Chapter 2

The Merchant from Chaozhou

A building this ambitious says a great deal about the person who paid for it. Tan Yeok Nee’s house was a statement of wealth, of origin and of belief.

Names and origins

Tan Yeok Nee (陈毓宜) is also recorded as Tan Hiok Nee (陈旭年). He came from Chaozhou in Guangdong province, the heartland of Teochew culture, and his home village was Jin Sha Xiang (金砂乡). That village name, “Jinsha”, gives this reading room its title, because the story of the Singapore house begins there.

Like many young men from southern China in the nineteenth century, he left home to look for opportunity in the Nanyang, the “southern seas” of Southeast Asia. The surviving accounts are short, and we prefer to stay close to them rather than embroider.

From peddler to towkay

According to the National Heritage Board, Tan began his life in Singapore as a textile peddler. He moved into the pepper and gambier trade — the plantation economy that underpinned much Teochew wealth in Singapore and Johor at the time — and later into the opium and spirit farms, the revenue concessions that the colonial government auctioned to private operators. By the later decades of the century he had become one of the wealthiest Teochew merchants in Singapore.

His path mirrors that of other Teochew leaders of the period. Pepper and gambier linked Singapore traders to plantations across the causeway, and the profits of that trade financed shophouses, temples, clan institutions and, for the most successful families, grand private homes.

The site was chosen for its fengshui: a hill at the back, water flowing in front.

Choosing the ground

Between 1882 and 1885 Tan built his private residence on Tank Road, today’s 101 Penang Road. The location was chosen with care in the geomantic sense. The house had its back against Oxley Hill, and a stream — present-day Stamford Canal — flowed in front of it across the low-lying ground of Dhoby Ghaut. In fengshui thinking, a protective height behind and water before were believed to ward off misfortune and draw prosperity to the owner.

The plot also sat at what is now a busy crossroads at the start of Orchard Road. The Straits Times describes the house as standing opposite The Istana, and its prominence on the street was itself a signal of the owner’s standing in colonial society.

A copy of home

Tan did not invent the design from scratch. He modelled the Singapore house on Cong Xi Gong Ci (从熙公祠), a large clan cluster house he had begun building years earlier in Jin Sha Xiang. That Chaozhou complex was completed in 1884, about a year before his Singapore mansion. Both are showcases of southern Chinese planning, with large central halls divided by wide courtyards.

This is a useful lesson for anyone reading the house. Its motifs and layout are not decoration chosen from a catalogue; they intentionally echo an ancestral building on the other side of the South China Sea. The link to the homeland was the point.

Symbols in the fabric

The ornament repeats auspicious themes familiar across Chinese culture. Reporting on the restoration lists orchids for resilience, bats and koi for abundance, and dragons for luck. On the roof ridges the horse appears often. The National Heritage Board explains why: 1882, the year construction began, was a Year of the Horse in the Chinese zodiac.

Leaving the house

The family did not stay long in the finished mansion. According to the National Library Board’s Infopedia, as quoted by The Straits Times, the family left in 1902 because of the noise and dust from building the nearby railway. Tan died later that year in China. The house then passed to the colonial administration, beginning the long sequence of new uses described in chapter six.

Reading him through the house

We have no diaries from Tan Yeok Nee and few personal details. What we do have is the building. Its scale shows ambition; its siting shows belief in geomancy; its plan and ornament show an insistence on Chaozhou tradition far from Chaozhou. Visiting with that in mind turns a beautiful old house into a portrait of a migrant who wanted his new city to look a little like home.