Gouw Peng Liang
1869–1928
Biography
Gouw Peng Liang was a Peranakan Chinese writer in Malay, born in 1869 at Jatinegara, in what is now Jakarta, and he died in the same place in 1928. He came from a wealthy Peranakan family. He worked as a journalist on the Malay-language newspaper Bintang Betawi from 1893 to 1906, then on Sinar Betawi and on Perniagaan, and he held the post of chief editor from 1909 to 1916.
His political outlook was conservative. In his early years as a journalist he was very critical of the revolutionary movement led by Sun Yat-sen, and he defended the Chinese officer system, which the revolutionaries regarded as an instrument of colonial government. His novel Lo Fen Koei (1903) runs to about 88 pages and is based on a real case. It tells of a rich opium tenant who plots a murder so that he can take a poor girl as a younger wife, and it is critical of the opium tenant system. The story was first serialised in Bintang Betawi. Later works, among them Perniagaan Prempuan dan Anak-anak Prempuan (1919) and Resia Pelacuran Perempuan (1923), turned to the lives of women and to prostitution.
The site holds his Mohamed Ali Pacha, a Malay story from 1917. It is a different kind of work from Lo Fen Koei, and reading the two together shows the range of a Peranakan writer who worked for the Batavia press in Malay and took up the social and legal questions of his community.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Mohamed Ali Pacha
by Gouw Peng Liang
A poor German bookseller's boy, Julius Werner, leaves his country and becomes in time Mohamed Ali Pasha, a soldier in the Ottoman service who commands the Albanians in their rising against the Porte. Gouw Peng Liang's tale of 1917, told in the Malay of the Peranakan Chinese…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.