Freemasonry was spread across Asia and the Eastern Archipelago by the military, trade and migration.

Freemasonry took root in the lodges under the District Grand Lodge of the Eastern Archipelago. The District, which is the largest by membership under the United Grand Lodge of England, has over forty lodges spread over the independent nations of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

The origins of Freemasonry in the Eastern Archipelago begin with the British East India Company, present in India, Japan and China until 1858. But the Moderns  and Antients Grand Lodges were not alone in their expansionism; the Grand Lodges of Scotland, Holland and France also appointed Provincial Grand Masters in China, Ceylon, Bombay, Java and Sumatra from the 1730s onward, modelling themselves on the Grand Lodge of England.

It took time for Freemasonry’s ambition to be a ‘center of union, and the means of conciliating true friendship among persons’ to be fully accepted by Masonic lodges in the east. The experience today of Freemasonry as an inclusive institution was not a linear progression. Inclusivity began with a small number of anglicised Indians and was followed by Zoroastrians and Muslims, and later Hindus and Sikhs being admitted into lodges.

The paper below looks at the history of Freemasonry in Sumatra through to the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 and after the founding of modern Singapore by the freemason Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. It covers the history of Penang before Captain Francis Light leased Penang Island in 1786 on behalf of the British East India Company from Sultan Abdullah Mukarram Shah and renamed it Prince of Wales Island. The first lodge was petitioned on the island in 1808 and warranted in 1809, but eventually failed with Freemasonry fading by the mid-1840s.

The paper notes John Colson Smith’s petition for Singapore’s The Zetland in the East Lodge, and how the lodge sponsored the Lodge of Fidelity in Singapore which persuaded UGLE to permit the formation of the Provincial Grand Lodge of the Eastern Archipelago. This now contains over forty lodges meeting across Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

The paper concludes by commenting how the District of the Eastern Archipelago with its diversity of members, medley of tongues, assortment of religions and bonds of benevolence mirrors the 1723 Constitutions in that ‘we are also of all Nations, Tongues, Kindreds, and Languages, and are resolv’d against all Politicks, as what never yet conduc’d to the Welfare of the Lodge, nor ever will’.

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Freemasonry in the Eastern Archipelago