Tan Clan Jetty

Tan is the Southern Fujian pronunciation of the surname Tan. The local Tans came from Bingzhoushe, a coastal village in southern Fujian. The community’s ancestors are considered to have been fishermen and oyster gatherers. They arrived in George Town gradually, so at first they kept a shared clan house on Armenian Street: there, people united by their surname and home village cooked, ate, and slept together.

They earned their living on the water. In sampans, small wooden boats, the Tans carried cargo between ships and shore. After unloading, the boat had to be left somewhere, so the workers themselves drove piles into the ground by the waterfront to tie their sampans to them. Above, they put up a simple shelter from the rain. This was how the first structure of the future jetty appeared: a shelter over a mooring place for working transport.

The change came when family life was added to their earnings. New fellow villagers kept arriving, and one shelter was no longer enough. By nineteen seventeen, five such shelters already stood above the water. Those Tans who had families stopped returning after work to the shared house on Armenian Street and settled right here. The shelters were enlarged, new piles were driven nearby, and a walkway was laid between the structures. The working mooring place for boats became a residential row.

The jetty took the surname of the people who jointly drove in the piles, moored the sampans, and turned the shelters into homes. The narrow path above the water still follows this layout: on one side stand the homes of Tan families, with the piles remaining beneath them. Once, boats on which people earned their living were tied to this line; later, people began returning home along the same line.