Imagine a corridor.
Not a grand one. Not at first. Just a corridor in the Old
Town of Semarang, on a street the Dutch called Heerenstraat and the locals
called Jalan Kepodang, with the heat of Java sitting on it like a wet hand.
Inside the offices of the Kian Gwan company, the typewriters never stopped. Clack-clack-clack-ding.
Down the hall, the telegraph machines chattered on and on, a sound like insects
that had learned to count money.
And somewhere in London or New York, a man was setting the
price of sugar because a man in Semarang had told him what it was.
Not the other way around. Think about that for a second.
His name was Oei Tiong Ham, and people called him the Sugar
King of Asia. They didn’t say it the way you’d say it about a man with a nice
house. They said it the way you’d say the Pope or the weather. It
was a fact of life.
But kings don’t come out of nowhere. They come out of
somebody’s before, and Oei Tiong Ham’s before starts with his father.
---
Oei Tjie Sien came out of Fujian, in China, with the Taiping
Rebellion at his back. If you don’t know about the Taiping, all you need to
know is this: it was one of the bloodiest wars in human history, and the people
who could run, ran. Oei Tjie Sien ran. He ran all the way to Java, and when he
got there he had nothing. He set up in Semarang as a small-time trader, a man
with a handcart and a good memory for faces and prices.
In 1863 he founded a firm and called it Kian Gwan. Rubber,
coffee, gambier. Nothing glamorous. The kind of business that puts food on the
table and keeps a man up at night doing sums by lamplight.
Three years later, in 1866, a son was born into that house.
Oei Tiong Ham came into a family that was already becoming
something, and I want you to hear that word, because it matters. Not rich yet.
Not powerful yet. Becoming. Like a storm is becoming, out over the
water, when the sky goes the color of an old bruise and the birds get quiet.
In 1893 he took the helm of Kian Gwan. He inherited capital,
sure. Plenty of men have inherited capital, and plenty of them have pissed it
away by forty. But Oei Tiong Ham had something else, and it was the thing that
set him apart: he could see. Where other men saw a family business, he
saw an empire, the first modern conglomerate in Southeast Asia, sitting there
in the dark waiting for somebody to switch on the lights.
The Dutch noticed. The Dutch always notice a man who is
getting rich in their territory, and they generally do one of two things about
it. They crush him, or they co-opt him. In his case they gave him a title: Majoor
der Chinezen, Major of the Chinese, the highest rank a Chinese resident of
the colony could hold.
It was an honor. It was also a leash. Keep that in mind.
---
Now, sugar.
In the late 1800s, the sugar business in Central and East
Java was a shambles. The mills were old, the methods were older, and the whole
industry ran the way it had always run, which is to say badly. There’s a
certain kind of man who looks at a mess like that and sees only the mess. And
there’s another kind who looks at it and thinks, There’s money lying on the
floor, and nobody is bending over.
Oei Tiong Ham bent over.
Between 1893 and 1910, he bought five bankrupt sugar mills.
Pakis. Rejoagung. Ponen. And two more, their names lost to me in the ledger
dust. These were dead things. Failures. Corpses with chimneys. He bought them
the way a certain kind of doctor takes on a patient everyone else has given up
on, and then he tore them apart and put them back together.
He shipped in the newest steam-powered machinery from
Europe. Great iron monsters, wheezing and hissing, pistons the size of a man’s
body. One historian has called it one of the biggest leaps in mechanization the
Dutch East Indies ever saw. I like to picture the first day they fired the
boilers, the workers standing back from the machines with their eyes wide, the
smell of hot oil and cane juice rolling out across the yard. You can almost
feel the ground shake.
But machines were only half of it. Anybody with enough money
could buy machines.
What Oei Tiong Ham did next was stranger. He hired
Europeans, professional managers, trained experts, and put them in charge of
running his factories. He was the first Chinese businessman in the colony to do
it. Think about what that meant in that time and that place, with the order of
things bolted down as tight as a coffin lid. A Chinese man was signing the
paychecks of white men, and telling them what to do.
Some of them must have hated it. I’d bet money on it. And
they took the money anyway, because the money was good and the work was good
and the man at the top knew exactly what he was doing.
The result was Western technology married to hard-headed
efficiency, and the sugar came pouring out. By the time the First World War was
at its height, his company was producing hundreds of thousands of tons a year.
It went to Singapore. It went to Hong Kong. It went to London and New York. On
one side of the world, people stirred it into their tea without a thought. On
the other, a man in Semarang counted what it cost them.
---
He was the richest man in Southeast Asia. The number people
whispered was two hundred million guilders, and I don’t know about you, but a
number that big has always struck me as a little obscene, like a smell in a
room where nobody wants to look in the closet.
And where did a man like that live?
He lived at Gergaji.
The Gergaji Palace, they called it, though the family name
for it was simply the Oei Tiong Ham Complex. Eighty-one hectares. Let that
settle. Eighty-one hectares of neoclassical colonial columns, pavilions that
looked like they’d been carried whole out of some European fever dream, gardens
that went on and on until you lost your sense of where the world stopped. And
somewhere in all that green there was a zoo, a private zoo, with rare
animals in it, behind the walls of one man’s house.
You would walk in, people said, and feel the everyday world
fall away behind you like a door swinging shut. I believe it. Money like that
doesn’t just buy a place. It buys a pocket of the world, a bubble where
the normal rules don’t apply, and inside it a man can start to believe they
never will.
Back in the Old Town, on Jalan Kepodang, the Kian Gwan
headquarters told the same story in a different voice. It was a modern
building, built to be one. It had its own telegraph system, wired straight into
the London exchange, so that Oei Tiong Ham could sit in Java and watch prices
rise and fall on the other side of the planet as they happened. Like a spider
in the middle of a web, feeling the smallest tremble on any strand.
---
And the man himself?
He was a Major of the Chinese. He could have played the
part. Worn the robes, kept the queue, been the good, grateful subject the Dutch
wanted. Plenty did.
He cut off the queue.
The tauchang, the braid every Chinese man was
supposed to wear, a thing with centuries of meaning behind it. Gone, snip, on
the floor. He put away the traditional clothes. He wore European suits every
day, stiff-collared, buttoned, correct. He was one of the first in Semarang to
do it, and I don’t think it was vanity. I think it was a message, delivered
without a word to every white man who ever looked at him sideways: I am your
equal, and you can see it in my clothes, and you can see it in my ledgers.
Modernity wasn’t a fashion to him. It was a weapon, and he
wore it well.
---
But here’s the thing about golden ages, Constant Reader.
They have an expiration date stamped on the bottom, and the stamp is always
there, even when nobody’s looking.
The Dutch colonial government had a tax on inheritance, and
it was a big one. Ham looked at it and did the math he always did, and the
answer made him leave. In 1920 he packed up and moved to Singapore. Maybe he
thought he was outrunning the tax collector. Maybe he was.
He couldn’t outrun the other thing.
In 1924, in Singapore, Oei Tiong Ham died of a heart attack.
Just like that. The king of sugar, the man who set the prices, the man who cut
his queue and hired white men and built a private zoo. Stopped, like one of his
own machines when the steam runs out.
His sons took over, mostly Oei Tjong Swan and Oei Tjong
Hauw. And for a while, the empire held.
But a storm was coming. You could see it out over the water,
if you knew how to look, and by then the sky was the color of that same old
bruise. Indonesia became independent, and the years that followed were years of
nationalization and legal fights and foreign assets falling like dominoes. In
1961, the Indonesian state took everything. Everything. Every asset the
Oei Tiong Ham Concern held in the country, seized.
Nearly a hundred years of building. Gone in the time it
takes to sign a piece of paper.
What was left became the foundation of a state-owned
enterprise called PT Rajawali Nusantara Indonesia. Which means the machine kept
running. It just had a different name on the door and a different hand on the
lever.
---
Today the man is dead. The company is dust.
But if you go to Semarang, and you stand on Jalan Kepodang,
and you look up at those old, grand buildings with the tropical damp creeping
up their walls, you might feel it. Or if you walk through what’s left of
Gergaji, the remnants, the ghosts of pavilions, the outline of a garden that
has long since been swallowed by streets and roofs.
You might feel it in the back of your neck.
Because from this port city on the north coast of Java, one
man once dictated the terms of the world’s trade. He did it with sugar, and
steam, and a telegraph that never stopped chattering.
The buildings are still there. And if you’re quiet, and the
wind is right, you can almost hear it.
Clack-clack-clack-ding.
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