Tales From the South China Seas

by Charles Allen

Book Overview

A chronicle of the adventures of the last generation of British men and women who went East to seek their fortunes. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0708824943
• ISBN13: 9780708824948
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Futura Publishing Co Inc
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Essential reading on colonial Malaya

If you have an interest in British colonial history then this is essential reading. This book mostly deals with the period from c.1910-1950s in British Malaya. This isn't quite as good as "Plain Tales from the Raj" (a true classic) but it is still pretty good. I was disappointed that there wasn't more information about city life in Singapore and elsewhere in Malaya (and Hong Kong or Shanghai): mostly he deals with the lives of planters and their families. Still, it is a valuable insight into the reality of British Malayan life.

Long Ago and Far Away

This book is an edited oral history of the lives of British ex-pats in Malaysia and Borneo in the early Twentieth Century. In making this collection, Allen interviewed ex-pats from all walks of life-from bank officials to boat captains and family members of rubber plantation owners. He collated the material into chapters organized by topic, including motivations for going to the East, types of work, racial mixing and segregation, daily life, living in the back country, administration, women, the War, and the prison camps. Allen provides much historical background, and uses lengthy excerpts from the interviews to illustrate his points. I found this book absolutely fascinating for the information it provides on the ex-pat mindset. I had never understood before who these ex-pats were and why they were so nonchalant about living overseas. In movies and books British ex-pats are frequently portrayed as having the attitude of being superior to locals, and oblivious to local cultures. This book provides a much deeper exploration of what British ex-pats living in the colonies were all about. We learn that many of the men were younger sons of middle class families, who knew they would not be inheriting money or business, so they would have to make it on their own. A career in the colonies provided a respectable way for an average chap with limited resources to make a living, as well as have some adventure along the way. But this wasn't their only motivation-as many in Allen's interviews note, they were also drawn to the colonies by a sense of service to their country and to the people of the colony. Conditions were often extreme, and deaths from disease were common. The only way to survive was to develop an incredible toughness of character, sometimes taking the form of daily routines that seemed to deny the hardships through seeming to be oblivious to them. From our perspective, these customs may appear to be out of synch with local culture, but when it is understood that they are survival mechanisms, their worth becomes clear. In this book, the ex-pats explain themselves, as Allen sums up in the epilogue: "As the younger [local] men that they had trained began to take over so the British officials went into early retirement; a few moved to other colonies but the great majority returned to the United Kingdom. They went with the satisfaction that they left behind countries that were `prosperous, and peaceful and well-governed'. They had stood for `decent, not very efficient but well-meaning government that gave the very poorest man a chance to live and enough food to eat'. And if as rulers they had been `sometimes pompous and stupid' they had also been, by and large, `dedicated, intrinsically good and incorruptible." Whether or not the officials actually measured up to these descriptions is another story, but this is how they saw themselves and described their own work. Allen's work in collecting these stories and creating a cohesive whole