FOREWORD

WEE CHO YAW
Chairman, Board of Governors,
Chinese Heritage Center

This encyclopedia is compiled and published under the aegis of the Chinese Heritage Centre, which was set up in Singapore in 1995. The establishment of this centre has made it possible to study overseas Chinese globally, rather than as separate communities. Thus this book is not only the first major project of the centre but the first to look at overseas Chinese communities across the world so comprehensively. Bringing many communities together between the covers of a single volume helps to reveal the contacts that these communities have established both among themselves, and between themselves and the wider world. And such contacts are crucial in a world increasingly linked and shrunk by information technology.

The purpose of both this book and the Chinese Heritage Centre is to meet the increasing demand for information on the overseas Chinese, interest in whom has waxed and waned through the years but which has patently grown with China's expanding openness to the world. There is no doubt that the overseas Chinese have played an important part in the ties which China has forged with its neighbours in Asia and with the West over the centuries. These ties have been forged for the most part around trade, but they have also been enriched by the flow of ideas and culture.

The Chinese Heritage Centre aims to contribute to such exchanges. It does so as a repository of materials on overseas Chinese settled across the globe. This information bank will expand through both its own efforts and through cooperation with research institutions sharing its interests throughout the world. It is helped in this endeavour by its location in Singapore, a place with a sizeable population of Chinese descent and strong telecommunications infrastructure.

The centre was founded by the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations, but it is housed in a building leased from the Nanyang Technological University. It is deeply in the debt of these two organizations, but it could not have embarked on the encyclopedia without the support of many individuals located outside Singapore. Specifically, I want to record my thanks to the international Board of Governors and to all those donors whose generous financial assistance brought both the centre and this volume into being. I am also grateful to the international Panel of Advisers for their wise counsel. We recognize that the book is only the first step on a long journey for the Chinese Heritage Centre. But we are confident of steady progress towards our goal of being the world's premier centre for the study of the Chinese overseas.

Excerpt copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.