The Hills of Singapore

by Dawn Farnham

  The white men might talk of home, of going home for years, but most stayed. Life was easy and free in the East. As for white women in Singapore, there had been a few wives of the officers, officials and missionaries, the many young girls of the da Silva family and the occasional arrival, like Charlotte herself. Men who did not care to risk the dangers of disease in the brothels or the dispiriting anonymity of loveless encounters took native girls as “wives”, nyais as they were called. Robert, himself, had had his nyai, Shilah, for many years before his marriage to Teresa. She had not yet had enough time to talk to him on this subject.

  Nothing had changed for the local communities. It was in the European community that the change had come. The previous governor, Samuel Bonham, had been a bachelor; he paid no heed to how the young men spent their time, content to invite them into his bungalow for convivial evenings and otherwise leave them to their devices. He was old school, a man raised in ruder times when liaisons with native women were considered normal and because they kept one from whores and the attendant diseases, even healthy.

  The arrival of Colonel William Butterworth, Companion of the Order of the Bath, had brought an insidious change in attitudes. He was a decorated soldier, where almost all governors before him had been civilians. He was newly come to the Straits, where most had spent all their lives here. He was married and his English wife brought a certain social expectation to the settlement. He was, in addition, a prig. His attitudes were those, she supposed, of a Great Britain which had never been in so close contact with its Eastern settlements as now. The sailing ships of the previous centuries were slow. Mail, orders, attitudes, were a year away from Singapore if they came at all. Men did as they pleased, made decisions and acted on them without thought of “back home”.

  Now, steamships could travel at unheard-of speeds, and the new Egyptian Overland Route carried mail and passengers from Southampton via Gibraltar and Malta to Alexandria, up the Nile to Cairo, eighty miles by camel overland to Suez, down the Red Sea to Bombay and on to Singapore. A newspaper printed in London could now be read only forty days later in Singapore. It was unimaginable. The connection to “back home”, so long severed, was quickly being reestablished and with it, the feelings and attitudes of the mother country.

  Charlotte felt almost like “old school” herself. She had been only nine years in the East, but her experiences had made her wary of this newfound “respectable” Singapore. She did not like so much the changing attitudes to the mixed marriages which had been so common only a few short years ago. Then a white officer or official would have sought a wife, with pleasure, amongst the mixed-race girls—the children made as a result of married liaisons between white men and native women.

  Now that was not always the case. Isabel da Silva, a plain young woman, had had the great misfortune to turn down marriage to a lieutenant in the Madras Regiment in the hope, as she told Charlotte, of a more handsome prospect. She now found herself in a position of less good circumstances for, within the space of two years, an officer of the regiment who had hopes of promotion would find such a union an insurmountable obstacle to advancement.

  Her dark brothers and sisters, the offspring of Jose da Silva’s six previous marriages, counted against them. Isabel was now engaged, at her mother’s urging, to the son of a Spanish merchant and his native wife from Manila. She did not care a fig for this man, she had told Charlotte, and despaired of her life with him. She envied her sister Isobel, who had caught an Englishman, a merchant from Prince of Wales Island.

  Perhaps, mused Charlotte, I am sensitive to these changes because of my own life: a child born of the love of a Scottish man and a Creole woman, I love a Chinese man and am the widow of an Armenian Dutchman whose mother was the child of a Dutch–Indian marriage. She shook her head. It all seemed so pointless. Her own children were half this and that. All this blood nonsense gave her a headache and she disliked these insidious attitudes which she felt creeping like a shadow over the town.

  Doubtless if Butterworth had the slightest inkling of any of this, he would have ripped up the invitation in a trice. This thought gave her a small moment of pleasure, and she stopped her musings and returned to the tasks of the next few days, one of which was enrolling her beloved little half-Chinese boy in the best school in Singapore.

  Charlotte picked up her parasol and set out through her gardens. It was early and the air held a comparative coolness that only the dawn and the dusk can bring in a tropical climate. She was going to the blessing of the Church of the Good Shepherd.

  Charlotte greeted Evangeline and sat amidst the considerable congregation, both European and Chinese, gathered for the event. The activity and vitality of this Catholic community stood in stark contrast to the benign indifference of the Protestants.

  She had been to St. Andrews many times over the years and always remarked on the general absence of the population, the sleepy and indifferent attitudes of the few who were there. One rainy Sunday, long ago, when Tigran was alive, she, Robert and John Thomson, the Surveyor of the Straits Settlements, had gone to a morning service.

  “If the English be the true church, it is evident the East India Company do not think so,” John Thomson had murmured.

  St. Andrew’s seated perhaps four hundred people, but around them there had been but twenty worshippers. Three emaciated young ladies had occupied one pew, an old man with his dark wife behind them. A corpulent bald gentleman fanned himself, a pretty blonde sat with her old mother. Men from the garrison had occupied other pews. Above them the punkahs waved like the wings of birds in flight.

  In the dusty silence, suddenly the organ had pealed forth. The Reverend White and his clerk entered. The service was read, the responses made by the clerk flippant and indifferent. The congregation played no part. Psalms were given out, the organ boomed, a pagan native boy exerting himself mightily pumping air, but neither the clerk nor the worshippers had sung. The sermon had been tedious platitudes. No charity was asked, and the congregation roused itself and departed.

  As they had walked through the extensive gardens which commanded the finest sea view in Singapore, Charlotte was moved to ask John his opinion on this.

  “It is a mystery,” he had said. “The Company pays its chaplains magnificently but what for, it is difficult to discern. The curate does not visit his people, good heavens no, he plants nutmegs. For the Company forbids him, under the heaviest penalties, to be an apostle to the heathen, and John Company is more powerful here than his heavenly Master. He is the burra padre, you know, the great man’s priest, not the coolie padre, ministering to the poor.”

  “So why build such churches John? Look at this place, magnificent, on the finest piece of land in the whole town.”

  John had shrugged. “Not for religion certainly. Perhaps some abstruse point of East India Company policy lost to reason. The Europeans do not attend church and the natives are all pagans or Mohammedans. Patronage, doubtless then, to the political bench of the bishops in parliament. Who can say? The visible and familiar sign of England, even in a dusty landscape? All I know is that the chaplain is here because he is well paid, and his only thoughts are how to make money and go home.”

  She thought of this now and looked around her. No wonder then that the Catholic Church found such fertile ground. It was all but abandoned to them. Good for them then, she thought, if they do some good. She took Evangeline’s arm in hers and smiled at her friend.

  6

  Zhen tossed his head back and swallowed the small cup of rice wine. It tasted good and a feeling of mellowness crept over him. He lay back on the thick cushions on the floor and looked up at the ceiling. He loved to be in this room. This was Qian’s inner sanctum. This had been Qian’s dead father-in-law’s bedroom and strongroom, he knew. When the old miser had been alive, he kept his treasure chests in here and never let anyone enter. Sang had been the most miserly man in Singapore but immensely rich and powerful. He had been head of the kongsi, the society which ran everything Chinese
here in Singapore, the temples, the coolies, the farms, everything. When he died, ten thousand men had been ordered to his funeral. The British authorities could not believe their eyes. Despite the vast numbers of Chinese pouring, with each monsoon season, into Singapore, the administration never increased. Zhen smiled, nothing had changed much. The kongsi still ran almost everything.

  Still, Sang had lacked the one thing he craved. He had no son to carry out the rites for him. Two daughters had been born to two wives, but no son had ever survived. So Qian, like Zhen, educated and poor, had been selected to marry the second daughter and despite his personal leanings towards the “pleasures of the bitten peach”, had managed to sire two healthy sons on his young wife, Swan Neo.

  Husbands were often selected from the pool of poor coolies that turned up on these shores in their thousands each year: fresh new Chinese blood for the local merchant’s daughters, men who spoke the language and understood the ancient rites. Swan Neo spoke Hokkien, a somewhat old-fashioned type of Hokkien, but at least she and Qian could talk. Zhen had been forced to learn Baba Malay to talk to his own wife, for she had been born and raised in a Peranakan family

  Qian could not have known his luck. Everyone knew Sang was rich, but how rich he discovered on the second day of his marriage, when he had found the chests of silver and jewels in this room. Qian had taken Sang’s name, and now he ran the company and his own sons were the heirs to this vast fortune.

  Zhen poured himself another cup of rice wine and drank it down quickly, gazing upwards. The ceiling was decorated with wooden beams painted in gold and black with writhing dragons. Carved folding doors stood back, showing the open inner courtyard into which late golden sunlight was pouring onto a pond filled with flitting gold and red carp and touching the leaves of great pots of bamboo. The floor was made of gleaming, cool, green and white Malacca tiles. It was secluded, opulent and expensive. Here Zhen knew, Qian made love to his young catamite, a half-Chinese half-Malay boy called Salim whom he had rescued from a brothel.

  Here Qian and Zhen could be alone in their close friendship, alone to talk and get drunk. Here in this place, Zhen could truly relax. In his own home, the top floor of the shophouse on Circular Road, he could find peace but there was always a servant or someone to bother him. In the house in Market Street he shared with his wife and sister-in-law, there was absolutely no peace. Only here could he truly do as he pleased, for Qian, despite his humble beginnings, now lived like a Mandarin.

  He looked up as the subject of his ruminations came and sat down next to him. Zhen punched him lightly on the arm and poured him a drink.

  “She is here,” Zhen said.

  Qian knew exactly who Zhen was talking about. He contemplated his friend lolling, loose-limbed, half-undressed, beautiful, on the cushions. He recalled the day in the coolie house when they had stripped off their clothing and washed in the streaming rain in the air well courtyard. His first sight of Zhen’s body had been his first inkling of his own desires. Now though, he could relax in his friend’s company.

  “I see. What do you intend to do about it?”

  Zhen poured more wine.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head. “Just look at her.”

  Qian fell back on the cushions and began to laugh.

  “She is here and you will do nothing. Just look at her. This is delightful talk, for I know you are a man of small passions and a soul filled with poetry. Perhaps you will write some for me. I believe it is commonplace to begin by being in the misty mountains, contemplating the moon …”

  Zhen smiled.

  “Well, nothing for the moment. What can I do? Of course I want to … want her … But you know the situation. Unless she is willing to be my …”

  He looked at Qian, whose smile had widened. This subject, Zhen knew, always amused Qian. The mere idea of a white English woman becoming the concubine of a Chinese man in Singapore always put him in high good humour. But it had once terrified him. Zhen had pursued the lovely Xia Lou Mah Crow with a single-mindedness which made Qian fear for his friend’s future and her mind. He knew the depth of Zhen’s feelings and his resolve. That their love affair had not been detected, that Zhen had married Noan and Miss Mah Crow had gone away, had been a source of the greatest relief.

  Now she was back, a widow. Free, he thought. Free and very rich. As rich as himself perhaps. The thought was fascinating. Much richer than Zhen.

  “Well, thunderhead, if you ever want to meet her quietly and talk to her—not just look at her and think of the misty mountains—then let me know. I would like to see her again. She is a lady.” His voice softened, and he realised that really he did like her and would like to see her again.

  Zhen heard it and stopped being fierce. Yes she was a lady. His lady and yet not his.

  He sighed and dropped back on the cushions. Qian poured them both some wine. Zhen changed the subject; this one just went round and round. Qian knew he would come back to it when he was suitably drunk and filled with longing.

  Zhen tossed back the cup of rice wine and took up the chopsticks to pick at the food which was spread out on a low table.

  Qian turned the subject to business.

  “The gambier farmers are moving to Johor. The land survey by this Thomson man has meant that for the first time, there are rents to be paid. The new roads to Kranji and Changi mean the government men can move out and see for themselves. Many of the farmers are getting out. The prices are picking up for the Europeans are becoming interested in gambier also.

  Zhen nodded.

  “Well, well” he said. “This will sort itself out. I am part of a syndicate which is presently in an interesting position with the Temenggong. He has recognised that the Chinese are now his staircase to wealth and power, not the piratical bunch of orang laut he has been controlling. He needs a land base. He is shrewd, the cleverest Malay I’ve ever met and he knows where his fortunes lie. He is opening up land in Johor for development.”

  Qian poured rice wine and nodded.

  “My influence in our kongsi is useful, for we need to quickly establish ourselves in Johor before the Teochews get involved. The Dutch are kicking them out of Rhio and they are landing up here in Singapore. There will be trouble.”

  Qian looked at his friend. They both understood how things stood here in Singapore. The Europeans had no way of controlling the profitable agriculture of the island. Their attempts at spice and sugar plantations had failed for the poor soil. The nutmeg trees had survived for a while but a disease had wiped them out. They were left with no alternative but to cooperate with the Chinese merchants who provided money for the gambier and pepper farmers and vitally, all the Chinese labourers.

  The entire source of income for the town of Singapore came from the revenue farms and the taxes on the houses and properties of the town, in particular the opium farm, which supplied over fifty percent of government revenue and depended on the addictions of the labourers themselves. These farms were profitable undertakings, but there was a great rivalry for this profit between the Hokkien and the Teochew which could spill into violence.

  “I’m bringing Min back to Singapore. Old Khoo is exchanging two of his brothels for the idiot son’s debts. I need you to make it good with the kongsi.”

  Qian poured more rice wine, and Zhen raised his glass and drank. They trusted each other absolutely and preferred to do business together wherever possible. They had first met on the road to Amoy, on the road to the port and the junk which would take them to Singapore. Qian, physically weak, had found a protector and friend in Zhen, and Zhen had liked Qian for his resemblance to his youngest brother. Zhen’s second daughter, Lian, was already promised to Ah Soon, Qian’s first son. United, they would have one of the greatest merchant houses in all the South Seas and share grandchildren. These networks of marriages and alliances formed the basis of the Chinese business empires.

  “Min still loves you, you know,” Qian said.

  Zhen shrugged. “What can I answer? Whores love an
yone who is kind to them.” He poured more wine.

  Qian frowned. Zhen was being unkind. He did not think of Min like that. She had been sold into prostitution as a child. Zhen had been her patron in his early days in Singapore. When she had been beaten and left for dead by an English sailor, Zhen had saved her life, seen her cared for and placed in the care of Qian when he had become a wealthy man overnight. Qian had bought her out of the whorehouse in Singapore and set her up in business in Malacca.

  In a hard world, she had been lucky; she knew it and so did they. They had fallen together and now she was able, at least, to live a life over which she had some control. Zhen’s words had been thoughtless. He did not want anyone to love him but Xia Lou Mah Crow, that was the truth. Not his own wife, not Min. Qian knew that Zhen would like all these other women to leave him alone.

  And now she was here in Singapore, this woman he loved to desperation, wanting the impossible. Wanting, in effect, for her to agree to be his concubine. Qian despaired for his friend. He no longer felt like laughing. They both drank, and Qian brought out the wei qi board and began to talk of home.

  7

  Government House had not changed. It stood square and solid on Bukit Larangan, looking down benevolently on the town, as it always had. The original building had been made of rough planks, Venetian shutters and an attap roof. Over the years it had been rebuilt in hardier materials, brick and tile, and this was the building before whose portals her phaeton now drew to a halt. Charlotte thought this house reflected in every way the unpretentious and simple origins of the town itself. It seemed to grow as the town grew, improving in construction and size to reflect the energy of the spreading streets around its feet.