• The Mandarin term “欧亚裔” is a paraphrase of the English term “Eurasian”.
• In the early 19th century, the 1st Marquess of Hastings, who was Governor-General of India, coined this term to refer to people who had European ancestry on their father’s side and Asian ancestry on their mother’s side. These were the offspring of the Portuguese, Dutch and English colonial men who had intermarried and had children with Asian women between the 16th and 18th centuries.
• As the definition of “Eurasian” is quite broad, the term can currently be used to refer to all people of mixed European-Asian descent.
• The term “Eurasian” was first officially used in Singapore in the 1849 population census. Before Singapore’s independence, there were approximately 25,000 Eurasians in Singapore. Many emigrated to
  Australia and the United Kingdom from the 1960s to 1980s. As of 2020, the Eurasian population in Singapore was about 18,060, accounting for 0.4% of the total resident population.
• In addition to British, Dutch and Portuguese ancestry, Eurasians in Singapore may also have mixed Chinese, Malay and Indian ancestry. This is significantly different from Eurasian lineage in other parts
  of Asia.

As its Mandarin name suggests, Eurasians are “descendants of both Europeans and Asians”. Their ancestors mainly came from Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain during the colonial period between the 16th and 18th centuries. (Lianhe Zaobao, 25/8/2019)

• The Portuguese Eurasians are an ethnic group with their own mother tongue, called Kristang, which is a creole language of Portuguese and Malay. At present, the language is spoken fluently by only about 50 people in the world, and is on the verge of extinction. In 2015, the local community in Singapore established a group known as “Kodrah Kristang” (meaning “to revitalise the Kristang language”) to save and promote the language.