Chinese Indentured Labour in the Dutch East Indies, 1880–1942 by Gregor Benton

Author:Gregor Benton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031050244
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Labourers’ Spare Time

At the end of a day in the fields or in the mines, Huagong had little access to entertainment in the camps, which were usually remote from society. Accounts mention music performances on the erhu and singing after supper.234 Kongsi houses and the attached paithin were sites of communal activity. Gambling and opium-smoking was commonplace, although officials and employers tried to stop it. Chinese merchants, abetted by supervisors, set up gambling dens and opium dens near places of work. Where there were no brothels, the supervisors privately procured women for the workers.235 Opium smoking was particularly rife among older Huagong, and Chinese inspectors described gambling as the labourers’ “greatest tragedy.”236

Where not forced by the authorities to crack down on gambling, employers pandered to their workers’ obsession with it. However much the authorities tried to stamp it out, the habit was too ingrained to go away, and lower-level managers and even the companies had a material interest in preserving it—it kept the workers happy while trapping them into debt and making it impossible for them to leave. The companies provided various sorts of entertainment for their Javanese employees, including gamelan (music), wayang kulit (puppet-shadow plays), film shows, and even football and (given that the Javanese communities were more likely to include women) dancing. For the Chinese, however, gambling was the main pastime.237

Gambling was the subject of the longest section of the Chinese inspectors’ report on daily life in the Belinyu mining district, where an astonishing number of people—put by Chinese inspectors at several hundred, including professionals—lived off gambling. Miners gambled with ready cash and on credit, the gamblers’ greatest bane and most open to abuse. Different sorts of gambling were associated with Chinese of different provenances. Gambling was so institutionalised that it had its calendar: November was for “gambling for New Year money,” March and April for staking one’s wages, and June for wagering one’s savings. Gamblers fell ever deeper into debt with the gambling bosses, who charged 30 percent interest on gambling loans. The gambling reached fever pitch on official holidays, when dens were overrun.

The communal buildings were used not just for relaxation but for other gatherings, to which workers were summoned by a temple block or wooden bell, also sounded to mark shifts and prayers.238 Where kongsi houses were built around a shrine or altar, as was often the case, religious activities were a feature of communal life.239 By the 1920s, however, many of the altars had fallen into disrepair in the wake of the Revolution of 1911, when political activity and reading grew more popular. Kuomintang supporters conducted political education on the tin islands and set up reading rooms.240 But most mines and plantations were too remote and most labourers were either illiterate or too exhausted by hard work to join in.

There was generally a temple wherever Chinese settled, including temples in or around the bigger towns that were the focus of processions, festivals, and funerals.241 Temples were the main sites of communal and public speech-group

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