishman involved in the founding of MCA was of course Sir Henry Gurney, whose contribution to Malayan history I covered in the previous article. Without his prodding and quiet words behind the scenes, the birth of a Chinese representational body would have taken longer and been a lot more torturous that it already was.
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