Chinese names of streets and places in Singapore and the Malay Peninsula
H.W. Firmstone’s “Chinese Names of Streets and Places in Singapore and the Malay Peninsula (Continued)” (1905) is a comprehensive bilingual gazetteer compiled from fieldwork across the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States, providing Hokkien and Cantonese equivalents for streets, towns, and districts. Published in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, the work serves as a practical reference for colonial administrators, interpreters, and European residents navigating the Chinese-language toponymic landscape of early twentieth-century Malaya.
Summary
The article is structured as a series of tabular lists organized by geography: Singapore streets and public buildings, country districts on Singapore Island, Malacca town streets, towns and villages in Negri Sembilan (across five districts), places in Pahang, Perak, and Selangor, and finally a section on places with commercial or other connections to the Straits Settlements, ranging from European capitals to regional ports. Each entry provides the English name alongside its Hokkien and Cantonese renderings, with Chinese characters where available, and occasional remarks explaining etymology or dialectal variation.
The work addresses a practical administrative problem: the absence of a reliable, systematic reference for Chinese place-names in a territory where the Chinese population constituted the commercial and labour backbone of urban and mining centres. Firmstone’s concluding remarks (pp. 205–207) reveal the core difficulty—Chinese speakers themselves used imprecise, overlapping, or non-existent names for streets, particularly in newer districts like Tanjong Pagar and Kampong Kapor. He observes that a resident asked for his address would invariably answer “Singapore,” and that the expression “Tek Kah” (Foot of the Bamboos) could refer to any of a dozen streets in the Bukit Timah Road area. He explicitly criticises Government interpreters for their ignorance of street names and calls on the Municipality to impose systematic Chinese street-naming.
The compilation relied heavily on collaboration with colonial officials across the region: Mr. Langham-Carter of the Land Office supplied country road and district names; Mr. E.A. Gardiner of the Straits Police provided Malacca street names with notes by Government Interpreter Go Lai Kui; and officers of the FMS Civil Service contributed names for Perak, Pahang, Negri Sembilan, and Selangor. Penang and Province Wellesley were excluded on the grounds that Mr. Lo Man Yuk had already covered them in earlier notes.
Key Findings
- The Singapore street list extends to at least 218 numbered entries, with many streets bearing multiple Chinese names reflecting different dialect groups or historical layers (e.g., Fraser Street is “Sio-po sin-koi” in Hokkien but “Kam-pong san-kai” in an alternative form; Havelock Road carries four distinct Hokkien names) (pp. 88–138).
- In Negri Sembilan, Seremban is known by two Chinese names: Sai-lam-ban (Hokkien) and Fu-yong (Cantonese, 芙蓉), the latter also applied to the broader region of Sungei Ujong (pp. 168, 201).
- Ipoh is called Pa-lo by Kheh and Cantonese Chinese, distinct from the Hokkien and European form Ipoh; Firmstone notes that two original kampongs existed—one called Ipoh (upas-tree) and the other Paloh (a hollow filled with stagnant water)—and that the Cantonese/Kheh name prevailed for the town subsequently built (p. 183).
- The international place-names section reveals that Chinese speakers distinguished San Francisco (Ku-kim-suan, “Old gold diggings”) from Australia (Sin-kim-sua, “New gold fields”), and Manila (Sio-lu-song, “Small Luzon”) from Spain (Toa-lu-song, “Big Luzon”) (pp. 200, 202–203).
- Firmstone reports that up-country kampungs in Malacca had no Chinese names at all, reflecting the comparatively thin Chinese population in that state’s interior (p. 207).
- The work was signed at Penang in March 1904, indicating a compilation period of at least several months drawing on informants across at least six administrative jurisdictions (p. 207).
Conclusion
Firmstone’s definitive takeaway is that the Chinese toponymic system in the Straits Settlements and FMS was functional but unsystematic, and that the colonial administration—particularly its interpreters and municipal authorities—bore a responsibility to regularise it. He frames the work not merely as a scholarly exercise but as an instrument of administrative efficiency, arguing that the proliferation of unsystematic Chinese street-names alongside English ones was a problem requiring official intervention.
Context
- Firmstone was based in Penang and appears to have held a position connected to the Chinese Protectorate or colonial administration there; his network of contributors spans the Straits Police, the Land Office, the FMS Civil Service, and the Chinese Protectorate in both Singapore and Penang, indicating he operated within the colonial bureaucratic apparatus (p. 207).
- The article is explicitly a continuation of earlier work (the title reads “Continued”), and it defers to Mr. Lo Man Yuk’s prior notes on Penang and Province Wellesley, situating it within a small body of collaborative colonial-era reference literature on Chinese-Malay linguistic contact (p. 207).