Sia was a hereditary title of Chinese origin, used mostly in colonial Indonesia. It was borne by the descendants of Chinese officers, who were high-ranking, Chinese civil bureaucrats in the Dutch colonial government, bearing the ranks of Majoor, Kapitein or Luitenant der Chinezen. , the first Dutch-appointed Kapitein der Chinese of Surabaya.
History
As with other Chinese honorifics, the title 'Sia' came at the end of the title holder's name: for example, as in Oey Tamba Sia. The title was used not with its holder's surname, but with his given name, so Tamba Sia instead of Oey Sia. In everyday speech, use of the title was often combined with other honorifics, such as Ako Sia or Baba Sia. Originally, the honorific was used in Imperial China to address certain senior mandarins, the relatives of a mandarin or descendants of the House of Koxinga, formerly the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Tungning. In colonial Indonesia, the honorific came to be used as a hereditary title for the descendants of Chinese officers, who were seen as the colonial Indonesian equivalent of the Chinese mandarinate and scholar-gentry. These title holders and their families constituted the so-called Cabang Atas, the traditional Chinese establishment or gentry of colonial Indonesia. As a class, they dominated the administrative posts of Majoor, Kapitein and Luitenant der Chinezen, or the Chinese officership on a near-hereditary basis. To a significant extent, they also monopolised the colonial government's lucrative revenue farms, which formed the economic backbone of their political influence. To preserve and consolidate their power, families of the Cabang Atas contracted extensive, strategic intermarriages within their social group. In the later colonial period, it became fashionable among western-educated title holders to refrain from using the title 'Sia', which was seen as an old-fashioned anachronism. This mirrored the decline in the importance of the Chinese officership as a government institution in the early twentieth century, which presaged its eventual abolition in most of the Dutch East Indies with the exception of the colonial capital, Batavia. Indeed, as pointed out by Monique Erkelens, the prestige of the traditional elite declined in the early twentieth century due to changing political and ideological circumstances in late colonial Indonesia and early twentieth-century Asia.
Title holders
As part of the Cabang Atas, Sias played an important role in the history of Indonesia, particularly in relation to the country's ethnic Chinese community. Prominent Sias include:
