The Chinese Community of Surabaya, from its Origins to the 1930s Crisis

Abstract

This article traces the history of the Chinese community in Surabaya, a major port-city on the East Coast of Java, over several centuries. It uses evidence gathered from numerous sources, including Chinese epigraphy and genealogical records collected locally by the author, early European travel accounts, Dutch colonial records and memoirs, and Chinese and Malay language newspapers. The essay unravels, for the first time, the history of a handful of influential entrepreneurial of families who pioneered local cash-crop production, the sugar industry especially, during the Dutch colonial era. It concludes by tracing the waves of resinicisation that swept the community in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new associations that arose as a result and the gradually fracturing of communal life that followed.