Grandfather Yeo Cheow Kaw chose to erect the clan house, the Xiayang Yeo Gongsi, or Sit Teik Tong (STT), (霞阳楊公司植德堂) on Strand Road (海滨街)， at the corner of 17th Street, in Rangoon/Yangon. The biggest Chinese (Hokkien) temple Kheng Hock Keng (庆福宫), is less than 200m away, and facing the same Yangong River. The two buildings share the same fengshui – water in-front and high ground behind. Without tall buildings in between, as it was in the earlier times, Shwedagon was clearly in sight on the higher ground. On the altar in the clan house, Sie Thow Gong (使头公) the Protection God the clan worships, has been gazing for nearly a hundred years in the same direction as Yangong river flows to the east to reach Xiayang, the ancestral hometown. It symbolises the innate affection of the decendants of Yeo Teik Kheng (楊德卿), towards Xiayang.
The 4-storey mansion stands out uniquely on this stretch of Strand Road, for being not crowded together like other Chinese clan houses in the main streets of Chinatown in Yangon. The remarkable architecture that replicates Southern Hokkien (Minnan) design draws more than casual attention from Western tourists and history authors.
1
【Eternal Rangoon, 1999】 prints a color picture of Yangon STT.
2
In her book 【Mapping Chinese Rangoon，2016】, Dr Jayde Lin Roberts includes a shot of Yangon STT.
3
In her book 【Chinese in Colonial Burma，2017】, Dr Li Yi mentioned Yangon STT two times.
4
In fact, after the opening of Yangon STT in December 1925, Rangoon Gazette ran paragraphs of considerable length on the occasion, elaborating on the magnificent decorations on the walls and floors.
5
Dr Bob Percival, wrote about Yangon SST in his travellog in March 2016 entitied “Yangon, 17th Street”. This article now appears in an eBook 【Opening up Hidden Burma】, but is also available at this Web address.
Dr Percival, a well-travelled prolific writer from Australia was not just impressed with the building but also the story inscribed on the marble tablet on a Yangon STT wall that tells the origin of the 22 generations of Xiayang Yeo, so much so that he later was to pen his imagination of Somerset Maugham visiting SST under the guidance by “Chan Thong” “who built the Gongsi to honour his descendants”. Dr Percival wrote other fictional accounts of authors like George Orwell who themselves wrote about Burma and Yangon during their stay. His Creative Writing on Maugham can be found here.
【Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese】, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016
The book shows only SST in black-and-white. Dr Jayde Lin Roberts was kind to send me a colorful digital copy.
Dr Perceival’s Creative Writing on Somerset Maugham can be found here.
【Eternal Rangoon, Contemporary Portrait of a Timeless City (City Heritage) published in1999 by Benedicte Brac De LA Perriere (Author), and Thomas Renaut (Photographer)】
【Chinese in Colonial Burma : a migrant community in a multiethnic state】, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017