158 
CHINESE MARRIAGES. 
•expressly so stated in the report, that the accused took a second 
t’sai or principal wife in the lifetime of the first. By Chinese law 
this offence is punishable with ninety blows of the bamboo and the 
lady must be returned to her parents. The Acting Consul General 
for China at that time gave evidence' that the second marriage was 
illegal according to Chinese law. 
The conviction was most unsatisfactory and the defence of the 
accused would not seem to have been conducted too skilfully though 
very possibly the report does not do justice to the counsel concerned. 
It should be mentioned that the custom in Penang, according 
to sworn evidence recorded in the Supreme Court there, is that a 
(Chinese can have a t’sai in Penang provided his other t’sai is in 
China. The Penang t’sai would then be called a peng t’sai. 
There are no other reported decisions on the law of bigamy 
as applicable to the Chinese but the present position in this regard 
can only be considered as very unsatisfactory. 
We come now to the great Six Widows’ Case as it is commonly 
called from the fact that in it six women claimed to be the lawful 
widows of the late Mr. Choo Eng Choon, a very wealthy and well- 
known Chinese gentleman, who was a British-born subject and 
domiciled in the Colony. The case is reported in Volume XII of 
the Straits Settlements Law Reports, where it occupies one hundred 
and six pages; it lasted from October 1905 to June 1909. 
A determined attack was made on the settled law of the Colony 
by counsel for the son of the deceased by his first t’sai, and by 
counsel for a second t’sai whom the deceased married after the 
death of liis first. The settled law was upheld bv counsel (of 
whom the writer Was one) for the women who claimed merely to 
be t’sips ; and the attack upon it was over-ruled by Sir Archibald 
Law on appeal from Mr. Registrar Velge’s findings, and by Sir 
William Hyndman-Jones and Sir Thomas Braddell on appeal from 
Sir Archibald Law. 
For the sake of convenience the unsuccessful parties will be 
called the appellants, though before Sir Archibald Law all the 
parties concerned were appealing, and in the Court of Appeal 
several of them. 
The first main argument put forward by the appellants was 
that the Chinese are not a polygamous race and that the expres- 
sion polygamy imports an equality amongst the wives. They 
called a somewhat formidable array of expert witnesses amongst 
whom were Messrs. Tso Ping Sing, Consul-General for China, 
Suen Sze Ting, Acting Consul-General for China, and Lo Tseng 
Yao, a former Acting Consul-General for China. 
The views of these three gentlemen may be summed up as 
follows and undoubtedly accord with a strong body of opinion 
amongst the educated Chinese of this 1 Colony at the present moment 
Jour. Straits Branch 
