Lim Chuan Teck – Chinese basketball guard in 1920s

Guest blogger: Marie Sheallene Lim-Yeo
Inspired by the CEA blog essay on Chinese basketball players, Marie started tracking down the games her grandfather, Lim Chuan Teck 林川澤, played on tour in China, Canada and the United States in the late 1920s. He played guard and was also known as Charles Lim.

The Chinese basketball team played in Hubei, China in 1926 and won all the matches. Lim did not join them in Japan in 1927 but he was there for their Canadian tour which started in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada on 23 January 1929. In the next three weeks they played Victoria, Montreal, New York, Seattle, University of Southern California, and Indianapolis, Indiana; ending their tour in Honolulu, Hawaii on 14 February 1929. Some of the players continued on for a total of three months playing many of the leading college basketball teams in the U.S.

The squad was led by Captain Choa Itsan; Enyang Siok Huy was their tallest member. He and Lee Dah Chen were forwards. Lim Chuan Teck and Co Teck Eng were guards. An article in the Bismark Tribune on 6 February 1929, said the guards were as hard to stop as their names were to pronounce.
Photos provided courtesy of Marie Sheallene Lim-Yeo:

Basketball players YMCA
YMCA Basketball players in the early 1920s
Chinese Basketball team
Chinese Basketball team
Mr. C. C. Lim History of YMCA Part III
Mr. C. C. Lim History of YMCA Part III – provided courtesy of Marie Sheallene Lim-Yeo

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s