STRAITS SETTLEMENTS CHINESE

Evening Star, Issue 18021, 15 July 1922, Page 14

STRAITS SETTLEMENTS CHINESE

DISPLAY AND GAMBLING. The Prince of Wales visited Penang, that little island which is part of the scattered colony of the Straits Settlements and famous throughout the East for its luxurious beauty (writes a correspondent in a London paper). Georgetown,, its capital, flourishes as a port, and into. it. every’ day from the outlying suburbs drive rich Chinese, leaning back in their cars and gazing incuriously about them from behind their gold-rimmed spectacles. It is, indeed, a Chinese town in all but name, and the chief things that strike you as you wander about its streets are the Chinese shop-signs and the Oriental life busy around you. The suburbs stretch far away in groat avenues of leafy trees, amid which appear the splendid villas of the Chinese merchants that face the sea in the unabashed gaudiness of their Chinese architects’ imagination. The Chinese certainly hanker after display—a kind of childish display which is not so much conceit as a sort of national instinct.

When a Chinese in the Straits becomes wealthy, when from a_ coolie he rises to be a towkay (an influential person) his first desire is to _ have a residence worthy of his prosperity. He jnaf very probably inhabit only one of the rooms, but there it is for all to see, and there it is for the few important social engagements of the year. He likes bright colors and fantastic designs. And, somehow, in the glowing sumptuousness of the tropics, these likes of his quite harmonise well with the surroundings. The Chinese is a bom gambler. From obscure beginnings many a Straits Chinese has grown immensely rich, and then, again, has sunk into poverty. It is seldom that a Chinese will •* sell out ” and invest his money safely. Even when he has made a fortune he continues to gamble. For him the whole zest of life would be gone if he were merely secure and had no further chance of making more. A “boom” comes and he soars; a "slump” comes and ho disappears. What with the collapse of the rubber and tin market, a good many have gone under these last couple of years. But he is a good loser; ha always hopes to rise again. The Chinese is blessed with the gambler's optimism. Of course some Chinese become sufficiently rich to be impregnable. There is a Chinese Sugar king in Java said to be worth about seven millions sterling, and certainly a Chinese recently died in Kuala Lumpur leaving between two and three million pounds. The enterprise and energy of the Chinese have had much to do with the prosperity of the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States, and nobody for one moment can grudge them their deserved success.