PHILANTHROPIST & SCHOOL FOUNDER - GAN ENG SENG
Peranakan culture is one of Singapore’s most distinctive. Otherwise known as Babas and Nonyas, the Peranakans were early Chinese immigrants to the English Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca and Penang who embraced the predominantly Malay local culture. They are often assimilated with the Straits Chinese, who, according to some members of the community, adopted the indigenous life-style but in ethnic terms, remained wholly Chinese. Beyond this genetic hair-splitting however, the mix of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Arab and European heritages that characterises the Peranakan and indeed Straits Chinese way of life is responsible for some of Singapore’s most interesting indigenous art and architecture.
Peranakan communities exist throughout Southeast Asia and as a result, a number of Baba houses have sprung up over the years. These, located in 19th-century or early 20th-century, Peranakan-built shop-houses showcase the Straits Chinese lifestyle in situ and tend to be big on atmosphere rather than scholarship. Singapore, doubtless boasting Southeast Asia’s most sophisticated museum infrastructure, has just launched its new Peranakan Museum. The museum is both unique as an institution as well in the splendid and comprehensive collection it displays.
Located in Armenian Street, in the heart of the city-state’s museum district, the new venue is run by Singapore’s young but well-established and internationally respected Asian Civilisations Museum. The ten permanent-gallery Peranakan Museum is housed in the early 20th century Peranakan-funded Tao Nan School, which subsequently harboured the first incarnation of the Asian Civilisations Museum until the institution’s 2003 move to its permanent home at Empress Place on the Singapore River. According to Tan Huism, Deputy Director Curation & Collections at ACM, the Peranakan Museum’s collection, actively built up over the last four decades, is the world’s most comprehensive and doubtless largest grouping of such objects. Including documents as well as artefacts – jewellery, silver, furniture, textiles and crockery predominate – brought alive by interactive and multi-media stations, the material has been skilfully assembled to give a vivid picture of the culture it represents.
Emphasising the living aspect of the culture and keen to avoid the nostalgia that many locals associate with the Peranakan lifestyle and the group’s early twentieth century heyday as an elite Singapore community, the museum does not focus on any particular time-line. And though much of the material dates to the pre-war period, recent, gallery-punctuating interviews with members of Singapore’s Peranakan community bring history into the present by shedding light on the heritage’s current context and concerns. Says Tan ‘Peranakan culture is very diverse, fluid and alive. With our presentation of the collection we aim to show how being Peranakan means different things to different people. In the end, this culture is quintessentially Southeast Asian in nature: hybrid, evolving and ultimately far more than the sum of its parts. The idea here is not to deconstruct the culture into its different ethnic strands but rather to say this is our own very locally produced heritage, let’s understand it as a whole and appraise it on its own merits’.
Displayed over three floors, the information and supporting objects are grouped into ten thematic spaces. On the ground floor, the introductory gallery known as Origins defines the culture in broad terms by explaining to the public that not only are there Peranakan Chinese communities beyond Singapore (they exist in Indonesia for example), but also that Diaspora Indians who have embraced Malay culture are also known as Peranakans. This is a community-based display currently showcasing large-scale colour portrait photographs of Peranakans as well as an important Peranakan mid 19th-century cotton batik of Javanese origin on loan from the Dutch national collection, Leiden.
The second floor’s four galleries are devoted entirely to the Peranakan wedding and its associated 12-day ritual and elaborate accessories. Here highlights include a sumptuous carved, lacquered and gilded canopied wedding bed from 19th-century Penang complete with richly adorned silk hangings. A grand wedding procession features heavily embroidered wedding outfits, their mixed Chinese-Malay style in evidence with sarong and kebaya. Related ceremonies are examined, including lapchai, the pre-marital custom involving the exchange of gifts between the bride and groom’s family. Here museum-goers are treated to a wealthy display of Peranakan jewellery that attests not only to Malay and Chinese influences, but also to Indian and Western stylistic and technical attributes that combined, make Peranakan art so eclectic.
On the museum’s top floor, six galleries afford different society-based perspectives on the Peranakan. The respectively labelled Nonya, Religion, Public Life, Food and Feasting and Conversations Galleries tackle distinct themes that juxtaposed, serve to elucidate the culture in all its complex hybridity. Through material evidence such as embroidered and beaded clothing and more utilitarian household objects, the Nonya Gallery examines the traditional values imparted by Peranakan women to their daughters. The section elaborating Religion and its rituals is probably the museum’s most multi-layered and surprising, explaining the strongly diverging religious tendencies within the Peranakan community and so illustrating the culture’s fluidity and pluralistic overtones. A video of a catholic mass given in Baba Malay, the Peranakan Chinese-Malay patois, the Tan Kim Seng ancestral altar table referencing traditional Chinese ritual practice, and displays documenting animistic folk superstitions embraced by some Baba families, together provide a snapshot of Peranakans as an accepting and uniquely cosmopolitan group that in its openness, exemplifies the best of Southeast Asian tradition. Seeking to underscore the importance of ritual in the culture, curators have devised the ‘wailing corridor’ where mourning clan members are recorded grieving at a family wake. Though this vivid and realistic audio-montage is clearly designed as a crowd-drawer specifically targeting museum-shy Singaporeans – museums in the city-state, however well presented and whatever the quality of their collections has trouble competing with the local shopping malls for audience attention – is nonetheless well made.
The Public Life section, the institution’s most classically historical in flavour, presents a changing display of a number of the community’s more illustrious members. Divided into five parts, including Philanthropists, King’s Chinese (Peranakans who played a role in the colonial civil service), Career Women, Nation Builders and Social Reformers, the listed figures include, amongst others, philanthropists Tan Tok Seng and Gan Eng Seng; (see pic) Mrs Seow Peck Leng, one of the trailblazers of the women’s movement in Singapore; Dr Lim Boon Keng, an early 20th-century social reformer who advocated education for girls (Lim founded Singapore Chinese Girls’ School with Sir Ong Siang Song); and Lim Kim San, the Chairman of the Housing and Development Board, Singapore’s notorious public housing blocks that forever changed the face of physical Singapore in the 1960s. A private variation on the public nature of the previous showcase, the Conversations gallery features audio-documentaries detailing the lives and views of ordinary members of the Peranakan community.
Finally, the museum looks at that most well-known and loved aspect of Peranakan culture, its food. In the Food Gallery curators present a fully laid Tok Panjang (tok, Hokkien for table, panjang Malay for long) boasting a fine array of ostentatious Peranakan porcelain, as well as video screenings of food preparation. If anything illustrates the culture, Nonya cuisine’s blend of Chinese and Malay methods and ingredients (noodles, coconut, lemongrass, chilli, turmeric and screwpine amongst much more) does. As well as its feasting table, the gallery contains other pieces of Peranakan furniture. These attest to a mixture of influences namely Malay carving and inlay, overall Chinese structure and Western style derived both from the heavy Victorian furniture of late 19th-century England as well as from Dutch colonial prototypes of the same period ubiquitous in the Indonesian archipelago.
As well as its just-opened state-of-the-art Peranakan Museum, as of summer 2008 the city-state will also boast a new straits-Chinese house museum. South of the Singapore river on Chinatown’s Western fringe, the Baba House affords visitors an atmospheric taste of life as it was lived in an affluent Straits Chinese household circa 1928. The 150-year-old three-storey home, site of the Baba House, is located in one of Singapore’s few surviving intact Peranakan residential enclaves known as the Blair Plain Conservation Area. Run by the National University of Singapore’s Centre for the Arts, the Baba House is not a traditional museum but a heritage house with a mission to provide education and research about Straits Chinese culture. The house, in the same family for six generations until its purchase by NUS, is thought to be one of Singapore’s most authentic remaining Peranakan residential properties. Though opening to the public with considerably less fanfare than that accorded the Peranakan Museum, the Baba House is probably the best of its kind in the world.
IOLA LENZI
Peranakan Museum, 39 Armenian Street, Singapore
National Museum of Singapore’s Baba House, 157 Neil Road, Singapore
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