This fourth edition (2015) is the most up-to-date version of my book on Prominent Indonesian Chinese.

The origin of this book was a long paper published by Ohio University in 1972 with the title of Prominent Indonesian Chinese in the 20th Century: A Preliminary Survey (papers in International Studies, Southeast Asian Series, Ohio University, it consists of only 62 pages). Six years later, when I worked as a researcher at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), I revised the paper and made it into a book and published it in 1978 with a new title: Eminent Indonesian Chinese: Biographical Sketches. This was officially the first edition of this book. Two years later, an Indonesian publisher in Singapore, Gunung Agung, expressed his interest to republish the book. But since the book would be sold in Indonesia, I had to come out with two versions, one with the Chinese characters and the other without as the Soeharto regime banned books with Chinese characters for distribution. As a result, I had to remove all Chinese characters from the book and prepare a separate booklet on the list of Chinese characters for readers who were outside Indonesia. I wanted my book to be circulated in Indonesia and I accepted that arrangement, otherwise the book would have not been allowed to be distributed in Indonesia at all. This was the second edition of my book.

The book was out of print for many years. Fifteen years later, many new figures emerged and old ones passed away. An update was needed. I was interested in issuing a third edition and offered it to ISEAS, which was the publisher of my first edition. My offer was accepted and the book was published in 1995 with a new title: Prominent Indonesian Chinese: Biographical Sketches. Chinese characters in the book were restored. Within a year, the book was reprinted at least once.

In the last nineteen years, there have been a lot of new generation leaders and the book requires another update. This time, updating of the book becomes more difficult as not only do I need to revise the existing biographies, I also need to add new figures that have emerged in the last two decades.

This work is to present a documented study of Indonesian Chinese in the twentieth century and beyond. The term “Indonesian Chinese” as used here refers to “ethnic Chinese” in Indonesia who have or had Chinese surnames, regardless of their citizenship. Many Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent have adopted Indonesian-sounding names since 1966 — in a few cases, the adoption of such names occurred even earlier than that date — and they prefer not to be identified as “Chinese”, but for academic purposes, they are still included in this study.

It should also be noted that some Indonesian-born Chinese who migrated elsewhere in their early age and became well-known only in their newly adopted land (for instance, Wang Gungwu and Choo Hoey) will be excluded from this book, but those who migrated after they had made significant contributions in Indonesia will be included in the category of Indonesian Chinese (for instance, Thung Tjeng Hiang and Yap Tjwan Bing).

In fact, the Chinese in Indonesia, numbering about 4 million, are a heterogeneous and complex community. Culturally, they can be divided into Indonesian-speaking peranakan and Chinese-speaking totok, but the Chinese- speaking group has rapidly declined during the Soeharto New Order period (1966–98); legally they can be classified as Indonesian citizens and aliens, cutting across the abovementioned cultural divisions; politically, they are split into pro-Jakarta, pro-Beijing, pro-Taipei groups, and others who are not sure of their orientation. The majority, however, remain politically passive. Economically, the Chinese are heavily engaged in, but not confined to, trading activities. As the present study shows, they are found in a wide range of professions.

The division between the peranakan and the totok has become less useful with the passage of time as most totok children by the third generation have become peranakan in the sense that they have lost their command of the Chinese language. This is especially true with the Chinese who were born or who grew up after Chinese schools in Indonesia were closed in 1966. However, for the older generation, some of the second generation, and some who have been educated in Chinese-speaking countries/areas, Chinese or Chinese dialect is still used at home as their medium of communication. In such cases, they can still be classified as totok in the cultural sense.

In the past decades, we have witnessed academic articles and monographs published at an astonishing rate on the cultural interactions between Tibet and China. These studies have tended to focus on the religious ideas and practices influencing the elite class, namely the Tibetan Buddhism that interested the rulers of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Tibetan influence on the popular culture of the Chinese has been largely ignored. This is partly because the Tibetans have never been rulers of the East Asian Heartland. Moreover, for geographic and historical reasons, Tibet was — until the 1950s — a mystical and hermetically enclosed society in the Chinese imagination. It has consequently been believed that Tibetan culture could not have any direct or lasting effect on Chinese society during the imperial period.

This study aims to challenge these assumptions, and to rethink Sino- Tibetan cultural communications from a different perspective. We begin with a survey of the surviving textual records on the usage of the peacock's gallbladder and the image of the peacock, revealing several clues for further exploration. Following these clues, we close in on the origin of the peacock's gallbladder as a lethal poison in the Tibetan culture of medicine and pharmacy. We examine the introduction of Tibetan medicine to China under the Mongol rule, and its tremendous impact on the Mongol elites in the second section of this paper, and focus on the medicinal usage of the peacock's gallbladder recorded in two major works of Tibetan materia medica, namely the rGyud-bZhi and the Shel gong shel phreng, in the third section. Lastly, we discuss the possible Buddhist influence on the reception of the peacock in Tibetan tradition.

The Peacock's Gallbladder and the Peacock in the Chinese Tradition

A pharmacologist would point out that the “peacock's gallbladder”, at least as a poison, simply does not exist: like the gallbladders of many other birds, it is in no sense toxic. Why, then, did this story, so at odds with any kind of fact, survive?

What is the peacock's gallbladder? Can we associate the poisonous mythical “peacock's gallbladder” with the actual gallbladder of a peacock? Alternatively, is the item in question something possessing a fancy name but actually having nothing to do with the peacock? An examination of the history of the myth, especially regarding the cultures that have accepted it, may help answer these questions.

This volume is composed of papers presented at the international conference on “Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours”, organized by the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore, and held at ISEAS on 28–29 June 2012.

The northern periphery of China, from the late Neolithic and the Bronze Age up to modern times, has been carefully scrutinized, both by Chinese scholars and foreign researchers. Even traditional Chinese sources, such as the standard histories, devote considerable attention to the peoples, cultures, and states of the northern and northwestern border regions of the Chinese heartland. Since the Chinese state began in the northern portion of its current configuration and received demonstrable, formative inputs from the north and northwest, it is understandable that correspondingly greater attention would be paid to the north than to the south, particularly during the early periods of the development of the Chinese nation. In contrast, the southern rim of China has been relatively poorly studied, despite the fact that the languages, ethnic groups, and cultures of the south are every bit as complex, interesting, and important as those of the north.

In this conference, we aimed to remedy this disparity by giving due emphasis to the south as a vital region of social, economic, and cultural interaction between Sinitic and non-Sinitic peoples. First, however, we had to recognize that “the south” has not been a fixed entity or a static, welldefined region during the last three millennia of Chinese history. Rather, it has been defined by a continuously changing, amorphous boundary with the north. Indeed, there has been a gradual encroachment of the north upon the south. This was already documented in modern scholarship more than half a century ago by Harold J. Wiens, China's March Toward the Tropics (1954, also published under at least one other title), and C.P. Fitzgerald, The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People (1972).

A dramatic change occurred around the time of the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty (265–316) and the founding of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420). This was a time of crisis in the northern heartland, one that was precipitated by climatic distress and consequent geopolitical realignments. The net effect was to catapult large numbers of northerners southward, quickening the pace of expansion and assimilation.

Sixty years ago, a newly unified China was established, and its new leaders began to look southwards afresh. What they saw was a region that had been transformed by five centuries of a global maritime trade that eventually spawned several European empires. During that period, and especially in the nineteenth century, the earlier trading empires of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries evolved into national empires as nationstates developed out of feudal and absolute monarchies. Some, like those of Britain and France, were greatly enriched and strengthened by the scientific and industrial revolutions and their large capitalist enterprises spread across the globe. By the first half of the twentieth century, however, the rival empires in Europe had turned on themselves, and this led them to fight two world wars. In the Asia that they had dominated since the early nineteenth century, their destructive conflicts produced many revolutionary changes, for example, the rise of a modern Japanese empire, the destruction of imperial China, new divisions on the Indian subcontinent and, at the end of the Second World War, the emergence of Southeast Asia as a selfconscious region with nationalist leaders who were dedicated to the task of building nation-states out of former colonial territories. The region's newfound self-awareness was enhanced by the common experience, for three and a half years during the Second World War, of having been under the dominance of a single, the Japanese, empire. This was the first time that the various kingdoms and ports and their peoples had ever come more or less under the control of one imperial power.

By the time China was reunified in 1949, some of the leaders of the countries to China's south were beginning to discover that they could together develop a distinctive identity for the region, and that it was in their interest to consider doing so as soon as they could. Spurred by anticolonial movements that embarked on the task of nation building, inspired by modern concepts of sovereignty, freedom, equality, and economic development, their leaders and scholars found new perspectives from which to examine the history of China's relations with the region. For a while, the new countries were divided by the Cold War.