Abstract
Urban growth in the twentieth century engulfed many cultural enclaves and led to threatened histories, communities and cultural practices of places. One such spatial context within the urban space of cities is the diasporic space of the Chinese, often named Chinatown. Petaling Street has been commonly perceived as the microcosm of the Chinese diaspora in Kuala Lumpur with Yap Ah Loy the figure who catalyzed its urban growth that resulted in the fabrication of a sense of belonging and a sense of home for the Chinese diaspora. This paper argues that while discourses on the Chinese diaspora have been centred on the street as a diasporic space it is Market Square (Medan Pasar), the foci of Chinese diasporic development during the historical period of Yap Ah Loy, that offers a more critical perspective. It first examines how the Chinese diaspora constructed the street and the square in Old Kuala Lumpur, and looks at the question, ‘In what sense do they still own them?’ By focusing the discourse on the context of the square in more detail, through historical narrative and spatial analysis, it then highlights the fact that the discourse extends beyond the street. It contends that urban patterns such as the square act as a critical text for unfolding the varying issues of diasporic space within enclaves that are not only contested but record the erosion of culture.
Keywords
Introduction
Old Kuala Lumpur was once a major socio-spatial container of the Chinese population and a private community space where the Chinese could build and maintain connections with their kind, both within Kuala Lumpur and abroad. No longer an epicentre it nevertheless retains an important material and symbolic role in relation to Malaysia’s Chinese population. ‘Chinatown’ (a specific portion of Old Kuala Lumpur defined later in this paper) is not just an ordinary Chinese settlement in Malaysia: neither was it ever one when Malaysia was Malaya. Located at the centre of Kuala Lumpur, around the famous Ci Chang Street (or Petaling Street), it is now a popular place for, both, locals and foreign tourists. This place was the original starting point of Kuala Lumpur town, in the late nineteenth century. Built by the Chinese pioneer Yap Ah Loy, the streets which were later named Petaling Street, High Street and Sultan Street and their immediate surrounding area formed the centre of Kuala Lumpur.
When used with inverted comas, ‘Chinatown’ refers to a specific portion of Old Kuala Lumpur—principally around Petaling Street, which the city council proposed as a brand name to promote (or so it was given to understand) this heritage enclave as a tourist spot. The proposal sparked considerable controversy. This episode, part of a sequence of events which commenced in 1980 and climaxed at the end of the 1990s—the making of ‘Chinatown’—may be regarded as a lens through which we can examine the larger predicament of what Chinese cultural elements should be included, and how much should be expunged in the process of nation building. From the mid-1980s onwards, Kuala Lumpur had seen the formulation of grand projects to nationalize the urban centre by means of building a new landmark (Kuala Lumpur City Centre) within her boundaries and a new administrative capital (Putrajaya) outside. Perhaps by uncanny coincidence, in that same period, the Chinese Old Town surrounding Petaling Street succumbed to various measures that effectively erased some Chinese cultural symbols and history. Three representative examples of this memory blotting out were (i) the denial of the founder status of Yap Ah Loy; (ii) the replacement of Chinese street-names and (ii) the issue of the stamping of the name, ‘Chinatown’.
Loo Yat Ming’s book, Architecture and Urban Form in Kuala Lumpur: Race and Chinese Spaces in a Postcolonial City, is a seminal piece of literature which argues for the need to read the street in the context of the broader colonial space rather than seeing it as a singular isolated entity. According to Loo, the Chinatown issue provides a good case study to initiate an examination into the politics of space, race and power, and its implications for the ethnic Chinese. Loo labelled a diasporic space such as Yap Ah Loy’s Chinatown as ‘other space’. He argued that Chinatown had existed and had been represented as an ‘other’ place both in relation to the adjacent colonial buildings, as well as the native Malay kampongs and settlements. For the colonial agenda, it served as a racial container in the city and was instrumental in the definition of the Chinese race itself and the manipulation and segregation of the different racial groups. The unique built forms and architecture of the shop houses in Chinatown, which were a big contrast to the colonial buildings on the other side of the Klang River, was also used to construct a dichotomy of native and civilized, indeed colonized and colonizer. Indeed, the shop house design and Chinatown as an urban whole were so unique and so closely associated with Chineseness that it was synonymous with the Chinese way of life and the ‘race’ itself.
If Chinatown is represented as a container, fabricated and perceived as a cultural enclave commonly associate as Petaling Street, can further reading of the entire urban space of Yap Ah Loy’s Chinatown offer extensions to the contested identities of the Chinese diaspora? Extending from Loo’s inquiry of ‘other space’, this paper studies the square, Medan Pasar, as an urban space which forms the heart of the development of Kuala Lumpur and the foci of Yap Ah Loy’s Chinatown. The relevance to the urban space is rather obvious, as the overseas Chinese have long had a specific relation to space through ‘Chinatown’. Drawing on archival literature and images, spatial and social mappings of Chinatown, as well as contemporary studies on Chinatown by Loo as a secondary source, this paper presents the trajectory of historical and contemporary narratives of the Old Market Square as a diasporic space—or rather a space conceived of and developed by the then diaspora. Architecture and the built environment are important interpretive ‘text’ for reflecting upon the expressions captured in spatial and social constructs that made up the habitation of the diaspora. A key theme is the exploration of tensions and conflict within the urban space. This paper argues that the diasporic space occurs beyond Petaling Street, and that the street and the square, although spatially and socially differentiated, jointly offer the varied and more complete array of contested terrains of the Chinese diaspora in Kuala Lumpur. Whether we look at the overtly symbolic and commercialized Petaling Street or the resistively historical Medan Pasar, the thinning out of identity as an homogenous cultural enclave is clear.
This article will begin with defining Chinatown as a discourse of diasporic space, followed by literature review of historical notions of diasporic space in Kuala Lumpur Chinatown. The paper subsequently draws focus on the diasporic discourse to the context of the square through historical narrative and spatial analysis, arguing the importance of urban patterns such as the square acts as a text for unfolding the different issues on diasporic space within the cultural enclave, that not only have contested but eroded the Chinese diaspora.
Chinatown as Diasporic or Other Space
The multi-perspective of the term ‘diaspora’ points towards many things: (i) the very idea of migration and dispersal of people from their homeland, (ii) the notion of boundary and segregation distinguishing the ‘us’ and ‘them’, (ii) the commercialization of diasporic space as cultural product for consumption and (iv) the meaning of diaspora as a contested terrain of integration with the locals.
‘Diaspora’ comes from Greek and means scattered or separated. Horticultural words have often been used to convey its central idea of sowing and transplanting, of people dispersed from their original homeland to build lives in new places. ‘Diaspora’ originally referred to major historical migrations, such as the dispersal of the Jews from Israel, the colonial expansion of the Greeks, the removal through slavery of millions of Africans, and the exile of Armenians following massacres by the Turks in the early twentieth century. In the case of the Jews the implicit meaning is the hope of return to their originating point of dispersal. Nowadays the term has a wider remit. It is commonly used to refer to ethnic or religious communities spread around the world who stay connected and retain a sense of common identity and origins (Knott, n.d.).
Diasporas implied boundary or territorialization around those who belong. In the case of the Chinese, Chinatowns are, firstly, physical manifestations of community, embodying a connection between Chinese people and a distinction from others (Dufoix, 2008, pp. 72–73) which allow them to present a ‘Chinese face’ to the outside world (Christiansen, 2003, p. 5). Anderson reiterates this objectification: ‘Chinatowns’ are not ‘Chinatowns’ only because the Chinese have lived in them in cloistered fashion; rather, ‘Chinatowns’ are in part a European creation. Like the idea of a Chinese race, ‘Chinatowns’ possessed a tradition of imagery lodged firmly in the popular consciousness of Europeans (and indeed of the Chinese themselves). Originating as a product of institutionalized discrimination and forced segregation (Anderson, 1991) they later developed as ethnic enclaves often centred on specific economic niches such as catering.
More recently, they have not only been increasingly transformed into places of leisure and consumption (Rath, 2007) but also calcified as ‘cultural spaces’ of wider symbolic and material value (Benton, 2007). Official multicultural policies have sometimes involved the ethnicization of particular spaces and the promotion of ‘Chinatown’ has sometimes been a means to regenerate certain areas of the city (Chan, 2005, p. 15).
‘Chinese space’ is also the visible space where the Chinese population interact with the local through everyday encounters and via negotiation with official bodies. They thus have an important role in the process of integration which is a contested and multidimensional concept involving both tangible and intangible elements (Niessen & Huddleston, 2007). Contradictions predictably abound.
Studies that focus on urban space as diasporic space (Loo, 2013; Lou, 2017; Panos & Montagna, 2012) are perhaps one of the very last to join the stable that include studies in the fields of sociology (Sales, D’Angelo & Lin, 2011; Sales, Hatziprokopiou, et al., 2009), cultural studies, history and literature (Wong, 2016), linguistics (Wang, Koh, Riget & Shoniah, 2016) and media (Lu, 2015). A study on the Chinese diaspora in Boston argued that Chinatown Park was the outcome of a re-interpretation of diasporic into something identified by the western city (Lou, 2017). The conceptualization of the Chinese diaspora—fragmented and fluid—was based on the local social context with the vivid image of a new contemporary Chineseness: This was an attempt at an isolated ethnic identity, the government’s intent at shaping a public Chinese presence evidencing an Eurocentric perception of place making.
Current studies on Chinatown as diasporic space primarily focus on the construction and development of identity. From a sociological and urban perspective, a research team from Middlesex University led by Professor Rosemary Sales researched on the Chinese diaspora in London from 2007 to 2008 (Sales et al., 2011). The diaspora, migration and identities programme sought to provide a critical understanding of the relationship between Chinatown and diasporic identity and practice. In addressing the questions relating to Chinatown’s role for London’s Chinese communities, and the images of Chinese diaspora portrayed in and through London’s Chinatown, the research group combined qualitative and quantitative methods to map Chinatown and explore its meaning for Chinese people in London. The results affirmed Chinatown’s importance for London’s Chinese population, especially newcomers for whom it provided practical support, information and networks both formal and informal. It also had a symbolic role in creating a sense of belonging and being ‘at home’ notwithstanding the fact that its varying interests and activities, often complementary might have been sometimes conflicting. Its role as a tourist destination might have been disorientating for the community but it also brought resources for regeneration and the maintenance of its Chinese character. The research also revealed the fragility of Chinatown’s acceptance in London with issues of undocumented workers who were vital to its economic success but raised the specter of Chinatown as being dangerous and uncontrolled. A similar study on Milan with comments on the politics of contestation and protests involving Chinese immigrants in an urban context was carried out to investigate the nuance of this issue in mainland European (Panos & Montagna, 2012).
The review of literature above points to limited research on the Chinese diaspora in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. Wang et al. (2016) explored the Chinese diaspora using an historical approach to linguistic landscape studies. Old photos of Kuala Lumpur Chinatown from Moving Mountains (2012) and Our Petaling Street (2012) were analysed in terms of language choice, script choice, size of various scripts and word choice. The common ideology within the community was that language was the symbol of Chinese identity and represented the core of Chinese culture. Signs in this study included any visible signage from advertisements or flyers pasted on pillars and walls to huge posters or banners on perimeter fences or buildings.
Loo’s (2013) book is arguably the first academic book to examine the relationship of Malaysia’s large Chinese minority to the politics of architecture and urbanism in Kuala Lumpur. It is also one of the few academic books to situate Chinese diasporic spaces at the centre of the construction of city and nation. By including the spatial contestation of those from the margins and their resistance to the hegemony of state ideology, this book proposed a recuperative urban and architectural history, seeking to revalidate the marginalized spaces of the minority community (Chinese spaces in Kuala Lumpur), and to re-script them into the narrative of the postcolonial nation-state.
Discursive forces of the government or policy makers on the territorialization and minoritization of the Chinese ‘other’ to the host country, the economic drive and the cultural consumption of place through tourism, the symbolic role of sense of belonging have implications on the diasporic space of Chinatowns. Chinatown as a symbol of diversity due to urban restructuring and regeneration where multiple stakeholders have competing and conflicting interests upon its space, which further commodify and commercially exploit the symbolic landscape of ‘Chineseness’ (Loo, 2013).
Chinatown, Old Kuala Lumpur
With the hindsight of history, we can argue that the concept of Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur has from inception been associated with the politics of space, race and power. Chinatown is an instrument of minoritization—aimed to create segregation between the minority Chinese and the ‘dominant community’—and Loo calls this ‘a colony within a colony’. The use of boundaries to demarcate an ‘immigrant’s town’ signifies separation, creating a wall between ‘You’ (Chinatown and Chinese) and ‘Me’ (White), and at the same time, as an inherited follow-on, between ‘You’ (Chinese) and ‘We’ (White and Malays). This segregation and ‘difference’ is further emphasized by the urban forms and architecture of Chinatown, which are distinctive from both the colonial buildings (British) and kampong houses (Malays).
This place called Chinatown impinged an image of Others onto the Malay eyes. The Chinese language and Chinese culture contrasted enormously with practices of the British and the Malays. Almost all the Chinese at that time of Kuala Lumpur’s early development were landless immigrants who were dependent on capital. They were ‘urban-livers’ and ‘morally spoilt’ in the eyes of the Malays. Chinatown then was full of prostitutes, gambling places, opium houses and drinking businesses. It was an ‘other’ to the British as much as it was to the Malays.
Concrete geographical circumstances and urban spaces can be understood as expressions of abstract social relations. The colonialist administrators in institutionalized a racial ideology not only in policies but also through a set of territorial arrangements. In a physical sense, overseas Chinese settlements of this period the world over were molded in decisive ways by their receiving societies, and a colonial city like Kuala Lumpur was no exception. The idea of a Chinese race became objectified in space, and through that nexus it was given a local referent in the minds of Europeans, became a social fact, and aided its own reproduction. Partridge (cited in Loo, 2013) states: The establishment of the large, urban Chinatowns in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was the product of political and economic forces driven by racism. The existence of the Chinese native town was crucial in colonial urban layout as other space. Chinatown had a lot of racial and cultural connotations to the colonizer, as well as to the other colonized race, especially the Malays. By and large, it helped in race segregation and the manipulation of different racial groups. These differences and separations were emphasized by the designs of the colonial buildings.
The Square as Diasporic Spaces: The Old Market Square (or Medan Pasar)
Unlike scenarios in most Chinatowns the world over, the visitor to Petaling Street and Medan Pasar (Old Market Square)—an enclave that Malaysia sells as her own Chinatown—will be surprised by the proliferation of identities that could be labelled as anything but Chinese. The source of this superficial observation—the ubiquitous non-Chinese crowd, the muted use of Chinese in signages, the paltry presence of Chinese architecture—hides an undercurrent of a contestation that pervades all aspects of being of the Chinese diaspora here. While the historical event-sequence of the diaspora in Malaysia (originally, Malaya) has been adequately documented, the socio-political agendas behind protagonists in the narrative, however, continue to be debated upon, particularly when the evaluation of who contributed more in nation-building is still being forged. The implication of this evaluation has a direct comment on the nature of the rights of each party to belonging, and for an independent nation of 60 years of age the issue is far from being resolved amicably. This is the contestation, and this paper goes further, or wider, by discussing the issue architecturally, focusing on the very place that is both the actual and symbolic start and ‘home’ of the representative Chinese diaspora, a main party to the contestation. Working under the larger thematic question, ‘Can the Chinese ever be not a diaspora in Malaysia?’ we seek to investigate two questions. (a) In what way do urban spatial types relate to contestations by diasporas? (b) In what way can the balance between integration and assimilation be read in the character of urban spatial types? We will conclude with a comment on the ultimate value of Old KL to the Chinese, and by default to the country.
Historical Narrative
At exactly a century before the independence of Malaya, 1857, is the most convenient year to understand the commencement of the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. While the Chinese had settled in the peninsula much earlier (as far back at the sixteenth century) it is Kuala Lumpur that would become the most critically and symbolically contested place for it is here that the diaspora had the principle role in building up a city from mud and jungle to become the nation’s capital (See Figure. 1 for the location of Kuala Lumpur in the peninsula). In that mid-nineteenth-century year, two royal brothers, Raja Abdullah and Raja Juma’at of the state of Selangor, would fund a team of 87 immigrant Chinese miners to row upriver from Klang, the royal town, on Selangor’s coast to prospect for tin in the Ampang area. River conditions prevented their progress beyond the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers at the spot that was to be named Kuala Lumpur (River Mouth of Mud) a name that itself would be contested later (See Figure. 2 for the location of this confluence, marked in red, at the centre of today’s city of Kuala Lumpur). Conveniently a base camp for overland forages into Ampang towards the northeast it grew into a diasporic settlement of Chinese miners before, five years later, in 1862, it would welcome its most illustrious and historically significant son in the person of Yap Ah Loy.
The settlement since inception was administered by community leaders called Capitans, of which Yap would become the third in 1869 after fighting as trusted lieutenant of the second (Liu Ngim Kong) in the drawn out Selangor Wars (1867–1873). He was conferred this position by no less than the Selangor ruler, Sultan Mahdi, who travelled up from Klang for the investiture. Having proven himself an outstanding warrior, Yap would then unveil his administrative and entrepreneurial acumen by controlling and building up the settlement into a formidable town—prosperous enough to entice the Klang-based, colonizing British to relocate their centre of control to Kuala Lumpur in 1880, thus legitimizing and setting it on a trajectory towards its present-day status as the capital of Malaysia.
By the time British Resident, Frank Swettenham, arrived in the town at the muddy confluence a year earlier the settlement pattern was already well set with a market square as the main public space. His thumbnail sketch from an earlier visit in 1875 (Figure 3) is the earliest representation of the one and only ‘public space’ in its embryonic stage. This representation of perception tells us more than any surveyed map can. In the Resident’s mind the dominant architecture was the house of Yap Ah Loy, in front of which the chief urban space was occupied by a gambling shed and a market shed. This appears to be of greater importance than the correct configuration of the main waterway: Note that it misses the continuation of the Klang River past the confluence with the Gombak. While the extent of building around the square is unclear, it is certain that by 1878 all four sides were designated building land to define the conveniently named ‘Old Market Square’ (Figure 4). It can also be asserted that by 1882 buildings around Old.
Market Square were shop houses of one or two storeys (Figure 5). The southern and flanking eastern and western sides of the square had shop fronts while the northern a shop-side. Yap’s own house, built in 1870, occupied a prominent spot on the southern side of the square (Figure 6). In terms of space ownership, it appears that the Square was very much Yap’s: He built and controlled ‘a very insecure shed called a market’ and ‘the busy gambling booth’ in front of his house (Gullick, 2000, p. 39).
This was a natural evolution in the growth of a settlement juxtaposed to the jetty built by the early miners at the confluence. Thus the western row of shop houses fronted the market with their backs to the river, not an unusual organic outcome for pioneering establishments. These flanking rows were naturally separated from the southern row by a street (Market Street) which was the most rational plan as Market Street was the first and only street with a bridge (felled tree trunks over the water) that connected either banks of the Klang River that was nearest to the epicentre of the development. From the focus of the market as the chief and daily trading place the town grew northward (Ampang Street) and southward (Roger Street) on the eastern bank of the river. Rippling eastward would come High Street, the longest street in the town, and at its intersection with Market Street two streets veered off—Klyne Street to the north, and Petaling Street to the south. Thus Market Square may be regarded as the ‘genesis space’ giving form and focus to the pattern of the town.
The regular growth of Old KL from 1857 was interuppted by the catastrophic six-year Selangor Wars (1867–1873) which all but decimated the town. In the narrative of this paper it may be regarded as the first watershed event in the morphological development of Market Square, and indeed Old KL in its entirety. Opposing factions of the Chinese diaspora – such as the Kanching Chinese, led by Chong Chong, opposing those in Kuala Lumpur, led by Yap Ah Loy – battled for the rights to land and mining opportunities under the larger umbrella of local royalty – such as Syed Mashhor, opposing Raja Mahdi and Tunku Kudin (Gullick, 2004, p. 77–79). Collaboration across ethnic divides was the order of the day with allegiences sometimes vacillitating. Yap was in the thick of it before securing victory and the devasted township for spoils. Undaunted by depletion, he rebuilt the town, including his commemorative temple, the Sin Sze Si Ya, for its re-opening in 1875. The Sin Sze Si Ya would be the one of a few of Yap’s properties remaining to this day (Figures 7 and 10).
Two points are pertinent to our investigation. When the British came into the narrative of Kuala Lumpur in March 1880 (relocating from the coastal Klang) (i) Yap Ah Loy, having ascended to Capitancy in 1869, was already well established as the most powerful person of the diaspora in Kuala Lumpur, and (ii) the British shrewedly concluded that it was the most feasible (least costly to the Empire) to build upon the established urban pattern developed by Yap for their own agenda to legalize land ownership with property titles (Loo). The British rulers would not only continue to recognize Yap as the leader of the Chinese community (essentially, the diaspora) but in fact regard him as the founder of Kuala Lumpur.
The legalizing process was not without contestation as Yap ‘owned about half the town’ in a settlement of 220 houses, ‘shacks of wood with atap roofs’ (Gullick, 2000, p. 38). New to the scene, the British surveyor, Daly (son-in-law of the Resident, Douglas), tasked with surveying both the West Bank for the colonial administrative and residential buildings as well as the East Bank into commercial and other zones for the colonized, was met with resistance by Yap who deplored changes. It wasn’t so much that ‘unoccupied land in and around the town was divided into building plots’ for auction in September 1881 but that auctioneer and one of the bidders for some of the property were Daly and his father-in-law! This would be an unsavoury practice that was apparently widespread enough for Maxwell, the succeeding Resident after Swettenham and Douglas, to intstruct his head of lands, Birch, to investigate the existing land registry. The resultant report sent to the Colonial Office early in 1891 stated in the majority of land purchases by government officials the sale or purchase price was not recorded with family proxies used in many cases (Gullick, 2000, p. 106). In this climate, therefore, ownership of property that would form the Chinese diaspora’s urban space would not go uncoveted. On the positive side the issue of land titles by the government of the day meant security of tenure even if citizenship for the diaspora was still decades away.
If war was the first watershed then acts of God in 1881 would be the next. On 14 Januaryand 21 December of that year respectively fire and flood nearly wiped out the town. Most of the shophouses were burnt to the ground, and Yap’s own house was destroyed in the flood. The colonial master’s ensuing decree that all rebuilding would be in brick saw Yap starting a brick factory in Brickfields, south of Old KL which resulted in most of the heritage shophouses remaining to this day. Brick and tiles replaced timber and attap, in a sense the Square and the Street were spatially concretized.
In 1885 the British compelled Yap to demolish the unstable market shed in front of his house (from which he derived stall rentals). This was twinned with land reclamation of the large swamp behind his house. Aside from structural risk of the flimsy shed the disposal of putrid and rotting vegetables around the market was most unhygenic, to say the least. A site for an new market would only be possible after land ownership was resolved. Yap laid claim to the large swamp in his backyard into which flowed surface water from upstream Pudu as well as effluent from piggeries and abatoirs. The Selangor Secretariate files of 1882 record his complaint ‘perhaps with some justice, that hitherto (I have) done everything and the Government has done nothing for the Town’ (Gullick, 2000, p. 50). Nevertheless, seeing the overall good of health and safety to the community (many of them his workers) he cooperated with commencement of earth (mainly refuse) filling in 1884 allowingboth the construction of a better market (Figure 8) as well as, more significantly, the market square to become a truly open space.
Yap died in 1885 before he could see the town he built become the state capital in 1887 and later the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States in 1896—just 36 years from the miners’ landing at the confluence. Old Market Square then was indisputably the centre of commerce of the town. At the time of his death Yap had already amassed great wealth (through mining, tapioca flour manufacture, opium trade and gambling, to name the main avenues) and was the single largest owner of property in town: he owned 147 lots in Kuala Lumpur out of which 116 were in the centre which we define as ‘Old KL’ or ‘Chinatown’ (Figure 9). Of the 38 lots facing Old Market Square, he owned 19, exactly half, including his own house on Market Street on the southern side of the Square (Figure 4). He had also built ‘Chinese schools, the main roads within and around the city, a hospital, a temple, the first manufacturing factory in Kuala Lumpur, etc.’ (Loo, 2013). His tapioca manufacturing factory occuppied three lots (i.e., Lots 2, 3 and 4 of Block 23 in Figure 7) on one of the major business streets and would give that street its name, Ci Chang Kai, literally ‘Tapioca Factory Street’ in the Cantonese dialect. ‘Petaling Street’(from the original ‘Pataling’) would be the official name given by the British.
Clearly the pattern of land ownership was firmly set by then and henceforth developemnt of private buildings, dictated by commerce more than anything, else grew within the unchanged street matrix. Maps of 1889 and 1889 (Figures 11 and 12) show a fixed road network against a rerouted Klang River and introduction of a railway branch across the river towards the east. Even the government of the day had to negotiate with private owners for purchase of designated lots for institutional purposes, with money changing hands, as was the case with the purchase of Loke Yew’s shop at the corner of Jalan Raja and Market Street to build the New Post Office, to cite one example.
After the year of natural disasters that was 1881, new brick and tile buildings around Old Market Square were progressively built to three storeys. The earliest southern view of the Square (Figure 13) shows a two-storey shophouse in the middle of the eastern block which by 1915 has been redeveloped to match the adjoining three storey neighbours both in height and architectural style (Figure 14). This change in the urban spatial demeanour was a snowballing result of rising land values following the legalizing of lot ownership. Barely visible in Figure 13, behind the luxuriant foliage, is the southern face of the Square where Yap’s house occupied one (or at least one) of the three lots known to be his, that is, Lots 6, 7 and 9 (Figure 9). While it is unclear whether he rebuilt his house after the flood of December 1881, we do know that by 1915 the said block had been developed commercially.
The northen face of the Square tells a similar story: note the infill redevelopment from Figures 15 and 16. Increasing prosperity was also reflected in the coming of the motorcar, in general use by the 1920s. While Old Market Square continued its evolutionary growth as the commercial centre of Kuala Lumpur its arhitectural fabric remained largely intact save for the addition of a clock tower in 1937 (Figure 17) and the ground accommodation of circulation patterns for the motorcar—perhaps an heuristic experience for the municipal planner.
The city as a whole did not see escalating property development until the 1970s and even more so from the early 1980s when premiership was taken over by Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister, Mahathir Moahamad. In his 22-year administration, three particular enacted occurrances (discussed later) would impact the Chinese diaspora sifgnificantly. By his time, the term ‘diaspora’ was no longer technically correct, for the Chinese in Malaya had in 1957 obtained citizenship in the independent Malaysia by operation of law, thus overturning their country-subject status with China, their motherland. The emotional tie was quiet a different matter, though and patriotism was always called into question with attestations dependent upon the party making the call. Other than the sporadic self-repatriation pursuant to the Communist takeover in 1949, the Chinese in Malaysia are adamant on being Malaysian, a desire that has sometimes been met with suspicion by parties whose own agendas were equally emphatically challenged. The uglier, recorded outbursts by the Malays—having inherited the mantle and instruments of government from the British—to leave this land (as you are a pendatang, ‘comer-from-elsewhere’) are fortunately rare, and, more significantly, tempered by saner voices of all ethnicities that these strains may be motivated by entrenched powers with agendas of permanence. At the other extreme are more progressive voices calling for assimilation of the Chinese (and other ex-‘diasporas’) into a Bangsa Malaysia—Malaysian Race, a formulaic concept first mooted in the Sixth Malaysia Plan in 1991. This must be seen in the context of the rise of China as a formidable global political and economic force with ramifications for the non-national Chinese living overseas. Malaysian Chinese may be categorized as ‘… generally commited to the new nation-building politics, even though they remained uncertain of their future as ethnic Chinese and were never sure whether they would ever be fully accepted as loyal nationals’ (Gungwu, 1972 and requoted in 1993). Amidst a drawn out experience of acceptance and rejection by the majority and controlling Malays the experience of the Chinese has been spotted by anxiety, but never really threatened. The balance of power and their economic clout and usefulness in relation to global politics obviated that. Nevertheless, while they are fully commited to integration in Bangsa Malaysia it is fair to register an existence of ‘delicate equilibrium’ (Wang et al., 2016, p. 946).
The period 1857–1880 may be classified as Yap Ah Loy’s City in which he reigned supreme, being the only point of negotiation between the incoming British administrators and the prevalent migrant Chinese populace that made up the majority of Kuala Lumpur. The Malays congregated in Kampung Jawa towards the north of of the town and were not an economic force if gauged by the fact that ‘only seventy of the 220 houses were in the Malay quarter’ (Gullick, 2000, p. 41). Town planning was pragmatic and organic repercussions of pioneering ‘frontier-based’ sensibilities. Market Street bridge, for example, started and stayed as felled tree trunks (replaced once) for some time until the British replaced it with a steel girder bridge in 1891 (Gullick, 2000, p. 50). Sanitary infrastructural considerations were not a priority if for no other reason than lack of scientific knowledge.
The fire and flood in the hindsight of history was a boon to the strengthening of diasporic urban space, and the retention of the pre-disaster land boundaries is in fact a monument to Yap Ah Loy. Arguably, this is by association the prime contribution of the Chinese to the building of Kuala Lumpur. Building the town in masonary itself was the concomittant. Research is required on how many of the 220 shophouses belonged to the Chinese, of which Yap owned well near half, justifying the discussion here that regards Yap as representative of the diaspora. The British brought not only health and safety principles, which were instituted but, perhaps more significantly, architectural taste and expertise. Shophouses in Old Market Square were rebuilt after the flood by British architects in the ‘latest’ European styles and there is no record that this met with derision by Yap or the populace. On the contrary, it was deemed a symbol of progress and ‘rise in class’ as Yap employed these architects (A.C. Hubback, for one) to design his shophouses on Old Market Square—see Figures 19 and 20, for examples, of his properties. Note the reinterpretation of the verandah on the upper storeys of Lot 4 in Figure 20, indicating an architectural evolution from timber to masonary architectonics. Further, trade profitability would be the next factor altering the demeanour of facades around the Square. Chinese signages, and retail activities on five-foot ways, pronounced in earlier decades would give way gradually as modern transaction and advertising methods came into play. Chineseness was obviously obviated where owners or tenants were of other ethnicities. Unlike Petaling Street which was doggedly a place of individual Chinese retail, Old Market Square increasingly attracted corporates such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. This was the nature and pace of development in the Square (interrupted by both world wars) until Independence when transformations took a different course.
Malaysia had three prime ministers after Independence whom may be described as post-colonialist in more than one sense: They were congenial to, and perhaps beholden of, the ex-rulers; inherited the controlling ruling position consequent to the Independence negotiations; and treaded deliberately with British methodologies in governance. The situation changed when Mahathir Mohamad took over in 1980 to lead for 22 years as the longest serving prime minister of Malaysia. No lover of the British, he (i) looked East to Japan and Korea for development models, (ii) privileged the welfare of the Malays—his ethos very much derived from his book (earlier banned by the first prime minister) The Malay Dilemma and (iii) deputized a minister fully commited to islamization. Filtered down through the municipal city council this meant that expressions of Chineseness were not encouraged if not outrightly hampered. The change of street names from the original English and Chinese to the Malay, the statutory demand for incorporation of Malay translations (with the condition that text in other ethinicities be in smaller fonts) has been discused by Loo in his thesis on of Malaynization and minoritization of the Chinese. In a typical attitude of compromise, and perhaps fatalistic subservience, this was not met with great protest. Endearment to Chinese identity was perhaps undergoing the gradual but irreversible effects of globalization and affluence with its favour of things Western. Other than major festivals (such as the lunar new year, Ching Ming and the mooncake festival) and familiarity with the reading and writing of the Chinese language by their progeny the economically advancing Chinese community did not regard anything else as worthy carriers of Chinese heritage—not architecture apart from the intrinsically religious, such as temples.
Islamization, fuelled in no small measure by the Iranian revolution of 1979, did not affect the evolution of Old Market Square which do not contain any religious element—Islamic or otherwise. Thus the buildings that make up Old Market Square morphed according to the dictates and values of business investment, incidentally a naturally Chinese trait and was only moderated by planning regulations which were circumscribed quantitatively in factors such as plot ratios rather than the preservation of things past. Consequently, from the 1960s onward, outscaled towers were approved for construction to jostle uncomfortably against older neighbours (see Figure 21—Everest Hotel and A-One Hotel; and Figure 22—UOB Tower, middle, and Maran Tower, right, or Figure 23—towers on the left).
Change on the same building could, and did, happen more than once over the years. Yap Ah Loy’s house, for example, was replaced in the 1960s by the Mercantile Bank with a Modernist podium and aluminium brise soliel tower (illustrated earlier as Figure 18) which was later remodelled into the white banded façade that is the present Pacific Express Hotel (Figure 24).
Beyond architecture the urban platform itself has undergone its own contestations. Beginning as virgin tropical jungle, Old Market Square has accommodated compacted earth for an open market, tarmac for the incursion of the motor vehicle, and finally homogeneous tiles for a pedestrianized plaza (Figures 23 and 24). In turn, it accommodated mere space followed by trees and road kerbs before the present concrete planters and other street furniture. The space has seen and continues to acccept a variance of human activities from grocery retail to transportation and recreation. More unusual events such as the catering of an ‘open house’ dinner for Diwali (Figure 25) and a demonstration for free and fair elections (Figure 26) are not alien in this public realm. Perhaps the very stability of Old Market Square itself as an acceptable urban typology is the foremost quality that allows the performance of expressions of dissatisfaction at the incapacity of a country which, as a nation, has yet to achieve perfect harmony.
Yap’s follow-on community can no longer be regarded as a diaspora, and in fact many have moved on to become ‘second diasporas’ in more advanced countries (primarily Western and White) for the same reason that brought the 87 miners up the Klang River—to seek a better life of prosperity. There is a difference, though: In contemporary times, the right to partake in political processes and effect the society one lives in has become as crucial as food and shelter. Couple this with the fact that ‘the world has become more sophisticated about the nature of ethnicity and partly because the global trading system has made ideas about national interests broader and more flexible’ (Gungwu, 1993, p. 946) it is unsurprising that diasporas morph into emmigrants. The relative absence of Chineseness in Old Market Square is therefore, and ironically, as much evidence of the diaspora’s continuing pervasion worldwide as it is the inability of the Square to perpetually contain the Chinese and things Chinese.
Conclusion
Old Market Square was birthed by the Chinese diaspora, nurtured as a real and symbolic stronghold en route to the shedding of the community’s diasporic label. It has kept in step with—and in many instances led—the inevitable march towards mordenization, and will continue to exert itself as a fabric-with-stubborn-palimsests-of-Yap-Ah-Loy to remind many that architecture is more than meets the eye. In comparison to streets the world over, the square is a formal pattern in which one expects a summation or an arrival at a discursive climax. If Old Market Square can be seen to be beset with that role then the conclusion seems to be that recognition by the power of the land upon which it sits will in the last resort be the final arbiter of its strength as a repository of cultural meaning. The British inadvertantly laid the first stones of permanence with the installation of surveyed land titles, legitamizing in built terms the raison d’être of the immigrant Chinese. The subsequent architectural expressions that coloured the Square as a container of meanings representing the Chinese were outcomes of forces and sensibilities of historic time—the admiration of things Western, astuteness in the reading of trends in property investment, the sensitivities of the governing majority in their rising consciousness of self-identity, the respect of laws and legislations which are continuously subject to shifts in parliamentary balance, and—not least—a sense of making home. It would appear from the construction of numerous high rise corporate buildings on amalgamated lots in Old Market Square that commerialism will be the major force that heritage meanings have to contend with if the voice of the diaspora is still to be heard.