Typological and Morphological Adaptations of Hakka Diaspora’s Settlements in Cosmopolitan Southeast Asia: West Kalimantan case

Abstract

In Southeast Asia, cultural and geographical “boundary” is always blurred, overlapping, or intersecting, and has never been very clear-cut. People in different places – islands or continents – keep moving, communicating, and intermingling from past till present, influencing each other and producing a hybrid, fused, diverse architecture and material culture. Here the spirit of unity in diversity had been kept and passed as a valuable tradition for generations. The never-ending process of layering, transformations, and hybridization, has been going on for thousand of years in the region around the “Mediterranean of Asia”. The Diaspora immigration from Southern China (Fujianese, Cantonese, Hainanese, Teochews, Hakkas, and other dialect groups from Southern China) into Southeast Asia has been going on for centuries. Their presence and cultural production have been further enhancing the development of the cosmopolitan architecture and urbanism in this region, both coastal and inland. The Chinese Diaspora who migrated and settled in various parts of Southeast Asia laid the basic structure of the urban pattern (grid, axis, blocks, thresholds, zoning, etc.), built many primary elements (such as harbor, temples, shrines, market, shopping street, community halls, etc.), and gave special identity to their adopted homes. They became native to the locality where they settled, by adopting and blending tangible and intangible cultural heritage into their own.