Despite the long Dutch presence in Taiwan (1624–1662) and the active trade between Batavia and China in the eighteenth century, the Dutch tradition of academic Sinology got underway only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the training of future officers for Chinese affairs in the Dutch East Indies was moved to Leiden. This training (often including an extended period of stay in China) remained the main task of Chinese teaching at Leiden until 1949, when Indonesia achieved independence. The earliest phase of Chinese teaching at Leiden has received an encyclopedic coverage in the work of Koos Kuiper. Scholars of the second generation who have received monographic treatment include J.J.M. de Groot and Henri Borel. The best-known Dutch Sinologist of the middle of the twentieth century was Robert Hans van Gulik who was not only a successful diplomat and highly original scholar, but also established an international reputation with his Judge Dee crime novels. His work has given rise to considerable scholarship in English and Chinese.

How did colonial family law reshape the ethnic and gender norms of a creolized entrepreneurial minority? While the literature on colonial Indonesia has tended to view the Dutch colonial preservation of adat (customary) law as helping to preserve Indonesian women's autonomy and property rights, this essay shows how, in the case of the Indonesian-Chinese entrepreneurial minority, the colonial government's institutionalization of Confucian “Chinese” family law gradually introduced more patriarchal norms for creole Chinese families. The Dutch colonial state's legal regulation of credit and commerce in Java took a moralistic turn in the mid-nineteenth century, giving shape to a more patriarchal and “Chinese” form of the family in Java by the century's end. This legal-moralistic turn took the form of a critique of creole Chinese women on one hand, and the Sinological construction of a body of Confucian “Chinese” private law on the other. For almost half a century, this encroaching colonial ethno-moral critique of creole Chinese credit manipulations and marriage arrangements came up against resistance from Peranakan Chinese matriarchs and patriarchs. In this article, I show how colonial Confucian family law eventually ended creole Chinese women's contract-making and credit-manipulating autonomies by subjecting the “Chinese” household to the civil law authority of the “housefather.”

From 1960 until 1965, the People's Republic of China (PRC) built a remarkably cordial quasi alliance with the Republic of Indonesia. At the same time, however, the years between 1960 and 1965 were marked by two large waves of anti-Chinese movements in Indonesia. Although more than half a century has passed since these events, our understanding of Chinese foreign policy towards Indonesia during these turbulent years remains incomplete. In 2008, the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives declassified for the first time documents produced during the years between 1961 and 1965. However, very recently in summer 2013, the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives re-classified the main body of its collection. Through examining this body of fresh but currently inaccessible official records, this article aims to bridge the gap between scholarly works on the PRC's diplomatic history and overseas Chinese history. By tracing the processes by which Chinese diplomats dealt with Sukarno, the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or the PKI), this article argues that the ambivalent Chinese alliance with Indonesia was shaped by three disparate pressures which interacted and competed with one another: the strategic need to befriend Third World countries, ethnic ties to the Chinese in Indonesia and ideological commitment to the international communist movement.

As archaeologists grapple with the international curation crisis, new attention is being given to the problem of ‘orphaned’ archaeological collections and collections that are underanalysed and underreported. The common rationale for curating such collections is to restore research potential, but such efforts are met with frustration because of the difficulties of re-establishing provenance and quantitative control for artefacts long separated from their original archaeological context. Moreover, most archaeologists view curation as a process that manages, rather than investigates, archaeological collections. To the contrary, this article argues that accessioning, inventory, cataloguing, rehousing and conservation are not simply precursors to research, but rather meaningful generative encounters between scholars and objects. Examples from the curation of the Market Street Chinatown archaeological collection illustrate how the process of curation can generate innovative research undertakings. Because archaeological research on this collection cannot proceed in a typical way, the research developed through the curation process departs from archaeological conventions to bring new perspectives on the social history of the Overseas Chinese diaspora.

Relying on Vietnamese internal government documents now available to scholars for consultation in the No. 3 Vietnam National Archive in Hanoi, this article examines the linkage between the escalated Sino-Vietnamese territorial dispute and the increased Vietnamese mistreatment of Chinese residents and experts in northern Vietnam from 1974 to 1978 owing to state-sponsored Vietnamese anti-China/irredentist nationalism. During this period, Vietnamese leaders were seeking to forge national unity, solidify popular loyalty to the state, and mobilize domestic resources to defend the Vietnamese “fatherland” against the threat of Chinese territorial expansion. Specifically, this article demonstrates how these policies encouraged mistreatment of Chinese residents and experts, and created a climate of fear and paranoia within the Chinese community which caused the widespread flight of Chinese from northern Vietnam in 1977–1978.