Mo PaiArchive

Island · Indonesia

Java

Where the whole modern story happens.

Historic photograph of a street in Java lined with Chinese shopfronts, including a batik shop.
A street of Chinese shops in Java. This is the ordinary setting of the whole modern story — a trading community centuries old, in a town of the kind the archive never gets to name. Dhr. C.H. (Christoffel Hendrik) Japing (Fotograaf/photographer). · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The most populous island on earth, and the one Mo Pai's modern history takes place on. John Chang lived and worked in a Javanese town whose name has never been published; Liao Sifu is said to have taught him there; the Blair brothers filmed him there in 1988; and the small number of Western students who were accepted travelled there to sit.

Chinese communities have been established along the north coast for centuries — traders were in the ports before Zheng He, and the temple at Semarang commemorates his voyages. Those communities, and the closed networks of family, surname association and temple inside them, are the route by which an inherited practice would have travelled and the reason no record of it was kept.

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