Introduction
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Nusantara, referring broadly to the Indonesian archipelago, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a stratified system of governance premised on segregation. This system attempted to partition a complex, fluid social reality—formed through centuries of interethnic cohabitation, cultural exchange, and mixed ancestry—into rigid legal categories such as ‘Europeans’, ‘Foreign Orientals’ (predominantly Chinese, but also Arabs, Japanese, and other Asian groups), and ‘Natives’ (Inlanders).Footnote 1 Although this logic of administrative classification did not correspond to the reality of multi-ethnic co-residence and a long history of cross-cultural intermarriage, it profoundly influenced later scholarship. Indeed, Furnivall’s widely cited concept of the ‘plural society’ was deeply informed by colonial administrative frameworks. It describes societies as consisting of distinct ethnic groups, defined by colonial authorities, ‘comprising two or more elements or social orders which live side by side, yet without mingling, in one political unit’.Footnote 2
Grounded in this conception of clearly delineated, non-integrating ethnic groups, much research on Southeast Asian societies, especially studies of overseas Chinese, has relied on the singular use of ‘Chinese’ as an analytical label. Chinese intellectuals themselves, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards, participated in a parallel project of identity construction. Figures such as Liang Qichao envisioned a transnational imagined community of global Chinese, sustained through shared cultural practices and affective ties.Footnote 3 Within this framework, studies of the Chinese diaspora have often centred on consolidating Chineseness as both an analytical category and a mode of collective belonging. Even now, scholars who acknowledge the internal diversity and historical dynamism of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and the wider diaspora often maintain that Chineseness remains analytically stable.Footnote 4 In other words, the category ‘Chinese’ has been repeatedly naturalized: first through colonial governance, then through nationalist and diasporic efforts to reassert cultural unity.
However, by scrutinizing the legal archives of the Batavia Kong Koan (Chinese Council),Footnote 5 we find that these essentialist presuppositions fracture in the microhistorical record. As an autonomous Chinese institution operating within the VOC governance structure, the Kong Koan attempted, on the one hand, to maintain community boundaries and a hierarchy of civilization by invoking ‘Chinese Customary Standards’ (Tangren Guili/Guiju 唐人規例/規矩). On the other hand, it was forced to confront a mixed-residence society marked by severe gender imbalance and widespread interethnic marriage, practices that persisted despite formal colonial prohibitions. These cross-cultural unions catalysed significant transformations in lineage formation, kinship relations, family and gender norms, and social organization. Over time, such changes were partially recognized and institutionalized within a hybrid legal system that amalgamated common-sense notions labelled as Confucian ethics, Dutch colonial statutes, and locally negotiated customary compromises, while sometimes invoking the Great Qing Legal Code less as a binding statute than as a rhetorical benchmark for moral orthodoxy to bridge the gap between idealized tradition and colonial reality. The resulting social practices—though labelled as ‘Chineseness’—progressively diverged from the lifeways of contemporaries in southern China, from which most migrants originated. What emerged was not a transplanted tradition but a contingent, dynamic constellation of practices shaped by the everyday negotiations of migrant communities navigating interethnic entanglements and legal pluralism. These ongoing processes of adaptation challenge the prevailing assumption, evident in both colonial records and some scholarship, that a coherent diasporic ‘Chineseness’ ever existed.
Rather than narrating identity as if it followed a continuous trajectory of Chineseness, this article traces how identities were reworked, redefined, and reimagined as Chinese subjects moved beyond the spatial and symbolic boundaries of ‘China’. The article is structured as follows. First, it reviews the theoretical literature on ‘Chineseness’ and its limitations. Second, it examines interethnic marriage in Batavia from the late eighteenth century to 1850,Footnote 6 revealing how these unions created ‘moments of rupture’ within rigid ethnic boundaries. Finally, it analyses how the Kong Koan engaged in judicial negotiation amid the tension between ‘maintaining orthodoxy’ and ‘adapting to reality’. The article argues that even when local communities claimed, for various reasons, to preserve a distinctive Chineseness, whether grounded in internalized distinctions between ‘Chinese’ and ‘barbarian’ or in compliance with colonial authority, their everyday practices often revealed something quite different: the persistent indeterminacy and structural fluidity of Chineseness across time and space. Although contemporary observers might view the Kong Koan as a fortress of tradition, operating within the realities of Batavia’s multi-ethnic cohabitation and plural legal systems, it in fact constituted an active field of adjustment and transformation. Within this institutional space, identity was not immutable; rather, at the intersection of law, power, and lived experience, it was constantly contested, instrumentalized, and actively reproduced.
Chineseness: Anything or nothing
The concept of ‘Chineseness’ has long been invoked to describe ethnic and cultural identity associated with being Chinese, yet its precise meaning remains elusive. Does it refer to national citizenship, a transnational cultural consciousness, or a broader civilizational or racial formation loosely centred on Han ethnicity? Since the 1970s, overseas intellectuals have widely argued for disentangling Chinese identity from state-based political affiliations, seeking instead to redefine ‘Chineseness’ through cultural frameworks. Wei-ming Tu proposed the notion of ‘Cultural China’ as a means to reconstruct diasporic identity, emphasizing a shared cultural consciousness among Chinese across the globe.Footnote 7 His framework conceptualizes Chinese culture as a civilizational lineage centred on Confucian values. While Tu acknowledges internal diversity and external influences within Chinese civilization, his model nonetheless posits a dominant cultural core capable of absorbing external elements without fundamentally altering its essential character. As such, the Chinese diaspora is portrayed as fluid and context-dependent, yet is ultimately framed as a historical and moral extension of an unchanging Chinese civilizational essence.
Contemporaneously, Gungwu Wang also recognized a model of civilizational and cultural continuity, but treated it as a historical phenomenon rather than an ontological essence. He highlighted the widespread yet ambiguously defined usage of the term ‘Chineseness’, suggesting its conceptual vagueness and lack of substantive coherence.Footnote 8 Wang’s critique aligns with broader efforts to question the legitimacy and historical construction of ethnic classifications, emphasizing that such classifications are products of representation and power relations rather than empirical or civilizational givens.
Subsequent studies on the Chinese diaspora have, in part, moved away from definitional debates, treating ‘Chineseness’ as a social phenomenon rather than a fixed cultural essence. Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee, representing a sociological approach to contemporary Chinese migration, reject cultural determinism and essentialist understandings of identity.Footnote 9 They argue that the ‘culture’ of overseas Chinese is not pre-given or static but is produced through the migration experience itself. Structural factors, such as immigration policy, labour-market segmentation, and racial hierarchies, shape the development of Asian American communities and, in turn, influence patterns of intergenerational transmission. Zhou and others challenge the notion that diasporic Chinese resist assimilation by choice or cultural disposition; rather, they highlight how institutional constraints and systemic exclusions often restrict or discourage such integration. Their work, along with scholarship on ‘flexible citizenship’, has drawn attention to how Chinese diasporic identities are not inherited but continually renegotiated.Footnote 10 Identity formation is understood as adaptive and contingent, shaped by the political and social contexts of diverse host societies, especially in the wake of post-colonial nation-building and the rise of ethno-nationalist state discourses.Footnote 11
Another strand of scholarship has sought to establish more defined criteria for articulating Chinese identity. Shu-mei Shih offers a forceful critique of the Han-centric model of ‘Cultural China’ and instead proposes the concept of the Sinophone.Footnote 12 For Shih, cultural production mediated through the Chinese language should be understood as operating independently of the Chinese nation-state or any essentialized ethnic identity. Her framework foregrounds the heterogeneity and decentralization of Chinese-language cultural practices across various geopolitical contexts. Crucially, she reframes ‘Chineseness’ as an unstable, contested category—one that must remain open to critique and reinvention rather than being anchored in fixed traditions or civilizational continuities. However, Shih’s Sinophone model has itself drawn criticism, particularly from scholars such as Ien Ang, who speaks from the perspective of diasporic subjects of Chinese descent who grew up in non-Chinese-speaking environments. Ang questions the assumption that all ethnic Chinese must speak Chinese, arguing that this linguistic expectation reinscribes an essentialist logic tying identity to a singular language and a nationalist centre. In her view, such frameworks risk reproducing the very cultural essentialism they intend to resist.Footnote 13
In light of the aforementioned academic discussions, any attempt to define ‘Chineseness’ as a coherent essence—whether through language, lineage, or culture—ultimately risks re-essentializing identity and fails to account for the heterogeneous and historically contingent practices of diasporic Chinese communities. As diasporic identity is increasingly understood as a provisional and continuously reconstituted affiliation, debates have resurfaced over whether ‘Chineseness’ should still be treated as a viable analytical concept.
Scholars such as Chih-yu Shih continue to argue that ‘Chineseness’ serves as a practical shorthand for historically specific identity practices shaped by migration, state discourse, and global imaginaries.Footnote 14 To address the indefinability of ‘Chineseness’ as a fixed nature, Shih and collaborators propose Post-Chineseness—not as a nationalized or essentialized identity, but as a decentred cultural framework.Footnote 15 While this model rejects the idea of ‘Chineseness’ as a civilizational constant, it nonetheless affirms its persistence as a social and symbolic phenomenon. Yet if ‘Chineseness’ is merely a contingent phenomenon, can it meaningfully function as an analytical category? This question underpins critiques by scholars such as Allen Chun, who view ‘Chineseness’ as a politically instrumental construct mobilized by states, elites, and diasporic actors to assert legitimacy, cultural superiority, or ethnic authenticity.Footnote 16 For Chun, the term is ideologically overdetermined and conceptually unstable, a discursive mirage whose definitional elasticity undermines analytical clarity. When ‘Chineseness’ can mean anything, it risks meaning nothing at all.
One of the most persistent defences of the concept, however, lies in the claim that ethnic Chinese across the world share an ineradicable emotional attachment to ancestral culture. Yet this belief often rests on a cultural hierarchy that elevates Chinese civilization as superior. Some studies report that many overseas Chinese view the preservation of ‘Chineseness’ as a moral obligation to safeguard a supposedly more advanced cultural tradition.Footnote 17 This logic implicitly reinforces a hierarchical conception of culture, reproducing the very centripetal cultural force it purports to dismantle. The insistence on retaining ‘Chineseness’ due to its perceived civilizational exceptionality signals not a rupture from cultural essentialism, but rather its reconfiguration into a postnational form.
Scholarly arguments positing (post)‘Chineseness’ as a stable analytical category often emphasize the historical continuity of ‘Chinese culture’. However, the limitations of this framework become particularly apparent when applied to communities for whom ‘China’ was little more than a distant cultural memory, and ‘Chinese’ functioned more as an externally imposed, residual label than an internally affirmed belonging. This is especially evident in the lived experiences of pre-modern Chinese migrants in Southeast Asia—the so-called Nusantara Chinese, or more precisely, Nusantara Tangren (唐人)—who had developed highly localized and syncretic identities long before the rise of modern nationalist projects. From the fourteenth century onwards, Chinese-descended Muslims in the Malay Archipelago played a central role in Islamization, not only integrating into but also leading early Muslim polities.Footnote 18 Within such a historical context, it is difficult to sustain the claim that Chinese/Tangren viewed local Malays as ethnic ‘others’; more plausibly they were perceived as religious ‘co-believers’. Ancestral culture varied across time and space, and the ‘non-Chinese’ ‘other’ was redefined as neighbour and kin. Intermarriage, mixed descent, and processes of creolization further destabilized cultural boundaries, undermining any coherent tracing of ‘Chinese culture’ or continuous ethnic identity.Footnote 19 The limited engagement with Nusantara history in scholarship on ‘Chineseness’ reflects enduring epistemological distortions—most notably, the retroactive imposition of postnationalist frameworks onto pre-modern subjects.
This article seeks to correct these distortions by grounding its analysis in the empirical complexities of early Chinese/Tangren migration. While existing scholarship has extensively documented the hybridity of highly integrated groups, such cases are frequently treated as mere exceptions; meanwhile, a significant body of scholarship continues to treat colonial-recognized institutions—like the Batavia Kong Koan—as bastions of static, ‘authentic’ heritage. By scrutinizing these very institutions, which were ostensibly designed to preserve a distinct Chinese/Tangren identity, this article demonstrates that even at the core of colonial governance, identity remained fluid, internally contested, and socially hybrid. Rather than relying on abstract reformulations of identity, the Nusantara experience provides a paradigm for examining how Chinese-descended communities reconstituted identities across generations. These were not diasporic nostalgists adhering rigidly to homeland traditions but settlers forging locally embedded identities that consistently diverged from both their ancestral past and later state-imposed categories.
Interethnic marriage as an adaptation strategy
Identifying the earliest instances of interethnic marriage between Chinese migrants and local populations in Southeast Asia remains difficult. Nevertheless, existing scholarship indicates that such unions were widespread from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries—persisting across both precolonial and colonial periods—despite official bans and segregationist regulations, as well as enduring social stigma within Chinese communities, where such marriages were often regarded as socially degrading.
Recent work has shed new light on the early formation of interethnic communities in East Java, particularly in port cities such as Tuban, Gresik, and Surabaya during the Majapahit period. Drawing on historical accounts, scholars show that these coastal settlements functioned as open, cosmopolitan maritime entrepôts where Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and local Javanese interacted and intermarried. The integration of Chinese settlers into local communities—often through marriage with indigenous women and conversion to Islam alongside a move away from Confucian ritual norms—produced influential mixed-heritage elites, especially in Gresik, and across maritime trade networks extending to the Moluccas.Footnote 20
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, however, the VOC increasingly disrupted this fluid interethnic dynamic. Motivated by fears of religious syncretism and concerns about social stability, the colonial administration institutionalized ethnic divisions through legal mechanisms such as racial censuses, spatial segregation into designated ‘Chinese quarters’, and strict rules on interethnic marriage. These imposed categories were rigid and often arbitrary, contradicting the complex genealogical and social realities of mixed-heritage individuals and, in effect, rendering racial mixing invisible in official records.Footnote 21
The responses of local Chinese institutions—most notably the Batavia Kong Koan—largely aligned with these colonial policies. The Kong Koan officially enforced prohibitions on interethnic marriage, as evidenced by a ruling on 21 June 1847 regarding the intended remarriage of a woman named Lau Kie Nio (劉己娘) to a non-Chinese man. The council ruling stated: ‘each [group], whether Chinese (Tang 唐) or Barbarian (Fan 番), should adhere to its own way, so as to avoid the mixing of registries (luan ji 亂籍) and the corruption of public morals (yi shang feng hua 以傷風化)’.Footnote 22 Deferring further to the Dutch Resident (addressed as Edelheer or Ai-sit-liam 挨實嗹) for the final decision, this stance reflected a dual pressure: it stemmed partly from obligatory cooperation with the colonial administration’s system of stratified governance and partly from an internalized commitment among the Chinese elite to preserving what they framed as superior civilizational values. Influenced by Ming-Qing cultural paradigms distinguishing ‘civilized’ Chinese (hua 華) from ‘barbarian’ ‘others’ (yi 夷), the Kong Koan and broader Chinese communities exhibited strong resistance to integration with indigenous populations, whom they perceived as culturally and ethnically inferior, going so far as to view them, in their rhetoric, as quasi-human beings.Footnote 23 This ideology, rooted in notions of civilizational hierarchy and cultural purity, became integral to the construction of ‘Chineseness’. It generated aversion to interethnic marriage and reinforced beliefs in inherent superiority, reflecting fears of cultural contamination and anxieties about assimilation into what was regarded as an inferior local culture. In this sense, the strict adherence to hierarchical distinctions between the Chinese and indigenous populations was not merely a political or social stance but a constitutive component of how ‘Chineseness’ was understood and maintained.
Nevertheless, regardless of efforts to uphold, if not invent, Confucian doctrines, reinforce rigid hierarchies, and maintain boundaries premised on bloodline purity and patriarchal continuity, such ideals often proved impractical in everyday life, particularly without the support of an imperial government that treasured Confucian values. Even after segregationist policies were firmly established, interethnic marriages persisted in practice, regardless of what the Kong Koan prescribed on paper. A detailed study of official marriage registrations in Batavia between 1772 and 1919 recorded 17,158 marriages over 129 years, an average of 130–160 registered Chinese marriages per year.Footnote 24 Within this population, men significantly outnumbered women; consequently, whether newly arrived or locally born, many Chinese men married women of mixed Chinese-indigenous heritage.
This stark gender imbalance was the most immediate driver of interethnic marriage among Chinese migrants. As Confucian norms discouraged women from travelling long distances, most Chinese migrants to Java were male, which led to a chronic shortage of marriageable Chinese women. Consequently, many men married local women. Over time, the descendants of these unions—particularly women of mixed heritage—increasingly entered marriages with subsequent waves of Chinese migrants, reinforcing cross-cultural unions. According to the eighteenth-century Southeast Asian travelogue Jialaba, the majority of Chinese who had migrated to Java ‘no longer returned to China, but took local women as wives and raised children there’.Footnote 25
Interethnic marriage also functioned as a strategic adaptation to prevailing social and economic conditions. Local wives facilitated integration into indigenous communities, enhanced commercial networks, and provided access to land, credit, and social legitimacy. As also noted in Jialaba, ‘since [local] women who married Chinese were exempted from taxes […] when [Chinese] ships arrived, there were often old [local] women bringing young girls, dressed beautifully, to seek [Chinese] buyers at low prices, with the only condition being that the girls could not be taken back to China. After marriage, these women not only worked diligently but also managed market transactions and other affairs.’Footnote 26
Why, then, did official records—from both Dutch authorities and the Kong Koan—appear to reflect a strict prohibition on interethnic unions? One explanation lies in the prevalence of unregistered or informal relationships, including extramarital affairs, cohabitation with domestic servants, and other forms of legally unrecognized intimacy. Another factor is the flexible practice of intra-group identification within Chinese communities. Faced with the tension between the practical prevalence of interethnic unions and formalized legal and communal disapproval, Chinese communities often adopted a pragmatic approach to identity. Lineage was not a fixed biological fact but a mutable status—negotiable, revocable, and contingent on social arrangements and legal recognition. Specifically, illegitimate children of Chinese men—regardless of the mother’s ethnicity—could be adopted into Chinese families and legally recognized as Chinese; indigenous women with no Chinese ancestry could also be adopted into Chinese households and thereby attain Chinese status. In this sense, ‘becoming Chinese’ hinged less on lineage than on institutional affiliation, recognition by communal elites, and acceptance within semi-formal regimes of social governance. As a result, many de facto interethnic marriages were recorded in official documents as intra-ethnic unions.
One illustrative case in the Kong Koan judicial archives is Tjoa Tjie Ming’s (蔡捷明) 1788 petition, the earliest formally recorded instance of interethnic marriage in these records.Footnote 27 In July 1788, Tjoa Tjie Ming appealed to the Dutch Secretariat (Secretarie 實奎炳), the administrative arm of the colonial government, after the Chinese captain Tjoa Toen (蔡敦) refused to issue a marriage certificate for his union with Lauki (嘮吉), a locally born woman of indigenous origin (ba chan 吧產) who was serving as a maid in a Dutch household. Tjoa Tjie Ming argued for her eligibility by claiming she had undergone a formal transition of identity, asserting: ‘This woman has already “become Chinese (zuo tang 作唐)”, having discarded her indigenous status; therefore, I venture to request the certificate and entreat the Superior to investigate and decide.’ Despite Tjoa Tjie Ming’s claim that Lauki had legally moved from ‘indigenous’ to ‘Chinese’ status, Captain Tjoa Toen reacted with hostility, reportedly ‘scolding and driving him out’, and repeating the abuse when Tjoa Tjie Ming returned that evening. In his response to the Dutch authorities, Captain Tjoa Toen justified his refusal by exposing Tjoa Tjie Ming’s attempt to manufacture a false lineage, noting that Tjoa Tjie Ming had claimed Lauki was the adopted daughter of a Chinese man named Joo Lak Ko (游六郎), who denied the relationship, stating: ‘I know nothing [of this adoption]. It was only last night that Tjoa Tjie Ming came to ask me to accompany him to the Hall today to request a marriage certificate; there was nothing else to it.’ Beyond the procedural fraud, Tjoa Toen’s resistance was rooted in the Sino-barbarian (Hua-Yi) distinction and the preservation of a perceived civilizational hierarchy. He maintained that the Kong Koan’s duty was to safeguard communal ‘morals’ and ‘ancestral order’, arguing: ‘Since ancient times … whenever Chinese (Tangren) men and women marry … there has never been a precedent of granting certificates to those of different races (yi se ren 異色人) or maids of various backgrounds. Furthermore, several years ago, the Governor-General issued a proclamation prohibiting intermarriage between indigenous people (Fan) and Chinese (Tang).’ For the Chinese elite, admitting an indigenous woman into the Chinese registry was not merely a legal violation but a form of ‘cultural contamination’ that threatened the purity of Chinese society.
The case took a decisive turn in September 1788, when Tjoa Tjie Ming returned to the Dutch Secretariat with Lauki and presented two Chinese documents (tang zi 唐字): one stating Joo Lak Ko’s willingness to adopt Lauki as his daughter, renaming her In-nio (蔭娘), and another from Lauki confirming the bond. This time, Joo Lak Ko corroborated the claim, and consequently, the Dutch Secretariat prioritized administrative procedure over the Kong Koan’s ideological objections, issuing a final directive: ‘Because this case has been approved, the Chinese (Tangren) Captain is ordered to issue the marriage certificate to form this union. This is the decree (yu 諭).’ On 12 September 1788, under colonial intervention, Tjoa Tjie Ming and the newly renamed In-nio received their certificate and registered their marriage before Dutch officials.Footnote 28
This resolution provides critical analytical insights into the malleability of identity in the Nusantara. In-nio’s transition from an indigenous maid to a ‘Chinese’ woman with a legally ratified lineage demonstrates that ‘Chineseness’ could operate not only as an inherited essence but also as a legal label produced through administrative procedures and private contracts. While Chinese elites like Tjoa Toen sought to exclude indigenous populations to maintain a ‘pure’ civilizational identity, two pressures operated simultaneously. The Dutch authorities worked with a pragmatic administrative logic, prioritizing formal classification over bloodline purity; in parallel, the persistent resistance and agency of ordinary individuals in everyday life forced concessions from the institutional order. When the Dutch authorities prioritized the formal standards of the colonial ‘plural society’ framework, allowing boundary crossings so long as the paperwork was correct and categories were formally maintained, they made the boundaries of identity porous, even within a traditionalist body like the Kong Koan. In this context, interethnic marriage transcended demographic pragmatics to become a conscious exercise of agency, challenging orthodox moral codes and negotiating communal boundaries. Ultimately, in everyday practice, ‘Chinese identity’ was not a stable or pre-given essence but a paradigm continuously unmade and remade at the intersection of diverse legal and cultural systems.
Conflict and rupture: Interethnic practices and challenges to ethnic boundaries
Subsequent Kong Koan records from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries document numerous instances of Chinese individuals, particularly women, actively challenging Confucian orthodoxy and its rigid ethnic boundaries. Although the Kong Koan consistently attempted to maintain professed ethnic purity by reinforcing Chinese customs, and many individual struggles ended in failure, this does not obscure the persistence of such challenges or the extent to which they destabilized the very foundations of the Sino-barbarian (Hua–Yi) distinction.
These challenges first manifested as open departures from Confucian marital orthodoxy and its racial demarcations. Returning to the 1847 case of Lau Kie Nio mentioned earlier, she was turned away by her father when she returned home ill and destitute. She subsequently received financial aid and care from a Muslim, and in gratitude, she volunteered to convert to Islam and marry him. In court, she openly challenged the authority of her Chinese husband, Lim Djoe Djit (林如日), to whom she had been betrothed by her father, stating bluntly in her testimony: ‘The relationship between myself and Djoe Djit was merely one of love; it did not constitute the principles of being a wife. I am unwilling to go with him.’ Although the Kong Koan ultimately forced her to return to her Chinese husband on the grounds of ‘dishonouring ancestors and changing one’s lineage and surname (bei ji gai xing, dian ru zu zong 背籍改姓,玷辱祖宗)’, her words and deeds constituted a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of patriarchal marriage.Footnote 29
The roots of such challenges often lay in how being brought up in interethnic households shaped identity formation. Many challengers came from natal families composed of Chinese fathers and indigenous mothers; in everyday life interethnic marriage had long since breached the rigid hierarchy of ethnic segregation professed by the elite. Lau Kie Nio, for instance, explicitly leveraged her maternal lineage to challenge her father’s authority; she argued that since her mother was a Muslim (sit-tap 失畓), and her own past relationships with both a Chinese husband and a Dutch lover, she was no longer bound by her father’s patriarchal norms (bu gan jia fu zhi shi 不幹家父之事).
The Tjoe Hie Tam (朱喜淡) case of 1849 is another representative example. This 16-year-old girl (father Tjoe Teng 朱定, a Chinese; mother Kabo 茄勃, an indigenous woman) was raised by her indigenous maternal aunt, Kasieh (茄詩), after her parents’ deaths. The struggle over her custody reveals the intensity of the tug-of-war between the two cultures: Kasieh had previously managed to keep the child by deceiving the girl’s Chinese grandfather: pointing to a mound of earth, she claimed, ‘Hie Tam has already passed away; this is her grave.’ Years later, when her elder brother, Tjoe Bo Kiat (朱毛訖), discovered the truth and brought her back to the Chinese quarter, she refused to assimilate. After staying with her Chinese aunt Tjoe Tjai Nio (朱才娘) for only a few days, she escaped back to her indigenous village. In court, she firmly rejected her Chinese identity, testifying: ‘I am unwilling to follow my aunt Tjoe Tjai Nio; I am willing to convert to Islam. Moreover, the circumcision ritual (sun-lak 順叻) has been clearly performed, and I am already betrothed to a Muslim man (sit-ren 失人).’Footnote 30 This deep cultural fusion meant that, in the eyes of these women, indigenous groups were no longer inferior ‘others’, but family members closer than their Chinese kin. Their integration into indigenous society and their voluntary adoption of indigenous names and faith fundamentally challenged the civilizational hierarchy and the Sino-barbarian (Hua-Yi) distinction upheld by the Chinese male elite, who viewed indigenous cultures as inherently inferior.
Confronted with a largely irreversible interethnic fusion in everyday life, the Chinese elite could often sustain only a nominal hierarchy through institutional improvisations: the attempted ‘expulsion’ or ‘segregation’ of relationships that could not in fact be undone, and the deployment of ‘Chinese’ status as a pragmatic, instrumental category.
A typical case of ‘expulsion’ and ‘segregation’ is the 1845 Chee Mui Nio (徐梅娘) case.Footnote 31 This widow committed adultery with an indigenous labourer, Lie Poe (裏富), before her mourning period had ended, triggering a fierce cultural conflict between her son, Tan O Ha (陳澳夏), and her lover involving pork sacrifices. According to her son’s accusation, Lie Poe, upon ‘seeing [him] use pork for sacrifice, threw the items to the ground, shouting angry curses, and strangled [him] by the neck’. The Kong Koan adopted a pragmatic strategy: judging that Chee Mui Nio had ‘abandoned our Chinese (Tangren) rules’, they forcibly stripped her of the custody of her four children to ‘prevent them from being converted to Islam by their mother’. However, because her conversion was already irreversible, the Kong Koan did not force her to return to her late husband’s family to observe widowhood; instead they drew a line by ‘condemning her actions as criminal’ to serve as a warning to others (ming zui qi zui, yi jing hou lai 明罪其罪,以警後來). This ruling, stripping her of custody of her children, on the one hand, while partially tolerating an actual interethnic intimacy, on the other, was essentially an attempt to use institutional segregation to repair an ethnic boundary that had already collapsed in daily life.
At the same time, the Kong Koan’s rulings utilized ‘Chinese’ identity as a pragmatic category: flexible enough to be instrumentalized, yet constrained by colonial regulation and internal anxieties over precedent and propriety, as exemplified by the Yeo Pek Nio (楊柏娘) adoption case (1833).Footnote 32 Yeo Pek Nio sought to adopt an indigenous boy, Kwe Peng (奎炳), as her own son, explaining to the Kong Koan: ‘This is the desire of his father who wishes to commit Kwe Peng to me as an adopted son to learn the art of opera.’ Although she proposed that the child, ‘upon growing up, could still follow the regulations of Islam at his own convenience’, the Kong Koan’s ruling drew a final line: ‘According to the fact that Yeo Pek Nio originally operated an opera troupe, the claim that she wishes to adopt this son to learn opera is true. However, regarding the desire to adopt him as a son while still following the regulations of Islam, there is absolutely no such rule among the Chinese (Tangren).’ This demonstrates that ‘Chinese’ identity could be opened to non-blood relations, but only on the condition of renouncing public Islamic practice. This identity was defined less by blood than by ritual adherence and regulation.
In other words, regardless of whether the Chinese elite welcomed it, interethnic marriages and families continued to exist in everyday life. There was no practically effective segregation between Chinese residents and local indigenous people. They lived in close proximity, which inevitably produced intersections of human sentiments—intimacy, friendship, and love. Although the Kong Koan could deploy the forced deprivation of maternal custody as a punitive instrument to obstruct Chinese conversion to Islam, this coercive power was frequently contested in everyday life, sometimes to the point of near-impotence. The Kong Koan was thus at times compelled—within a Confucian moral idiom—to accommodate a ‘reconstruction’ of familial ethics and social hierarchy under the pressure of quotidian entanglements, as in the case of Kho Tan (許壇) suing his wife, Sio Jioe Nio (蕭柔娘).Footnote 33 After several confrontations in court where the Kong Koan refused to allow a divorce, Sio Jioe Nio ‘fled and married an indigenous man, which has now been several years’. Faced with Sio Jioe Nio, who entered the court wearing ‘indigenous dress, without a shred of Chinese (Tangren) womanly decorum’, the Kong Koan ultimately had to abandon the attempt to force her return, accepting that ‘Joe Nio has already changed her virtue and belongs to the indigenous’, and pragmatically judging that she ‘should be granted divorce’.
In many instances, the Kong Koan’s verdicts projected a moral landscape that, though framed in Confucian terms, bore only a tenuous resemblance to its ideological foundations. Rather than an enduring tradition, this moral order appears as a historically contingent assemblage, shaped by local demands, legal ambiguities, and everyday entanglements. The case of Ong San (王山) and Oei Kiau Nio (黃嬌娘) is illustrative.Footnote 34 Following Ong San’s imprisonment for theft, Oei Kiau Nio entered into other relationships during his absence. According to Ong San’s petition, she eventually absconded with substantial gold and silver ornaments as well as household furnishings. Oei Kiau Nio admitted that she had first eloped with a Chinese man for a year and, after his death, entered a union with an indigenous man. Upon his release, Ong San repeatedly summoned her to return, invoking conjugal obligations and offering to take her back. Oei Kiau Nio refused, arguing that she had already ‘lost chastity (shi jie 失節)’ and could not face reunion; she further claimed that Ong San was ‘unable to support himself’, let alone provide for her, and therefore ‘vowed to the death not to return’. She also disputed the allegation of theft, stating that the valuables had been pawned by the husband and that certain furnishings had been sold to repay a debt. Despite the seriousness of her alleged sexual and moral transgression under orthodox Confucian doctrine, the Kong Koan treated her ‘five years of raising the children’ as a compensatory claim, deeming it ‘sufficient to make up for the fault (zu yi bu guo 足以補過)’, and granted the divorce. The court also did not probe the contested details of the jewellery and furnishings, accepted her partial return of household items, and did not obstruct her de facto marriage with the indigenous man. This ruling suggests that what was presented as ‘tradition’ operated less as a strict enforcement of dogma and more as a pragmatic compromise necessitated by the exigencies of sustaining communal life amid Batavia’s transcultural reality.
A critical reading of these cases reveals that the Kong Koan’s rulings exposed the malleability, and arguably the internal incoherence, of the claimed Confucian ethical system when confronted with transcultural realities. This tension becomes particularly explicit when examining the correspondence between the Kong Koan and the Dutch Resident, specifically the exchange concerning the adjudication of the Tjoe Hie Tam case and the broader inquiry regarding Chinese subjects wishing to convert to Islam. The Kong Koan first emphasized that ‘regarding us Chinese (Tangren), we are bound to follow the Chinese regulations (Tangren Guili 唐人規例); for in China (Tang), there is no other legal classification’. Yet, they pragmatically acknowledged: ‘Nevertheless, regarding the regulations for the various races now residing in Batavia, we must submit to the Resident’s discretion and decision, so that each group may observe its respective laws.’ In terms of procedure, the Kong Koan conceded that ‘If an [Chinese] individual wishes to convert to Islam, and there are no elders in their household (wu qing zhi, 無請知), they may decide independently (ren cong qi bian, 任從其便).’ Conversely, they insisted that ‘if elders remain (you qing zhi, 有請知), they must obtain the approval of their father, uncles, or brothers’. Furthermore, the Kong Koan invoked a historical prohibition: ‘But if we observe the Ordinance [of the High Government] dated 23 July 1766, which explicitly reiterates the Resolution dated 9 February 1717, then our Chinese people (Tangren) are strictly prohibited from converting to Islam. We respectfully submit these details to the Resident for a decision.’Footnote 35 This correspondence fully illustrates the Kong Koan’s complex position: it explicitly acknowledged the necessity of adhering to colonial regulations while, grounded in its Sino-barbarian racial ideology, simultaneously seeking to prevent Chinese conversion whenever possible by leveraging patriarchal pressure. Yet, the Kong Koan was also aware of the intermixed living conditions in Batavia; thus, in situations where they were powerless to intervene, they had no choice but to acquiesce. This explains why, in the cases mentioned above, the Kong Koan could at certain moments vigorously defend bloodlines (as in the Lau Kie Nio and Tjoe Hie Tam cases), yet at other moments resolve social disputes through pragmatic compromise (as in the Oei Kiau Nio and Sio Jioe Nio cases). Far from being immutable, ethnic and cultural identities were continually negotiated, reconfigured, and at times dissolved.
Negotiation and restructuring: The dynamics and ambiguities of Chineseness under legal pluralism
As the practice of interethnic marriage, whether formal or informal, became prevalent, the entry of indigenous and mixed-descent women into Chinese households introduced divergent ethical norms. This demographic shift steadily eroded Confucian familial ethics, particularly regarding gender morality, and posed a persistent challenge to the patriarchal authority envisioned by Chinese male elites. Faced with this challenge, and while the Kong Koan harboured a genuine desire to uphold Chinese tradition and Confucian ethics, the necessity of maintaining community stability amid the reality of interethnic unions compelled it to adopt a more pragmatic approach. On the one hand, the Kong Koan maintained the ‘form’ of Chinese tradition by professing strict adherence to Neo-Confucianism, explicitly declaring that ‘all Chinese (Tangren) under our jurisdiction must earnestly observe the maxims and family instructions of Master Zhu (Zhu Fuzi 朱夫子; i.e. Zhu Xi朱熹), admonishing them earnestly and instructing them one by one’, and codified this in its 19 regulations.Footnote 36 On the other hand, in daily judicial rulings it frequently delivered verdicts more favourable to women, especially those of indigenous or mixed descent, than legal precedents in Qing proper would permit. This divergence substantively compromised Confucian family ethics in practice, with the result that the social and legal boundaries of ‘Chineseness’ became increasingly fluid and unstable.
The impact of interethnic marriage on traditional Confucian family ethics first manifested in the erosion of norms governing female seclusion and women’s movement outside the home. The Qing Statutes and Code, grounded in the Confucian belief that ‘words from within should not be heard without, and words from without should not be heard within’ (nei yan bu chu, wai yan bu ru 內言不出, 外言不入), regarded the confinement of women within the domestic sphere as a guarantee of chastity.Footnote 37 According to the Qing’s legal code, if a wife ‘abandoned her husband and ran away’ (bei fu zai tao 背夫在逃)—escaping her husband’s control by fleeing without permission—she would be sentenced to 100 blows of the heavy bamboo. If she remarried during her flight, the penalty escalated to ‘strangulation after the assizes’.Footnote 38 Furthermore, if a wife violated wifely virtue through adultery or absconding, the law permitted the husband to ‘sell her in marriage’; that is, the husband possessed the right, subject to official approval, to sell a non-compliant wife to another man.Footnote 39
In Batavia, however, these ideals were widely challenged by the presence of indigenous and mixed-descent women in Chinese households, many of whom, following local custom, continued to move freely, even after marriage, without seeking familial or marital approval. The Kong Koan’s fundamental principle was merely that one must ‘announce one’s departure and present oneself upon return’ (chu bi gao, fan bi mian 出必告, 返必面);Footnote 40 there was no explicit rule prohibiting women from going out privately. Subsequent verdicts confirm that women leaving the home privately, even overnight, was commonplace, whether for trade, visiting relatives and friends, or even bathing openly in rivers and canals. Society was accustomed to this and did not view it as problematic. For instance, in a case dated 28 June 1824 involving three girls running away together, when the Kong Koan inquired about the specific circumstances, the family replied: ‘This morning, upon waking, [I] saw the main door wide open. [I] immediately called for the three girls, but there was no response. Assuming they were bathing in the canal, [I] searched everywhere but saw no sign of them; only then did I realise they had run away.’Footnote 41 Other case details also frequently mention women ‘returning from bathing at night’, indicating that women going out alone or in groups to bathe was a commonplace occurrence.Footnote 42
Chinese husbands, retaining homeland expectations of female propriety, often found this unacceptable. Consequently, the Kong Koan archives record frequent marital disputes and divorce petitions triggered by wives leaving home unannounced, sometimes for several days.Footnote 43 However, in adjudicating these cases, the Kong Koan rarely strictly enforced Confucian prescriptions or even its own expectation that departures be announced and reported.Footnote 44 Instead, it considered whether the outing was for legitimate reasons, such as market visits or trips to natal homes. In the absence of proven adultery, husbands’ divorce requests were generally denied; at most, verbal reprimands were issued. Only when adultery was clearly established did the Kong Koan support divorce claims and impose penalties.Footnote 45
As challenges to restrictions on female mobility in interethnic marriages persisted, along with the consequent increase in female public visibility and expanded social networks, the concept of chastity was further eroded. This led to a significant weakening in the overseas setting of the Confucian chastity regime rooted in the gender ethics of late imperial China.
From the fourteenth century onwards, Neo-Confucian gender ethics, especially those condemning female sexual transgression and remarriage, became integral to both the cultural norms and legal institutions of Chinese society, particularly in the south, the primary region of origin for migrants to the Nusantara. Under these norms, chastity was enforced with absolute moralism, to the extent that countless women viewed suicide as the only acceptable response to actual or perceived violations of sexual propriety. The ideological framework offered little room for negotiation, treating any perceived impropriety as irredeemable and regarding death as a minor matter compared to the loss of chastity.Footnote 46 Simultaneously, Qing law permitted a husband to be exempt from the death penalty if he killed an adulterous wife and her lover on the spot. If he spared them, he retained the right, subject to official approval, to sell the adulterous wife, even into servitude.Footnote 47 In the Qing legal code and in the adjudication of serious crimes (homicides), any extramarital sexual conduct, including selling a wife, pawning a wife, or recruiting a husband due to poverty, was strictly defined as ‘adultery’ or ‘illicit sexual relations’. Although survival strategies such as ‘pawning a wife’ or polyandry existed among the impoverished classes (constituting de facto adultery), these fell into a zone of illegality; once those implicated entered the judicial process, they usually faced severe penalties, including heavy bamboo beatings and forced divorce.Footnote 48 Only in a minority of cases, specifically in routine county-level adjudication of non-homicide disputes, did officials, while verbally rebuking these acts as contrary to proper rites, display a certain degree of tolerance towards these survival strategies of the poor.Footnote 49
By contrast, verdicts on adultery cases in the Kong Koan archives reveal a pragmatic, negotiated moral order. Women accused of infidelity, upon clear evidence, would be punished with public shaming, whipping, imprisonment, or a divorce decree, after which they were permitted to ‘each marry another’ (ge cong bie shi 各從別適) or ‘each choose another spouse’ (ge ze bie pei 各擇別配), or were ‘handed over to relatives to be taken away’.Footnote 50 Regardless of whether divorce was decreed, the husband could not sell the wife, let alone kill her or her lover. Although sanctions were imposed, marital dissolution in such cases could occur without fatal consequences or permanent dishonour, a marked departure from the uncompromising moral logic of orthodox Confucianism. In some verdicts, such as the aforementioned case of Ong San and Oei Kiau Nio, Oei Kiau Nio’s adulterous elopement with an indigenous man resulted merely in a judgment of ‘divorce in court’ (dang tang li bian 當堂離邊), justified by the Kong Koan on grounds that ‘raising children for five years is sufficient to atone for the fault’.Footnote 51 Here, a woman’s reproductive labour was transformed into moral capital sufficient to offset the grave crime of ‘loss of chastity’ in the Confucian context.
With the erosion of chastity norms and ideals of lifelong female fidelity, divorce and remarriage became commonplace in the Kong Koan’s records. Late Ming and Qing law upheld the absolute authority of the husband and the patriarchal clan order. Divorce followed the principles of the ‘Seven Outs’ (qi chu 七出, grounds for a husband to cast off his wife) and ‘righteous severance’ (yi jue 義絕, state-mandated divorce).Footnote 52 Wives had virtually no right to unilaterally petition for divorce unless the husband committed extreme crimes, such as forcing his wife into prostitution, selling her to another man, or killing her relatives.Footnote 53 Although the Kong Koan in Batavia nominally followed the ‘Seven Outs’ in its divorce verdicts and upheld the principle that divorce required the husband’s consent, ruling that ‘if the husband is unwilling, this Hall cannot force separation’,Footnote 54 a distinct difference emerged in practice.
First, cases of divorce initiated by women were commonplace in Batavia, and when a woman persisted and substantiated her claims, divorce could be granted, albeit often at a very high price. In the case of Kiong Hie Nio (龔喜娘), the wife, suing Yeo Kiat (楊結/潔), her husband,Footnote 55 she initially petitioned for divorce because her husband refused to buy her dried tangerine cakes for a chronic cough and beat and scolded her, driving her out of the house. Yeo Kiat claimed poverty, alleging that his wife was making a fuss over nothing, stating that ‘due to a momentary lack of money making it difficult to buy [them], my wife became resentful and spoke of separation’, while in reality he suspected she was having a private affair. He demanded time to catch her in the act so the Council would ‘imprison her behind high walls’. The Council mediated and advised reconciliation. By year’s end, Kiong Hie Nio sued again due to her husband’s gambling and abuse. Yeo Kiat agreed conditionally: she must return all marriage jewellery before he would release her. Kiong Hie Nio agreed and brought the items to the court to effect the formal handover. However, Yeo Kiat reneged at the signing, once again citing suspicions of an affair with an indigenous man. He declared he would consent if she remarried a Chinese (Tangren), but refused if it meant enabling a union with an indigenous man (Fan). The deadlock was ultimately broken by a Kong Koan ruling that approved the divorce, with a restrictive clause: if Kiong Hie Nio were later discovered to have remarried an indigenous man, she would face arrest and punishment.
Second, in two specific circumstances, a divorce suit brought by a wife could be supported irrespective of the husband’s consent: cases involving the husband’s failure to maintain the household and domestic violence.
In the Qing empire, poverty was not a legal ground for divorce. In Qing homicide records, many women were killed by their husbands merely for verbally requesting to be sold (a legitimate way to leave the home) to escape poverty.Footnote 56 In Batavia, however, a wife could righteously petition for divorce upon discovering that her husband could not provide daily living expenses. Divorce cases initiated by women on the grounds that ‘the husband does not provide funds’ accounted for a large share of the archive: approximately 276 cases, constituting more than one-third of the entire Kong Koan archive. When adjudicating such cases, the Council consistently favoured the wife, regardless of whether the husband defended himself by claiming he had provided funds, only intermittently or in insufficient amounts. Typically, the initial verdict would order the husband to provide for the household, avoiding an immediate divorce. However, if the husband demonstrated he had ‘no profitable path’ and it was determined that he could not support his wife, a divorce would be granted in court. Generally, not only did the Council view the failure to provide funds as a dereliction of duty, but husbands themselves often felt ashamed of their inability to cover their wives’ expenses; they would either plead for an extension of time or willingly allow their wives to divorce and remarry. Wives in Batavia’s Chinese community were not expected to endure poverty with their husbands; divorcing and remarrying due to a husband’s poverty was viewed as a matter of course.
A representative case is that of Sia Beng Nio (謝明娘), who accused her husband Tan Kong Tiang (陳光長) of being idle, addicted to opium, and neglecting the family, and implored the judge to decree a divorce.Footnote 57 Left with no choice, Sia Beng Nio returned to her natal home to support herself through needlework, a separation that had lasted three or four years. The judge reproached Tan Kong Tiang: ‘Your wife testified that you spend all your days loafing around and smoking opium, rather than working hard to take care of your family. As a result, she has had to live at her parents’ house for three or four years, supporting herself by doing sewing work. As a husband, you have completely ignored this. How can you be so heartless?’ Tan Kong Tiang made excuses, claiming that bad luck and illness over the past few years had prevented him from doing business, and that a lack of money forced him to leave his wife temporarily with his mother-in-law. He promised ‘I will rent a house this very night’ and take his wife back to care for her properly, begging the judge for leniency. The judge ordered Tan Kong Tiang to rent a house and support the family, while simultaneously ordering Sia Beng Nio to return to her husband and fulfil her duty as a wife. Sia Beng Nio reluctantly obeyed; not long after, however, she sued again. She stated that the Council had previously ordered her husband to provide six guilders (dun 盾) monthly for living expenses and to rent a house. However, her husband defied the order: he gave only two guilders after one week and never returned home thereafter. Facing the judge’s rebuke, Tan Kong Tiang argued that he had given his wife two guilders as capital two or three days later, but that she had refused it as too little, treated him like a stranger, and insulted him day and night. He claimed that he felt ashamed, which was why he did not return home. The judge asked Sia Beng Nio whether this was true. She retorted that it was all lies: she had spoken to him kindly, but he had responded with abusive language. The judge scolded him, stating that refusing to return home simply because his wife had scolded him a few times showed that he had ‘no manly ambition’. Finally, the judge determined that ‘since the husband cannot diligently care for the family’ and ‘the wife cannot endure poverty and stay in her place’, reconciliation was impossible. Divorce was granted, allowing them to ‘each follow another fit’.
Similarly, Oei Boen Nio (黃文娘), accused Tan Tsai (陳在/再), her husband, as follows: ‘I have been married to my husband for four years, yet he has provided no care for clothing, food, or expenses.Footnote 58 Previously, upon petitioning the Kong Koan, the Captain ordered my husband to rent a house and provide for clothing and food, but with no effect. Since May of the Yi year [Yi Si Year, 1845], he actually gave the marriage document to me and unilaterally returned to China (Tang). I endured for three years. Now that my husband has arrived in Batavia from China (Tang), he has not come to care for me, nor has he even asked after me; such is his heartlessness. I beg for a separation.’ The Council meeting concluded: ‘Regarding Tan Tsai’s failure to care for his wife Oei Boen Nio’s clothing, food, and house rent; his presumptuous three-year stay in China (Tang); and his lack of care upon coming to Batavia: it is clearly seen that the affection between husband and wife is severed. It will be difficult for them to grow old together. It is reasonable to decree a separation.’
Another example is the case of Teo Kin Nio (張謹娘) suing Oei A Sam (黃亞三) .Footnote 59 The wife stated: ‘I have been married to my husband for five years and gave birth to a son who did not survive. Unexpectedly, my husband has provided no care for clothing, food, or expenses. I beg for a separation.’ The husband argued: ‘I returned to China (Tang) in the Ding year [Ding Wei Year, 1847] and arrived back in Batavia in the Wu year [Wu Shen Year, 1848], just like a new guest. My wife demands excessive expenses; I cannot even look after myself, so how can I satisfy her desires?’ The Council attempted to persuade them to reconcile, but ‘Kin Nio was steadfast and unwilling, determined to separate’. Finally, after discussion, the Council ‘permitted their separation, with each signing [their mark] as proof’.
After maintenance issues, domestic violence served as the second most frequent ground for divorce petitions initiated by women within Batavia’s Chinese community, accounting for approximately 20 per cent of such cases.
In the Qing empire, a husband physically disciplining his wife was legally sanctioned as a form of ‘correctional behaviour’. A wife could only seek legal redress if she sustained ‘severe injuries’, such as bone fractures or the loss of teeth, and even then a decree of divorce was not guaranteed, with courts often merely ordering the husband to repent before sending him home.Footnote 60 Furthermore, courts regularly showed leniency towards husbands who killed their wives, particularly where such acts could be rationalized, for example, if the husband was the family’s only son or if the wife was accused of violating filial or sexual norms.Footnote 61 In Batavia, however, the Kong Koan supported a divorce petition whenever physical harm was established, whether through visible bruises or the testimony of witnesses, irrespective of the husband’s consent.
For instance, in the 1834 case involving Giam Bok (嚴莫), who brutally beat his wife Yeo Dji Nio (楊二娘),Footnote 62 the wife alleged that ‘only twelve days after the marriage, I was beaten … and in the three months since, I have been beaten countless times, yet never as cruelly as this! My whole body is covered in wounds, the pain is unbearable, and I have nearly lost half my life. I beg for a clear investigation and a decree of separation.’ Upon inspection, the Council found that Yeo Dji Nio’s body was indeed covered in bruises, confirming the severity of the beating. During the hearing, Giam Bok confessed: ‘It was truly because my wife did not care for my illness; when I asked her to brew tea, she turned a deaf ear. Being sick, my mind was confused; in a fit of anger, I struck her without thinking. I beg for forgiveness. I truly did not intend to beat her this hard. If this leads to separation, this is not my wish.’ Despite the husband’s refusal, the Council determined that ‘given Giam Bok dared to cruelly beat his wife so soon after the wedding, his excesses are extreme and the affection between husband and wife is severed … it is reasonable to decree a separation’. Giam Bok again begged for forgiveness and a reunion. The Kong Koan ordered him: ‘You must seek Elders to plead your case to Dji Nio. If she changes her heart [and agrees to return], why would this Kong Koan stop you?’
Similarly, in the case of Teo Ban Jit Nio (張萬日娘) versus Tjoe Ban (朱扳),Footnote 63 the husband accused his wife of stealing household property and absconding. Conversely, the wife alleged that she had been beaten by her husband, his stepmother, and a male relative, resulting in bruises on her face, hands, and feet that were unbearable. She further claimed her husband threatened that if she did not return home quickly, he would kill her. Fearing for her life, she hid under a neighbouring roof all night before reporting to the authorities. The Kong Koan summoned witnesses; while the accused relatives denied the assault, the Kong Koan inspected the wife’s injuries and verified the beating. Finding the husband’s allegations of theft unsupported by evidence, the Kong Koan granted the divorce and rejected the husband’s claim for compensation.
In instances of domestic violence where witnesses were present or injuries were visible, the Kong Koan, even if not immediately granting a divorce, frequently supported the wife’s return to her natal home with alimony provided by the husband. During the trial of Tan Kong Hie (陳光喜) for assaulting his wife Kwe Ek Nio (郭益娘),Footnote 64 the wife alleged that ‘last night, when I returned from begging for sirih (betel nut) at a neighbour’s, my husband flew into a rage for no reason and beat me until I was bleeding; though I committed no fault, I suffered this cruel hand!’ The husband claimed he had been drinking and that his wife had refused to attend to him before leaving; upon her return, he scolded her, complaining that she should have served him. He claimed that she attacked him with a wooden clog, and he accidentally hit her lip when blocking the blow. A neighbour testified that Tan Kong Hie was habitually ‘frivolous and reckless’ and prone to trouble when holding sharp tools, though he did not witness the assault this time. The Kong Koan rebuked the husband, asking: ‘At your advanced age, why are you so lacking in propriety?’ When Kwe Ek Nio steadfastly refused to return, declaring she would ‘rather die than go home with her husband’, the Kong Koan summoned her mother to take her daughter home to mediate. Later, Kwe Ek Nio sued again, stating the husband’s conduct remained unbearable. While the Kong Koan rejected the divorce at that time, it permitted her to reside with her mother and ordered Tan Kong Hie to pay monthly maintenance: three dou of rice and six guilders.
In summary, regardless of how Batavia’s judicial rulings nominally emphasized their foundation in the Great Qing legal code and Chinese tradition, the actual adjudication of family and gender ethics prioritized a pragmatic logic of survival over Confucian orthodoxy. Verdicts focused on resolving the practicalities of ‘subsistence’ and ‘daily life’, adapting—either by force or choice—to the fluid gender relations necessitated by the reality of interethnic cohabitation. This significantly lowered the threshold for divorce for women, judicially empowering them with a level of agency and negotiating capacity far exceeding that available to their counterparts in the Qing empire. While judicial practice in the Qing empire also sometimes displayed flexibility in the face of poverty, such as tolerating wife-selling, its core logic remained the preservation of patriarchal family integrity and hierarchical order.
This departure in judicial practice was not confined to individual adjudications; several official statements issued by the Kong Koan reveal a formalized yet implicit departure from orthodox Confucian gender norms, reflecting a negotiated ‘Chineseness’ distinct from the imperial centre. Regarding women’s remarriage, the Kong Koan declared: ‘According to our Chinese customs (tangren guili), parents may decide their daughter’s marriage only once. If she wishes to remarry thereafter, the choice is hers—though she must not bring dishonour to her family.’Footnote 65
This so-called ‘custom’ deviates significantly from the ideal of the three obediences—to father before marriage, to husband during marriage, and to son after the husband’s death. By allowing widows to remarry without consent from the deceased husband’s family, this regulation represents a fundamental compromise of the patriarchal moral order. By contrast, in contemporaneous China, opposition to remarriage was institutionalized. The Ming state incentivized widow chastity through tax and labour exemptions, and its veneration of virtuous widows redefined normative womanhood. Women who remarried after receiving honorary titles for virtue would be stripped of those honours—binding family prestige to a woman’s sexual conduct. By the late Ming and High Qing periods, such practices had reached their peak.Footnote 66 In this light, the Kong Koan’s stance on remarriage did not preserve orthodoxy but reconfigured it pragmatically in response to diasporic realities.
The Kong Koan did not adhere to a single coherent legal framework; instead, it functioned through a pragmatic legal pluralism, drawing on three overlapping sources: Chinese customary standards to establish patriarchal norms, the Qing code—invoked to bolster its legitimacy—and Dutch colonial statutes, which served as the overarching authority that could not be contravened. While presented as an autonomous institution of Chinese self-governance, it operated firmly within the colonial structure. Its primary purpose was not the static preservation of tradition, but the mediation between colonial authority and local elites—publicly supporting Dutch norms and precedents to secure stability, legitimacy, and survival under colonial rule. In matters such as interethnic marriage, the Council was caught between competing imperatives. On the one hand, both Confucian hierarchies and colonial racial taxonomies demanded formal opposition to racial mixing. On the other, assimilation and intercultural unions were widespread in everyday life. In response, the Kong Koan maintained the appearance of guarding bloodlines, preserving a nominal purity of ‘Chineseness’ in official records, while allowing considerable flexibility in practice.
Over time, these informal compromises were selectively institutionalized within a hybrid legal system that nominally invoked Chinese customs, claimed to be centred on Confucian norms, officially adhered to Dutch superior law, and practically adapted to the exigencies of daily life. This structural friction created fissures within which Chinese women in Batavia, though lacking formal rights, gained the ability to assert moral and legal claims. By relentlessly pursuing divorce despite moral suspicion and economic hardship, and by insisting on marrying indigenous men despite communal disapproval and repeated coercion, these women actively contested the foundations of Confucian patriarchy. Their courtroom struggles accumulated in moments of rupture that destabilized the essentialist Sino-barbarian binary that male elites upheld as central to diasporic identity.
Consequently, the Kong Koan emerged not as a static forum for preserving inherited tradition, but as an active site of structural adjustment and transformation, often in ways that fractured the ideological coherence of Confucian values. Within this institutional space, the terms of identity were constantly contested, selectively applied, and repeatedly reconfigured at the intersection of law, power, and lived experience. These shifts exposed the structural contradictions of a system that invoked Confucian rhetoric while being compelled to adapt to a colonial plural legal regime characterized by the intermingled residence of diverse ethnicities and cultures. What emerged was not a transplanted or preserved ‘Chineseness’, but a fractured and reassembled socio-legal formation, one in which women, long marginalized by dominant narratives, became its most unexpected architects.
The operation of the Kong Koan thus illuminates the limitations of viewing overseas Chinese governance as a mere extension of traditions centred on Confucian orthodoxy. While certain ritual practices persisted, the legal accommodation of women’s marital agency and the recognition of interethnic unions signalled a transformed moral order. In this context, Confucian values were no longer hegemonic but negotiable; ‘Chineseness’ became a fluid construct, rooted not solely in bloodline or doctrine, but shaped through the pragmatic demands of plural governance and the lived experience of those who challenged its boundaries.
Conclusion
This article examined the ways in which interethnic unions and everyday negotiations continuously recalibrated the contours of Chinese identity in the Nusantara long before the consolidation of modern nation-states. An analysis of family structures and marriage practices among these communities prior to 1850 reveals significant departures from orthodox Confucian norms. Such shifts underscore the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the diasporic experience, as individuals navigated and adapted to unfamiliar social and cultural landscapes.
The evidence presented here complicates an essentialist understanding of Chinese identity by highlighting a persistent tension: a profound anxiety over ‘cultural contamination’ that coexisted with inevitable local integration. To counteract the eroding effects of assimilation, diasporic subjects consciously maintained a sense of ethnocultural distinction and superiority, even as they became deeply embedded in local social structures. This paradox of behavioural adaptation versus identity preservation is vividly captured by the Ming scholar Zhang Xie, who observed that ‘some Chinese who had not returned to China for generations had fully adopted the local language, food, clothing, and texts. Yet despite being indistinguishable from Javanese Muslims in practice, they refused to identify as Javanese and instead called themselves Xi-lan (息坔)’.Footnote 67 Here, Xi-lan functions as a transliteration of the local term Selam (Islam); by adopting this label, they asserted a religious identity as ‘people of the faith’ to distinguish themselves from having Javanese ethnicity. Similarly, the Qing scholar Wang Dahai noted that many Chinese merchants had permanently settled in the archipelago—‘wearing local clothes, eating local food, reading local books, and adopting Javanese customs’—yet continued to look down upon the Javanese and relabelled themselves Xi-lan to demarcate distance from local Muslims.Footnote 68 At the same time, these early travel records suggest that Confucian values, though influential, were not dominant guiding principles overseas: communities adapted to multi-religious and multicultural settings, blending local customs with inherited practices. Such adaptation complicated any effort to maintain a clear-cut Chinese identity.
This article has highlighted interethnic marriage as an early and enduring adaptation strategy. Despite communal stigma and colonial restrictions, such unions were widespread and often instrumental for survival and integration. The incorporation of indigenous women and the presence of their descendants posed profound challenges to ritual norms and hierarchical family structures, disrupting the binary of ‘civilized’ Chinese versus ‘uncivilized’ indigenous ‘others’ and undermining claims to putative civilizational superiority. In Batavia, while women did not enjoy formally institutionalized gender equality, they nonetheless asserted moral and legal claims within the fissures of colonial governance and the attenuation of Confucian authority. The degree of autonomy observable in women’s marital decisions, although limited, exceeded that in the contemporaneous Qing empire, suggesting that Confucian values central to family life in the Qing empire were neither uniformly enforced nor consistently salient in overseas settings.
Defining ‘Chineseness’ thus becomes increasingly difficult once these communities moved beyond the territorial and institutional bounds of the Qing empire. In the multi-ethnic and multi-religious milieu of the Nusantara, Chinese migrants were compelled to negotiate their identities in ways shaped not only by ancestral values but also by local practices and colonial constraints. The result was a complex and dynamic interplay of social roles and self-understandings that defied the essentialist notion of a singular, coherent Chinese identity. The experiences of the overseas Chinese in Nusantara before the mid-nineteenth century reveal the inherent ambiguities and challenges of defining Chinese identity outside China. The distinctive familial and social structures that emerged illustrate the resilience, pragmatism, and adaptability of Chinese cultural practices when confronted with unfamiliar and often adverse circumstances.
Revisiting these early histories shows that the deconstruction of ‘Chineseness’ is not a postmodern provocation but a historical condition. So-called ‘Chinese tradition’ in the region was never a stable inheritance; it was always a negotiated—often contradictory—assemblage shaped by interethnic intimacy, social adaptation, and political marginality. These lived histories challenge both the romanticization of cultural continuity and the epistemic violence of collapsing diverse subjectivities into a single name. In this light, ‘Chineseness’ is not merely to be defined or redefined; it is to be historicized, interrogated, and—where analytic clarity requires—bracketed.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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