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An American Victor Talking Machine (Victrola) displayed among traditional Chinese furnishings. Johnson Tan Collection, Singapore.
A round blackwood table and stools with marble inserts set in front of an elaborately and symbolically dressed alcove bridal bed. Baba House Museum, Singapore.
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo | Rutland, Vermont | Singapore
A multistorey skywell, a traditional element in Chinese homes, accentuated with here iron columns, balustrades, and filigreed work fashioned in Scotland, floor tiles from England, and carved wooden lattice panels from China. Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, Penang, Malaysia.
contents
Who are the Peranakan Chinese?
Chapter 1 HOUSE FORMS AND FAÇADES
Chapter 2 SYMBOLS AND ICONOGRAPHY
Chapter 3 THE RECEPTION HALL
Chapter 4 THE COURTYARD
Chapter 5 THE ANCESTRAL HALL
Chapter 6 THE LIVING AREAS
Chapter 7 THE BEDROOM
Chapter 8 THE KITCHEN
Who Are The Peranakan Chinese?
Few visitors to Malacca, Penang, and Singapore today leave without impressions of Peranakans, whether having eaten a Nyonya-style restaurant meal, visited one or more of the multiplying Peranakan museums, or marveled at the colorful yet softly polychromatic pastel façades of restored shophouses and terrace houses in what have become vibrant neighborhoods.
The thirty-four episode serial drama The Little Nyonya, which aired first in Singapore in 2008–9, put a spotlight on a Peranakan family beginning in the 1930s and following them over the next seventy years. After high ratings and unprecedented viewership in Singapore, the series was subsequently broadcast in Malaysia, Cambodia, France, the Philippines, Myanmar, the United States, Vietnam, China, Thailand, and Hong Kong, before being rebroadcast in Singapore in 2011. International recognition of Peranakan culture came in October 2010 with an exhibition called Baba Bling, Signes intérieures de richesse à Singapour, a sumptuous showcase of objects that was launched at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in cooperation with Singapore’s Peranakan Museum. In 2011, Joo Chiat, a bustling Peranakan conservation area and trendy hotspot, was named Singapore’s first Heritage Town, with the expectation that it would lead to a boom in cultural tourism. Moreover, Peranakan cuisine has gained prominence globally as Nyonya-style restaurants have opened in London, New York, Sydney, Copenhagen, and Tokyo, among other world cities, and even in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai in China. These expressions of Peranakan identity, among many others, are not merely nostalgic impulses but speak to the efforts of many people to revive a culture to its proper position after having languished in the shadows over a period of three decades following the Second World War.
Wearing silver amulets, beaded slippers, tunics, and caps, these four Peranakan children pose for a portrait in a studio late in the nineteenth century, Singapore.
Attired in their custom-made wedding finery, the bride, groom, and young attendants pose in the ornate Reception Hall of a Jonker Street residence in Malacca on October 24, 1939. Photograph courtesy of Chee Jin Siew family, Malacca, Malaysia.
Who are these Peranakans, Nyonyas, and Babas?
These questions cannot be answered easily since the descriptors have been characterized by a remarkable mutability over time and across space. In the Malay language, the word peranakan, which has several meanings that derive from the word anak or child, means those who are the offspring and descendants of intermarriage between a local person and a foreigner, someone from an outside ethnic group (Tan Chee-Beng, 2010: 32). As an adjective, peranakan is applied as a descriptor of those who are thus locally born to distinguish them from immigrants born elsewhere. In Southeast Asia, there are Peranakan Indians who are Hindu and called Chitty Melaka as well as Peranakan Indian Muslims called Jawi Pekan, in addition to Eurasian Peranakans and Peranakan Chinese, just some of the more notable, named blended families who emerged over the centuries. Beyond the Malay-speaking world, other terms are used for similar mixing. In Thailand, Luk-jin (Sino-Thai) is employed, while in the Philippines, mestizo de sangley (Chinese mestizo) expresses those of mixed ancestry involving Chinese and the indigenous population, but neither of these can be called peranakan. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that all of these groups are incredibly varied in terms of their origins and current forms in spite of what appears to be single words describing them. Perhaps because Peranakan Chinese exceed in numbers all others who are peranakan, it is common for many people to use the single word Peranakan as a substitute for the more accurate two-word phrase Peranakan Chinese. These terms continue to be used ambiguously and inconsistently in scholarly as well as popular writings due to the striking diversity of the region’s mixed ethnic heritage.
While Baba and Nyonya are gender-specific terms that refer respectively to male and female Peranakan Chinese, the term Baba is sometimes employed alone to describe Peranakan Chinese in general, “and in this sense is gender free” (Suryadinata, 2010: 4). Baba is also an honorific term for grandfather and elderly men generally, although its use in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore differs. Its origin is unclear—some say the word is derived from Hindi, others that it is a Persian loan word,
