The Urban Heritage of Homesickness: Reconstructing Seventeenth-Century Dutch Batavia’s Chinese Hospice

204 Frick Fine Arts
Sim Hinman Wan

In Zee- en lant-reize door verscheide gewesten van Oostindien (1682), Johan Nieuhof writes about a Chinees Ziekenhuis from 1640 as one of Batavia’s most celebrated urban artifacts. European historians have understood this Chinese establishment to be a place for infirm, elderly, and orphan care, equivalent to the Dutch hospice, that had administered philanthropic services for the indigent members of society since monastic times. Chinese sources inform that the so-called hospice was also a kind of community building for more general poor relief, public education, administration of neighborhood affairs, and possibly religious rituals. This multipurpose venue was essentially a huiguan 会馆, a type of guildhall for sojourning merchants with an increasingly philanthropic function around the turn of the seventeenth century. By including the Chinese perspective in a narrative from Indonesia that has been largely shaped by the Dutch, this paper discusses the reconstruction of a disappeared landmark with layers of civic values.