Dressing Up Subjecthood: Straits Chinese, the Queue, and Contested Citizenship in Colonial Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACTOn 4 December 1897, a major English press in Singapore ran a story headlined ‘Extraordinary Incident at Amoy.’ A Singapore-born Chinese trader named Khun Yiong was imprisoned by the provincial authority in Amoy (Xiamen) in China after a German firm charged him for reportedly defaulting on a payment. Reporting him to the Chinese authority, the Germans managed to get Khun Yiong arrested. Claiming to be a British subject, Khun Yiong sought British protection and immunity from Chinese law, but his request was denied. Khun Yiong’s case ignited an intense public discussion in Singapore over the troubled legal status of the Straits Chinese British subject. One major thread of discussion involved an 1868 regulation which the British Government imposed on all British subjects of Chinese descent obliging them to wear non-Chinese clothing while travelling in China, something Khun Yiong had apparently failed to do. This article tracks the controversy surrounding Khun Yiong’s case which culminated in a social reform movement in Singapore urging Straits Chinese British male subjects to cut their queues and change the way they dressed. Departing from analyses discussing the ‘dual or multiple nationalities’ of Southeast Asian Chinese migrants using nationalist frameworks, this article situates the troubling legal status of the Straits Chinese within a transborder history of imperial formation. Using the concepts of ‘imperial citizenship’ and ‘subject-citizen,’ the article demonstrates how Straits Chinese British subjects like Khun Yiong and his contemporaries were caught up in as well as how they engaged with creeping projects of imperialist and nationalist border-making. This was a multilateral and open-ended process that involved re-working languages of imperial citizenship and tangible identity markers which underscores the necessity of grounding a discussion of contested citizenship not just in hardcore legal prescriptions but also material cultural histories.