Chan Wing

Chan Wing (陳永, 1873–1947) was a Kwantung-born Chinese immigrant who rose from rural poverty to become one of Kuala Lumpur’s most prominent early business figures, his commercial career spanning tin mining, banking, rubber cultivation, and rice export across the major economic transformations of colonial Malaya from the 1880s through the Japanese occupation [1, pp. 112–117]. His life, as reconstructed by his eighth daughter Chan King Nui in a 1996 biographical record, offers a representative account of the Chinese entrepreneurial class that shaped the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [2].

Migration and Early Commercial Career

Chan Wing was born in 1873 into a family of seven in Seck Tow (石塘), in the District of Sun Wui (順威) near the river port of Dragon Bay on the bank of the Pearl River, Kwantung [1, p. 112]. His grandfather, described as an irresponsible wastrel who smoked his life away on his opium couch, left his grandmother to work long and hard to raise the family single-handed [1, p. 112]. The poverty and hard work of his childhood left a lasting impression and, according to his daughter, generated the stimulus and fierce determination that would drive his later success [1, p. 112].

In 1887, at the age of fourteen, Chan Wing sailed for Singapore to seek his fortune in Nanyang (the South Seas), a destination then attracting Chinese migrants lured by the prospect of gold and tin [1, p. 112]. He arrived at a moment when Malaya’s economy had been given a significant boost by the development of its tin industry, the Residential System had been gradually established, and centralised British administration in Kuala Lumpur was channeling revenue into infrastructure, including short railways built from 1885 onwards to facilitate the export of tin and the import of mine equipment [1, p. 112]. Kuala Lumpur had already grown from a village of hovels with dirt roads to a small neat town of brick houses with metal-surfaced roads [1, p. 112].

Chan Wing headed not for the comforts of the capital but for Sungei Besi outside Kuala Lumpur, where he first worked as a labourer and later found employment as a clerk for Loke Yew, described as the most successful entrepreneur of his time [1, p. 112]. When he proved his worth, he was put in charge of two shops at the age of eighteen [1, p. 112]. His frugality was notable: his new clogs were reserved for job interviews and special occasions and were often carried rather than worn [1, p. 113].

Tin Mining and the Hong Fatt Venture

By 1905, Chan Wing had accrued sufficient savings to undertake his first major independent venture. Along with a group of friends—Cheong Yoke Choy, Liew Weng Chee, and San Ah Wing—he acquired a piece of land which had been operated by a European company, then a Chinese kongsi (a traditional Chinese mining partnership) took over from the European firm, and Chan Wing and his partners were the fourth group to work on the site [1, p. 113]. Tin mining, as he discovered, was hard and labour-intensive work: the overburden had to be removed, the ore-bearing soil lifted, and the ore separated from the soil [1, p. 113].

The initial period was one of considerable anxiety. For days and months the mine was worked yet no tin was in sight, and their meagre resources were getting depleted [1, p. 113]. They were about to give up when a heavy downpour of rain stripped the soil and exposed a tin lode of the purest quality [1, p. 113]. The mine was named Hong Fatt (鴻發), meaning “Abundant Prosperity,” and proved extraordinarily rich, operating continuously until 1982—a span of seventy-seven years [1, p. 113]. The harrowing uncertainty of the initial prospecting period, however, convinced Chan Wing that he would never invest in another tin mine, and he never did [1, p. 113].

The broader context for this venture was the surge in tin prices driven by the use of tin-plating in food canning, a practice expanded during the American Civil War of 1861–1865 and by pioneers travelling west in America [1, p. 113].

Banking and the Kwong Yik Bank

In 1913, the burgeoning economy motivated Chan Wing and his friends to set up a bank to cater to the Chinese community. Thus Kwong Yik Bank in Kuala Lumpur was born, with a capital of $1,000,000 [1, p. 114]. The other founder members were San Ah Wing, Chew Kam Chuan, Leong Yan Teck, Liew Weng Chee, and Cheong Yoke Choy [1, p. 114]. As the first Chinese bank in Kuala Lumpur, it was a great success [1, p. 114].

During World War I, the other directors made a proposal which, though legal, was against Chan Wing’s principle. He objected, and when they went ahead with it, he resigned in indignation [1, p. 114]. Subsequently, he drifted apart from these friends and set up all future commercial ventures on his own, though he kept in touch with them socially [1, p. 114]. His later banking involvements—Eu Tong Sen’s approach to invest in the Lee Wah Bank, and Sir Sau San Chow’s invitation to invest in The Bank of East Asia, Hong Kong—were undertaken as an individual rather than as part of his original partnership [1, p. 115].

Rubber Cultivation and the Chaah Estate

Rubber cultivation was being encouraged in Malaya especially after the collapse of coffee cultivation, and with the advent of the motorcar industry and mass car production by Henry Ford, there was a demand for tyres that drove rubber prices up by leaps and bounds [1, p. 114]. A boom occurred in 1905–1910, but Chan Wing came later into this industry, having found tin mining a gamble whose demand and price were uncertain [1, p. 114]. He recognised that rubber was even more speculative: a lot of unprofitable initial work was involved, the jungle had to be cleared and the soil prepared, and the trees took seven years to mature for tapping, by which time the rubber price might not be in one’s favour [1, p. 114].

He first bought 4,000 acres of land in Segamat, which he later sold to Dunlop; the estate was renamed the Regent Estate [1, p. 115]. In 1935, through the assistance of Dato Wong Ah Kwee, a friend of Sultan Ibrahim of Johore, Chan Wing acquired 6,464 acres in Chaah, Bekok, in the mukim (administrative district) of Johore [1, p. 115]. He planted the whole estate with the new TJIR One, a superior rubber clone that was the product of Dutch research and yielded 1,000 lbs per acre, compared with 250 lbs per acre for other clones in 1910 and 275 lbs ten years later [1, p. 115]. No other person had the courage to plant an entire estate of 6,000 acres with bud-grafted TJIR One until then [1, p. 115]. In 1951, his sons reaped enormous profits from this estate during the Korean War boom [1, p. 115].

Rice Export and Commercial Diversification

Knowing the instability in the demand for rubber and the fluctuation of its price, Chan Wing recognised the need for an alternative product that was in constant demand and whose price was more stable [1, p. 115]. He found it in rice. In 1921/23, he started exporting rice from Bangkok, Siam (now Thailand), a business that proved lucrative [1, p. 115]. It was said he made only a negligible profit of half a cent to one cent per sack of rice, but it was profitable enough for him to build the second-largest rice mill in Bangkok [1, p. 115]. He purchased a small fleet of cargo vessels to export rice to Saigon (French Indo-China), Hong Kong, Klang, Manila (the Philippines), Singapore, and Surabaya (Indonesia), and set up offices in all these towns [1, p. 115]. This business sustained his family during the lean times when the rubber estate was in its immature infancy, and he carried it on until an embargo on the export of rice was placed by Siam at the start of the Japanese aggression in 1941 [1, p. 115].

Civic Life, Patriotism, and the Japanese Occupation

Chan Wing lacked a formal education beyond an elementary village schooling and was mostly self-taught, but right up to World War II he read old Chinese books—the Four Books, The Three Kingdoms, and Sun Tzu—and nightly practised Chinese calligraphy [1, p. 116]. He was made a Justice of the Peace in the 1930s [1, p. 116]. During the Great Depression of 1929–1931, he and other leaders of the Chinese community gathered the tin miners who were hard hit by the slump at the temple on the edge of the cemetery at Airport Road and saw to their welfare, with Chan Wing visiting them to ensure they were cared for [1, p. 116].

He was intensely patriotic to China and donated $40,000 and later a further $80,000—totaling $120,000—to the Sino-Japanese War Relief Fund headed by Colonel Lee Hau Sik [1, p. 116]. For this patriotism, he was awarded a medal by Chiang Kai Shek [1, p. 116]. He was also a generous donor to Chinese schools, serving as the youngest director on the board of the Confucian School on Wesley Road, Kuala Lumpur, in 1906, and was a founder member of that school [1, p. 116]. A Chan Wing Scholarship existed at the University of Hong Kong, and scholarships were given to the Methodist Boys’ School and Methodist Girls’ School where his children were educated [1, p. 116].

As the twentieth century progressed, Chan Wing’s fortunes were at their peak. He acquired 13 acres of land along Taylor Road in Kuala Lumpur and engaged the architects Swan & McLaren to design what was described as the biggest house in Kuala Lumpur and the Straits Settlements [1, p. 116]. Completed in 1929 at a cost of $380,000, the red and white building with its twin domes occupied a hill slope commanding a view of the Klang River and beyond to the Railway Station [1, p. 116]. His family of wives and twenty-five children lived there until the Japanese invaded Malaya in 1941 [1, p. 116]. The Japanese took over the mansion, and after the war it was acquired by the Government and became Istana Negara, the palace of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, which it remains to this day [1, p. 116].

The Japanese invasion brought upheaval to Chan Wing’s life. Because of his patriotic contributions to China, he had to flee the country at the end of the occupation [1, p. 116]. After much persuasion by his sons, he flew out of Malaya to Java, but the Japanese soon reached Java [1, p. 116]. He and two of his sons boarded a boat to go to Calcutta, from where they planned to go to Chungking, but the boat was torpedoed [1, p. 116]. Chan Wing and his seventeenth son, Chor Cheung, were rescued and taken to Perth, while the other son was in a different boat and found his way to Java [1, p. 116]. They later made their way to Melbourne, where they stayed until the end of the war [1, p. 116]. In 1945, Chan Wing returned to Singapore, a sick man, and succumbed to lung cancer on 7 February 1947, aged seventy-four [1, p. 116]. When he was brought back to Kuala Lumpur for his burial, many came to the funeral out of respect for a good man [1, p. 116]. In his will, he stipulated that not more than $5,000 should be spent on his funeral expenses, preferring the money be spent on other useful purposes rather than on empty prayers of monks and nuns [1, p. 116].

Research and Documentation

The principal source for Chan Wing’s life is the biographical record published by his eighth daughter, Chan King Nui, with assistance from notes by his twenty-second son, Dr. Chan Chin Cheung, in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1996 [1, pp. 112–117]. The article draws primarily on family oral history and memory, supplemented by a small number of secondary sources—Chai Hon Chan, J. M. Gullick, N. J. Ryan, and Tan Ee Leong—for contextual verification; no archival collections are cited [2]. As a family biographical note rather than a peer-reviewed historical study, its historiographical contribution lies in preserving the personal and commercial record of a mid-tier pioneer whose story is absent from standard economic histories of colonial Malaya [2]. The author explicitly argues that her father has not been given the credit he richly deserves, noting that the family had previously taken it for granted that his success was due to luck predicted by a fortune teller, whereas a careful study of his work and life in relation to the times reveals that all his business decisions brought him success and prosperity [1, p. 116]. The record thus serves both as a corrective to family memory and as a rare primary account of the commercial strategies, civic commitments, and personal character of a Chinese entrepreneur who navigated the tin, rubber, banking, and rice economies of early twentieth-century Malaya.

MBRAS Sources

• Chan King Nui (1997). From Poor Migrant to Millionaire: Chan Wing 1873 - 1947. ** : 96
• Chan King Nui (1996). A short biographical record of Chan Wing, an early pioneer of Malaya. JMBRAS 69: 112–117

References

1. Chan King Nui (1997). From Poor Migrant to Millionaire: Chan Wing 1873 - 1947 : 96. Read on JSTOR
2. Chan King Nui (1996). A short biographical record of Chan Wing, an early pioneer of Malaya JMBRAS 69(1): 112–117. Read on JSTOR