Yap Goan Ho

Yap Goan Ho (, died 1894) was a Chinese Indonesian translator, businessman, bookseller, and publisher based in Batavia, Dutch East Indies. In the 1880s and 1890s, he was one of the first Chinese Indonesians to own a printing press and the first to publish Chinese language novels in Malay language translations.

Biography Yap was born in Batavia, Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth century, although the exact date is unknown. Around 1883 he acquired a printing press and started to get contracts to print books for schools and government offices. In the 1880s, he turned to the popular market and began to publish Chinese novels in illustrated Malay translations, which became very popular among the Peranakan who spoke Malay as their first language and often could not read Chinese. He may have been the first publisher to do so, and was followed not long after by Lie Kim Hok.

In June 1888 he launched a Malay-language newspaper in Batavia, with himself as publisher and an Indo man named W. Meulenhoff as editor. , a four-page paper, was distributed in cities around Java and Sumatra; it had a mostly Chinese readership and was published until around 1898. Yap had a contract to print for the government printing house, which is how he had come into possession of them. He also tried to found a second newspaper in 1894, , but it was not successful and quickly closed.

In around 1893 he announced plans to open a new publishing house in Semarang, Central Java. In 1901 Yap's company went bankrupt and was forced to sell off assets in Batavia and Semarang. One of the printing presses was bought and shipped to Surakarta for a new Chinese press there, while Kho Tjeng Bie took over the part of the business that printed translated Chinese novels in Batavia.

Selected works (1883, Translation of the novel ) (1883, Translation of ) (1893, translation from Chinese short story collection)