“I bequeath the residue of my estate” : intergenerational change, contestation and conflict in a Straits Chinese family, 1863 to 1917

• Main Author: Sim, Tng Kwang
• Other Authors: Koh Keng We
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities; DRNTU::Humanities::History::Asia::Singapore::Social aspects; DRNTU::Humanities::History::Asia::Singapore::Politics and government
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/73599
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this paper, I examine how the legal contestations among the descendants of the prominent nineteenth century Straits Chinese merchant Tan Kim Seng show that a family’s unity is hard to maintain and even harder to perpetrate across generations. By drafting out a legal will that incorporated clear instructions on how his personal estate and family business was to be managed, Kim Seng sought to eliminate the risks of family disunity and domestic strife after his death. However, the Straits judicial system’s ruling that Kim Seng’s will was entirely null and void three decades after his death in 1864 disrupted the late patriarch’s succession and estate distribution plans. The colonial state’s responses to the subsequent legal battles that broke out between dissatisfied family members highlight how it was never fully certain of how to treat or manage its Straits Chinese subjects. Consequently, the interplay between colonial law, Chinese inheritance customs and human agency became a complex and multidimensional process that defies easy categorisation. There is future research value in exploring whether the disunity and domestic infighting of Tan Kim Seng’s descendants mirrored a general trend that also affected other prominent Straits Chinese families residing in colonial Malaya and Singapore.