Search

To place the Chinese in late nineteenth-century Java one must find them first.1 Finding them is by no means easy. Until now, scholars of the Chinese in Indonesia have touched on this period only lightly.2 Many primary sources remain underexplored, and in some important cases they are meager. Aside from peranakan Chinese writings of the late centuryonly now being explored with vigor3-few Chinese records remain. And what is, to my knowledge, the best collection has been transmitted to us only indirectly, that is, Liem Thian Joe's Riwajat Semarang of 1933, based largely upon the archives of the Chinese Council of Semarang and augmented by Liem's own collections and the peranakan talk stories of his day.4 A rich store of information may await the collector of oral histories. But one hundred years is too long to expect facts to come through undisturbed, especially in large families where polygamy and the dispersal of various branches around the world have complicated