(summary from the book Hakka people - Jews of the Orient by Kao Chung Xi. Summary digest compiled by Jonathan Teoh. Some spelling were revised according to Josef Widjaja, Oct 26, 1996)
Towards the end of the 18th century, Kwangtung Hakkas established a republic in Western Kalimantan which lasted 107 years and had 10 presidents.
The first president is Low Lan Pak. He was born in Kwangtung, Mei Hsien, Shih Pik Pao on the third year of Ching dynasty Chien Long emperor. He married a girl and had a son. But Hakka's custom usually do not take wife along for overseas trip. He left for Western Kalimantan alone to join the gold rush at that time.
He travelled along Han Jiang to Shantao, along Vietnam coastline, and finally landed in Western Kalimantan.
The sultan at that time, Panembahan believing that Chinese workers are hard working, brought in 20 Chinese from Brunei. The sultan Omar in Singkawang, also heard about Chinese diligence and use the lease land system to encourage Chinese to explore in his territory.
When Low Fan Pak reached Western Kalimantan, the Holland has not yet aggressively moved to Kalimantan. Along the coastal area, a lot of Java people and oceania's Bugis people settled down. Also, the Sultan's power were confined to the coastal area, the inland power belongs to the Dayak. The territories among Sultans were not well defined as well.
In the beginning of 1740, the Chinese numbered only a few tens. By 1770, the Chinese has grown to 20,000 strong. By blood clan or by the area they are from, the Chinese established Kongsi(company) to protect themselves.
In 1776, 14 kongsi banded together to form a He Soon 14 Kongsi in order to break the bottleneck of being grouped by area or by blood.
At that time Low Lan Pak established his own Lang Fan kongsi. He then united all the Hakkas in the San-Sin lake area and build a Mem-Tau-Er township and made it the headquarter of his united company.
At that time, Kun Tian(Pontianak) which located in the lower stream of Kapuas River was an important commerce area and was controlled by Sultan Abdul Laman. The upper stream of the river is controlled by the Dayaks. Kun Tian neighboring state Mempawah's Sultan tried to build a palace in the upper stream which led to the fighting between the 2 Sultans.
The Kun Tian Sultan asked Low Lan Pak for help. Since the palace is being built near the Lan Fang company territory, Low Lan Pak decided to help Kun Tian Sultan and defeated the Mempawah's Sultan.
The defeated Mempawah's Sultan then joined forces with the Dayaks and launched a counter-attack. Low Lan Pak again defeated Mempawah Sultan and this time marched North all the way to Singkawang. Singkawang Sultan and Mempawah Sultan signed a peace treaty with Low Lan Pak and Low Lan Pak's popularity increased dramatically. He was 57 then.
After that, Chinese and locals, turned to Low Lan Pak to seek protection, and when Kun Tian Sultan realized that he can not challenged Low Lan Pak, The sultan himself seek protection from Low Lan Pak.
Thus, Low Lan Pak established a government, using his company name, changing kongsi(company) to republic, and formed Lan Fang Republic in 1777, 10 years earlier than USA(1787). At that time people wanted Low Lan Pak to be Sultan, but he declined and take the post of governorship, similar to the president post.
From Qing dynasty's sea nation annals, it recorded that it is a place where Ka Yin people (Mei Hsien area) do mining, build road, establish its own nation, every year has ships reached ng Zhou and Chao Zhou area, doing commerce. >From its own Lan Fang Company annals, it indicated that every year it pays tribute to Qing dynasty like Annan (Vietnam).
The capital was in Ceh Wan Li. The Ta Tang Chon Chang(president) is elected by election. Both the president position and the vice president position has to be of Hakka from Ka Yin or Ta Pu area. The flag is a rectangle yellow flag with the word Lan Fang Ta Tong Chi. The president flag is a triangular yellow flag with the word Chuao (General). The high ranking officials dress in Chinese style while lower ranking officials dress western style clothing.
Low Lan Pak passed away on the second year of the republic. He has been in Borneo for 20 years. he 47th year of the republic during the reign of the fifth president Liew Tai Er, Dutch began its active expansion in Indonesia and occupied the South East region of Borneo. Lan Fang lose its autonomy and became a protected state of Dutch.
Then Dutch opened a colonial office in Kun Tian and intervened republic's affair. In 1884, Singkawang refused to be ruled by Dutch, and was attacked by the Dutch. The Dutch occupied Lan Fang Kongsi. Lan Fang Kongsi fought for 4 years but eventually was defeated, and its people fled to Sumatra. Fearful of strong reaction from Ching government, Dutch never declared that it occupied Lan Fang and let one of the descendent be a figure head. It was not until the formation of Republic of China in 1912 that Dutch formally declared its formal control of the area.
Those that fled to Sumatra regrouped in Medan. From there, some moved to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. One of the descendent from these people is Lee Kuan Yew. While Hakkas are the minority in Singapore, it is the Hakkas that played an important part to establish the second Lan Fang company - Singapore.
How fitting. Kwantung was Japan's puppet state during WW2.
Singapore Inc is Langfang company.
Originally posted by Lau bakkwa:One of the descendent from these people is Lee Kuan Yew. While Hakkas are the minority in Singapore, it is the Hakkas that played an important part to establish the second Lan Fang company - Singapore.
It is more accurate to label Harry Lee Kuan Yew as hakka peranakan.
The babas, on the other hand, also known as Straits Chinese, were Chinese more in name than practice. They were the descendants of the very early Chinese immigrants (Hokkiens from the Fujian province) to the straits settlements of Malaya (Penang, Singapore and Malacca). They assimilated with both the local Malays and the colonising British, whom they especially admired. The babas developed their own culture, cuisine and language - Malay liberally sprinkled with Hokkien.
The sinkeh were the traders, the coolies and the shophouse owners. The babas became the lawyers, the civil servants and the politicians; they attended the local English-language schools run in the tradition of the UK's public schools, and Oxford and Cambridge. If the sinkeh received an overseas education at all, it was in Nanking or another university in China. Although the sinkeh dominated Singapore's population, it was the babas who dominated public decision-making. In effect, a baba minority captured sinkeh Singapore, and that minority's attitudes were more those of Victorian England than China.
It was the babas who were the framers of Singapore's rules and institutions. Many of Singapore's most prominent Chinese have had baba backgrounds. Lee Kuan Yew, who became prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is the most obvious example. He claims a Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba: at home, he spoke English with his parents and baba Malay to his grandparents. "Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected with my life," Lee said of his childhood.
For Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and later a political necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese with a focus on China, but as a baba who looked to England. He followed the conventional career path of a baba and went to London to study law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore became Harry Lee of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His father had given him and two of his brothers English, as well as Chinese, names.
Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in Chinese ways?
No. He ran it in a manner to which a British colonial administrator would have aspired.
That other great framer of Singapore's institutions, Goh Keng Swee, who rose to become finance minister and deputy prime minister, is the epitome of the baba elite. Goh was born in 1918 in Malacca, the epicentre of baba culture, into a baba family. His parents were English-oriented Chinese Methodists.
The baba influence is now more subtle, but still there. Singapore's current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has the strongest baba pedigree of any of the country's leaders.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
Endangered species?
For goodness sake, Lee Kuan Yew practically filled the entire cabinet with inbred Peranakans.
For the last few decades in Singapore, the top positions in civil service, statutory boards, armed forces, GLCs have all along been going disproportionately to the Peranakans.
That is one reason why Singapore has been run to the ground.
Lee Kuan Yew worked with the Japanese Kempeitai and later the British colonizers to suppress the non-Peranakan Chinese.
That's why he has always been wary of non-Peranakan Chinese and could only entrust power to his own family members and his other Peranakan cronies.
http://tomorrow.sg/archives/2009/02/17/peranakans__going_the_way_of_the.html
He claims a Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba: at home, he spoke English with his parents and baba Malay to his grandparents. "Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected with my life," Lee said of his childhood.
The diffusion of material elements from one society to another has a complex effect on the importing society.
In the short run it is usually benefitted by the importation, but in the long run it is frequently disorganized and weakened.
When white men first came to North America, material elements from Western Civilization spread rapidly among the different Indian tribes. The Plains Indians, for example, were weak and impoverished before 1543, but in that year the horse began to diffuse northward from the Spaniards in Mexico. Within a century the Plains Indians were raised to a much higher standard of living (because of ability to hunt buffalo from horseback) and were immensely strengthened in their ability to resist Americans coming westward across the continent. In the meantime, the trans-Appalachian Indians who had been very powerful in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to receive firearms, steel traps, measles, and eventually whiskey from the French and later the English by way of the St. Lawrence.
These greatly weakened the woods Indians of the trans-Appalachian area and ultimately weakened the Plains Indians of the trans-Mississippi area, because measles and whiskey were devastating and demoralizing and because the use of traps and guns by certain tribes made them dependent on whites for supplies at the same time that they allowed them to put great physical pressure on the more remote tribes which had not yet received guns or traps.
Any united front of reds against whites was impossible, and the Indians were disrupted, demoralized, and destroyed. In general, importation of an element of material culture from one society to another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if it is (a) productive, (b) can be made within the society itself, and (c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial culture of the importing society without demoralizing it.
The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralize their ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability to destroy them in a material sense with firearms.
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/01.html
Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in Chinese ways?
No. He ran it in a manner to which a British colonial administrator would have aspired.
In the short run it is usually benefitted by the importation, but in the long run it is frequently disorganized and weakened.
The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralize their ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability to destroy them in a material sense with firearms.
That is one reason why Singapore has been run to the ground.
Lee Kuan Yew worked with the Japanese Kempeitai and later the British colonizers to suppress the non-Peranakan Chinese.