Some Early Photographs of the Dog in 19th-Century Singapore and the Region
Retired lawyer and banker John Koh is a keen supporter of Singapore’s history and heritage. He recently donated more than 500 items to the National Library Board, among which is an issue of Bintang Timor, a weekly newspaper published in Singapore in the 1850s. In this post, he shares his love for both dogs and collecting.
My first dog was a gift from my uncle. It was an Alsatian intended to be a watchdog for the house. I have been a dog lover ever since (I now have three cockapoos) and for the last decade, I’ve combined my love for dogs with my penchant for collecting historical memorabilia.
I’ve been collecting 19th-century photographs of dogs as an offshoot of my interest in early photographs. Very early on (for reasons of space), I decided to collect dog pictures in the carte de visite format which first appeared in 1854. Usually made of an albumen print, a carte de visite is a thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker paper card, about 54 mm x 89 mm in size.
Due to its portable size, the format readily lent itself to the emerging interest in portraiture. Later on in the early 1870s, the larger cabinet card format supplanted the carte de visite. Slightly larger at 110 mm x 170 mm, they are usually albumen prints mounted on cardboard backs. Most importantly, copies could be made and shared and this would be undertaken by photo studios, the names of which would appear at the back of the cards.
As with all collecting, one thing led to another and when I came across a set of cartes de visite of dogs in India, my interest naturally turned to pictures of dogs closer to home.
The first dog cartes de visite in Asia I came across were those taken in India. The subject was military personnel with their dogs or the dog as a regimental mascot. It occurred to me that it would not be at all strange if there were cartes de visite of dogs elsewhere in Asia, such as British Malaya and Singapore. That hunch proved to be correct and while rare, all the major photographers and studios in Asia had produced cartes de visite of dogs.
I was encouraged by the early discovery of a pair of terriers photographed by John Thomson, the famous photographer in 19th-century China. The dogs actually looked like shih tzus (above left) and would be the first non-European breed in an early photo. There is also one of a Jack Russell by AFong (above right), widely regarded as the first Asian studio set up in Hong Kong. There are also cartes de visite and cabinet cards from Haiphong, Tientsin, Shanghai, Rangoon, Bombay, Mandalay.
These photos captured a narrow social group, essentially of European colonials and the pets they kept for utility (as watchdogs, hunting or as mascots) or as companions. These roles almost always overlapped. Occasionally the photographs taken outside of the studio would include the servants who looked after the dogs.
Consequently, the breeds often seen in the photos are European. In the studio portraits, the dogs pictured are all European breeds: spaniels, pointers, Jack Russell terriers, dalmatians. As one might expect, predominantly hounds and no toy dogs. It is very likely that the dogs the Europeans had in Singapore came from either India or Ceylon. It is only in the photos taken in the 20th century that Asian breeds such as the Pekinese and the shih tzu appeared, though these could have also come from Europe where relations with China had brought breeds to Europe or made them more popular.
As for local breeds, the mongrel, now commonly known as the Singapore special, was not recorded in the cartes de visite that I’d come across. There are, however, postcards of the Dutch East Indies showing the Balinese dog and a hound in Java. The Balinese dogs that you see today with black and white markings are all supposed to have descended from Danish Dalmatians that the adventurer Mads Johansen Lange brought to Bali in the 1830s. He was buried in Kuta and on his tombstone is a statue of a Dalmatian that looks very much like the Dalmatian in the photo above. Interestingly, one of his daughters was one of the wives of Sultan Abu Bakar and the mother of Sultan Ismail of Johore.
Finally, a word about the dogs on the island. The photographs only reflect a narrow group that by class and convention kept dogs in roles similar to those in their European homeland. Written records show that while not everywhere, dogs were common and found with and around people.
There were already dogs in Singapore before the British arrived in 1819. In Hikayat Abdullah, Munshi Abdullah records that one of William Farquhar’s dogs was taken by a crocodile during a walk by the river. In those early days, dogs were mostly feral and viewed as a nuisance to be culled as provided for by law. (This mirrored similar steps in India and probably elsewhere in the emerging British empire.)
The gradual ascendancy of the dog in Singapore’s first century has been meticulously laid out in Timothy Barnard’s Imperial Creatures.¹ In the book, two accounts stand out for me. The first was a Magistrate’s notice of April 1845 where dogs with collars could not be culled even though found on the streets. The second was a lawsuit in 1862 brought by a European resident whose dog – though wearing a collar – had been shot by the deputy commissioner of police. This resulted in a $50 fine for the police officer as he had failed to provide the six days prior notice before a cull. This was a pragmatic acknowledgment of an error as there was no legal basis then for compensation.
While this was an unusual outcome, it is a significant event for those who love dogs – a phenomenon that has accelerated since Singapore’s independence. One of the consequences of COVID-19 restrictions has been an explosion in pet ownership through adoption or purchase. It’s safe to say that there has been no time in the history of Singapore when dogs have been more doted upon.
John Koh is currently working on a book of 19th-century dog photographs.
[1] Timothy P. Barnard, Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819–1942 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019), 36–51. (Call no. 304.2095957 BAR)
