Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Chinese in Indonesia

Abstract

It is not clear when the Chinese first started living in Indonesia however, reports by Fa Hsien, a Chinese traveler in the fifth century, wrote about the presence of Chinese in Indonesia (Toer, 2007: 197). Several main phases of Chinese population growth can be identified over the last fifteen hundred years or so. During the first phase, between about the tenth and sixteenth century a.d., traders were visiting various Southeast Asian ports, remaining temporarily or assimilating individually but rarely establishing permanent Chinese communities. In the second period between mid 1500s and 1800, Chinese trading quarters in the major cities such as Manila, Ayutthaya/Bangkok and Batavia became large and permanent. The third phase between 1800 and 1860 saw the numbers of Chinese in the region increase gradually. By 1860, there were an estimated 222,000 Chinese, two thirds of whom lived in Java (Coppel, 1983: 1). The fourth period from the 1860s till the onset of the 1930s Depression saw a large influx of Chinese from China (Mackie, 1996: xxii--xxiv).