1. Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Malaya (London, 1948) pp. 143ff. See also Joyce Ee, “Chinese Migration to Singapore, 1896–1941,” 2 Journal of Southemt Asian History, (1961) pp. 33–35.
2. The need to introduce the secondary wife to the primary wife—who was almost always taken first—and thus have her accepted at a tea ceremony is one traditional aspect that could have been utilized as a preliminary basis for the reform of Chinese law. The underlying basis for the taking of a secondary wife was to continue the family line, and this could have been the ideological basis for further restrictions, etc. For example, emphasis upon the fact that to “ ... the Prophet Mohammed divorce is the most detestable of all permitted things...” has provided an ideological basis for reform of divorce under the Muslim Ordinance, 1957, in Singapore. See Ahmad Ibrahim, State Advocate-General, Singapore, “Muslim Marriage and Divorce in Singapore,” XXVIII M.L.J. (1962) p. xi at p. xiv.
3. Zelman Gowen, “A Note on Potentially Polygamous Marriages,” 12 I.C.L.Q., p. 1407 (1963).
4. See Lee Wah Fui v. Law, Times, March 4, 1964, Cairns J. In this recent English case the parties were married in Hong Kong by Chinese traditional custom in 1942. In 1959 they entered a contract of mutual divorce and the husband returned to England where he is domiciled, and wishing to remarry there wanted first to ascertain the validity of his divorce. In view of the importance of this case, the Queen’s proctor was called in and he requested that the court avoid the difficulty of jurisdiction in view of the fact that the marriage was originally potentially polygamous, by deciding that “the divorce was valid to dissolve any marriage in fact celebrated.” He cited Russ v. Russ [1962] 3 W.L.R. 930, and Merker v. Merker [1963] P. 283. The final decision has been rendered in Lee v. Law [1964] 2 All E.R. 248. The court held that, although the marriage was potentially polygamous, the divorce validly dissolved any marriage between the husband and wife. The court did not determine whether or not a valid marriage was celebrated, but avoided that question by narrowing the issue to whether or not the husband was free to marry. The court said that cognizance can be taken of a potentially polygamous marriage for some circumstances, including the facts in this case, without necessarily determining whether the marriage was valid in the first place. The court’s reasoning is somewhat specious, in that unlike the legitimacy of offspring or questions of property rights, in determining the question of the legitimacy of a divorce the validity of the original marriage is more directly at issue. Nevertheless this is some indication of the lengths courts are willing to go to avoid the consequences of Hyde v. Hyde. See also Shahnaz v. Rizwan [1964] 2 All E.R. 993 enforcing a contract for deferred mehar or dower in an English court, arising out of a potentially polygamous marriage. See P. R. H. Webb, “Polygamy and the Eddying Winds,” 14 I.C.L.Q. 273 (1965).
5. See David C. Buxbaum, “Preliminary Trends in the Development of the Legal Institutions of Communist China and the Nature of the Criminal Law,” I.C.L.Q. (1962), 1, at p. 1, for some information on the attempt by the government on the Chinese mainland to foster formal and informal institutions to handle legal matters. See also David C. Buxbaum, Osteuropa Recht, No. 1, 1964, for some notes regarding possible traditional influences upon legal development in mainland China.