Cheang Hong Lim wearing his Qing Dynasty honorific robe.
I once had grandiose visions of me posing for a photo standing in the middle of Cheang Jim Chuan Street located in Singapore’s Central Business District. The namesake is my mother’s paternal grandfather and indeed, “I would have been crossing my (great) grandfather’s road”. In many cultures, fathers are known as “Baba” and this nomenclature was applied to the Peranakan men.
Besides the streets named after my mother’s forefathers, there is a park that is the hotbed for political expression in Singapore. Hong Lim Park is named after my great-great grandfather Cheang Hong Lim. He was also the father of Cheang Jim Chuan and considered the patriarch. In 1876, Hong Lim provided $3,000 (a large sum in those days) to convert an open space in front of the Police Office at South Bridge Road into a public garden. Iron railings were put up around the park and it was initially known as Hong Lim Green and briefly, Dunman’s Green.
As a child, my mother would narrate stories about her family and even helped me trace out our genealogy. It was amazing that all the names, their years of birth and death, remained so vivid in her memory. So by the age of eleven, I would visit the public library to read up more about Cheang Hong Lim. Imagine, research without wiki or google in those days.
Born in Singapore, Cheang Hong Lim was the eldest son of Cheang Sam Teo, an immigrant from China in the mid 1800s. The elder Cheang had an enterprise in opium and sireh (the addictive betel nut leaves). The engine of this business was running a government-tendered monopoly processing raw opium imported from British India, often with dark syndicates and collusion involved. Upon his death, the son Hong Lim took over, incorporating it into Cheang Hong Lim and Co. It later renamed to Chop Wan Seng. His son Jim Chuan, in turn, parlayed the family’s fortune into shipping and land ownership. It was no coincidence that by the 1930s, my mother was born in the family’s villa at the foot of Bukit Chandu which in English, means ‘Opium Hill’.
The opium tycoon Hong Lim became a prolific land owner that there was a saying, “You can be as rich as Hong Lim, but never have as many houses as Hong Lim’. There were an estimated two thousand plus properties primarily located along the Boat Quay area. He also contributed land for the poor in an area called Bukit Ho Swee. In the 1960s, a great fire razed the extensive village to the ground and stimulated the young government’s ambitious public housing program, a sterling model for many other countries to follow.
Perhaps to legitimize his reputation, Hong Lim became a prominent philanthropist. In addition to establishing a fire brigade, a few Chinese temples and welfare institutions, even a wet market, he donated capital funds to schools, including the building that housed the Town Convent’s St. Nicholas’ annexe in 1890. He also set up a free school at Cheang Wan Seng Place to teach English to impoverished children.
Another notable deed was convincing the widowed wife of his trusted company advisor to let her brilliant son continue his studies at Raffles Institution, the premier boys’ school in Singapore. This promising boy, Lim Boon Keng later became the first Chinese to win the Queen’s Scholarship to pursue his medical degree at Edinburgh University, graduating with First Class Honors in 1892. Lim Boon Keng went on to become a prominent educationist and social reformer in his own right.
Hong Lim did himself a few favors too. He supported the Qing Dynasty in return for honorific titles, bestowing on himself and his family the air of aristocracy among the Overseas Chinese.
For all his contributions, Cheang Hong Lim was made a Justice of the Peace in 1873 in a ceremony presided by the British Governor, Sir Cecil Clementi Smith. He died soon after, at the premature age of 52.
Coincidentally, my niece pursued her studies at Oxford. Whip-smart and bookish, she had received a distinction scholarship from a Hong Kong trading house. This company’s origins were linked to the opium trade and its fortunes intertwined with the history of Hong Kong itself. In our family, we chuckle at ‘coming full circle”, given that our forefathers traded in opium as well.
Gan Eng Seng, my father’s ancestor.
As a young bride with a family cook, my mother had little experience in the kitchen. She was soon required to prepare meals for her in-laws and was therefore subjected to a punishing regimen under my father’s blind grandmother. This lady was a wife of Gan Tiang Tock, the eldest son of Gan Eng Seng.
I was once asked by a researcher at London’s SOAS if there had been a deliberate decision to join these two families, as was common among the high-born Peranakans of those days. His assertion was that this was often done to preserve the bride’s dowry. My mother had never mentioned anything. Besides, the Second World War and inheritance distribution did much to diminish these great family fortunes.
Gan Eng Seng was born in Malacca in 1844, the birthplace of the earliest Babas. He came from a poor family and migrated to Singapore at the age of 17 where he began work as an apprentice in the Guthrie Trading Company. Eventually, he rose to become the chief shipping compradore but at the same time, operated fifteen other businesses of his own, including the supply of labor and transport for the Tanjong Pagar docks. The latter allowed Gan Eng Seng to amass a fortune, sufficiently substantial for him to become a pioneer in education and a notable philanthropist.
His major accomplishment was the founding of the Anglo-Chinese Free School at Telok Ayer Street. This all-boys’ school was later renamed the Gan Eng Seng School and it still exists today. It was the first and only school in Singapore set up by an individual who provided the land, building and endowment to operate the school, distinct from the many others which had been founded by ethnic clans or Christian/Catholic missionaries.
In addition, Gan Eng Seng was instrumental in the setting up of Tan Tock Seng Hospital by donating the land for its original building along Rochor Road. Interestingly, he was a founder of one of the most exclusive private clubs in Singapore, nicknamed the Millionaires’ Club and officially called the Ee Hoe Hean Club.
I once visited the Gan family gravesite at Bukit Brown and was struck by one anecdote. This conveyed the kind-heartedness and generosity of my forefather. Among all the family members buried at that plot, his butler’s grave stands beside his.
In 2015, both Cheang Hong Lim and Gan Eng Seng were featured among the 50 Great Peranakans in a Peranakan Museum exhibition. They are considered among the key pioneers in Singapore’s early history.