Chinese Marriages, as regarded by the 
Supreme Court of the Straits 
Settlements. 
By Boland St. John Bbaddell. 
When Penang and Singapore were first settled by the English, 
they were for all practical purposes uninhabited islands or at all 
events they were without settled institutions, as our Courts here 
and the Privy Council in England have held. In either view the 
Colonists brought with them as part of their baggage the Common 
Law of England, which is the birth-right of every subject and is 
portable property. But they carried with them only so much of 
the English law as was applicable to their own situation and to the 
conditions and wants of the inhabitants of the new Settlements. 
Furthermore in applying such law as was so applicable the Courts 
had to modify it to suit the above circumstances. 
A part of the Common Law so imported into the new Settle- 
ments was the Statute of Distributions which regulates the dis- 
tribution of the estate of an intestate amongst his next of kin and 
it is in connection with the application of this Statute to the 
Chinese race that the Courts in their reported decisions have con- 
sidered the Chinese institution of marriage. 
This Statute (22 and 23 Car: 2. c. 10) was passed by a 
Christian legislature for a Christian people and doubtless without 
any thought of its ever being applied to non-Christian peoples but 
from the time that the English became a colonizing race and the 
principles of the Common Law as applying to our new territories 
became settled our Courts and lawyers held that the English laws 
of inheritance were part of the general law applicable to the new 
plantations: as to which Blaokstone is clear. The Statute of Dis- 
tributions had, therefore, to he applied by the Judges in Penang and 
Singapore to the non-Christian and polygamous races in the Settle- 
ments over which their jurisdiction extended. 
Now, the Statute contemplated marriage only in its Christian 
sense, that is to say, “the voluntary union for life of one man and 
one woman to the exclusion of all others ”, to use Lord Penzance’s 
classic definition in Hyde v Hyde and Woodmansee, L. B. 1 P. & 
D. 133. Further polygamy had always been considered by the 
jurists as outside the pale of Christian Courts and international 
comity, as to which more will be said later. How then were the 
•Courts of the Colony to apply this Statute based on monogamy to 
a state of polygamy? 
-.Tour. Straits Branch R. A. Soc., No. 83, 1921. 
