The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas
By LEONARD BLUSSÉ VAN OUD ALBLAS
No literary tradition in the world has produced as many encyclopedias as the Chinese one. Thanks to these encyclopedias often compiled under Imperial auspices a large part of Chinese literature has actually been saved for posterity. Consisting, as they generally did, of selected quotations of earlier writings, they tended to serve not only as summaries of the whole realm of knowledge but also as style manuals for writing essays and poems.Certainly one topic to which no reader would have found any reference in imperial times was that of the 'overseas Chinese' those people who, notwithstanding the imperial prohibitions on emigration, had moved abroad. Emigration was, after all, strongly discouraged until the end of the nineteenth century by the imperial government in Peking. As a result, the number of people who moved abroad has remained relatively small if compared to, for instance, European emigration overseas.
Over the past decades several attempts have been made at producing general overviews of the presence of Chinese expatriates in Southeast Asia or America. Yet Lynn Pan's The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas is the first example of a concise modern encyclopedia, both in Chinese and English, which covers the overseas Chinese on a global scale. When the board members of the Chinese Heritage Center commissioned the editor to compile this encyclopedia, they may have wondered whether such an encompassing task could be carried out within just a few years time. But this is exactly what Lynn Pan, with the help of a handful of assistants, has done. The editor had already shown her strong grasp of the subject matter in her very readable Sons of the Yellow Emperor, which appeared in 1990. Moreover, in this publication she has enlisted a number of collaborators to support her own work with essays on topics with which they are well acquainted. The encyclopedia is not arranged in alphabetical order but is grouped around five sets of general themes: origins, migrations, institutions, relations and communities, which are then interspersed between shorter vignettes on specific matters and a fine collection of illustrations.
Not all contributions have the same high standard. Some of the essays on communities read almost like a folder from the local tourist bureau, but others like the one written by Kwok Kian Woon on Singapore show, in addition to factual information, a considerable amount of in-depth analysis. Among the less remarkable sections is the one on religion. For example the overseas distribution of specific cults or even the very basic practice of fenxiang the age old custom of distributing the incense ashes from the main temples in China to a subsidiary establishment abroad with all of its ritual and organizational connotations receives very meager treatment. In the section on overseas Chinese organizations one would have liked a somewhat more detailed account of representative institutions like panglong or kongsi. References to kongsis are found throughout the book (for instance in the geographical account of Indonesia) but should have been given a fuller treatment under the heading 'organizations'. The same applies to the Kongkoan, or Chinese Council of Batavia, which has left us the only existing large archive of an urban Chinese expatriate community spanning more than two hundred years! In this context perhaps funeral associations or the crucial issue of burials among overseas Chinese societies, especially in the past, could also receive extra attention in a future revised edition. The extremely important research on grave inscriptions in Malaysia and Indonesia by Franke, Salmon and others is not mentioned anywhere. If a revised edition will appear and I have no doubt about it of this very commendable and beautifully executed enterprise, than I would also suggest a separate historiographical section with a few vignettes on some of the older Chinese works on Chinese settlements overseas such as the Dong-Xi Yangkao or Ong Tae Hai's Chinaman Abroad. Readers who can read Chinese should also purchase the Chinese language version as a companion volume, not only for the convenience of finding the Chinese characters for names that are only known to us by their dialect pronunciations but also because of the fun to be had in comparing the variations in the texts with the captions under the illustrations. *
Lynn Pan ed.,
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE CHINESE OVERSEAS
Richmond: Curzon, 1998, ISBN 0700711228
Professor J.L. Blussé van Oud Alblas is currently working at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar, the Netherlands.
E-mail: blusse@nias.knaw.nl