[14] Consuming Modernity, 1850–2000

Housing for a Fragile Environment

Southeast Asia’s warm and humid environment was responsible for some broad common features of diet and lifestyle, which continued to distinguish the region even as it embraced new possibilities from elsewhere. The mild climate and the abundance of water, wood, bamboo, and palm in most places made for relatively light buildings easily assembled and demolished. Frequent flooding, the proximity of jungle wildlife, and the mosquitoes dictated that most domestic buildings were erected on poles, allowing refuse to fall down below and maintaining the domestic space above as a shoeless clean area. Even palaces were overwhelmingly of wood, bamboo, and thatch, although on a grander scale. Only Hindu and Buddhist temples were of stone, brick, and mortar on modified Indic models, since merit accrued to their builders and rebuilders regardless of the earthquake damage that was certain in most areas. Mosques or monasteries, on the other hand, built for people rather than gods, were of wood and thatch.

By the sixteenth century, Tongking, Java, and Bali had departed from the Southeast Asian pattern to build their houses on the ground with some use of brick or stone foundations. These populous pockets first felt the scarcity of wood as the forest frontier was rolled back and ceramic kilns, metalworking, and domestic cooking required ever more wood as fuel. Chinese and European merchants had always feared to store their cloth and other trade goods in fire-vulnerable wooden buildings, and their cities encouraged a more dense building pattern in brick or stone. The Manila Chinese were manufacturing bricks and tiles locally as early as the 1580s, and the other Euro-Chinese cities were not far behind. Some rulers then followed this example, using European architects as early as the seventeenth century to build some solid buildings as exotic showpieces or armories. There was a reward in security from fire and attack, but a major cost in both earthquake damage and unsanitary heat and congestion. After Manila, in 1645, and Batavia, in 1699, suffered terrible earthquake damage, there was more experimentation even in the cities with hybridized styles of building.

This process extended in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to all urban centers and the major irrigated rice bowls. The supporting poles grew shorter in the denser valley-floor settlements of the Bama, Thai, Minangkabau, and Tagalog. In the Philippines a hybrid style developed with a masonry lower floor and a light, wooden upper level. The onset of cement in the late nineteenth century encouraged bathrooms and kitchens to be built on the ground even in an otherwise elevated timber house. The Manila earthquakes of 1863 and 1880 damaged the lower portions even of houses built with unusual thickness, leading to a Filipino urban standard that supported the upper house on a wooden frame and used brickwork only as an outer shell.

For most rural agriculturalists housing remained essentially impermanent well into the nineteenth century – easily built and easily rebuilt after fire, war, or natural disaster. Split-bamboo was preferred for walls, so that the laborious sawing of timber for planks was largely limited to boat builders and the finer palaces. The retreat of the forests with population pressure, however, made this pattern increasingly difficult to sustain in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the scattered populations of most areas in earlier times wood had no cost except the goodwill of neighbors to help cut and haul it for the house-posts. As dense settlements of irrigated rice and sugar spread in the nineteenth century, while shifting cultivators had to cut the secondary forest ever more frequently, good timber had to be bought. The central valley of Luzon and the islands of Panay and Negros were largely deforested by the expansion of sugar and tobacco by 1900. Gradually, therefore, the poor built closer to the ground and with flimsier fast-growing material such as bamboo, and the new corrugated iron or zinc roofing.

The twentieth century witnessed the first evidence of rat-borne plague in the Islands, with a major epidemic in East Java in 1913–14 and periodic attacks thereafter. This induced the Dutch government to begin a radical rebuilding program, enforcing the replacement of rat-friendly bamboo and thatch with solid materials and a tiled roof. Over two million houses were built or modernized in the Indies by 1940, giving Java villages their current neat look. The new model houses were also smoke-free with separate kitchens, though unfortunately this had the effect of driving overall mortality up as malaria-bearing mosquitos were able to invade the homes. Cement and zinc gradually transformed the housing of more affluent villagers as the century wore on.

The rapidity of urbanization since the 1940s saw a deterioration of building standards, as access to affordable timber and bamboo declined and crowded makeshift slums developed in such giant cities as Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Saigon. The urban opportunities for education, informal-sector employment, and modern glamor outweighed the undoubted loss of housing comfort as the poor moved to the cities. For all their disproportionate share of national wealth, these hastily built coastal conurbations were vulnerable to floods, typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunamis, as if the lessons of earlier generations had been forgotten . The disasters came with unprecedented frequency and magnitude as the twenty-first century began (Chapter 18). The rush to develop new cities and nations in the twentieth century left little attention for the fragile environment and traditional means of building to resist earthquake and flood.

The Evolution of Foods

The Columbian exchange should in the Pacific be named the Magellan exchange, in that the crucial new crops from the Americas – maize, tobacco, chili, papaya – entered Asia through the route opened up by the Spanish between Mexico and Manila. Irrigated rice complexes had developed sufficient surpluses by then to supply the large trading cities and spice-exporting regions. When the seventeenth century crisis forced them toward greater self-sufficiency, the New World crops were fortunately available to assist. By the mid-seventeenth century maize was being planted in many hillier or drier regions of Southeast Asia as a supplement or replacement for rice. In the eastern Archipelago, especially those places hitherto dependent on imported rice or on sago, maize became a primary staple in the eighteenth century. One index of Java’s growing impoverishment was the increasing acreage devoted to maize, from 18% of non-irrigated agricultural land in 1815 to 36% in 1880 and 50% in 1910. Although rice was always preferred, maize (like tapioca) kept people alive, with about the same number of calories produced per hectare of land as rice, but with much less labor and without the need for irrigation.

Visitors from temperate climates were usually enthusiastic about the abundance of fruits of Southeast Asia, the mango, durian, mangosteen, rambutan, and jackfruit being long established and a pleasant surprise to visitors, while there was also no shortage of citrus options. Papaya, pineapple, and soursop made their entry from the Americas in the seventeenth century, papaya being the quickest to establish itself within the staple diet through its hardiness and the portability of its seeds. Widely available coconuts and other fruits of the palm provided vital additional calories and nutrients and enriched local cuisines. In a few areas of the eastern islands they became the primary source of food. Essentially grown as a standby by householders, fruits were not commercialized into large-scale production until the twentieth century.

Vegetables had been less developed until the settlement of Chinese increased the range, with items such as kangkong and spinach entering the local cuisine. Soybeans were also introduced from China by the sixteenth century, and in the form of both soy sauce and soybean cakes (tofu) took a place in the diet of many Southeast Asians. The most remarkable adaptation occurred in Java by the eighteenth century, to turn soy by fermentation into chewy compact cakes (tempe), which had some of the functions of meat in both food and protein content.

The commercialization of rice production in the Mainland deltas from the late nineteenth century provided the means to sustain the plantation sector, as well as city-dwellers, military personnel, and miners. Rice was a complete food capable of long storage, and thus ideal for such purposes. The plantation and mining areas of Malaya, Bangka, and East Sumatra became, with the cities, the great importers of commercial rice. This expansion of the trade in steam-milled rice produced an epidemic of beriberi in such areas, with 30,000 a year estimated to be dying from it in Malaya alone around 1900. It was research on this problem, begun by Christiaan Eijkman in Java in the 1890s, which established that unhusked rice protected against the disease, whereas a dependence on milled and polished rice exposed people to it. This discovery was followed by further research in Malaya and the Philippines that succeeded, in the 1930s, in isolating the chemical thiamine as the active protective element. Beriberi was gradually contained, and the contribution of these discoveries to the development of vitamin theory led to a Nobel Prize for Eijkman in 1929.

The commercialization of rice production and export in the Mainland deltas also had the effect of lowering its price relative to cloth and other consumption goods. Where there was abundant land farmers might switch their efforts to rubber or coffee and do well in good years. In the lowland rice bowls of Java, Viet Nam, and Burma, however, the return on their crop was ever more marginal and debt became a critical problem. In the 1930s the shift was evident to less preferred foods for survival, such as tapioca, taro, and sago. The Japanese occupation of 1942–5 marked the nadir of this mid-twentieth century crisis (Chapter 17). The spiciness of many Southeast Asian diets, not mentioned by earlier observers, appears to have been a response to this impoverishment. Meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables increasingly became luxuries, and only the spicy pickled sauces made the essential starch palatable.

Fish, Salt, and Meat

As explained in Chapter 1, Buddhism and Islam changed meat-eating habits. Though domesticated in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago, probably the first important meat source to be so, pigs retreated as Islamic and Theravada norms took greater hold. Pork remained nationally popular only in Viet Nam and the Philippines, together accounting for 60% of Southeast Asia’s pig population of some 60 million in recent years. Elsewhere it was associated especially with Chinese, Balinese, and the hill peoples who rejected the scriptural religions. Chickens and ducks, on the other hand, became the major meat resource in most of the region. Whereas the sight of chickens running freely around a village house was once universal and is still very common, the expansion of battery hen farming in the late twentieth century provided most of Southeast Asia’s 1,500 million chickens in 2002, over half of them in Indonesia.

Until this recent expansion of the chicken population and the return of greater affluence from the 1970s, meat was a negligible factor in the nutrition of all but the elite. Rice itself provided most of the proteins, but the share of animal proteins in most diets was overwhelmingly derived from the ubiquitous waters of the region – freshwater rivers and ponds in the interior, especially of the Mainland, and the seas and estuaries in the coasts and islands. The shallow waters of the Sunda shelf, stretching all the way from Bali to the Gulf of Tongking, formed one of the world’s most abundant fisheries, while the great river systems of the Mainland, including the extraordinary bounty of the Tonle Sap river system, made fishing a universal skill. Crawfurd (1820 I, 195) was convinced “There is no art which they have indeed carried to such perfection.”

Fresh fish was consumed by those who caught it, but it decayed so quickly in the tropics that it was a minor factor in consumption. Most fish was immediately dried in the sun, with salt added where possible, or else pickled in salt until it produced a spicy fermented paste. The pickled prawn, squid, or fish paste known as belacan in Malay, ngapi in Bama, or nuoc mam in Vietnamese was a key feature of the Southeast Asian diet, making rice or other starches palatable even when nothing else was available. The largest item of exchange in the markets was, however, dried fish, since it could be stored and carried into the interior.

Fishing as an industry was limited by the availability of salt, which was most cheaply produced only in coastal areas where there was a marked dry season and flat, non-porous land adjacent to the sea that could be flooded with sea water to form salt pans. These conditions were best met on the north coasts of eastern Java and Madura, the northern shore of the Gulfs of Thailand and Martaban, Pangasinan in Luzon, the southern coast of Sulawesi, and the central (formerly Cham) coast of today’s Viet Nam. Key fishing grounds around the Malacca Straits and the Tonle Sap had to import their salt, from East Java or the Gulf of Siam. Salt was, however, a tempting source of tax revenue for governments, and the Dutch monopoly of it in nineteenth-century Java hurt the industry to an extent that provided a limitation to Java’s own fisheries. The Straits area then began to source its salt primarily from Siam, and later even from the Red Sea.

In the high colonial period of peasantization (Chapter 13), fish consumption per capita probably declined for the rural majority without direct access to the sea. While populations increased greatly, inland waterways were impoverished by deforestation and pollution, in some areas poisoned by the residues from tin mining or sugar milling. If, as Butcher (2004, 70) concludes, per capita consumption of aquatic products as a whole increased very slightly between the 1870s and 1930s, that growth would have occurred in the wealthier Euro-Chinese cities that could afford the prices of commercial fisheries. Chinese-led commercialization did expand production of dried and even ice-cooled fish in a number of key areas, while the new transport networks facilitated distribution. But production methods changed little from the time-honored methods of nets and fish-traps.

From the 1850s, Chinese fishermen opened a number of commercial fisheries on both sides of the Malacca Straits, with close-packed houses over the water in villages such as Bagan Siapiapi, Kuala Kurau, Pangkor, and Pulau Ketam. Singapore and Penang became the commercial hubs through which dried fish was distributed to other cities and towns. At its peak, in 1904, Bagan Siapapi, on the prolific estuary of Sumatra’s Rokan River, exported 26,000 tons of dried fish and 2,700 tons of belacan. As its salt supply became a constraint, more of the catch was put into the less salt-demanding belacan, exports of which reached 10,000 tons in 1909. Siam, with better supplies of salt, was the other area where certain coastal fisheries became commercialized enough to supply fish to Malaya, Singapore, and beyond. The Tonle Sap and other fresh-water fisheries, on the other hand, expanded by traditional means to provide the minimum of fish products to a growing Mainland population.

Technical improvements were minimal during this period for the great majority of fishermen, with the result that catches in Burma actually declined throughout the high colonial period. Southeast Asia by the 1930s was a net importer of fish, primarily in the form of American tinned sardines everywhere, and Indian fish imported to Burma. Colonial experiments with trawling were half-hearted and too costly, but Japanese fishermen began trawling in Philippine waters successfully around 1900. By 1931, 70 Japanese diesel trawlers were registered with the Manila authorities, and supplied a good proportion of the Philippine market. Okinawans specializing in catching deep-water fusiliers (Caesionidae) also moved into Southeast Asia in the 1920s, using divers to position their large nets and chase the fish into it. By the 1930s these teams of motorized fishermen based in Southeast Asia accounted for about a third of the fish unloaded commercially in Singapore and a quarter in Batavia.

In short, the high colonial period witnessed a dismal failure of mechanization or planning in Southeast Asia’s rich fisheries, partly because poverty kept fish prices too low to attract investment. The rural population probably consumed a little less fish on average during this period, and markedly less during the disastrous 1940s. In 1961 such naturally well-endowed countries as Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia produced less than 10 kg per capita of fish per year. The rural poor consumed a small fraction of this amount, mainly in the form of a tiny garnish of belacan.

The post-war conversion of Southeast Asian fishing fleets to motorized trawlers with synthetic nets and ice, or later refrigeration, began in the Philippines in the 1950s, Thailand with a great rush in the early 1960s, and the rest of the region progressively thereafter. Fish catches more than tripled to six million tons between 1960 and 1980, with Thailand in the lead, and the region became a major net exporter to Japan, Hong Kong, and beyond. Fish consumption per capita roughly doubled in Indonesia between 1960 and 1996 and increased by more than that in Thailand. But from the 1980s the pressure on fish stocks was palpable, and increasing investment no longer gave comparable increase in yields. Each country in turn declared a 200-mile exclusion zone off its shores in 1977–80. Indonesia and Burma, having the weakest fishing fleets of their own in relation to their maritime zones, led the unequal struggle to exclude or license foreign trawlers. As fish stocks of many varieties plummeted, there was a massive shift into aquaculture, particularly of shrimps. Consumption levels increased with prosperity more generally. But for the small independent fishermen who lined the region’s coasts life had become increasingly hard and dangerous, as they were forced to travel ever further in search of the elusive catches.

Stimulants and Drinks

Water was the main drink for pre-modern Southeast Asians, piped in bamboo from mountain streams in the highlands. Lowlands and cities were less fortunate, getting whatever water they could from springs or wells, and letting river-water stand for weeks until de-silted. Such water was perfumed with lemon or spices. Young coconuts could become a vital resource when clean water was not available, as on boats or in a crisis such as a flood. In northern Burma and Viet Nam there are ancient traditions of tea growing and drinking, but diasporic Chinese habits of tea drinking with boiled water did most to reduce the dangers of dirty water in crowded cities. It was reported of the Siamese capital in the seventeenth century, and of Java in the early nineteenth, that the upper classes had learned to boil their water, whether or not in the form of tea, and advised Europeans to do the same if they wished to avoid disease. Southeast Asia was one of the places in which Europeans first encountered the healthy Chinese habit of tea drinking in the seventeenth century, most languages adopting its Malay name (teh) derived from the Hokkien dialect of Chinese traders. Commercial growing of teas for the by then insatiable European markets began in hill districts of Java in the early nineteenth century, later transforming upland forests also in Viet Nam, Burma, and Malaya. By the early twentieth century weak green tea was beginning to replace water as the common drink.

Before and outside the scriptural religions, alcohol was an indispensable part of feasts, but not of everyday consumption. This was most commonly in the form of toddy, fermented from the juice of one of the many available species of palm. The new religions disapproved of the whole practice of farewelling the dead through all-night feasting, drinking, and dancing, and this type of indulgence was by the nineteenth century only to be found in the unincorporated highlands. By comparison with Europeans, or even with the Chinese who ran the urban drinking houses for arak (distilled spirits), Southeast Asians became a notably sober people. The drunken European was a standard caricature of popular theater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The great social facilitator and relaxant was not alcohol but a quid of chewed betel. Of its three essential ingredients to produce the active alkaloids, the leaf of the betel vine (Piper betle) was widely grown in household gardens, and consumed fresh. The nut or seed of the Areca catechu palm was dried and traded over large distances from the coastal areas where it was grown. Aceh exported it on a substantial scale to India throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The third ingredient was lime, obtained from shells in coastal areas and limestone outcrops in the highlands. Most parts of the region, therefore, had adopted by the sixteenth century the habit of mixing betel in this way, chewing it frequently, and offering it to guests as the standard euphoric stimulant. A set for storing and preparing betel was an essential item of every household, and a servant to carry it a necessary part of elite rituals and social interaction. The complementarity of the “heating” areca nut and the “cooling” betel leaf held erotic implications, manifest in courting rituals, when a woman’s delicate folding of the quid for a man was a prelude to engagement or to love.

Tobacco was one of the most eagerly adopted introductions from the Americas, both directly from Mexico to Manila and through Europe. Some smoked it in pipes as the Europeans did, but more did so as a smoked cheroot in the seventeenth century, put together from locally grown tobacco and wrapped in a leaf of maize or palm. The great Viet encyclopaedist Le Quy Don condemned it as an evil barbarian introduction, in contrast to civilized tea, but complained that “officials, ordinary people, wives, and unmarried girls” even went without food in their passion to smoke it, despite a ban by the Dai Viet court (cited Woodside 1997, 258). Tobacco was seen as having relaxing effects similar to betel but more powerful. Beginning in the eighteenth century it was added in small amounts to the betel quid and chewed as a more economical means of gaining a stronger effect.

If betel was the great facilitator of male-female relations, the twentieth century cigarette became in its place one of the key modern markers of the gender boundary. The increasing power of modern fashions rendered betel chewing increasingly unacceptable. European males in Asia had abandoned the habit before 1800 in favor of the cigars being produced in Manila. By 1900 Europeans saw spitting betel-juice in a public place as the epitome of the dirty native habits of the East, their prejudices bolstered by the new bacteriological theories. The Asian elites who dealt extensively with Europeans quickly sensed this scorn and adopted instead the European fashion of handing around Manila cigars. Manila cigarettes became fashionable among Southeast Asian elites in the 1850s, swiftly following the new European fashion, and their affordability made it possible for the new urbanites to smoke them. Modern schooling became coterminous with the abandonment of betel chewing on a mass level. So eager was the Thai nationalist dictatorship of Phibun Songkhram to enforce “civilized” modernity that it declared the chewing of betel illegal in 1940.

Apart from the chic cigars and cigarettes of Manila, designed for export, there was much local production of home-made cigarettes with an image almost as rustic as betel itself. The Malay term was simply “bundle” (bungkus), since all kinds of aromatic or sweet additives could be put in the maize-leaf wrapper along with tobacco, not unlike the betel quid itself. These became commercialized in Java from the 1880s, once the Sino-Javanese entrepreneurs of Kudus began to open small factories employing local women using hand-operated rollers. This production for the market used a formula of ingredients in which cloves played the major part alongside tobacco. The way they crackled when smoked caused them to be called kretek, onomatopoeically. These were cheap and popular, but not at first seen as modern. Only after British American Tobacco (BAT) opened a cigarette factory in Cirebon in 1924 did the Kudus manufacturers modernize their production in competition. They produced a trimmer cigarette and advertised it as modern, with the result that output increased tenfold in the 1920s. In 1939 the kretek industry was already a Java manufacturing success story, producing about ten billion cigarettes a year and employing 80,000 women to roll them. In the 1970s production expanded and became more mechanized, and by 2000 Indonesia was producing 200 billion kretek cigarettes a year as against 25 billion of “white” or international style cigarettes. The importance of this lobby and source of tax revenue helps explain why Indonesia remains one of the few countries not to have signed the World Health Organization convention to limit smoking.

BAT brought modern cigarette production to most of the region in the 1920s and 1930s. In Thailand the nationalist government established a revenue-earning tobacco production monopoly in 1939, initially in partnership with BAT. For Viet Nam and Burma, state tobacco monopolies in the post-war era also became important sources of revenue.

Betel use was dying altogether for men by the 1950s and women by the 1980s. Its role in rituals of courtship, marriage, birth, and death continued only in symbolic form. In many rituals cigarettes were substituted as a gift to guests or to the spirits. The shift was a revolution in gender relations. The incidence of Southeast Asian male smoking has become among the highest in the world, from Indonesia’s 61% down to Burma at 40%. Women smokers were, however, among the lowest proportion in the world (Indonesia 5%, Thailand 3%, Viet Nam 1.5%), except in the Philippines (10%) and Burma (8%) where female smoking had a long history. Whereas betel chewing had long provided protection against many forms of bacteria and parasites, tobacco has had very negative effects on male health, and more so in its kretek form. This item of overwhelmingly male expenditure, moreover, consumed around 5% of Indonesian household budgets in surveys of the 1970s and 1980s, more than the expenditure on medical and educational expenses combined.

The twentieth century universalized coffee drinking as another primarily male substitute for betel chewing. The coffee shop became a ubiquitous place in every village for males to gather, smoke, and sometimes also drink coffee, milo, or something stronger and eat snacks. In Malaysia and Singapore the mixed clientele gave rise to the hybrid term kopitiam, combining the Malay for coffee with the Hokkien Chinese for shop. Bottled drinks (including bottled tea) were seldom part of the coffee shop menu before the war, but became widespread from the 1960s.

Cloth and Clothing

Chapter 6 showed how beautiful Indian cloths in the form of wrap-around sarung, scarves, and wall hangings became the item of conspicuous consumption par excellence of the age of commerce. Southeast Asian imports of Indian cloth rose to a peak of 1.7 million “pieces” (averaging about 11 square meters each) in the period 1620–50. The period of consolidation that followed drastically reduced the demand for Indian-made cloth. Southeast Asians turned again to their own resources, with some centers of large-scale production for the market adapting the favored Indian patterns. Javanese batik and south Sulawesi checked patterns began to be traded as far as Siam, Cambodia, and Lower Burma, where local production was less competitive in price.

As East India Company monopolies withered, India-based private traders, both Tamil Muslim (Chulia) and European, continued to supply Indian cotton cloth affordably to the western ports of Southeast Asia such as Aceh, Phuket, Mergui, Rangoon, and after 1786, British Penang. Neither traders nor Southeast Asian consumers were quick to make the transition to the much cheaper British manufactured cloth that became available in the 1790s. But the British occupation of Dutch possessions in 1811–16, followed by the founding of Singapore (1819) enabled British cloth to replace Indian imports in British-controlled areas. Even the batik industry of Java switched to the use of machine-made white cloth on which to draw their wax-resist patterns. Singapore became the chief distribution point for a host of small Chinese, Bugis, Malay, and Vietnamese boats to pick up factory-made European cloth, sales of which rose from 245,000 Spanish dollars’ worth in 1828–9 to four million dollars’ worth in 1865–6. Indian cloth rapidly fell out of the trade after 1840, and constituted only 2.5% of Southeast Asian imports by 1865. Almost none of the British cloth went to Dutch ports in Java and elsewhere because of prohibitive tariffs in favor of boosting Dutch industry, but Siam and Viet Nam became the largest importers of the cloth through Singapore.

By mid-century cheap manufactured European cloth was replacing not only imported Indian but also locally produced cloth. In the first half of the following century this imported cloth was more dominant than it had ever been in clothing Southeast Asians, and was again the major item of importation. Fluctuations in the level of imports began to be used as a measure of welfare, and the fact that far less was imported in the 1930s depression years than in the 1920s (about half in Burma’s case) was taken to imply a marked drop in welfare. The 1940s were even more critical, reducing many to wearing old rags, skimpier clothing, and gunnysack material for want of cloth. Once again there was a reversion to local production and replanting of cotton. Factory production began very modestly in some areas in the 1930s, while others rediscovered ancient spinning and weaving methods.

Dress styles had become more ethnically standardized in the eighteenth century after the wild experimentation of the age of commerce (Chapter 6). The extensive mixing between foreign men and local women produced some common ground of acceptable dress, whereby both men and women would wear a long sarung-like wrap-around in the house, although men might wear trousers in the office or marketplace. Southeast Asian men frequently wore a dark jacket and ethnically differentiated headdress with their sarung for more formal occasions, or a collarless shirt for everyday.

Pre-twentieth century Vietnamese and Filipinos had been the most fully dressed in western eyes, using locally produced silk and cotton cloth. Both Vietnamese realms maintained the old Ming style of Chinese dress and long hair, distinguishing them from Manchu-ruled Chinese with their pigtails. Both sexes wore loose trousers down to the ankles and one or more loose tunics down to the knees. Garments were commonly of silk for the upper classes but cotton for the poor. Not until the 1920s was the ensemble refitted with tight-fitting tucks to become the female national dress, ao dai. Lowland Filipinos also incorporated their Spanish fashions from the seventeenth century into more distinctive hybrid styles in the eighteenth. The male shirt began its evolution to the modern embroidered barong Tagalog not tucked in, and at first collarless. For women the skirts (terno) became fuller, the sleeves of the blouse (camisa) shorter and more starched in what eventually became the characteristic butterfly style, while the scarf (panuela) became ever more decorative and highly starched.

As undergarments were introduced in the late nineteenth century, fashionable Burmese as well as Archipelago women initially revealed them beneath the sheer upper garment. Because it was more comfortable than European or Chinese female fashions in the tropics, the sarung-kebaya became a cosmopolitan urban dress, and even the European women who began to come to Southeast Asia in greater numbers in the 1870s were instructed how to purchase and wear them. Around 1900, however, the more numerous women born in Europe or China (the totok, in Chinese-derived Malay usage) began to distance themselves from the “native” in dress, and to be influenced by global fashions. Sarung-kebaya was first restricted to morning wear or when receiving lady friends, but by 1920 it was definitely out for Europeans or those who sought to emulate them. Chinese had more choices, between local, Chinese, and European styles, with Paris and Shanghai increasingly setting the pattern for the modern woman. Eurasians and Christians were among the first to follow the trend to more European styles of dress, and western-educated young men and women were not far behind.

Modern Dress and Identity

The globalization of dress fashions in the twentieth century was the most visible marker of the end of autonomy discussed in Chapter 11. Before 1900 the few elite Asians who dressed like Europeans stood out as anomalies; by 1960 it was survivals of locally particular dress in urban settings that seemed anomalous and in need of explanation. Nothing better than dress expresses the tortured conflict between desires to emulate the modern status of the European and to reject his alien arrogance. Each time and place revealed different nuances in the nature and outcome of this conflict. There were dramatic moments of overturning tradition or asserting neo-tradition, but the overall current was irresistible in the direction of globalized modernity.

Status hierarchies were everywhere expressed in dress, but these differences had seemed relatively minor to Europeans in Southeast Asia. In particular, male and female dress and hairstyles had seemed disturbingly similar, whether it was the “masculine” short brush look of Thai women or the “feminine” long locks of Bama, Javanese, and Viet men. Palace sumptuary codes and hierarchies became stricter as the courts became defensive, but did not extend to whole societies as they had in Europe. It was the Europeans in Asia who became obsessive about dress codes as ideas of racial hierarchy took hold. Experimentation and hybridity was no longer acceptable to the Europeans who set the tone from 1900, so that men and increasingly women should dress as they did in Europe. The British officials, accustomed to wearing shoes as a mark of identity wherever they went in India, seemed willing to risk war or rebellion in Burma rather than remove their shoes in palace and pagoda.

“Protected” royals in the colonial context tended to insist on distinctive dress styles held to be traditional among their own subjects, since it imposed a pattern of deference in walking, crouching, and speaking which was seen to be under attack elsewhere. In Siam, however, the determination of successive rulers to achieve “civilized” status in the eyes of the powerful Europeans drove the most explicit and orderly westernization. King Mongkut (1851–68) already required those attending court to wear shirts, and began the habit of wearing a military uniform in emulation of the most powerful of his European visitors. His successor Chulalongkorn wore immaculate European dress on his travels in the 1890s (Figure 14.1), and full dress uniform for his public representation at home in statues and portraits. Government officials, the epitome of the thrust to modernity, wore a white uniform. A hybrid style of sarung-like cloth tucked in such a way as to resemble knee-length pantaloons was fashionable into the twentieth century, but increasingly was replaced by western trousers for the intelligentsia and fashionable urbanites, Chinese and Thai. At a popular level, a decree had to be issued in 1899 imposing fines for women who did not cover their breasts and men who did not wear the sarung down to knee length during the visit of Prince Heinrich of Prussia to Bangkok.

Figure 14.1 King Chulalongkorn of Siam, pictured with eleven of his 33 sons at Eton College, England, 1907.

Source © Photos 12 / Alamy.

The imposition of global modernity reached its peak after the absolute monarchy was overthrown in 1932, and particularly under the wartime dictatorship of Marshall Phibun Songkhram (1938–44). Decrees of 1941 insisted that Thais must be dressed properly when in public to uphold the civilized status of the country. This meant European dress or the approved hybrid style of national dress. Women were not excluded, and a “Miss Thailand” competition was officially encouraged in which from 1941 only European dress should be worn, complete with gloves, hats, and high-heeled shoes. Ahead of the rest of the region, Thailand appeared to have made its choice.

The same desire to claim the modern, civilized, and free status of elite Europeans weighed even more heavily on the racialized status hierarchies of the colonies. Men who dressed, acted, and spoke like Europeans were more likely to be treated respectfully and feel the equal of their masters, so nationalists became the foremost westernizers. In Indonesia a radical young Soewardi Soerjaningrat (1914, 267) had marveled how “a slavish attitude and manners, yes even opinions, change into ways which are unforced, free … through the change of clothes.” Filipino politicians of the 1920s discarded Spanish or local styles for a dark jacket, the americana, once they had to deal with Americans. Those engaged in revolution, whether in 1890s Philippines or the 1940s elsewhere, were particularly eager to embrace European military or civil dress.

Burma proved the exception to this westernizing pattern, perhaps initially because of the influence of Gandhi’s ideas during its administrative incorporation into British India until 1935. The first generation of English-educated nationalists in the YMBA of the 1920s did adopt western dress as a mark of equality. Their more radical successors of the 1930s, however, who adopted the respectful term of address to Europeans, Thakin, as their own badge of equality, preferred a Burmese style of pinni (jacket) and longyi (sarung-like wrap-around, with an opening at the front). Post-war politicians, concerned to assert Bama distinctiveness, were more concerned than elsewhere with uniformity of dress. U Nu already emphasized national dress as the “very backbone” of “the culture of the race or nation” in 1951 (cited Edwards 2007, 133). The advent of military rule in 1962 brought to a new level the enforcing of a dress code centered on the longyi, which had the probably intended effect of making trousers, the symbol of assertive male modernity, the prerogative of the ruling military alone.

The same nationalist men who embraced modernity in dress often preferred the presumed delicacy and deference of traditional dress in women. Another struggle between equality and identity took place here, the battle lines being drawn differently. The first women to achieve high levels of education or political office adopted modern western dress, like Sundanese lawyer Maria Ulfah Santoso (1911–88) or Filipina pediatrician Fe del Mundo (1911–2011) – the first woman (accidentally) admitted to Harvard Medical School. The wives of political leaders were more likely to appear in a distinctive Asian style, however modernized. Once the revolutions were over, a “national” style of female dress became established in the 1960s and 1970s in each of the new countries. For men too there were experiments with adding a “national” touch to a fundamentally modern/universal dress, beginning with the Indonesian headdress. Javanese might combine their blangkon in batik cloth with a European suit, while Sukarno popularized a black fez (pici) as a unifying symbol for all Indonesian men.

The antithesis of modernizing nationalist dress was the undress of those most recently incorporated into the world system through colonialism. For lowlanders in the early 1900s, the wearing of a simple loin-cloth or sarung without clothing the upper body became the preeminent sign of savage and marginal status. As education spread to the highlands, particularly if at missionary hands, cheap manufactured shirts were accepted as the price of acceptance in the broader society. The cultural conservatism of late colonialism, however, allowed this relative undress to survive, notably in the “cultural museum” of Bali and in Rajah Brooke’s Sarawak. Nationalism was more confident of its mission to civilize, and these pockets disappeared quickly after 1945. Yet there is evidence at least from the Luzon Cordillera that highlanders understood and used their undress as one of the weapons against incorporation, even against President Marcos in the 1970s.

Southeast Asia’s dress, like its politics, emphatically joined the new international pattern during the middle third of the twentieth century. Once the diverse local patterns of dress had gone, however, and the struggle for equal dignity won, elites made a return to local color from the 1970s and 1980s. Batik shirts became pervasive on even formal occasions in Indonesia and Malaysia, as did the barong Tagalog in the Philippines. The graceful ao dai, shunned by revolutionary North Viet Nam during the war, made a great comeback thereafter beginning with the tourist trade. Weddings in particular became occasions for experimenting with modern adaptations of traditional wear, where competitive ethnic pride could be displayed within accepted national and international parameters. This kind of sartorial display became a feature of the many international summits held in the region, each country feeling obliged to produce its “national” dress at its turn as host.

Performance, from Festival to Film

Public performance, we have seen in earlier chapters, was the Southeast Asian social activity par excellence, playing the cohesive role for palace, temple, and village occupied by the written word in China and parts of Europe. Print had little impact in popular culture until the twentieth century, and we should look rather to the world of theater, recitation, procession, and display for the transmission of shared knowledge and values. Patronizing such spectacles had been a central concern of palaces until they made their own exit in the nineteenth century, or withdrew to less central “cultural capitals” like Hue, Luang Prabang, Yogyakarta, and Surakarta. In rural areas the festivals, pilgrimage sites, and larger weddings and funerals provided the patronage to sustain both peripatetic full-time performers and villagers who would turn their hand to the arts in the post-harvest dry season. The traditions of theater, dance, puppetry, and recitation continued and developed, even though peasantization and poverty reduced the scale of such patronage.

Meanwhile, a different cultural space developed in the polyglot coastal cities, where quite new forms developed out of cultural interaction and technical innovation. The years around 1900 seem again to have been decisive in creating indigenous or hybrid majorities in most of these cities, who became not only consumers but sponsors and creators of new forms of performance. Public urban spaces had long been the venue for Chinese opera at big Chinese festivals and weddings. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were sometimes rendered in Malay or Thai and included local-born female singers, many of them not Chinese by any definition. Nevertheless, Chinese opera changed little in form and content no matter how hybrid the audiences. Like European theater, it became more totok (China-born or pure) in the late nineteenth century as steamships allowed troupes from south China to try their luck among the wealthy Chinese diaspora. The Vietnamese variant (Hat tuong or hat boi) made the transition to a kind of secular national theater in the nineteenth century, as King Tu Duc (1847–83) had theaters built for it in the central region he best controlled.

In contrast to the open-air style of most Southeast Asian performance, European theater developed in enclosed theaters with paying patrons in the nineteenth century port-capitals, the new bourgeois model. The British and French colonial authorities invested much in theaters both as solidarity-makers for the colonial elite and symbols of the mission civilisatrice. Raffles already had a theater opened in Batavia during his governorship there, and Singapore in turn had its early venues. Singapore’s classical Town Hall was built in the 1850s to accommodate performances, which moved to the Victoria Theatre in 1901. The Opera Houses of Saigon (1901) and Hanoi (1910) were (and are) the grandest buildings of the two cities, able to accommodate 1,800 and 900 people respectively. Private initiative was more important in Dutch and Spanish colonies. Handsome neo-classical theaters (schouwburg) were erected in Batavia (1821), opening with a local production of Shakespeare’s Othello, and in Surabaya (1854). In Manila a circus-like wooden building was upgraded to become first the Teatro Nacional in 1890, and then the Manila Grand Opera House under the Americans in time to receive a touring Italian opera troupe in 1902.

With the advent of regular steam-shipping routes, international touring companies and performers became ever more frequent. Some would stop only with the steamers at Rangoon, Singapore, Batavia, and Surabaya on their way to Australia, or at Singapore and Saigon on their way to Hong Kong and Japan. Others toured the provincial centers, spending weeks or months in the region before moving on. It may have been touring French players who so popularized the term comédie for indoor paying theater that it passed into urban Malay. The schouwburg of Batavia and other centers became known as the gedung komedi (theater house), while komedi tents and arenas sprouted throughout the Archipelago covering every type of show. Opera may have been the most prestigious, but Russian circuses, Indian magicians, American vaudeville, Chinese jugglers, and Japanese acrobats were more popular in urban societies of diverse languages and tastes.

A bewildering variety of shows passed through the urban space of Southeast Asia around the turn of the century, offering precious opportunities for its plural populations to wonder and laugh at each other. “Komedi culture was transregional, brash, and unapologetically oriented to all that was ephemeral and novel. It was the culture of the [urban] masses, volatile and sensitive to public taste and opinion” (Cohen 2006, 21). It also had profound effects on older and purer theatrical traditions. Dance drama performed by human actors was best able to adapt to polyglot urban audiences, especially when the role of clowns was extended to provide slapstick interludes making playful use of different languages. The Bama zat pwe, Khmer lakhon khol, Thai lakhon nai, Vietnamese hat boi, East Java ludruk, and palace-derived central Java wayang wong all responded to the demands of urban audiences for more spectacular effects and costumes, male and female actor/dancers, comedic interludes that crossed cultures, and an often boisterous paying public inside an enclosed theater rather than court or festival patronage. The most phenomenal success attended new commercial romance genres born of the early twentieth century, using an innovative mix of themes – Vietnamese cai luong (literally “reformed theatre,” mostly derived from hat boi), Thai likay, a popularized court drama, and Javanese ketoprak, a hybrid form with dance, spoken Javanese dialogue and western instruments as well as gamelan. In the 1920s, Viet Nam and Siam were each supporting several hundred professional troupes and Java about 500. Local Sino-Southeast Asian mediation was often essential in providing the capital and commercial know-how to support the innovative methods of indigenous actors and directors.

The period also gave rise to hybrid genres more influenced by foreign example and local demand than by traditional proprieties. Parsi troupes, having already developed hybridized popular forms in India, were also a hit in the cities of Southeast Asia in the 1870s and 1880s. It was in Penang that local Indian and Arab entrepreneurs sought to replicate their style in Malay, though adding actresses rather than the all-male Indian style. One leading group established in 1885 was named Indra Bangsawan after its most popular Malay tale, and the term bangsawan stuck for this genre. It developed a novel degree of professionalism and stagecraft, touring the cities of British Malaya and Netherlands India with large troupes, Indian-style musicians, elaborate costumes, and stage props. In contrast with its high Malay language and Indian inspiration, komedi stambul developed first in Surabaya with low Malay for its even more polyglot audience and European musical and theater models. Its early repertoire was taken from the Arabian Nights stories of Baghdad, which may account for the exotically Turkish-flavored name. A company of that name was formed in 1891 with primarily Eurasian actors initially, but Chinese capital and management. The dominating figures were the high-school-educated actor, director, and talented composer Auguste Mahieu (1865–1903) and the multilingual impresario Yap Gwan Thay. Mahieu went on to direct a number of companies, touring Java, Sumatra, and Malaya with a variety of musical romances. This genre of theater had many emulators over three decades, and prepared multilingual audiences for the advent of film. It well represented the excitement and scandal of crossing boundaries of race, gender, and class as these were becoming harder and more contested.

The European model was most influential in the Philippines, where Christian festivals were enlivened by popular vernacular theater, including Moro-Moro romances (also called komedya) climaxing with battles between Christians and Muslims, and the passion of Christ (pasyon or sinakulo) during Holy Week before Easter. A secular romantic light opera, zarzuela, was popularized in Spain in the 1850s and spread quickly to Manila. It was an immediate hit with music-loving Filipinos and companies were formed throughout the provinces. The same creative moment around 1900 that saw the creation of other popular stage genres in the region also witnessed the vernacularization of zarzuela into sarsuela, musical romances that also experimented with contemporary themes including the revolution against Spain. Severino Reyes (1861–1942) in 1902 founded the most successful of the many professional companies that flourished in the new century, the Gran Compania de Zarzuela Tagala. Among its first hits was “Not Wounded” (Walang Sugat) about heroic guerrilla fighters and their loves.

All these popular new forms flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century, and faded before the onslaught of film in the 1930s. Even though steadily losing this battle, live theater held on in rural areas. James Brandon (1967, 172–3) could still document over 1,100 professional theater troupes in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, twenty times the density to population of the United States. All combined music with the dancing and dialogue of actors or puppets, but in a bewildering variety of forms. Performance, more than the written word, continued to create common meanings and values in this transition to commercial modernity.

The earliest experimental cinema spread quickly along the steamer routes of Asia within a few years of 1895, when the Lumière Brothers showed the first commercial films in Paris. Short documentaries were shown in Manila, Singapore, Batavia, and Bangkok as early as 1897, and quickly fitted in to the komedi niche of commercial popular entertainment. The first short films, including clips shot locally as early as 1898 in Manila, were typically shown as part of a more extensive vaudeville routine. The first dedicated cinemas were opened in the Philippines in Manila (1900) and Cebu (1902), then in Singapore and Bangkok (1904), initially focusing on French productions. Japan was the quickest Asian society to take up the new medium, and its entrepreneurs were exciting Southeast Asian audiences in the early 1900s with depictions of their country’s modernity and military successes against the Russians.

Manila, with its greater affluence and links to Hollywood, led the move to local production. Edward Gross, an American married to sarsuela star Titar Molina, devised the first locally produced film in 1912 on the life of nationalist hero José Rizal. His firm followed this up by other nationalist-themed films and adaptations of popular sarsuelas, before selling their equipment in 1917 to the first Filipino film-makers, the brothers Nepomuceno. Even in the silent era they sought to adapt the Tagalog sarsuela to the screen, with live singers accompanying the action on the screen. In 1932 Manila studios produced a total of 23 Tagalog silent movies of this sort, often intertitled in English and Spanish as well, while Cebu produced a few in Cebuano. Intertitled Bama, Thai, and Malay (Indonesian) language films had their first successful features in Myitta Ne Thuya (Love and Liquor, 1920), Nangsao Suwan (Miss Heaven, 1923), and Loetoeng Kasaroeng (1926), respectively. All required cosmopolitan resources, as well as audiences, but had such an electric effect that local firms mushroomed thereafter.

The silent era marked the first stage of vernacularizing the new medium and thereby expanding enormously its appeal. Every Southeast Asian town had its cinema venue, usually owned by Sino-Southeast Asian entrepreneurs. Much larger than the professional live theaters that preceded them, they also provided venues for other public activities such as nationalist politics. The cinemas cut across race, class, and gender, mixing more expensive chairs with the cheap benches that allowed the urban poor a little escape. In Bangkok they were alleged to be associated with dalliance and prostitution. Despite the popularity of local products, the main fare of cinema audiences was Indian, Chinese, and especially Hollywood romances. So subversive of colonial hierarchies were the latter seen to be that censorship of foreign films was introduced to the Dutch Indies in 1926 and the Philippines in 1929. An article in the London Times complained that Hollywood movies now reached the great Asian masses, revealing “scenes of crime and depravity … as faithful representations of the ordinary life of the white man in his own country. The pictures of amorous passages … give him a deplorable impression of this morality” (cited Sen 1994, 14). For the first time, indeed, global audiences were consuming the same mass culture, emanating from a novel world where romance was for all and status was determined by looks, talent, and money rather than birth or education.

The domination of Hollywood was greatly increased by the advent of sound movies around 1930. The level of technology and capital required was beyond the resources of local studios, most of which collapsed or merged in this depression era. The first Bama feature of the talkie era was made in Bombay, and the Vietnamese equivalent in Hong Kong. Led again by Manila, however, local studios with larger capital were churning out dozens of vernacular talkies by the end of the 1930s in each of the urban lingua franca in process of becoming national languages. While the intertitles of the silent era could be written in several languages and understood in the viewer’s own dialect, sound film required actors to speak in the most commercially viable common languages, thereby greatly spreading their reach. Urban Malay spread and standardized with the movies (and newspapers), in step with the Indonesian nationalist movement, as did Tagalog in the Philippines. As screen idols spoke, so did their young audiences. In this way the talkies were complicit with nationalism in rendering popular culture less cosmopolitan, less local, and more national.

Distribution networks had been dominated by Chinese business since the early days. The most successful of them, the Shaw Brothers, opened an office in Singapore in 1924 and began acquiring or building theaters throughout the Peninsula, as well as in Bangkok, Saigon, and Batavia. By 1940 they owned or operated 69 such venues in British Malaya alone, as well as seven amusement parks featuring various live performers including bangsawan troupes. Initially their primary expertise was in distributing Shanghai-made Chinese silent movies, though of course they showed also Hollywood and Indian films to multilingual audiences. In 1932 they made the transition to sound film production with a western-dress modern Cantonese opera, Baijin long (white golden dragon), also a hit with Cantonese audiences in Malaya. This success led to a hundred more Cantonese films in the next decade. In 1939 they established Malay Film Productions in Singapore, which produced eight Malay-language talkies based on the bangsawan tradition before the war. The heyday of the studio, and of Malay film, came after the war, with a peak production of thirteen Malay films in 1952. Many of them starred Penang-born Acehnese heartthrob P. Ramlee, and had India-born directors and local Chinese cameramen. The gradual decline thereafter involved conflicts that would end by sending Malay, Chinese (increasingly in Mandarin), and English films in different directions.

The beginning of Indonesian language talkies in the 1930s was also cosmopolitan, as the Wong Brothers produced the first Jakarta-based action film based in part on local theater traditions. Chinese-managed local industry mushroomed, producing 41 talkies in 1941. A minor player in this flowering was the government’s small unit (ANIF), but it planted important seeds, notably with the hit movie Terang Bulan (Full Moon). The Japanese military administration of 1942–5 expanded this unit into a powerful instrument of propaganda while suppressing all independent film-making. Having excluded Dutch and Chinese and introduced Indonesians to heroic nationalist imagery, the unit helped provide independent Indonesia with both an institution helpful to its government, and a broader taste for nationalist themes. Sino-Indonesian companies, however, again initially dominated the massive expansion of commercial films in the 1950s.

By the end of the 1950s, film dominated the popular culture of the region’s expanding cities, with 676 cinemas registered in the Philippines, 655 in Indonesia, and 264 in Thailand (Brandon 1967, 305). In the Philippines and Malaysia this was the end of live popular performance, but elsewhere it continued to be a vital factor in rural areas, helping to keep alive many local languages and traditions. Centralized systems of universal schooling, however, followed by the extension of television into rural areas in the 1980s, eventually brought about the death or museumization of the cornucopia of live popular theater, and the birth of new national cultures – or more realistically, national versions of global culture.