An eye on history

The original book

A manuscript of Kai Ba Lidai Shiji by an anonymous author, circulated at the end of the 18th century. The two annotators speculate that the author might have been the secretary of the Kong Koan of Batavia, a semi-autonomous organization, in which the local elite of Jakarta's Chinese community supervised and coordinated its social and religious matters－as they believe that only a secretary would be in possession of in-house information, and that it might have taken its present form in 1793,

Historical accounts compiled by the Chinese in Southeast Asia are very rare, because most of them headed south for business, focusing more on commercial benefits rather than literary cultivation. The Kai Ba Lidai Shiji is all the more precious as it chronicles the lives and work of Chinese people between 1610 and 1795 and their troubled relationship with the Dutch colonists.

"The text is a mix of languages: Fujian dialect, Malay, and Dutch, and full of ancient, variant, colloquial, (then) simplified and coined words of Chinese … it took great efforts to turn them all into English. The two annotators have unlocked a wealth of historical accounts for us and the book makes for smooth and riveting reading" said Zhuang at the launch of the book.