Minister George Yeo, Mr. Ng Yew Kang, distinguished guests,
ladies and gentlemen.

Mr. Ng has named the number of people responsible and thanked them, and I join him in congratulating his Committee for making this occasion possible.

The Minister will also, as guest of honour, be thanking other people responsible for this HuayiNet, so I won't go over the names here.

I would like, on the other hand, to speak on behalf of potential users. As a potential user myself and as someone who has tried over the years to get hold of sources and materials and documents pertaining to the Chinese Overseas, you cannot imagine how happy I am to see something like this happen today. This makes future scholarship on the subject so much easier, so much fuller, so much more comprehensive.

Singapore is a very suitable place to do this. In fact, there is a long history of scholars in Singapore who have been studying the Chinese in this part of the world and elsewhere. I recall as a young man being introduced to the work of Song Ong Siang, one of our own wonderful scholars and the first of his kind, who prepared his unique work called the "One Hundred Years' History of the Chinese in Singapore". That work has helped so many scholars ever since it was first published in 1923. I think it symbolises how central Singapore has been because, from then onwards, there has been a succession of scholars from outside Singapore who have come here to start gathering materials about the Chinese in the region.

In fact, one of the historic organisations was the Nanyang Xuehui, which was founded just before the start of the Pacific war in 1940, by Singaporeans and Malaysians and some scholars from China. Among the Singaporeans was someone known to several of you here, Mr. Tan Yeok Seong. He and Hsu Yun-t'siao who later became a professor at Nanyang University, together with scholars like Yao Nan and Han Huai Toon set out to form this society. Although meant to study other parts of Southeast Asia as well, it nevertheless made major contributions to the study of the Chinese and the relations between China & Southeast Asia. They covered historical and ethnographic subjects from archaeology down to the present, but their focus on, and their contributions to our understanding of, the Chinese in Southeast Asia has been widely acknowledged.

The Society still exists, and of course, it is no longer alone. It is now supplemented by many other societies and organisations but this inspiration that came from people like Tan Yeok Seong and Hsu Yun-t'siao should be acknowledged here.

Professor Hsu Yun-t'siao went on to teach at Nanyang University, and during his period at Nantah, he and his colleagues and students gathered together a very good collection for the Nantah University library, and this collection is now with the NUS. Some other collections of course have been gathered by other scholars. I should mention that, on the part of the government, the Raffles Museum in the past, now the Singapore History Museum, had also started collecting materials from very early on. These materials are now distributed in different places like the National Archives and National Library. Various other organisations have also started collecting documents. It seems to me that it is not at all surprising that we in Singapore are bringing all these together in ways that are now possible with modern technology.

I recall the days when we wandered from library to library, knocking at doors, calling on people to try and get hold of some materials about the stories that we wanted to tell. It was extremely difficult, but the work of all those scholars, each of them pursuing their particular interests, had led to collections being built up, little by little, here and there, and these have been gathered in institutional collections, and then in libraries, in Universities and so on. Now we do have spread around Singapore and elsewhere in the world, larger and larger collections put together by individual scholars over many years.

The problem now is that the materials are very scattered, knowledge about them is scanty and fragmentary and they have not been comprehensively put together. That will be a very major task, but we have to start somewhere. I am extremely encouraged that the National Library Board and its constituent groups and all the organisations behind this HuayiNet project have undertaken to take on this great project. It will not be something that Singapore can do alone. There will have to be cooperation between our organisations here and those elsewhere.

This is an excellent beginning, and I am sure this will lead to international cooperation on a scale which will make the study of the Chinese Diaspora a major field in the future. So, on behalf of all the users and potential users, here and elsewhere around the world, I wish to thank the Committee responsible and all those who have helped and donated generously to this project.

Thank you very much.

(Transcribed by The National Library Board of Singapore)

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