Claudine Salmon Although a large body of literature has been produced on the Chinese of Java, there are very few studies of the history of their various settlements. We present here a detailed study of the Chinese community of Surabaya whose historical development appears to be specific to East Java. In the first part, we discuss the sources concerning the beginnings of the community and briefly allude to an early Islamisation process which allowed the settlers to intermingle with local society. In the second part, we single out three big Peranakan families (the Han, the Tjoa and the The), whose history (which lasts from the end of the 17th or the beginning of the 18th century to the early 1930s) may be regarded as representative of the different ways the Chinese and their descendants adapted themselves to the host society. In the third part, we put the attempts of the community to re-establish its Chinese roots into relation with political issues on the Mainland and in Java. The first attempt started in Surabaya in 1864 with the foundation of the Hokkien Kong Tik Soe or "Temple of the Merits of Fujian", which was aimed at reviving Chinese funeral and marriage customs and curbing the process of Islamisation. The second attempt, much broader in scope, was aimed at promoting Chinese education by the foundation of various private schools (one of them, the Hoo Tjiong Hak Tong, 1903, was closely linked with Mainland revolutionnaries), reviving Confucianism as a reaction against Westernization (foundation of a temple dedicated to Confucius in 1898), establishment of a Chinese Chamber of Commerce (1906) intended to help the local Chinese merchants to promote their enterprises both in the South Seas and in China. Since the last decades of the 19th century there has been a continuous stream of migrations from the Mainland that gradually modified the social and economic structure of the Chinese community and finally caused it to split up. In the fourth part we deal with the Totok (or newcomers) who started to organise themselves into a great number of smaller associations (on the basis of geography, profession or lineal descent) ; we also pay attention to the Peranakan who resented the competition of the newcomers decided to struggle separately. This restructuration was disrupted by the recession of the 1920s, the depression of 1930, which affected the Chinese of Java and especially of Surabaya, and was finally stopped with the occupation of the Dutch Indies by the Japanese. The conclusion suggests that since Independence, the history of the Indonesians of Chinese descent in Surabaya cannot be dissociated from that of the city as a whole., Lombard-Salmon Claudine. La communauté chinoise de Surabaya. Essai d'histoire, des origines à la crise de 1930. In: Archipel, volume 53, 1997. pp. 121-206.