The Golden Chersonese: Racial Empowerment in the Travel Writings of Victorian Women and Chinese Men in Colonial Singapore and Malaysia

Challenges to British male dominance over the empire came in unexpected forms. Construction and dissemination of racial ideologies, packaged in romantic and thrilling publications about mysterious tropical locales, served the interests of both Victorian women travelers and overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. The travel memoir allowed educated British women to find success as amateur anthropologists, a field dominated by men at home. Educated British women found immediate empowerment via their race in Asia through detailed race classification. Hybrid-identity peranakan Chinese and overseas Chinese in British Malaysia and Singapore also found themselves in a position of political and economic power via their race in ways not afforded at "home."  Peranakans acted as an informal economic and political power, buttressed by their own discrete racial discourses based on modern Chinese nationalism and constructions of a “lazy native” Malay. Like the Victorian travel writer, Chinese in Southeast Asia used the popular literary form, the tropical adventure story, to depict their own conceptions of race which elevated the overseas Chinese above “the locals.”  Building on Laura Hostetler’s work on late Qing ethnography and “colonial enterprise,” Tony Ballantyne’s conceptions of “webs of empire,” and even more expansive recent scholarship on transnationalism in the Pacific World, this paper argues that layers of power and ideology in the fluid and porous world of colonial Malaya resulted in a complex hierarchy informed by overlapping Chinese and British ideas of superiority. Both British women and Chinese men used imaginations of the “Golden Chersonese” the “golden” peninsula of Malaysia as a form of racial and gender empowerment, a means to commodify exotic cultures for literary success, and ultimately, as a challenge to white male hegemony within the empire.