Chinese women’s vegetarian houses in Singapore
Marjorie Topley, drawing on a year and a half of fieldwork in Singapore, documents the Chinese women’s vegetarian house (素食堂) as it existed in the early 1950s and argues that these institutions functioned primarily as pragmatic old-age security arrangements for unattached women rather than as strictly religious communities. Published in 1954 in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, the article situates the vegetarian house within the broader failure of the Chinese joint family system to provide for women who were unmarried, widowed, or otherwise severed from male kin support in colonial Malaya.
Summary
Topley begins by interrogating the common assumption that the Chinese family system provides adequate social insurance for all members. She demonstrates, drawing on recent Chinese-language studies of peasant family life, that the idealised joint family was in fact rare among the lower classes, where inheritance laws that divided estates equally among all sons tended to fragment landholdings and drive younger sons into urban migration. Women’s position within even the intact joint family was precarious: they held no property rights, their earnings belonged to the male head of household, and after marriage they fell under the authority of a mother-in-law who could treat them harshly. In southern China, particularly Kwangtung and Fukien, women who worked in fields and silk mills had greater economic independence and a longer history of refusing marriage, sometimes organising collectively as “Girls who do not go to the family” or “Women who put their own hair up” to simulate a married status that would shield them from forced unions (pp. 51–54).
The specific conditions that produced vegetarian houses in Malaya were created by the emigration of these same women. The Aliens Ordinance of 1933 imposed a monthly quota on male deck passengers but initially excluded women, and ticket brokers at Chinese ports actively encouraged women’s emigration by conditioning the sale of quota tickets on the purchase of non-quota women’s passages. The result was a large influx of Cantonese women, mostly from the Sun Tak and Dun Kwan districts, who came to work as domestic servants and in rubber estates and tin mines. Many of these women had no intention of returning to China, and those who did have fewer incentives to do so after the political changes on the mainland. In Singapore they faced the additional anxiety that marriage under local Chinese custom offered no security against concubinage or desertion, reinforcing their preference for remaining single (pp. 54–56).
The vegetarian house itself is described as a hybrid institution: religious in character and appearance, offering the amenities of a temple, yet fundamentally a home for women run on religious lines. It is distinguished from a nunnery by the freedom of its residents, who may come and go, smoke, entertain visitors, and even eat meat when away from the house, provided they maintain a vegetarian diet while resident and attend religious observances. The economic arrangements are varied: some women pay a lump sum for permanent residence, others contribute labour, and still others pay monthly subscriptions while still working outside. The houses also operate death benefit societies, manage burial plots, and in some cases run associated businesses such as vegetarian restaurants, religious paper goods shops, and old people’s homes. Ownership structures range from committee-based management to individual proprietorship, and networks of “sister houses” linked by a common teacher create loose federations that allow women to move between houses when interpersonal tensions arise (pp. 56–64).
Key Findings
- Between 1934 and 1938, Malaya recorded a migrational gain of 190,000 female Chinese deck passengers, the majority of whom were peasant women from the Sun Tak and Dun Kwan districts of Kwangtung (p. 55).
- The Aliens Ordinance of 1933 established a monthly quota for alien deck passengers; women were outside this quota until May 1938, when a monthly quota of 500 was specifically introduced for them (p. 54).
- Permanent boarding fees in vegetarian houses ranged from $300 to $700 depending on the standing of the house; working women could alternatively pay monthly rates of up to $20 in advance of their retirement (p. 61).
- A documented death benefit society operated on a monthly subscription of $3.00 for ten years (reduced to an annual $3.00 “oil and incense” fee thereafter), paying a death benefit of $500 after four months’ continuous subscription and a return-to-China benefit of $250 after five years or $500 after ten years (p. 65).
- Topley visited between thirty and forty vegetarian houses in Singapore, each on several occasions, conducting interviews in Cantonese or with the aid of dialect interpreters over a period of one and a half years (p. 51).
- In the Sun Tak district of Kwangtung, women who joined the “Girls who do not go to the family” movement often had to pay a considerable sum in compensation to the husband’s family to prevent legal trouble when they refused to enter their husband’s home after marriage (p. 53).
Conclusion
Topley concludes that the long-term viability of vegetarian houses depends on two factors: the continuance of Buddhist belief among Chinese women in Malaya and the persistence of women’s prejudice against marriage. She anticipates that the ban on Chinese immigration will cause the immigrant-based houses, which are organised on narrow village lines, to gradually die out as their founding members pass away, leaving only the houses composed of locally born women to persist. Nevertheless, she asserts that as long as women find themselves without family support in old age, they will continue to seek sanctuary in these religious institutions, ensuring their survival in some form.
Context
- The article is based entirely on original ethnographic fieldwork—interviews, observation, and eavesdropping conducted over eighteen months in Singapore—with no reliance on archival or administrative records. It represents one of the first systematic studies of this institution in the Malayan context.
- Topley includes a brief comparative note with vegetarian houses in Hong Kong, observing that they appear fewer in number and more limited in scope, which she attributes to the closer geographical proximity of Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland and the easier possibility of return for elderly women (p. 67).