ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how the two judges, Sir Richard Bolton McCausland and Sir Peter Benson Maxwell arrived at a ruling on the validity of owning sinchew property that touched upon British commercial interests. Common law as a case-based system owed its shape and content to a history of judicial decisions. In the Straits Settlements (SS) a similar system of personal laws developed, where laws were applied to persons of a particular religion or race. In the early days of colonization of the SS, the under-resourced British colonial government needed to make concessions to local customs and other native forms of judicial practice. The term sinchew was widely used by Baba communities and most Chinese immigrants to mean the worship carried out before the spirit master tablet, a wooden tablet with the name of the deceased relative on it. Choa Chong Long promoted the kinds of worship he had learned in Fujian to the Chinese immigrant communities in Malacca.
