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A peek into 39 Armenian Street in Singapore
May 12, 2008
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This week in the Asian Journal, join me Loretta Foo as I make my way through a lovingly refurbished building that once reverberated with the sounds of school children’s laughter and footsteps. More than a hundred years later, its halls are once again filled with the bustle of people, this time recreated as the only Peranakan museum in the world at 39 Armenian Street in Singapore. Randall Ee, curator of the museum and a Peranakan himself explains what the word Peranakan means.
RE: Peranakan is a Malay term and it’s used to refer to a lot of the descendents of the early immigrants that settled in Southeast Asia as far back as 600 years ago. These immigrants whether they were Chinese or Indians or Arabs used to come here and trade, but what some of them did was they intermarried with local women and settled in the region. Some of them became fabulously wealthy like a lot of the Peranakan Chinese. But it was actually during the 19th century when the British and Dutch started to bring in large numbers of Chinese that these Peranakan communities were already settled in the region and it was this coming into contact with these cultures that sparked off the awareness within the Peranakans themselves of their unique culture. Most of what you see in this museum comes from this period of the late 19th to 20th century – the period of the colonial boom, where a lot of wealthy families commissioned special objects for use.
The music that you are listening to now is something that would’ve been played during a traditional Peranakan bridal procession. The wedding ceremony and its accompanying activities take centrestage on the entire second floor of the museum. The first stop in our tour is an exhibit containing two heavily encrusted headpieces that a Peranakan bride would wear over a topknot made from her hair.
In front of us, we have these two interesting head dresses that a bride would wear on her wedding day. They are very ornate and you mentioned earlier that one was from Singapore, and the other from Penang. So can you tell us how the culture varied across the different locations?
RE: Because they intermarried with a lot of the local women, there were Peranakans to be found in many of the port cities like Singapore, Malacca, Penang or even ports in Indonesia and southern Thailand. But because their original wives came from that region, there were very local elements in there. Let’s say for the Peranakan Chinese, there is this Chinese element, but there is also this local element which is why you find a lot of regional differences.
And talking about these two specific examples of the headdresses, what can you tell us about them?
RE: This particular headdress from Penang is made of silver pieces that are gilded in gold and decorated with kingfisher feathers. So the blue that you see here actually comes from kingfisher feathers. Whereas here, this piece from Singapore (it’s also used in Malacca) it’s not one piece, it’s made up of 174 different gold and silver hairpins and those are not diamonds, they are clear sapphires. This is a very rare set as no one seems to have a complete set of these. I think it’s the first time in about 50 years that a headdress like this has been on display.
You spoke about wedding rituals for the Peranakans. You’ve devoted four galleries just to the wedding portion of Peranakan culture. Why all these elaborate rituals and customs for a wedding?
RE: Peranakans themselves have kept a lot of these objects. It’s not that fine objects weren’t made for other occasions. In fact, lots of objects were made for the funeral as well. But I think it was something that many families did not want to be reminded of, they have not kept these objects whereas, these were associated with very happy occasions – a lot of them are treasured heirlooms. What has survived has survived in fairly large numbers. The wedding was seen as extremely important because it was seen as the beginning of two families coming together. People want to make sure that they set off on the right foot as the relationship between the two families is built during the wedding. That you have the right objects to convey that sense of grandeur, if you were a wealthy family. It was also an interesting period because even in England, you do see a similar culture. Even if you were not wealthy, there is a culture of keeping up with the Joneses. So people would rent jewellery and garments so that they could live like royalty just for a day.
If we move a little further down to what a bridal couple would actually witness on their wedding day…
RE: Something that was done before the wedding was the exchange of wedding gifts. So the objects are not of extremely high value but the symbolic value is really important. There was a lot of effort put into selecting the right symbolic objects as a measure of respect for the other family.
In front of us, we have Remy Martin brandy, you’ve oranges, you’ve a whole leg of pork here!
RE: Yes, let me just explain the pork leg. It is extremely interesting. It is raw and is given by the bridegroom’s family to the bride’s family. The significance of the pork is that the bride is a maiden that was accepted into the groom’s family. The significance of giving something raw and fresh and pure is basically an acknowledgement that you were taking someone into your family so you’d have to return something.
All these would be considered dowry gifts?
RE: Yes. Dowry gifts. Over here on this particular tray, you’d see unsewn batik, lace and organza. All these are cloth for a full set of garments and the significance of these is that the man is seen as the provider of such things but of course, it’s unsewn because it’s expected that the wife would turn this into garments for herself. So she is seen as a person who adds value to it. Likewise, these are the return of the gifts. Everything is exchanged which is an idea from the merchant community that something for something.
We moved out of the gallery to a space overlooking the foyer of the building where laid before our eyes was a large cushion. Its rough shape and size resembled those large comfortable cushions people would sprawl on the floor with. But no one would even think about touching this particular cushion, much less sitting on top of it.
RE: This is one of the really important objects here that is made up of about 1 million beads. It’s beadwork. Yes! It’s beadwork although it looks like cloth because it’s so huge. It’s sewn by hand.
You’ve got different birds – parrots, roses, bluebells on the cushion.
RE: It’s sewn entirely out of beads and if you look it, only these four birds are actually repeated. No other motive is repeated. They are all unique motifs. This piece was made in Penang and what makes it Peranakan is that the beads were made in Europe, it was sewn locally and yet, you see a lot of the patterns are very Victorian. They are from England as well but were chosen specifically to reflect the kinds of motifs that the Peranakans loved like birds, insects, flowers in full bloom. The imagery is actually of fertility because it’s used in weddings when they wanted good energy for the bride and groom.
How long would it take for a lady or a whole group of ladies to create something like this?
RE: We don’t know for sure who created this but from what I was told by two old ladies from Penang, was that the very large pieces of beadwork like this were made by Chinese men, professional beadworkers who did this for a living, who survived on special commissions like this.
I see over there, that there is a very interesting piece.
RE: This is the wedding chamber from Penang and as you can see the predominant colours in here are red and gold. The two most auspicious colours. If you look at two large pieces of furniture right in the middle. It’s been lacquered red and gilded gold. It’s typically of a lot the furniture that was made specially for use during weddings. The three characteristics is that they are usually very heavy-looking, solid pieces. They tend to be very ornately carved and thirdly, it wasn’t enough that they were ornately carved, they used surface embellishment, whether it was with gold leaf as you see here or sometimes it was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It’s decorated with a lot of embroideries. They were made in China but what was interesting is that you see that there is beadwork attached to it. So the Peranakans from Penang who purchased these pieces were not satisfied when these things came in. They added more to it because it wasn’t busy enough. It’s all over the top. It’s really more is more!
That was Randall Ee, curator of the Peranakan Museum that just opened its doors to the public at 39 Armenian Street in Singapore.
Next week in the programme…
“Yes, I mean you can see it in the food, you look at what we call the rempah or mixture of spices used in a lot of the cooking. The food is extremely rich. Like a lot of the old grandmothers would say, ‘We don’t stinge on our ingredients’ and it’s not about using less, it’s about using more!”
Long before fusion food or culture arrived on the world’s hip radar, the Peranakans were taking the best of local culture and mixing it with ethnic influences from China, India and Arabia. Randall guides me through the rest of the museum with sneak peeks at the food culture and religious beliefs of the Peranakans. So don’t forget to tune in same time next week to the Asian Journal with me, Loretta Foo only on Radio Singapore International.
Peranakan Wedding Outfits
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