The Differentiation of Overseas Chinese Community and the Literary Memories of a Pro-Reform Literati

Huang Zunxian was appointed as the Chinese Consul-General of Singapore from 1891 to 1894. Not only was his term of office amidst the late Qing Self-Strengthening Movement, but it was also on the cusp of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. As a Chinese consul in British colonial Singapore, Huang Zunxian’s dual identity as both a reformer of the Qing court and a diplomat made him trapped between two different eras, one old and one new. In this essay, I focus on Huang’s activities in Singapore and the Malay peninsula as well as his relations with the local Chinese community in late Qing. Beside reconstructing the consul’s life in Nanyang, I adopt the double vantage points of both a person living in the highly-differentiated Chinese community in the Straits Settlement and a traditional intellectual, and examine Huang’s social and literary activities in order to illuminate the multi-dimensional formations of the late Qing Chinese community in Singapore and the Malay peninsula. By doing so, I seek to chart Huang’s mental and emotional landscape at this historical juncture.