On February 8, 2004, Tubagus (Tb.) Okkie Adhika Tirta Monterie gathered his family, along with the local religious and government officials of the district of Ciampea in Bogor, West Java, at the local Chinese cemetery for the unveiling of the recently re-discovered and refurbished tomb of his great-great-grandfather, Tb. Abdullah bin Mustofa, alias Babah Embun Thung Tiang Mih (1793-1856). 1 Shaped like a typical round-mounded Fujianese tomb, the Chinese-style tombstone was rebuilt without any fresh inscription added to it. Instead, Okkie erected a vertical rectangular tombstone on the side, which traced seven sultans and two pangerans

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 ofadat(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.”

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