CHAPTER XIII: THE TENTH DECADE (1909–19) SECOND PART
IN February 1914 the Straits Times published a special contribution on ‘The Straits Chinese, their Character and Tendencies’, from which we can only quote portions, but the whole article is worth careful perusal.
The Straits-born Chinaman (sic) is usually regarded as being of mixed breed – half Chinese and half Malay. Except, however, as regards the original progenitors, this is not in accordance with fact, the first ancestress only being a full-blooded Malay: the subsequent generations usually intermarrying among themselves or introducing new Chinese blood, and thus maintaining the dominant racial characteristics in the breed. In the older settlements there are descendants of the 5th, 6th and even more generations but in Singapore the majority are those of the 3rd and 4th in descent from a purely Chinese male progenitor. … Recently, descendants from purely Chinese parentage on both sides are much in evidence, but these are still too insignificant in number, and too recent, to influence to any appreciable extent the distinguishing features and marked characteristics of the Straits-born Babas
