BAT brought modern cigarette production to most of the region in the 1920s and 1930s. In Thailand the nationalist government established a revenue-earning tobacco production monopoly in 1939, initially in partner ship with BAT. For Viet Nam and Burma, state tobacco monopolies in the post-war era also became important sources of revenue
Betel use was dying altogether for men by the 1950s and women by the 1980s. Its role in rituals of courtship, marriage, birth, and death continued only in symbolic form. In many rituals cigarettes were substituted as a gift to to the spirits. The shift was a revolution in gender The inci- dence of Southeast Asia male smoking has become among the highest in the from Indonesia's 61% to Burma at 40%. Women w in the world (Indonesia 5%, Thailand however, among the lowest proportion Burma (8%) female smoking had a long history. Philippines (10%) and provided protection against many forms of Whereas betel chewing had long had bacteria and parasites, tobacco has very effects on male health, and more so in its kretek fo This item overwhelmingly male expenditure, moreover, consumed around 5% of Indonesian household budgets in surveys of the 197os 1980s, more than expenditure on medical and educational expenses combined
The twentieth century universalized coffee drinking as another primarily male substitute for betel chewing.The coffee shop became a ubiquitous place in every village for males to gather, smoke, and sometimes also drink coffee milo, or something stronger and eat snacks. In Malaysia and Singapore the mixed clientele gave rise to the hybrid term kopitiam, combining the Malay for coffee with the Hokkien Chinese for shop. Bottled drinks (including bottled tea) were seldom part of the coffee shop menu before the war, but became widespread from the 1960s
CLOTH AND CLOTHING
AChapter 6 showed how beautiful Indian cloths in the form of wrap-around sarung, scarves, and wall ngings became the item of conspicuous consump- tion par excellence of the age of commerce. Southeast Asian imports ofIndian cloth rose to a peak of 1.7 million "pieces" (averaging about 11 square meters each) in the period 1620-50. The period of consolidation that followed drasti- cally reduced the demand for Indian-made cloth. Southeast Asians turned again to their own resources, with s centers of large-scale production for the market adapting the favored Indian patterns Javanese batik and south Sulawesi checked patterns began to be traded as far as Siam, Cambodia, and Lower Burma, where local production was less competitive in price
As East India Company monopolies withered, India-based private traders, both Tamil Muslim (Chulia) and European, continued to supply Indian cotton cloth affordably to the western ports of Southeast Asia su as Aceh, Phuket, ch Mergui, Rangoon, and after 1786, British Penang. Neither traders nor Southeast Asian consumers were quick to make the transition to the much the British cloth that became available in the 1790s. But British occupation of Dutch possessions in 1811-16, followed by the founding of Singapore (1819) enabled British cloth to replace Indian imports in British-controlled areas. the batit industry of Java switched to the use of machine-made white cloth on which to draw their wax-resist patterns Singapore became the chief distribution point for a host of small Chinese Bugis, Malay, and Vietnamese boats to pick factory-made European cloth sales of which rose from up worth in 1828-9 to four million 245,000 Spanish dollars' 1840, dollars' in 1865 rapidly fell out of the trade after none and constituted only 2.5% of Southeast Asian imports by 1865. Almost of the British cloth went to Dutch ports in Java and elsewhere because of prohibitive tariffs in favor of boosting Dutch industry, but Siam and Viet Nam became the largest importers of the cloth through Singapore.
By mid-century cheap manufactured European cloth was replacing not only imported Indian but also locally produced cloth. In the first half of the following century this imported cloth was more dominant than it had ever been in clothing Southeast Asians, and was again the major item of importation. Fluctuations in the level of imports began to be used as a measure of welfare, and the fact that far less was imported in the 1930s depression years than in the 1920s (about half in Burma's case) was taken to imply a marked drop in welfare. The 1940s were even more critical, reducing many to wearing old rags, skimpier clothing, and gunnysack material for want of cloth. Once again there was a reversion to local production and replanting of cotton Factory production began very modestly in some areas in the 1930s, while others rediscovered ancient spinning and weaving methods.
Dress styles had become more ethnically standardized in the eighteenth century after the wild experimentation of the age of commerce (Chapter 6) The extensive mixing between foreign men and local women produced some common ground of acceptable dress, whereby both men and women would wear a long sarung-like wrap-around in the house, although men might wear trousers in the office or marketplace. Southeast Asian men frequently wore a dark jacket and ethnically differentiated headdress with their sarung for more formal occasions, or a collarless shirt for everyday.
Pre-twentieth century Vietnamese and Filipinos had been the most full dressed in western eyes, using locally produced silk and cotton cloth. Vietnamese realms maintained the old Ming style of Chinese dress and long hair, distinguishing them from Manchu-ruled Chinese with thei pigtails. Both sexes wore loose trousers down to the ankles and one or more loose down to the knees. Garments were commonly of silk for the upper classes bu cotton for the poor. Not until the 1920s was the ensemble refitted with tight fitting tucks to become the female national dress, dai. Lowland Filipinos also incorporated their Spanish fashions from the seventeenth century into more distinctive hybrid styles in the eighteenth. The male shirt began its evolution to the modern embroidered barong Tagalog not tucked in, and at firs collarless. For women the skirts (terno) became fuller, the sleeves of the blouse camisa) shorter and more starched in what eventually became the charac istic butterfly style, while the scarf panuela) became ever more decorative and highly starched.
As undergarments were introduced in the late nineteenth century, fashion- able Burmese as well as Archipelago women initially revealed them beneath the sheer upper it was more comfortable than European or Chinese female fashions in the tropics, the became a cosmo politan urban dress, and even the European women who began to come to Southeast Asia in greater numbers in the 1870s were instructed how to pur chase and wear them. Around 1900, however, the more womn in Europe or China (the totok, in Chinese-derived Malay usage) b to distance themselves from the "native" in dress, and to be influenced by global was first restricted to lady friends, but by 1920 it was definitely out for Europeans or those who sought to emulate them. Chinese had more choices, between local, Chinese and European styles, with Paris and Shanghai increasingly setting the pat for the modern woman. Eurasians and Christians were among the first to follow the trend to more European styles of dress, and western-educated young men and women were not far behind