The Sino-Portuguese Style

One of the great and enduring sociological mysteries is how the Jews and the Chinese are able to establish small minority communities in hostile countries throughout the world, endure oppression and indignity, and yet thrive in and often out-compete the societies that oppress them. The Jews and the Chinese have an unusual gift for adaptation. They prosper wherever they go, even in the most unfavorable circumstances. For this they are subject to resentment, suspicion and conspiracy theories, because it is devilishly difficult to give any reasonable account of exactly how they manage it. What is it in these communities that allows them to adapt and thrive against all odds? What, moreover, enables them both to adapt to the societies in which they live as minorities and yet maintain a strikingly robust sense of their own identity and traditions with remarkable endurance and continuity?

In regards to the Chinese, it is a question that has occupied this present writer since arriving in South-East Asia many months ago and travelling through the historical centres of the Straits Chinese, that being the Chinese (mainly from the southern regions of China) who, centuries ago, migrated to various parts of the Malacca Straits. The prosperous state of Singapore is the most outstanding instance of their success, but in other places too – Penang, Phuket, southern Thailand – they have been remarkably successful. In Malaysia, more than a few people the author encountered told him candidly that “The Chinese are the brains of the outfit.” They are a minority in Malaysia, and increasingly uncomfortable in the face of creeping Islamization in that country, yet, despite the odds, their history has been illustrious and they are more successful in business, arts, law – every field – than the native Malays. The Malays resent this, but the fact of the matter is that without the straits Chinese Malaysia would, very likely, become a second-rate affair. 

In Siam, further up the peninsula, it is a similar story. The Chinese element constitutes some 40% of the population – this element, and not the ethnic Thais alone, constitutes the real genius of the place. The Chinese came for trade and tin mining. They stayed and, somehow, have become disproportionately prosperous. Wherever they go, the Chinese make a profound contribution. Those places from which they have been chased away, as the author has also seen – Calcutta and Cochin in India, for example, both of which once boasted thriving Chinese populations which are now departed – are that much poorer without a Chinese dynamic.

No doubt, much depends upon a capacity for hard work. The Chinese work like dogs. But there are other factors, surely, as well. One of them seems to be a great capacity for the creative appropriation of elements from other cultures; this, and an unfailing sense of what is and is not essential in their own. The author has been witness to examples of this throughout his travels among the Straits communities in the form of so-called Sino-Portuguese architecture. This is the style of architecture that the Straits Chinese created in their new home and in which they built monuments to their industry, success and prosperity. Shop-houses – also called “link houses” – are the most common example of Sino-Portuguese architecture to be seen, but the Chinese magnates and tycoons who grew fabulously rich on trade in the Malacca Straits built mansions and palaces in this style as well. Many of them are still intact and ,happily, many private residences are now open for public viewing.

The term “Sino-Portuguese” is not entirely appropriate, or at least the “Portuguese” part of it is not. Sure enough, the Portuguese were among the first Europeans to arrive and establish a presence in South-East Asia, but in fact they had little direct impact upon the hybrid architectural styles of the area. The Dutch, French and even more so the English make a greater contribution. All the same, the word “Portuguese” became attached to this particular architectural hybridization, and in this sense it merely means “European” inasmuch as Europeans in general were referred to as “Portuguese”. Thus, “Sino-Portuguese” actually means no more than “Chinese slash European”, being a style created by the Chinese by combining elements of traditional Chinese domestic architecture with what they came to learn of various European styles, borrowing and adapting those features they saw fit. The maturity of the synthesis, moreover, did not come about until the late XIXth century – long, long after the Portuguese had disappeared from Asia, and in fact under the fullest expansion of the British Empire. Actually, the heyday of the style was the 1920s, and the fine examples still to be seen in such places as George Town and Phuket Old Town are from that illustrious period. 

So-called 'link houses' - or what are in Australia called 'terrace houses'. Single-fronted, two storey buildings. The ground floor was usually used as a shop or workshop with the upstairs for bedrooms and living space. They are narrow but deep and feature an interior air well. 

This page, below, offers a short folio of examples of the Sino-Portuguese style. The style is a particularly charming synthesis and illustrates the creative powers of adaptation typical of the Straits Chinese. This is an architecture that documents exactly how the Chinese of the Malacca Straits were able to establish themselves as such extraordinarily succesful communities. One characteristic deserves comment. Despite their minority status, and despite a history of oppression and discrimination, resentment does not figure prominently in the Chinese psychology. They are not a people burdened, for instance, with post-colonial angst. Unlike others, they looked upon Europeans with admiration and a determination to acquire those things worth acquiring. In this, as noted above, they were unshakeably secure in their own cultural and religious identity. They did not feel that acquiring the benefits brought by Europeans in any way threatened or compromised their own traditions and identity. This same unshakeable security is typical of the Jews as well. Regardless of how much they acquire of non-Jewish societal norms, their own religious and ethnic identity remains unthreatened.  This sense of security is a prerequisite to creative appropriations. 

We see the fruits of such self-security in the Chinese in the Sino-Portuguese style. It is confidently Chinese and regardless of how much it acquires from European styles it never compromises on this. Compare this to those peoples who have spent decades whining and moaning about "colonial oppression" without achieving much of anything. The Chinese know that the best way to defeat your oppressors is to be succesful. Nothing succeeds like success. This architecture is a testament to that strategy, above all. 

The Sino-Portuguese architecture of the Staits Chinese communities is unquestionably some of the most charming and elegant architecture in Asia. It is no accident that it is the product of a happy blend of oriental and occidental styles. As elsewhere, much of it is now surrounded by modernist cement monstrosities underlining the sad fact that little architecture of any consequence has been built since before the Second World War. 

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The link houses in Soi Romani (Love Lane) in Phuket Town. Previously brothels, now boutique guesthouses and coffee shops. 

The interior air well for light and ventilation is a characteristic feature of the style. 

The typical hemispherical window of the Sino-Portuguese style. 

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A RESTORATION

The photographs below are of an old Sino-Portuguese home being restored in George Town, Prince of Wales Island. 

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Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Circle of the Same - A Platonic Practice

Therefore, at all times remember Me with your mind and intellect fixed on Me. In this way, you shall surely come to Me...

Bhagavad Gita

The Platonic dialogues are not systematic and in this are so rich that they provide essential material for a range of philosophical – or, as we might say, spiritual – paths. Socratic dialectic offers an intellectual path of realisation whereby the very nature of thinking becomes a path back to the font of thought itself. The theory of Forms leads to the Vision of the One and the Good. To live as a philosopher for three incarnations in a row, we are told, leads to liberation from birth and death – a Platonic Nirvana. Then there is also a path of Love – Divine Eros – as described in several dialogues, and elsewhere a path of imagination and the metaphor of “growing spiritual wings” and the textual foundations of the Plotinian path of “becoming one’s Guardian Angel”, which is to say realizing the Form of one's Self. Plato offers many paths. Arguably, they all amount to the same thing, but they are suited to people of various temperaments and dispositions.

In the cosmological dialogue Timaeus a further path is outlined. We are told that man is the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic order, but that this parallel is disturbed or ruptured at birth. In the greater cosmos are the circles of Sameness and Difference – the great cosmic motions obeyed by the planets and the stars. These same motions, we are then told, prevail in the spherical cosmic form of the human cranium, and thus in the mind, and distinctions of sameness and difference form the very bedrock of mental activity. The travail of childbirth, however, knocks the internal circles of Sameness and Difference from their pre-natal alignment with the cosmic order. The inner cosmos is knocked out of its alignment with the outer cosmos – and such is the nature of mortal life. The objective of man in his life, therefore, is to mend this misalignment and to bring the inner circles of Sameness and Difference back into orbits aligned with the circles of the heavens making micro- and macrocosms unison and whole again.

This schema is the rationale for all conceptions of Platonic astrology. It is through the study of the stars, we are told, that we come to learn of the inner cycles of the mind. On this basis astrology is a philosophical path of self-knowledge and self-realisation. But there is also another method at least implicit in this dialogue of Plato’s, and implicit elsewhere in Plato as well. The mind, we are told, has become unruly and disordered. The challenge that the philosopher faces is to bring the mind back into order. This is the same task as being able to discern the Forms – the ordering of all intellectual structures then reveals the Form of the One and the Good, the Thought of Thoughts. In terms of the cosmological system given in the Timaeus, as already noted, this entails restoring the proper relation between the Circles of Sameness and Difference. The disordered mortal mind, in particular, is overcome by the erratic motions of the Circle of Difference. Cosmologically, this is the motion of the ever-wandering planets and their chaotic alternations of progression and regression. Beyond them lies the steady reliability of the fixed stars. In the heavens, the Circle of the Same counters the chaotic diversity of the Circle of the Different. It is from the steady, eternal motions of the Circle of the Same that the mortal microcosm has become dislodged. In life we are thrown around this way and that as our thoughts become dragged around in the Circle of the Different. 

Many, or perhaps most, spiritual methods make the same diagnosis, albeit in different terms. The human problem, it will be said, is the so-called “monkey mind” and its incessant chattering. In Plato’s terms, this is the product of the primal misalignment between inner and outer cosmos. We are carried along with the erratic motions of the Circle of the Different. Our thoughts move back and forwards in time, never able to fix upon the eternal present. The cure, then, is to still the chatter of this “monkey mind”, to learn to concentrate, to be in the present and no longer a victim of our own errant thoughts. Nearly all systems of meditation have this as their objective. Typically, for example, the meditator will fix their their hearing upon the ever-same rhythm of their breath. Then they are instructed to let all wandering thoughts wash past without participating in them. The objective is to eventually still the mind, to stop the inner chatter, to bring the mind back to clarity. In Platonic terms, the meditator finds a stillpoint – the steady rhythm of the breath – which then represents the Circle of the Same. By fixing upon such a stillpoint, in its sameness, it is possible to calm the raging inconstancies and vagarious meanderings of the Circle of the Different and to restore the cosmic order. The mortal condition is fitful and in flux. Meditation cures us of this “monkey mind” condition.

Exactly the same process is used in the so-called “perpetual prayer” found in various religious traditions. Its most ancient form is the “japa yoga” of the Hindoos. This consists of fixing the mind upon one of the Divine Names and repeating it, silently or aloud, over and over and over. The most famous case is the divine syllable OM which practitioners of japa chant or intone, within or without, unceasingly. Once again, in Platonic terms, this is to be understood as fixing upon a Circle of the Same in order to bring order back to the rambling irregularities of the Circle of the Different. The Divine Name is installed as an enduring foundation of sameness in the mind. Throughout the day our thoughts wander back and forward. We are sitting on the bus – our thoughts rove from snippets of old conversations, to anxieties about future events, to bits and pieces of advertising jingles, images from TV, our desire for new shoes, the argument with our neighbour... We have no control over this endless stream of mental junk. This, various traditions assure us, is the cause of all our miseries. We are rudderless in a raging river of rubbish. In this, we are divorced from the reality of the present. To steady the Circle of the Different we need to bring ourselves back into alignment with the Circle of the Same.

We can do this through japa – the deliberate fixation upon an appropriate mantra. It is, therefore, a Platonic method. The Mohammedans call it “dhikr”, meaning rememberance, a strikingly Platonic title. Rememberance, ἀνάμνησις, anemnesis, is the Platonic path par excellence. We live submerged in a state of forgetfulness, removed from the One and the Good. The Mohammedan dhikr consists of remembering God – the One and the Good – through the deliberate recital of His revealed Names. The very same method is also found among the Christians – the rosary and the hesychasm - and in other traditions besides. Typically, though, religious traditions construe this method as a ‘prayer of the heart’, a dedicated devotion, a mode of bhakti. In the Platonic understanding it is an essentially intellectual method. It is the means by which the structures of the mind are rehabilitated to the innate structures of the cosmos. Other metaphors, though, lend themselves to the Platonic presentation. The cosmology of the Timaeus has presiding over it the Demiurge, a figure modelled upon the mythological figure of the blacksmith god Vulcan. The dhikr of the Musselmans, the japa of the Hindoo, the hesychasm of the Christian, the anamnesis, is sometimes described as beating upon metal or else polishing a bronze mirror, metallurgic metaphors that invoke the notion of alchemical transformation. The method has a more noble and arcane philosophical heritage than what is commonly found in the sentimental presentations of religious devotionalism. 

Historically, its simplicity has recommended it to simple people, but in fact it is a method especially adapted to the intellectual temperament. The man of intellectual disposition, more than anyone else, is likely to fall in love with his own thoughts and with thinking and ruminating. The intellectual, the mentalist, loves the parade of errant thoughts that drift through the mind. This is exactly why such a person should pursue an intellectual (jnana) path, rather than a path of devotion, and why the anemnesis (dhikr/japa) is an ideal element of such a path. No one needs a Circle of Sameness as much as the head-bound and scatter-brained intellectual! But it is just for this reason that he will find it difficult. He resents being drawn away from his own thoughts. He hates the interruption. He likes ruminating, not meditating – and they are precisely opposite things. Intellectuals make bad meditators. Methods that ask them to stop thinking, though, are, in this, unreasonable. Many methods of oriental meditation are actively anti-intellectual. It is unreasonable, and finally futile, or even dangerous, to ask a person of intellectual and philosophical temperament – a thinker by nature – to stop thinking and to “surrender to the Void.” The better strategy is to ask them to think on one thought alone. Relevant to this, the present author recalls a conversation with a psychologist friend who reported to him that she often encounters occidental people who are driven to madness – actually damaged - by many forms of Boodhist meditation. The Boodhist emphasis on Emptiness, she said, can drive intellectualized Western people insane. There are hazards in japa too – bringing one’s inner cosmos back into alignment with the greater cosmos, rectifying the very rupture of one’s nativity, is no casual feat. When one challenges the mind’s addiction to its own wobbling, reckless, self-indulgent Circles of Difference the mind will, at length, resist. But it is still a more concrete and structured method than embracing Nothingness, and safer in that respect. 

For the Platonist, in any case, this mode of anemnesis – within or without a religious context - can be recommended. It is a matter of redefining the Circle of the Same in the mind and thereby bringing it back into alignment with the Circle of the Same in the great cosmos as a whole. This is the same, as it happens, as finding an axis, a centre, for the Circle of the Same defines the cosmic axis whereas the Circle of the Different wobbles and shifts here and there in a never-repeated dance of difference. For the Platonist, this mode of anemnesis entails fixing upon the thought of the One and the Good in the form of some suitable Name or formulae. The method consists, as explained above, of repeating this Name or formula over and over and over and over as a mantra at all times and in all circumstances. (We will call it the anamnesis, the ‘remembrance’.) It is not always easy – the very nature of man is to forget – but eventually it can be installed as a fixture of the mind, the very best of habits. Strictly speaking it does not matter what the Name or formula might be, but in a Platonic context it should represent the One and the Good. Usually, some form of Divine Name from an appropriate religious tradition is in order, although let us recall that the philosopher is not, after all, a religionist. His motives in regard to this may have more in common with the astrologer than with the religious devotee. For the philosopher, there is truth in religion – Socrates is meticulous in respecting popular religious observations - but it is very often like a pearl buried in a pile of dung. In this case, the pearl is a Name that acts as an auditory icon encapsulating the Form of Forms.

The effect of this practice of amenesis is to recontextualize all thinking. The Circle of the Same in the human microcosm is strengthened and reinforced, and this brings stability to the Circle of the Different. The objective is not to crush the "monkey mind" but to tame it. The method, therefore, is not anti-intellectual but rather it aims to bring a coherent order to the disturbed pertubations of the common mind. It is, superficially at least, a remarkably easy practice and can be done anywhere at anytime, and better yet it can be done in secret, quietly, as silent as a thought. It is, all the same, transforming. No one should underestimate its potency. Over time, it transforms the entire psychology. We cannot know if Plato himself knew exactly such a method - it is very ancient, as we know from its use among the Hindoos, and it is found in virtually all spiritual climates - and yet we can be sure that he was acquainted with its impact, for many of his dialogues are nothing less than an exploration of the mental processes that unfold in the course of diligent application to this method. In some later religious traditions, moreover, - most notably the cosmological whirling dance of the Soofis of Konya - exactly this method is directly linked to the name of Plato. There can be no doubt that the strength of the tradition of hesychasm in Greek Orthodox Christianity is built on Platonic foundations. Let us also mention that the beads often used as a prop to assist in this method - so-called japa mala - typically consist of one hundred and eight beads strung on a string, and this number, one hundred and eight, is not chosen at random but is in fact a key figure in the calculation of Plato's Nuptial Number, for 108 x 120,000 = 12,960,000. This should suggest to us that what we have here, in Plato's dialogues and in various religious traditions, are remaining elements of what was once a universal understanding. 

The japa-mala, or string of 108 beads, is typically used to assist in the practice of anamnesis (remembrance) in many religious traditions. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Strange Temple on Monkey Hill

Three figures. The Three Pure Ones. Supreme deities of the Taoist pantheon. White, red, black. 

Monkey Hill - also called Telegraph Hill - on the outskirts of Phuket Old Town is so named because the forests on the slopes are infested with vicious, invasive, rabid monkeys. Lest tourists find them cute, signs along the steep three kilometer track to the summit warn walkers that the monkeys are dangerous and not to feed or go near to them. The present author – getting into shape for a forthcoming tour of the Wudang mountains in China – made the trek up the hill recently, dodging marauding packs of monkeys (and stray dogs) all the way.

At one of the stopping points on the journey up the hill is one of the strangest and most eclectic temples the author has yet witnessed. Its official name is Po Ta To Sae. It defies categorization. It is clearly a Chinese shrine in its structure and organization, and in that, it is Taoist (or Chinese folkish) rather than Boodhist since it contains few images of the Boodha or other signs typical of Boodhism. There are the usual altars and the usual offerings, along with large supplies of joss for devotees. But rather than the usual cult images such as one finds in other Chinese temples throughout Phuket Town, Po Ta To Sae features unusual images and strange iconography which, incongruously, seems to have Mohammadan associations. The temple itself is guarded by an excessive array of tiger figures, and small shrines are dotted throughout the forest on one side of the main building. One of these shrines features an image of Christ, but this again is in a Mohammadan context or with Mohammadan associations. What, exactly, is going on here? one wonders. Who is being venerated, and as what, and why? There are few guiding clues, no useful signs, and the attending staff only speak Thai. 

Most Chinese temples are guarded by tiger figures. In this case there is a profusion of tigers all throughout the temple and lined up along the road. 






Examples of the very eclectic iconography found in the various side shrines. 

The figures on the main altar are the strangest. Upon inquiry, and some subsequent research, one is informed that they are – apparently – personfications of the three colours red, white and black. They are marked such in Thai, but each of them is also marked with a Mohammadan hilal, which is to say the Islamic symbol of crescent and star. Or so it seems. See thus:

The three figures on the main altar: Red, White and Black. Each marked with the Mohammadan crescent and star. 

All the same, they are worshipped as gods in the usual Chinese manner, as we see in the picture below, with a young woman offering prayers with joss sticks:

This Mohammadan symbolism is also found in the accompanying shrines. In this small shrine near the road, for instance:

Here we seem to have a Chinese deity - one of the Three Pure Ones? -, flecked with gold, wearing, it seems, a Muslim prayer hat and again marked with the Muslim symbol of crescent and star. 

The colour symbolism, however, is distracting. In fact, the three figures are - or so the present author is led to surmise - the Three Pure Ones of the Taoist pantheon - the supreme gods of Taoism. In previous posts we noted the popularity of the Eight Immortals in Chinese iconography and spiritual symbolism. Here we find the Three Pure Ones - the Primordial Heavenly Worthy, the spiritual Treasure Heavenly Worthy and the supreme Way Heavenly Worthy. They are celestial (heavenly) figures who have a higher status than the Eight Immortals. The full significance of the colour symbolism is unclear to this author, although he notes that the three colours - red, white and black - feature in the European alchemical tradition and are likely to have an alchemical significance here too. In other renderings, the Three Pure Ones are associated with the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow. Why each figure is marked with the star and crescent - and whether this is intended to have a Mohammadan association or not - is unclear. 

As noted, one of the shrines, far from the road, includes an image of Christ. As attentive readers will notice, the image of Christ is accompanied by a calligraphy bearing the name ‘Mohammad’ in Arabic, along with an image of an unidentified Muslim sage - or is it the Sihk's Guru Nanak? The latter possibility would make some sort of sense, in which case we have: 1. Jesus, 2. Mohammad, 3. Guru Nanak, representing the three religions Christianity, Islam, Sihkism. (The author, by the way, was obliged by the rules to take off his shoes to access this shrine, and then had to walk across an area strewn with broken glass. He literally walked over broken glass for these pictures!)

It is, frankly, most strange. It is worth noting, though, that the main temple in Phuket Town – also the oldest – includes some Mohammadan calligraphies in the context of far more orthodox Taoist symbolism, so it would appear that some elements of Taoist/Islamic syncretism are a feature of the Phuket Chinese tradition. Even so, the temple on Monkey Hill offers an extremely unusual blend of iconography and calls for a fuller explanation. The most likely explanation would seem to be that the shrine is sacred to the Three Pure Ones of Taoism, and that since these three are supremely lofty they are above, and therefore subsume under them, all other divine figures. Accordingly, the accompanying shrines include figures from all other religions, each of them subservient to the Three Pure Ones. 

The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things. 

- Tao Te Ching

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black