A Bit of Earth is a work of fiction based on fact sculpted by the imagination. A footnote in a history textbook about the adultery of a tin miner’s wife had excited my teenage imagination, and I have been interested in the history of Chinese tin miners in Malaysia ever since.
Bandong is a fictional village in the Malaysian state of Perak. The Bandong war in the novel is based on the tin mining wars in nineteenth century Perak, which was colonised by the British. Malay resistance led to the murder of James Birch, the first British Resident of Perak.
British rule brought thousands of Chinese to the tin mines and rubber plantations of Malaya. These Chinese coolies were treated as dispensable workhorses. They could be easily deported under two laws upheld by the British—ius sanguinis, “the law of blood”, and ius solis, “the law of the soil”. The law of blood asserted that any Chinese could be deported to China, regardless of whether he was born there or whether he could speak Chinese. The law of the soil, on the other hand, stated that a person was a native and a citizen of his place of birth. In their dealings with the Chinese in Malaya, the British applied either of these two laws, depending on which gave the colonial government greater advantage and legal expediency at the time.