Quick Facts
Biography
Kapitan China Choa Chong Long (Chinese: 蔡滄浪甲; pinyin: Cài Cāngláng Jia; 1788-1838), served as the first Kapitan China of Singapore under the British colonial government, and was a prominent magnate, revenue farmer and pioneering colonist.
He was the son of the distinguished Choa Su Cheong, Kapitein der Chinezen of Malacca in the Dutch colonial period, The younger Choa ventured out to Singapore when the British Crown took over the island, but unlike most of the Chinese and Malays who went there to seek their fortune, Choa Chong Long was already a rich man. He was appointed Kapitan China of Singapore by the city-state's founding father and first British administrator, Sir Stamford Raffles.
Choa's daughter married Kiong Kong Tuan.
He was an opium farmer. The earliest on the island and its last as well.
He was thought to be one of the first Chinese to manage a plantation in Singapore.
He celebrated his forty-fourth birthday by giving a grand dinner to which all influential residents of the island, including many Europeans, were invited.
Dying in 1838, he left a will containing "a devise for ever of certain properties for sinchew (ancestral worship) purposes which was eventually declared void.
He died in China.