10 Cool Things To Do At Singapore's Peranakan Museum

10 Cool Things To Do At Singapore's Peranakan Museum

You would have gone on a cool walkabout around the impressive galleries of the Peranakan Museum since the official opening in April last year. Are there still 10 cool things to do at Singapore’s Peranakan Museum?

Certainly! To spice things up a notch, I shall suggest ten offbeat activities that you can do on a visit to Singapore’s Peranakan Museum.

The 10 cool things or adventures that I recommend are:

1. Make a video of your visit to the Peranakan Museum and submit it to yesterday.sg

Besides amusing yourself during your video-recording session at the Peranakan Museum, you can entertain your online friends, buddies and other voyeurs. Remember to look cool in front of the video camera. Who knows, you may score a lucrative contract with NHB’s HeritageTV and become Singapore’s Next Hot Presenter.

2. Seek ideas on home furnishing for your new flat, and save money on fertility treatments.

Running out of ideas for house renovations? Then check out the well-ornamented decorations and furnishing designs at the Peranakan Museum galleries. While there, explore homegrown ideas at the wedding room gallery on how to raise the nation's fertility rate.

3. Join a “Be Counted in the Million-Beads Embroidery Facebook Group” or start one if there's none.

With the Internet generation, it's hip and cool to connect through social media on the Web. Post a picture of yourself next to the exquisite million-beads handicraft at the Peranakan Museum and add your face to the wall. The first one million entries get bragging rights to poke or twitter others forever.

4. Admire the colonial architecture of the Peranakan Museum building when it started life in 1912.

Get excited by the visual treat offered by the Peranakan Museum building at 39 Armenian Street. Spot impressive features of this bungalow: fluted columns, symmetrical layouts and the balcony-lined frontage. Not a fan of architecture? No worries. Its illustrious history as Tao Nan School and beyond is even more illuminating.

5. Have lunch at the Peranakan Museums' restaurants and eat Peranakan food.

I don't need to mention this but Peranakan food is one the most ‘sedap’ in Singapore. Once you finish slurping that pot of Peranakan food at the Peranakan Museum food festival, you will never go back to hawker centres to eat nasi lemak, laksa or mee siam. Hey, where's the Peranakan food at the museum's restaurants?

6. Send your kids for Peranakan-inspired arts and craft sessions, when you can't find a babysitter.

The staffs are friendly, the kids love the companionship of their peers and you infuse the joy of hands-on learning in your children. Isn't the Peranakan Museum's children's programme a safe and secure substitute for your favourite baby sitter?

7. Browse at the Peranakan Museum Gift & Book Shop, when your local library gets too crowded.

For an A to Z reading list on Peranakan culture, consider the selection of reading materials available there. By the way, did you know you could also do some serious shopping and pick up delightful Peranakan knick-knacks, jewelleries and other fashionable keepsakes at the same time?

8. Learn to speak English, Malay or Peranakan through the telephone, without waiting for a campaign.

Pick up the cute old-fashioned telephone receivers inside the Peranakan Museum and you will surprise yourself with lively Peranakan conversations. Spiced with rich intonations, rapid-fire pronunciations and charming voices, the Peranakan soliloquy will let you learn the language in five minutes or less a day.

9. Celebrate a birthday at the Peranakan Museum when it turns one.

Keep your weekend of 25 and 26 April 2009 free. That's when the Peranakan Museum turns one with a “Peranakan celebration of the year”. You can test my tongue-in-cheek stuff to see if they work. Thereafter, you may even consider celebrating your own or your family's birthday at the Peranakan Museum!

10. Baba writings, paintings or sculpturing on Purely Peranakan things.

You can email contest entries to yesterdaysg@gmail.com with your literary and creative works. The content may be based on any aspect of Peranakan culture you fancy or about your latest Peranakan Museum trip. The cool prizes for your loved ones in yesterday.sg’s Purely Peranakan contest include beaded stamps, special edition Humphrey the Heritage Bears or Adeline Foo’s unique children’s books.

Enough said. Go perform these 10 cool things at Singapore’s Peranakan Museum now!

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Images Taken During My Family's Visit To Peranakan Museum: Published With Written Permission

Images Taken During My Family's Visit To Peranakan Museum: Published With Written Permission

If you read my earlier post on the Peranakan Museum, you would have noticed I wrote that no images of the exhibits in the Peranakan Museum could be published without permission. As a sceptical individual living on an island, I had assumed that their website notice was a polite way of saying NOBODY can publish any images from Peranakan Museum at all. Really. I had even published the earlier text without photos of the exhibits here.

As there was no form on its website to indicate who or where we could approach for permission, I took a chance and e-mailed them on their feedback form, believing it would be swallowed into a blackhole, never to be heard from again. I was really surprised when I received a reply the next day informing me that they were "OK for you to upload your personal photos of the Peranakan Museum on your weblog".

To Ms Joice Toh, Manager, Marketing and Corporate Communications Unit of the Peranakan Museum, thank you! I hope this would not unleash a flood of email requests to keep you from your busy schedule.

So enough talk, here's the photos.

Above 2 pics: The tok panjang (long dining table) with pingang mangkok (bowls and plates) demonstrating fine intricate motifs.


Above: One of the many kamcheng (porcelain pot) that may possibly feed a person with enough nutritional soup for weeks!


Above: Figure-hugging kebayas

Above: curtain of fertility motifs and good-luck amulets


Above: hands-on station for visitors to get in touch with the exhibits.

Above: Order of Temasek medal



Above: my girl trying to figure out whether girls or boys wear these clothes.


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A Family's Impressions Of The Peranakan Museum, Singapore: Marriages, Mothers, Models, Medals And Much More

A Family’s Impressions of Peranakan Museum Singapore: Marriages, Mothers, Models, Medals And Much More

My family of five, who carry no known Peranakan genes, paid a recent visit to Singapore’s Peranakan Museum at 39 Armenian Street, for a Saturday afternoon of exploration and learning. This occurred after the hustle and bustle of its recent opening festivities had subsided. What I discovered was a lavish collection of Peranakan artefacts spread throughout ten entertaining galleries in an impressive three-level building. To my family, the memories in the Peranakan Museum seemed to revolve around makan, marriages, mothers, models, medals, mourners and much more.

The many exhibits that were supplemented with information boards and audiovisual aids at the Peranakan Museum overwhelmed us. I would have loved to put up photographic images of the Peranakan Museum exhibits to share but the Peranakan Museum website has a warning: “No images of the Museum or its collections may be reproduced, distributed in any media, including websites, without permission from ACM.” You can inspect the high quality images at their museum website over here.

Who is a Peranakan and how do you recognize one? For this and other questions, my family wandered into Gallery One on the ground floor of the Peranakan museum to check out the photographic models of present-day Peranakan faces smiling from three walls. An audiovisual presentation in the same room performed a brief introduction that I felt did not provide in-depth answers.

From the photographs, it was not possible to discern any distinguishing feature to identify a Peranakan. According to the Peranakan Museum A-Z guide, I quote: “the term ‘Peranakan’, meaning ‘child of’ or ‘born of’ in Malay, has come to refer to the descendents of traders who intermarried with local women in Southeast Asia. Over time, a distinctive culture that brought together Chinese, Malay, Indian, European and other influences, emerged.”

Of the Peranakan Museum’s ten galleries of exhibits, my family liked the gallery with the tok panjang (long dining table) laid with pingang mangkok (bowls and plates). We loved the large spread of exquisite bowls, plates and other crockery, designed with fine intricate motifs of butterflies, phoenixes, peonies and pink emblems on both surfaces of the crockery. Just based on these exquisite display sets, I could imagine all the aromatic goodies calling out to my nostrils to sample Peranakan cuisine. A wall display nearby filled with rows of kamcheng (porcelain pots) with their elaborately attractive designs captivated our attention as well.

The twelve-day Peranakan wedding ceremony galleries provided an eye-opening experience. The matrimonial bedroom easily earned our family’s 'best visual exhibit' accolade. Besides beautiful carvings on the bedposts, a curtain of fertility motifs and good-luck amulets added to the superstitious mystique surrounding this bed used in yesteryears. While it was considered one of the largest furniture pieces during its heyday, I would deem it a size too small, and a tad too ostentatious for minimalist-designed bedrooms of today.

Other aspects of the wedding gallery intrigued. The service of a young boy to bless the wedding bed in the hope of procreating a son as shown in the video screening brought out a question from one of my daughters on the reason for the biasness of the generations at that time. While the deployment of a cockerel and a hen under the matrimonial bed to determine the sex of a couple’s first born might be hailed as a ridiculous practice in the light of modern scientific knowledge, this practice was still considerably more elegant than flipping a coin.

My wife and children were awed by the hand-sewn beaded pieces of embroidery like the million-bead tablecloth as well as the figure-hugging kebaya collection. While they checked out the laces, styles and designer quirks, I was wondering how useful these priceless investments would be as a collector’s item to beat inflation. The museum’s other exhibits of gorgeous handiwork like beaded slippers, knee pads and handkerchiefs, plus the history of house confinement for girls above twelve years old to learning sewing, beading and cooking, showed a society that placed great emphasis on training for married life and motherhood.

above: 'medals' of museum entry sticker tickets

Elsewhere within the museum walls, I noticed several medals on display. There was a Darjah Utama Temasek (Order of Temasek) medal conferred on Mr Lim Kim San and an Order of the British Empire (1918) medal for Dr Lim Boon Keng, amongst the exhibits. These offered ignorant visitors like me some idea of the significant contributions of prominent Peranakans in the past. Along the same corridor of this gallery, you cannot miss the large portraits of Tan Tock Seng, Tan Kim Seng and Gan Eng Seng, wealthy Peranakans rightly recognized for their philanthropic far-sightedness.

above: stamping machine enchantment

My kids did not jump with thrill when I pointed out clothes on display at one of the galleries that Peranakan kids used to wear on special occasions. They thought it was not as fashionable or comfortable as their present-day all-purpose T-shirts. However, there was one item in almost all galleries that enchanted them. The stamping machine was their favourite “exhibit” at the Peranakan Museum and they expressed disappointment with a broken piece at one of the galleries.

It was obvious at the end of the tour that the extensive use of glass barriers in the galleries prevented close proximity to better appreciate details. Thus it was no surprise that my children enjoyed one of the galleries because of the old telephone exhibits. There were three reasons for that. The telephones were a novelty to them. They were allowed to handle and play with the telephones. They could listen to weird conversations by strange-sounding voices. The wall display holding three items (including a single kasut manek) that were encased with holes large enough for hands to reach the items was a letdown as my children preferred them to be more accessible, perhaps like those hand phones on sale in a shop with a wire chained to the item.

The mourners’ wail at a corner of the Religion Gallery was a rather morbid auditory experience. For those who are “pantang” or superstitious about such funerary displays, it is best to heed the warning signs posted at the door and skip this creepy section.

In a nutshell, a two-hour visit to the Peranakan Museum inclusive of a guided tour is insufficient time for a curious family with little prior background knowledge to truly appreciate all the exhibits and the stories behind them. To extract a better understanding from the visit, books like Peranakan Museum A-Z Guide (first published by the Asian Civilisations Musuem for the Pernakan Museum 2008) and Lim GS Catherine’s Gateway To Peranakan Culture (Asiapac Books 2007) helped me to patch up the gaps. As for my children, who had to tag along because I recommended it, they were able to find something to learn. Most importantly, they managed to enjoy the visit to the Peranakan Museum without being saddled with the feeling that museum visits were boring turn-offs.

[Latest Update as at 18 June 2008:]

I have obtained permission from Peranakan Museum to upload the photographs taken at the museum. Here is the link to Images Taken During My Family's Visit To Peranakan Museum: Published With Written Permission.

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