Nation Building: The Peranakan Collection and ’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Helena C. Bezzina

A thesis submitted for the degree of

Doctorate of Philosophy College of Fine Arts New South Wales University

March 2013

1.1.1THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

1.1.2Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Bezzina

First name: Helena Other name/s: Concetta

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar:

School: Art History and Art Education Faculty: Collage of Fine Art (COFA)

Title: Nation Building: The Peranakan Collection and Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

This case-study investigates whether it is valid to argue that the museological practices of the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), as manifested in the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy (1999–2006) and in the subsequent (2008 to present), are limited to projecting officially endorsed storylines, or whether the museum has been able to portray multiple stories about the Peranakan community and their material culture. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, the study considers the genesis and context of the ACM within the social structures in which it operates. This approach allows for consideration of the generative reproduction of Singapore’s colonial structures, such as the prevailing doxa on race, manifested in the organising principle of the ACM’s Empress Place Museum with its racially defined galleries addressing Chinese, /Islamic and Indian ancestral cultures. Analysing the ACM as a field in which the curatorial team (informed by their habitus) in combination with various forms of capital are at play, exposes the relationships between macro structures (state policy and economic drivers) and the micro operations (day-to-day decisions of the curatorial team at work on Peranakan exhibitions). Through this analysis the study argues that the ’ refusal to support Singapore’s bid to join the Malay Federation resulted in their political and cultural marginalization. However, the Peranakan community’s legacy, consisting of unique, internationally prized material artefacts, presented ACM museum professionals with a compelling case to promote the community in this state-run museum. The study asserts that through these ACM exhibitions ACM museum professionals effectively repositioned the once disgraced Peranakan community in multiple ways: tentatively as an invaluable aspect of Singapore national cultural capital, as a galvanising symbol to encourage greater harmony between Singapore’s distinct racial groups and confidently as the source of a depoliticized collection of aesthetic artefacts within a newly defined canon of Southeast Asian art.

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‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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Abstract

This case-study investigates whether it is valid to argue that the museological practices of the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), as manifested in the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy (1999–2006) and in the subsequent Peranakan museum (2008 to present), are limited to projecting officially endorsed storylines, or whether the museum has been able to portray multiple stories about the Peranakan community and their material culture.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, the study considers the genesis and context of the ACM within the social structures in which it operates. This approach allows for consideration of the generative reproduction of Singapore’s colonial structures, such as the prevailing doxa on race, manifested in the organising principle of the ACM’s Empress Place Museum with its racially defined galleries addressing Chinese, Malay/Islamic and Indian ancestral cultures.

Analysing the ACM as a field in which the curatorial team (informed by their habitus) in combination with various forms of capital are at play, exposes the relationships between macro structures (state policy and economic drivers) and the micro operations (day-to-day decisions of the curatorial team at work on Peranakan exhibitions). Through this analysis the study argues that the Peranakans’ refusal to support Singapore’s bid to join the Malay Federation resulted in their political and cultural marginalization. However, the Peranakan community’s legacy, consisting of unique, internationally prized material artefacts, presented ACM museum professionals with a compelling case to promote the community in this state-run museum.

The study asserts that through these ACM exhibitions ACM museum professionals effectively repositioned the once disgraced Peranakan community in multiple ways: tentatively as an invaluable aspect of Singapore national cultural capital, as a galvanising symbol to encourage greater harmony between Singapore’s distinct racial groups and confidently as the source of a depoliticized collection of aesthetic artefacts within a newly defined canon of Southeast Asian art.

Acknowledgement

My sincere thanks to my supervisors Dr Gay McDonald and Dr Penny McKeon who have provided constant feedback and moral support throughout the many years of this part-time study. Without their encouragement and belief in my ability and in the significance of this case study, I could not have maintained the energy necessary to complete this study. My thanks to Joanne Elliot for her support with the administrative aspects of this research; she has been constantly kind and understanding throughout the entire process.

I would like to thank Dr Kenson Kwok for his support in gaining permission for me to undertake this research project within the Asian Civilisations Museum. Additionally I would like to thank Dr Kwok for allowing me access to the curatorial teams attached to both The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum.

I am particularly indebted to the Asian Civilisations Museum curatorial staff who generously agreed to be interviewed for this study, some on multiple occasions. I would like to thank Peter Wee and Peter Lee, who generously provided great insights both as Peranakans and as expert in their fields.

I would like to acknowledge the support of Dr Kirsten Wehner and Dr Anne Saunders and thank them for providing access to their unpublished doctoral theses; Exhibiting : Developing the National Museum of Australia, 1977-2001 and The Mildura Sculpture Triennials 1961- 1978: an interpretive history.

This study would not have been possible without amazing support from family and friends. I would like to thank Anne Mathison for her support and accommodation during my frequent trips to Singapore. I am indebted to Neil Phillips for his good humour, and the use of his front room, during my many supervisory meetings in Sydney. I am grateful to my recently departed father-in-law, Wallace Weaving, for his detailed editing in the early stages of this study, and his partner Natalie Weaving for her moral support. I owe much to Gae Bernays, who was a driving force towards finishing this thesis and provided detailed editing of footnotes towards the end of this study.

I would like to thank my partner Simon Weaving, who patiently read and reread, and discussed and discussed again the many drafts of this thesis for way too many years. Lastly I would like to thank my two daughters, Samara and Morgan Weaving, who provided constant love and good humour throughout the whole journey.

List of Publications and Presentations

Conference Publications

Bezzina, H. (2006). Community, Government, and Museum: The Peranakan of Singapore. Museums Australia, Brisbane, Australia.

Bezzina, H. (2007). The National Museum of Australia and Learning. Museums Australia, Canberra, Australia.

Conference Presentations

Bezzina, H. (2009). Constructing Singapore’s Model Citizen: The Peranakan Museum. Museums Australia, Newcastle, Australia.

Bezzina, H. (2009). Museums and Galleries: Engaging through Art. National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Bezzina, H. (2011). Careers in Galleries and Museums. The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.

Contents

Chapter One: Introduction and Overview of Study ...... 1 The Changing Fortunes of the Peranakans ...... 2 Rationale for this Case Study ...... 5 Background to Research ...... 7 Research Methodology ...... 8 Theoretical Framework ...... 10 Limitations of this Case Study ...... 13 Literature Review ...... 14 Who are the Peranakans? ...... 15 Contesting the Biological Thesis ...... 17 Peranakan Origin Stories ...... 18 The Peranakan, a British Colonial Construct? ...... 19 The Peranakans and Tourism ...... 21 The Peranakans: Promoting a Uniquely Singaporean Identity ...... 23 Material Culture ...... 27 Chapter Structures ...... 30

Chapter Two: Singapore’s Genesis ...... 34 Introduction ...... 35 Singapore’s History: The Mediating Link ...... 36 The Historical Context of the Case Study ...... 37 Raffles and Colonial Structuring ...... 38 The Establishment of Singapore’s Multiracial Character ...... 40 Peranakan: Positioning within the Struggle ...... 42 The King’s Chinese ...... 44 Colonial Interests First: The Dominant Field of Economics...... 46 Hysteresis Effect: Japanese Occupation and the fall of the ...... 47 A Shift in Social Spaces for the Peranakans ...... 47 : Father of Modern Singapore ...... 49 Post Colonial Singapore: Structured Structuring ...... 52 Lee Kuan Yew: An Enduring Habitus ...... 56 Conclusion ...... 58

Chapter Three: Survival and Nation-building ...... 60 Economic Dominance: EDB and Singapore, Inc...... 63 Housing the Nation ...... 66 Culture of Control ...... 68 Culture as Values ...... 69 Collective Misrecognition ...... 71 Culture Moves to the Inner Circle ...... 72 Conclusion ...... 76

Chapter Four: Constructing Singapore’s Fields of Cultural Production ...... 77 Introduction ...... 77 The Genesis of Singapore’s Cultural Fields ...... 77 State Policies: Directing Singapore’s Cultural Fields ...... 81 The Next Lap: Prime Minister , Second-Generation Leadership ...... 81 Singapore’s Cultural Field: Singapore Inc...... 84 Culture and the Arts in Renaissance City Singapore ...... 85 The Irony of Control in Singapore’s Cultural Fields ...... 87 Crossing the Line: in the New Arts Environment ...... 89

Third Generation Leadership: An Open and Inclusive Singapore ...... 92 Conclusion ...... 93

Chapter Five: Establishing Singapore’s Museum Precinct ...... 95 Introduction ...... 95 Establishment of a National Museum: Colonial Beginnings ...... 96 Establishing the Raffles Library and Museum ...... 99 Japanese Occupation and Independence...... 101 The Museum and Nation Building ...... 102 Constructing the Official Story ...... 103 Building the Vision: The Role of Museums in the Next Lap ...... 104 Constructing the Asian Civilisations Museum ...... 106 The Rationale behind Establishing the Asian Civilisations Museum ...... 108 The Empress Place Building: Fulfilling its Mission ...... 112 Recycling Singapore’s Built Heritage ...... 115 Chinese Primary School to Museum: The Tao Nan Building ...... 114 Asian Civilisations Museum within the Tao Nan Building ...... 116 Testing the Waters: The Asian Civilisations Museum’s First Exhibitions ...... 118 Filling in the g Gaps: Establishing the Peranakan Galleries ...... 119 Formal Approval ...... 122 Working within the Hierarchies ...... 122 Conclusion ...... 127

Chapter 6: Testing the Waters: The Peranakan Legacy ...... 130 Introducing The Peranakan Legacy...... 131 The Launch of The Peranakan Legacy ...... 131 The Universalising Effect of the “Aesthetic Museum”...... 132 Entering the Tao Nan Building: The First Wing of the Asian Civilisations Museum ...... 134 Gateway to The Peranakan Legacy ...... 137 A Mixed Response: Curatorial Input into The Peranakan Legacy Concept ...... 138 Creating the Storyline of The Peranakan Legacy ...... 146 Welcome to The Peranakan Legacy ...... 148 Narratives from the Introductory Gallery ...... 156 Sireh-Sets ...... 157 Nonya Beadwork and Embroidery ...... 161 Batik Work ...... 163 Display of the Wedding Bed ...... 165 Jewellery ...... 168 ’s Family Ancestral Altar ...... 173 Silverware ...... 175 Porcelain ...... 177 Main Findings ...... 180 Conclusion ...... 189

Chapter 7: Realising the Peranakan Museum ...... 192 Opening of the Peranakan Museum: the Prime Minister Acknowledges his Heritage...... 193 Introduction ...... 196 Background Context of the Peranakan Museum in 2008 ...... 198 Growing Professionalism...... 201 Changes in the Peranakan Curatorial Team ...... 202 The Peranakans Re-imagined ...... 203 Visiting the Peranakan Museum: A Boutique Experience...... 205 Inside the Museum ...... 207 Origins – Who am I? Gallery 1 (Level 1) ...... 208 The Underlying Narrative from the Origins Gallery ...... 215

Wedding! Getting Married over Twelve Days ...... 217 A Deeply Peranakan Perspective ...... 221 An Unconventional Approach to Exhibition Design ...... 227 The Underlying Narratives within the Wedding Galleries ...... 230 The World of the Nonya s Gallery 6 (Level 2) ...... 231 The Underlying Narratives within the Nonya Gallery ...... 233 Religion: The Realm of the Gods and Ancestors ...... 233 The Underlying Narratives within the Religion Gallery ...... 236 Public Life: Making a Difference Gallery 8 (Level 3) ...... 237 The Underlying Narratives within the Public Life Gallery ...... 241 Food and Feasting: Food glorious food! ...... 242 Tok Panjang Display...... 244 The Underlying Narratives within the Food and Feasting Galleries ...... 245 Conversations: Back to the Future Gallery 10 (level 3) ...... 246 The Underlying Narratives within the Conversations Gallery ...... 248 “Junk to Jewels – The Things that Peranakans Value” ...... 249 The Underlying Narratives within the Temporary Exhibition: Junk to Jewels ...... 251 Constructing a “Living” Peranakan Culture ...... 252 Conclusion ...... 252

Chapter Eight: Analysis and Conclusion ...... 258 Celebrating the First Anniversary of the Peranakan Museum ...... 258 Introduction ...... 259 Analysis ...... 260 Establishing the Free Port of Singapore ...... 261 The Peranakans’ Positioning within Colonial Singapore ...... 263 The Fall of an Empire and its Hysteresis Effect ...... 264 Expulsion from : Establishing a Culture of Fear ...... 266 Singapore’s Economic Rationalism and Nation-Building ...... 267 PAP Economic Management Success ...... 269 The Return of the Mother Tongue ...... 269 The Field of Cultural Production: Creating Ballast against Western Values ...... 270 Second Generation Leadership and Harnessing Singapore’s Cultural Capital ...... 271 Peranakan Cultural Revival ...... 274 Repackaging Peranakan Culture and the ACM ...... 275 The Peranakan Legacy: 2000 to 2005 ...... 277 Third Generation Leadership ...... 280 The Peranakan Museum: 2008 ...... 281 Conclusion ...... 283 Identity: ...... 283 The Aesthetic Approach ...... 284 The Social Politics of Exchanging Material Culture for Social Prestige ...... 285 Curatorial Difference and Dissonance in the Peranakan Museum...... 286 A Museum about a Community, not a Community Museum ...... 289 Self-Censorship ...... 290 The Shifting Position of the Museum in the Field ...... 293 Theoretical Framework ...... 296 Active Fields in Play ...... 297

Bibliography ...... 303 Appendix List of Interviews ...... 316 Sample of Interview Questions ...... 317

List of Figures

Figure 1: Ground Floor Layout of the Tao Nan Building...... 135 Figure 2: First Floor Layout of the Tao Nan Building ...... 136 Figure 3: Second Floor Layout of the Tao Nan Building ...... 137 Figure 4: Introduction to The Peranakan Legacy, featuring the Pinto Pagar and the Timeline ...... 149 Figure 5: Sireh Sets as displayed within Gallery 4 ...... 158 Figure 6: Sarongs as they were hung in Gallery 4 ...... 164 Figure 7: Mrs Quah Hong Chiam Peranakan wedding suite from , a semi-contextual display between Gallery 4 and 5 ...... 166 Figure 8: Bridegrooms’ jewellery, a pair of dragons mounted in “tremblant” style, as displayed in Gallery 5 ...... 170 Figure 9: Ibu or mother brooch as displayed in Gallery 5 ...... 171 Figure 10: Tan Kim Seng altar, the second semi-contextual display, between Galleries 5 and 6 ...... 175 Figure 11: Nonya-ware as displayed in Gallery 6 ...... 178 Figure 12: Promotional signage for the opening of the Peranakan Museum depicting cartoons of Nonyas and Bibiks ...... 206 Figure 13: Highly decorative foyer ...... 207 Figure 14: Ground Level ...... 208 Figure 15: Origins Gallery with contemporary Peranakan Portraits ...... 212 Figure 16: Level One: Wedding Galleries ...... 217 Figure 17: Digitally Animated Ancestral Portraits ...... 223 Figure 18: Contextual display of a traditional wedding suite, complete with plastic flowers and Irish carpet ...... 227 Figure 19: Peranakan Wedding Procession ...... 230 Figure 20: A contextual funeral display ...... 235 Figure 21: Level 2 ...... 237 Figure 22: Gallery 8, Public Life ...... 239 Figure 23: Ms ’s barrister wig ...... 240 Figure 24: Peranakan kitchen complete with ghost of the home’s matriarch ...... 243 Figure 25: Tok Panjang Display featuring a sixteen piece dinner service ready for the traditional feast ...... 244 Figure 26: Dr Farish Nour in the Conversatons Gallery ...... 248 Figure 27: Mobile-wielding Nonya ...... 285 Figure 28: The Peranakan Legacy exhibition within the hierarchy of Singapore’s power structures ...... 294 Figure 29: The Peranakan Museum within the hierarchy of Singapore’s power structures ...... 294 Figure 30: The Socio-Historical Genesis of the Asian Civilisations Museum ...... 296 Figure 31: Bourdieu’s theoretical framework ...... 298

Chapter One: Introduction and Overview of Study

The Peranakans are a minority group in who produced a genuinely unique material legacy during the colonial period of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, a large collection of which is to be found in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM). This case study examines the way that the ACM has chosen to represent the Peranakan community via their collection displays in the context of the shifting historical position of the Peranakans in Singapore’s social spaces, and in particular its carefully controlled public discourse on national identity. The thesis draws on French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of Habitus, Capital and Field. It also provides a relational framework to map and analyse the positioning of the Peranakan collection within ACM from its first incarnation as an exhibition entitled The Peranakan Legacy (1999 to 2006), through to the current realisation of the Peranakan Museum, which opened in Singapore in 2008.

The Singaporean Chinese Peranakans, the subjects of this case study, are a small community with a vibrant cultural history. They are often referred to as Babas or Straits Chinese, and are believed to be the descendants of Southern Chinese traders who married local Malay women as early as the fourteenth century, establishing unique communities, speaking their own Baba Malay creole, and creating a rich cultural phenomenon that blended Chinese and Malay traditions and aesthetics. In the nineteenth century the Peranakans, predominantly those from , migrated to Singapore to take up commercial opportunities in the trading port newly established by the British East Company. The Peranakans adapted rapidly to the needs of their colonial rulers, were recognised and rewarded, and rose to a level of significant prosperity during the period. Following the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II, and Singapore’s subsequent independence in 1965, the Peranakans became both culturally and politically marginalised. Despite this fall from grace, the Peranakans established a material legacy that is highly prized internationally, and which has more recently been consecrated, at the highest national level, as an invaluable aspect of Singapore’s cultural capital.1

1 Jurgen Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities: A Social History of the Babas in Singapore, (London: Ashgate Press, 1998), 177.

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The Changing Fortunes of the Peranakans I think for a period they [the Peranakans] did not enjoy the goodwill of the majority of who sort of regarded them as part of the old British establishment, but time passed, wounds healed and that part is over and now people say actually we should be very proud of them because they bridged the Chinese and Malay civilisations, they produce all these wonderful things, wonderful music and cuisine. So there are many Peranakans who have done well and are admired and are popular and I think this has helped overcome the ill will that used to be associated with the King’s Chinese.2 The changing perception of the space the Peranakans have occupied over time in Singapore’s cultural, social and political life is effectively illustrated by a comparison of two historical events. The first is the Peranakans’ contribution to the public debate in the 1950s leading up to Singapore’s inclusion in the formation of the Malay Federation in 1963; and the second is the recent export of a Peranakan Museum exhibition to Paris in 2010. The Peranakans (who had become known as “the Queen’s Chinese”) came under attack from Singapore’s political leaders, as reported on 28 January, 1957. They criticised their negative attitude in the debate as to whether or not to support the move for Singapore to join Malaysia in the country’s quest for independence. The Peranakans, organising their collective voice through the Straits Chinese British Association (SCBA), presented an alternative plan, which saw Singapore, Penang and Malacca formed into an autonomous group outside the Malay Federation. In this report, the President of the People’s Action Party (PAP), Dr Chin Chye, noted:

The suggestion that the settlement of Penang, Malacca and the Colony of Singapore should break away from the rest of the country is retrogressive. We cannot afford to have a miniature India–Pakistan in Malaya. At no time is there greater need for mutual understanding and tolerance between the races than at the present, but the proposal of the SCBA does not in any way help to promote racial harmony. The conception of the Queen’s Chinese is an anachronism at the present time. Other headlines went further, The Straits Times proclaiming on 6 August, 1955: “Queen’s Chinese told: You face extinction.” The political animosity towards the Peranakans was clear and, with the SCBA remaining loyal to their colonial masters demonstrating their dependence on the old regime, the Peranakans were seen as being out of touch in trying to forge a new independent, anti-colonial future. Lee Kuan Yew, leader of the People’s Action Party (PAP), provided an insight into the changing attitude towards the Peranakans in the

2 Professor Tommy , Chairman of the National Heritage Board, Ambassador-at-large, interview with author, Tommy Koh’s office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, April 2004.

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lead up to Singapore’s independence. His words were reported in The Straits Times on the 9 May, 1955:

Once upon a time, the babas [Chinese Peranakans] were proud to be babas and despised the ‘sinkeh’ [immigrant Chinese]. Those were the days when a paternal Colonial regime bestowed favours on those who tried to ape them. Fifty-five years later the Peranakans were being championed in official discourse, heralded as the poster culture of the nation. In October 2010, the headline of the tourism website Visiting France read: “Paris – the city of high fashion, culture, sophistication, and now exotic bling! Baba Bling is the name of a new exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly, which displays artefacts from a little-known culture.”3 The notice signalled the arrival of a new exhibition from Singapore devoted exclusively to Peranakan material culture: Baba Bling, Interior Signs of Wealth in Singapore, on display in Paris from 5 October 2010 until 30 January 2011. With the exhibition came a bevy of Singaporean politicians and bureaucrats, all proud to associate themselves, and their small island nation, with the material culture of the Peranakans, the community whose “bling” was on display.

Curated by a team from the Peranakan Museum, led by the founding director of the ACM, Dr Kenson Kwok, the exhibition was officially opened by Lui Tuck Yew, Singapore’s Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts. At the opening, Lui Tuck Yew endorsed Baba Bling as a significant milestone in the ’s arts and heritage, a fair statement given it was the first time an exhibition had travelled to a major European venue.4 Lui Tuck Yew also explained that Singapore and France had established a framework agreement on cultural cooperation in January 2009, followed by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between Singapore’s National Heritage Board (NHB) and France’s Réunion des Musées Nationaux. This agreement signalled Singapore’s state recognition of the significant role the Peranakan collection could play in cultural diplomacy as a vehicle for, as Yew had stated, “tapping into the vast opportunities that globalization offers for growth and development.”5 The signing of agreements reached a more practical level when the ACM and the Musée du quai Branly agreed to a cultural exchange, and so it was that Baba Bling arrived in Paris in return for the

3 Stuart Norval, “Exotic bling gives Paris a view of Singapore's Baba-Nyonya culture,” October 9, 2010, accessed April 15, 2011, http://www.english.rfi.fr/visiting-france/20101009-bit-bling-comes- paris. 4 Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, “Media Press Releases on Singapore Festival Arts. 2010” accessed April 5, 2011, http://app.mica.gov.sg/Default.aspx?tabid=79&ctl=Details&mid=540&ItemID=1211. 5 National Heritage Board, Renaissance City Plan III: Heritage Development Plan. 2008, 21.

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Musée du quai Branly’s Congo exhibition, which travelled to the ACM in December of the same year.

Baba Bling contained nearly 500 largely domestic Peranakan artefacts in the most ambitious temporary exhibition undertaken by curators of the Peranakan Museum. The temporary exhibition space at the Musée du quai Branly was three times larger than the temporary gallery at the Peranakan Museum, and the venture represented a major collaborative undertaking between curatorial staff from both cultural institutions. Officially, Baba Bling was made possible via the joint patronage of the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Prime Minister of Singapore, . Such high levels of official involvement from both countries signalled that Baba Bling, and with it the Peranakan community via their cultural artefacts, were being consecrated with the highest level of symbolic capital possible by both national governments. Over sixty individuals arrived from Singapore and supported the delivery of Baba Bling, including curatorial and public programmes staff, as well as a large contingent of members of the Peranakan Association who facilitated the month-long public programming.

Although one of the ACM’s initial missions for establishing the Peranakan collection was to provide the country with something unique that could be used as leverage to secure international cultural exchange, Baba Bling was not solely an exercise in cultural exchange.6 The Peranakans were now being deployed by the Singapore government assisting in another delicate and important mission: to support a long-term and carefully controlled campaign to build a unified national identity or “branding” both domestically and internationally.7 Through the meticulous, incremental and subtle repositioning of the Peranakans since independence in 1965 (accompanied by some carefully managed cultural amnesia), the Singapore government had come to see the Peranakans not as colonial sympathisers out of touch with the collective needs of progressive Singaporeans, but as historic examples of model citizens of uniquely Southeast Asian origin. It is through their progressive repositioning that the Singapore government has come to realise the potential of the Peranakans to symbolise a reconfiguration of Singapore’s national identity. Without a trace of irony, the official press release for the opening of Baba Bling boldly held the Peranakans out as an example for all: “The intercultural integration that lay behind the

6 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview with author, Asian Civilisations Museum, April 2004. 7 National Heritage Board, Renaissance City Plan III, 21.

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Peranakan identity is a lesson in open-mindedness and tolerance, two subjects that have never been more relevant today.”8

Baba Bling’s triumphal arrival in Paris provides an appropriate bookend to the research for this thesis. I will argue that the “golden age” of the Peranakans, from the 1870s to the 1920s, left Singapore with a unique collection of material culture. Supporting Singapore’s ambition to establish itself as an international hub for culture and heritage, the Peranakan collection enabled the ACM to position itself globally as a lead collector of Peranakan material culture.9 Further, this material legacy, now seen in the last decade as an important form of national cultural capital, is currently being deployed by the power élite of the state of Singapore, to bring about high-level cultural exchanges that strengthen Singapore’s position on the world stage. The Peranakan collection, with its “hybrid” fusion of Malay, Chinese, Indian and European influences, also presents a distinctive and symbolically rich collection that supports the Singapore state’s wishes to be perceived domestically and internationally as a racially harmonious and tolerant society. This thesis seeks to demonstrate how the state’s omnipresent positioning and control of the meta-narrative addressing Singapore’s national identity, through both direct policy and an implicit understanding of what is “sensible” and “reasonable,” influenced the curatorial policies and practices of the ACM, and in turn the meaning-making and values attached to Peranakan material culture.10

Rationale for this Case Study To date, there has not been an in-depth scholarly analysis of the ACM’s representation of the Peranakan community. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, this study investigates whether it is valid to argue that the ACM’s Peranakan exhibitions are limited to projecting officially endorsed, stereotypical, predictable storylines and that the ACM is effectively prevented from realising its potential for a democratic portrayal along multiple stories and contradictory perspectives that emerge from a thorough understanding of the Peranakan community and their material culture.

In keeping with Bourdieu’s position that research on the case has to begin with an understanding of its genesis, this research considers the context of the first public museum in Singapore, built in 1887. The establishment of a museum in Singapore was the direct

8 Press Release, Singapore Festival Arts. 9 National Heritage Board, Renaissance City Plan III, 45. 10 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 79.

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outcome of the British Colonial government’s nineteenth century understanding of the role museums played in supporting power and the legal right to rule. According to Bennett, one of the pedagogical functions of public museums in the nineteenth century was to support the production of orderly and reliable citizens.11 Bennett draws on Colquohoun, a social reformer from the early nineteenth century, suggesting that exhibitions at the time were considered as public spaces designed to improve morals and act as a vehicle for inculcating a love of the Constitution, and a reverence and respect for the law.12 In line with such values, Sir , officially accepted as the founding father of Singapore, was determined to establish an educational institution with a museum to display scholarly collections from the region and to educate the sons of the “natives.” To this end he included such an institution in his initial town planning of Singapore in 1819. While Raffles never realised his vision, a museum was established in Singapore in 1887 well after his death. The Raffles Institute and Library as it became known, represented the fulfilment of the colonial regime’s ambition to ensure its cultural authority in the region and to showcase the wonders and riches of the British Empire.

From these colonial origins, the role of state-funded museums in Singapore including the ACM, has been generatively reproduced and put into the service of the state as required by changing circumstances and contexts. This research views the ACM as part of a wider field of cultural production,13 in which it is encouraged to shape and use its cultural capital in order to reinforce the state’s authoritarian, non-discursive discourse on national identity and stability, and to support the state’s economic imperatives.14 The study also aims to understand how this doxic attitude, generated through the collective Singaporean habitus, has impacted on Singapore’s field of cultural production.15 This is seen through the ACM’s museological practices as manifested in the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy (which opened in 1999 and closed in 2006), followed by the permanent displays within the current

11 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 17. 12 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 18. 13 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (London: Polity Press, 1993), 37–39. Bourdieu refers to fields of cultural production as the contexts of discourses, institutions, values, rules and regulations that interrelate to produce and transform attitudes and practices. 14 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. R. Nice (London: Sage, 1990), 71. Bourdieu refers to cultural capital as including material things as well as culturally significant capital such as prestige, status and authority. 15 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 3. For Bourdieu, the doxic attitude is a specific community’s adoption of values and principles, generating a field that the community view as being innately sound and true.

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Peranakan Museum. Through examining and analysing the representation of the Peranakans in these ways, this research aims to add to the body of knowledge about the role played by national collections in supporting state–sanctioned ideologies related to national identity as they occur in a post-colonial context.

Background to Research This study evolved from work carried out when the researcher joined the ACM as Assistant Manager of Public Programmes in 1999. In this role the researcher attended a range of weekly executive and exhibition meetings and consulted closely with curatorial staff from the different departments, and with operational staff such as marketing, security and design in order to develop a range of interpretive programmes. Whilst the research began formally in 2003 (once the researcher had left the ACM), the researcher’s “lived” experience working on the interpretation of the newly installed exhibition The Peranakan Legacy from 1999 to 2002 became an incentive critical to undertaking this research. Such professional experience provided the researcher with an invaluable “insider” perspective on the day-to-day operations of the ACM as a workplace, including the organisational values, practices and minutiae that informed the daily decision-making of the institution. Importantly, the experience also established the contacts required to gain prolonged access to staff, and allowed the researcher to conduct extended interviews with critical stakeholders.

As a member of staff of the ACM, the researcher developed a profound interest in the representation of the Peranakan community. The researcher’s role as Assistant Manager of Public Programmes was to support the interpretation of The Peranakan Legacy through the development of public programmes ranging from children’s trails, family “backpack” activities, lecture series, workshops, off-site visits to Peranakan restaurants, and “expert” Peranakan tours of the exhibition for connoisseurs. The development of these interpretive programmes required extensive consultation with the curatorial staff involved in the establishment of The Peranakan Legacy, providing the researcher with invaluable insights into the interpretive understanding developed by each member of the curatorial team.

As an Australian citizen, the researcher benefited from both an “insider” and “outsider” perspective. As an insider the researcher was actively engaging in the day-to-day work of the ACM and experiencing the values and working culture of the institution and all its machinations within its umbrella organisation the National Heritage Board. The director

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and senior curatorial staff valued the experience of a well-travelled museum consumer, as an outsider in particular, in providing feedback on the ACM’s offerings to the public compared to more established international museums. This was particularly significant because museum attendance is still a relatively new pastime for many Singaporeans.

Research Methodology As Robert Stake points out: “A case study is expected to catch the complexity of the single case.”16 The focus of this case study is the ACM’s two permanent Peranakan displays, first within the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy, which opened in 1999 and closed in 2006, followed by the exhibitions within the current Peranakan Museum, which opened in 2008. In keeping with Stake’s methodology, this case study pursues a scholarly research question regarding the extent to which the representation of the Peranakan community in the ACM has been appropriated by Singapore’s government to support particular nation- building narratives.17 The case study uses a qualitative research methodology and seeks validity through the continuous reflective triangulation of the views, descriptions and interpretations of the exhibitions.18

In terms of research theory, the case study draws on a constructivist, naturalistic paradigm in that it adheres to the axiom that reality is socially constructed and, as a result, various agents in the field may have conflicting views and attitudes which are not necessarily constant and which may change over time.19 As a result, mental constructions and perceptions of reality, particularly those that are in conflict, have been interrogated as a process of the study.20 Seen as bricolage, the information gained throughout this case study has been pieced together from a variety of different sources and perspectives through a hermeneutical dialectical process.21

16 Robert E. Stake, The Art of Case Study Research, (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 17. 17 Stake, The Art of Case Study Research, 17. 18 Robert E. Stake, “Case Studies,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edition, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 454. 19 Egon G. Guba & Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Competing paradigms in qualitative research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edition, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 105. 20 Donna M. Mertens, Research and Evaluation in Education and Psychology: Integrating Diversity with Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods, 2nd Edition, (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 18. 21 Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications, 1985), 37.

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While researching the dynamics of the ACM as part of a larger state institution, research boundaries were set by focusing on the museological practices that resulted in the representation of the Peranakan community, firstly in the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy and later in the Peranakan Museum. The research addressing the ACM spanned more than eight years (from 2003 through to 2012) allowing for close monitoring of the impact of changing attitudes within the ACM towards the Peranakans and their material legacy.

Adhering to triangulation protocols to avoid bias and maximise validity, the research draws on a wide variety of sources from within the ACM and from related individuals and institutions in the greater Singaporean community. This strategy has been used to attain a representative sample of opinions and perspectives for the case study. While the primary object of the research was to understand the representation of the Peranakan community as experienced in the exhibitions themselves, the researcher employed extensive in-depth interviews with a wide range of participants to gain multiple readings and interpretations of the exhibitions. Participants interviewed over the duration of the research included members of the curatorial team from The Peranakan Legacy and of the curatorial team from the Peranakan Museum, as well as key members from within the ACM staff, the ACM board, external exhibition designers contracted by the ACM, and members of the Peranakan community employed as “expert advisors” on the exhibitions.

As an Assistant Manager of Public Programmes working within the ACM, the researcher had her own observations and experiences, which provided valuable first-hand evidence regarding the day-to-day work practices and the impact of external influences on organisational behaviour. The researcher made extensive field trips to the ACM including initial trips in 2003 and 2004, attending the opening of the Peranakan Museum in 2008 and making subsequent field trips in 2009 and 2012. Additional material relating specifically to The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum, such as exhibition-related brochures, catalogues, websites, press releases, education kits and worksheets, curatorial articles, video recordings of curatorial walkthroughs and a range of additional public programmes were drawn upon within this case study to add depth to research.

The use of participant observation, interviewing, and examination of additional exhibition material supported triangulation by combining the perspective of the observer with the perspective of those being interviewed, reinforcing the validity of the findings.

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Literature addressing the history of the Peranakans, the history and sociology of colonial and independent Singapore, and museology, supported the contextualisation and interpretation of the case study and can be found within the review of relevant literature within each chapter. Guba and Lincoln state that within a naturalistic inquiry “any collection of ‘facts’ is subject to meaningful interpretation within a variety of possible theories.”22 In this case study, the collection of facts is situated within the theory or heuristics of the philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the analysis actively draws on his “tools for thinking with” – primarily the interrelated concepts of habitus, field and capital, discussed below.

Theoretical Framework Singapore, often referred to as a “nanny state” because of the high level of governmental control and intervention,23 is a self-proclaimed “Asian Style Democracy” with current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong pointing out that “Western-style democracy has not always delivered stable, legitimate and effective government.”24 This context makes Singapore a fascinating place in which to analyse the representation of the Peranakan community in the state-funded ACM. Singapore is a post-colonial republic that achieved independence from British rule, first as part of the Malay Federation in 1963, and then two and half years later (having been forcibly removed from the Federation) as an independent sovereign state. Since independence, the People’s Action Party (PAP) has won every election. The PAP was established in 1954 under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew who headed the party for 36 years. He handed the leadership baton to Goh Chok Tong who served as party leader for 14 years until the appointment of Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew’s son. The high level of power and state control that the PAP has established in Singapore has been considered one of the reasons for Singapore’s economic success, since it provides foreign corporations with a stable government and secure environment in which to invest. At the same time, the state exerts a high level of control over Singapore’s social spaces. Drawing on Bourdieu’s non-teleological research approach this study analyses how this small, Asian-style democracy with wide-reaching central control has influenced the ACM’s institutional “game at play” and in turn the resulting representation of the Peranakans within The Peranakan Legacy exhibition and the Peranakan Museum.

22 Guba and Lincoln, “Competing paradigms in qualitative research,” 107. 23 Joshua Kurlantzick, “Love My Nanny: Singapore’s Tongue-Tied Populace,” World Policy Journal, 17, no. 4 (Winter, 2000/2001), 69. 24 Michael Vitakiotis, “Understanding Asian-style democracy,” Asian Times on line, October 11, 2006, http://www.atimes.com.atimes/Southeast_Asia/HJ11Ae01.html.

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In the tradition of Bourdieusian analysis, the intrinsic hermeneutics of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework will be explored fully in the case study as it unfolds. While acknowledging that the complexity of Bourdieu’s “relational mode of thinking” defies any attempts at a literal reading25, the following is a brief overview of the logic underpinning the theoretical framework of this research, using the analogy – often cited by Bourdieu – of the “game.”26 The “game” of this research is set within the context of Singapore’s field of cultural production. The ACM is one of many state-run museums set within a hierarchically ordered set of fields that form interrelated clusters, and that ultimately make up Singapore’s field of cultural production. Singapore’s field of cultural production sits in relation to other fields such as the field of economy, the field of politics, the field of education, some of which are more dominant than others. These fields are historically constituted within Singapore’s collective social spaces and are animated by individual agent’s relationships and interrelated forms of capital at play. Singapore’s social spaces are a dynamic system of relations dominated at any point in time by agents in the spaces in positions of power – what Bourdieu refers to as the overarching “field of power.”27

The ACM as a “field” only comes into play through the relationships of the players and their investment or belief in the field and, as a result, the “field effect” can only occur as long as the players believe and invest in the game. In other words, players have a generative effect on the field. The ACM field was formed as a direct result of the careful planning by the state to build a museum precinct to enliven Singapore’s cultural spaces with the intention of making Singapore a more attractive place for both locals and foreigners. Intrinsically, the ACM is tasked with supporting the state through its exhibitions by presenting Singapore’s national identity as racially tolerant, by reinforcing the state’s “shared” Asian values, and by creating cultural ballast opposing unwanted Western influences.

Once established, the ACM field has taken on a logic of its own, based on individual players and their relationships at play in the field. Each player within the ACM brings his or her own habitus (“schemes of perception, thought and action”28), which both affect and

25 Pierre Bourdieu. “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Spring, 1989), 14–25 , 1998, accessed April 5, 2007, http://jstor.org/sic?sic=0735- 2751%28198921%297%3A1%3C14%3ASSASP%E2.0.CO%3B2-T . 26 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 67. 27 Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 264. 28 Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 264.

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are affected by the game at play. As with any game, entry into the field is determined by whether or not the individual has the right “fit” or competencies for the game and knows the rules. Gatekeepers interview candidates to try and ensure this fit, but this process is not always foolproof, and it is possible for players to enter the field with a habitus that clashes with the logic at play. Players brought into the ACM are a product of both their early durable disposition and the embodied history of other roles and positions they have previously played. Each player brings to the game various types of capital, which can be in the form of technical knowledge, economic advantage, social networks or cultural knowledge. Some players are a “natural fit” and have all the characteristics for success, taking to the game like “fish to water,” while others struggle and clash with the formal and informal rules of the game.29

The various forms of capital at play in the ACM field work as a dynamic currency. The more dominant players, and the more dominant fields that influence the ACM (such as the field of the economy and politics) have the power to determine the “exchange rate” of the forms of capital of individuals and institutions.30 The value of any type of capital is never stable, but is in continual flux as the context within which it operates changes over time, and as players come and go and social spaces shift and evolve. The Peranakan collection forms a significant part of the ACM’s institutional capital, as well as becoming increasingly over time, a form of Singapore’s national cultural capital.

The complex dialectic relationship or game at play within the ACM involves the museum’s agents, each with their individual habitus which bring diverse forms of capital, in combination with the influence of individuals representing other institutions, agencies and fields, which combine in the struggle to control the legitimate representation of the ACM’s Peranakan collection – the key cultural capital at stake within this case study. Most significant, in a Bourdieusian game, is the context within which Singapore’s social spaces operate, which carries its own social ethos, social spirit and social norms.31

Bourdieu makes it clear that the logic and related structures of a field are historically constituted and rendered invisible over time, so that agents are often unconsciously complicit in maintaining the status quo. They place their belief in the game and see its

29 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 127. 30 Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 264–5. 31 S. Ramesh, “Enormous problems if Singaporeans don’t procreate: Lee Kuan Yew,” Singapore News on line, August 11, 2012, accessed December 6, 2012.

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commonsense logic as simply “the way things are.” Habitus, Capital and Field work together and are used as tools with the appropriate relational analytical rigour in order to examine this case study.32 Agents, through in-depth interviews, form the critical link between the micro day-to-day realities of the struggle at play within the field of ACM and the macro level historical context of Singapore’s social spaces. This means that the relational dynamics and influences of the more dominant fields at play (such as the fields of politics and the economy) can be incorporated into this analysis. In summary, Bourdieu presents an effective theoretical framework that is sympathetic to the ontological complicity between individual agent’s habitus, working within the ACM, and the shaping of the field of cultural production, whilst taking into account the dynamic nature of the exchange rates of the various types of capital at stake at any one time.

Limitations of this Case Study This research draws on a range of key authoritative texts to present an informed historical background in order to understand the collective histories and objective social and institutional structures influencing those Singaporean agents working on the exhibitions under review. This study does not attempt to present a complete history of Singapore or a definitive account of its cultural sector. Whilst this research does attempt to create a vivid account of the rationale behind the planning and implementation of the ACM’s exhibition The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum, it is beyond the scope of this investigation to include an analysis of its reception by visitors.

It should also be noted that the Chinese Peranakans are by no means the only Peranakan community in Singapore. Emerging in the colonial era were a host of other Peranakan communities such as the Muslim or , the Indian or Peranakan and Dutch, English, Portuguese and Eurasian Peranakan.33 This research is primarily focused on the Singapore Chinese Peranakans and their links with Malacca and Penang, rather than either the wider geographical group of Chinese Peranakans in the region, or the other Peranakan groups in Singapore.34

32 Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson, “Bourdieu and organisational analysis,” 2008, Springer Science Business Media, Accessed December 6, 2012, http://www.springer.com. 33 This is an area that is largely under-represented within Peranakan scholarship. 34 Significant scholarship exists addressing the Chinese Peranakan communities in , Thailand, the Philippines and Burma. Outside the Southeast Asian region there has also been research on the Hawaiian/Chinese Peranakan, research which is not included in the case study.

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Lastly, while this research draws selectively on Bourdieu’s analytical tools, it makes no attempt to provide a comparative analysis of Bourdieu’s theoretical “fit” in relation to his theories on the fields of cultural production relative to a Western rather than Asian context. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework does, however, provide the tools to allow for an effective non-teleological relational mode of analysis to support the case study.

Literature Review This case study presents relevant literature thematically throughout the thesis. The research attempts to present a clear understanding of both the context of the case by addressing Singapore’s history, with the evolution of its political, economic and cultural fields, and the museological theory necessary to support the interpretation of the Peranakan community as presented in the ACM’s exhibition The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum. This information is presented as the argument opens out within the chapters. However, to support the reader’s core understanding, the literature addressing the nature of the Peranakans as a category (or more importantly the identity of those who determine who the Peranakans are,) is addressed in this introductory chapter. Significantly, aside from a few articles and theses addressing Singapore’s museums, the Peranakans, and the ACM generally, there has been, up until now, no specific in-depth scholarly analysis of the representation of the Peranakan community within the ACM. This inquiry attempts to address this gap.

Who are the Peranakans? Central to this case study are the questions: “who are the Peranakans?” and, more importantly, “who determines who the Peranakans are?” Research on defining the Peranakans begins with the three major scholarly works by John Clammer, Tan Chee Beng and Jürgen Rudolph. Whilst some research has been completed on the Peranakans’ material culture (i.e., their silverware, porcelain, beadwork, batiks, woodwork etc.), Clammer, Tan and Rudolph collectively address the Peranakans’ social, political and cultural history, which closely pertains to this case study.

The sociologist John Clammer begins his research with the assertion that the Peranakans are a genuine syncretistic culture that not only combines Malaysian and Singaporean cultural elements but which also transcends the component parts out of which it springs to create something unique. He suggests that the Peranakans form a living culture that presents a model of what an integrated and authentic Malaysian/Singaporean culture

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might look like. 35 This is a contentious notion, one that forms a central concern echoed throughout this research and is especially relevant within the Peranakan Museum. Where, it could be argued, this perspective is embedded within the exhibition narratives in defining the Peranakan community.

Clammer rightly makes clear in his research that the Peranakans do not present as a homogeneous, neatly defined community. He discovered, by addressing the nomenclatures of the Peranakans from Malaysia and Singapore communities, that there was great confusion among academics and the Peranakans themselves on the following terminology, commonly used interchangeably: “Straits-born Chinese,” “Straits Chinese” and “Peranakans,” with “Babas” for the men and “Nonyas” or “Nyonyas” for the women. Clammer presents the need to differentiate between the terms “Straits Chinese” and “Straits-born Chinese,” arguing that the title “Straits-born Chinese” simply means someone of Chinese descent who was born in the Old (Malacca, Penang and Singapore). In Clammer’s opinion such designations do not provide any indication of the extent to which a person either retained their and traditions or assimilated with the local culture – as did the Peranakans. Clammer argues that “Straits Chinese” are people who have assimilated with the local culture resulting in the acquisition of certain characteristics, defined by him as the well-known exterior or cultural markers of the Babas: abandoning of the originally spoken Chinese dialect for the Peranakan creole; wearing of the particular Peranakan sarong-kebaya by women or Nonyas; regarding the Straits as home; strictly maintaining Chinese religious practices; and gradually abandoning links to family in .36

An alternative position is offered by Tan Chee Beng who uses self-ascription as the primary criterion of an ethnic identity (i.e., Chinese who identify themselves as Peranakan are Peranakan).37 Tan suggests, unlike Clammer, that there are no objective definitive criteria for distinguishing Peranakans from other Chinese. Tan Chee Beng’s argument is important in that it acknowledges that the “cultural markers” of the Peranakans change over time with the shifts in external influences such as fashions, education, and language policies. Like Clammer, Tan Chee Beng claims that there is confusion as to whether the

35 John Clammer, Straits Chinese Society: Studies in the Sociology of the Baba Communities of Malaysia and Singapore, (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1980), 1. 36 Clammer, Straits Chinese Society, 13. 37 Tan Chee Beng, The Baba of Melaka: Culture and Identity of a Chinese Peranakan Community in Malaysia (Selangor: Pelanduk Publications, 1988), 3.

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Babas were also called “Straits Chinese” or “Straits-born Chinese.” Tan argues that these terms meant different things in different contexts and at different times. Tan makes the point that these labels only came into use with the establishment of the Straits Settlements in 1826.38 Clammer also acknowledges some confusion about the term Peranakan. Whilst the term has multiple meanings (womb and child in Malay, and the offspring of foreigner– native union), he asserts that it is generally understood as referring to those descendants of immigrants who were believed to have married local women, and whose offspring now speak the local language and have become partially acculturated by the local people.39

Adding to the research on the nomenclatures of the Peranakans, Jürgen Rudolph asks under what circumstances, and in which forms the Peranakans have defined themselves as a discrete cultural entity. He states, like Tan, that their identity developed and changed over time, along with their identity markers. Further, he challenges the notion that they have established defining cultural markers,40 pointing to questions about who and what defines the Peranakans. For example, Rudolph’s socio-historical research, centred on the Singapore Chinese Peranakans, describes their social, political and cultural identities. He makes clear that “Peranakaness” with all its alternative labels has meant different things at different points in this community’s history. Building on research by Clammer and Tan, Rudolph addresses the confusion over the definition of the “Straits Chinese” and a “Straits-born Chinese.” He makes the important point that from 1852, the legal definition of a “Straits Chinese” was that of a “Straits-born Chinese” or “Chinese British subject.” In this legal context, the term “Singapore Chinese” was used to include all “Straits Chinese.” However, he concedes that the “Straits Chinese” considered themselves as being native to their birthplace (the Straits Settlements), and that, in addition to the legal identification by the British colonials, the subsequent self-identification by some as “Straits Chinese” was closely linked to status, wealth and the availability of local-born “Chinese” women.41

Importantly, Rudolph notes that with the establishment of the Federation of Malaysia in 1948 (which included two of the former Straits Settlements of Malacca and Penang), the

38 Tan, The Baba of Melaka, 10. 39 Clammer, Straits Chinese Society, 15. 40 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 208. 41 As the Peranakans are not counted as a discreet group within Singapore’s Census of Population, it is impossible to gauge with accuracy their current numbers within Singapore. However, in an interview with the author in 2003, the then assistant Peranakan Curator at the ACM suggested there were only about three hundred Chinese Peranakans families remaining in Singapore who still chose to live in a traditional Peranakan style home within a Peranakan extended family system.

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term “Straits Chinese” became a misnomer for the Babas, and a redundant title. In addition, Rudolph states that during the push for independence or Merdeka, the Peranakans referred to themselves as bumi patras or “sons of the soil” in an effort to position themselves as indigenous . Rudolph points out that the phrase “the first Singaporeans” came into popular use as a form of self-ascription for the Peranakans in the 1950s as another means of claiming the rights given to local Malays.42 Rudolph provides evidence of the Peranakans’ on-going attempts at managing their own definition as a way of adapting to the community needs as they changed over time.

Rudolph also addresses the distinction between the designations “Baba” and “Peranakan,” suggesting that the Babas are a clearly defined, exclusive cultural group, whereas Peranakan literally means “locally born” making it a much broader and more inclusive term. He argues that the only way to make sense of the confusion is through analysis of the historical context in which the terms were used and the relations between the various designations. Rudolph argues that there is no such thing as an ahistorical definition of the Peranakans, and that the meanings of the terms “Baba,” “Nyonyas,” “Peranakan,” “Straits-born Chinese” and “Straits Chinese” have changed over time, and continue to do so. He argues that it is meaningless to identify somebody by a set historically specific cultural marker or by a “petrified” definition.43 Ultimately Rudolph states, like Tan, that – given the widely different views of who or what constitutes a Peranakan – the only valid criterion becomes self-identification.

Contesting the Biological Thesis Clammer argues that there is no evidence to support the claim that Peranakan culture emerged from a process of biological assimilation and refutes what he refers to as the “biological” thesis.44 He makes the point that, historically, intermarriage has been a contentious issue with the Peranakans, many of whom hold dear the idea of purity within their Chinese ancestry. His research suggests that while marriages between Chinese men and Malay women did occur, they ceased after the first generation of Chinese settlers and from then on Peranakans only married other Peranakans or newly arrived Chinese settlers. Clammer describes marriages between Chinese men and Malay women as intra-ethnic marriages, and supports his argument that these marriages would have only occurred

42 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 49. 43 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 63. 44 Clammer, Straits Chinese Society, 123.

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amoung the early settlers with the understanding that Malay women were Islamic, mediating against the possibility of intermarriage as Chinese men would have had to convert to .45 Rather, he suggests that the Peranakan culture emerged from cultural assimilation through early Chinese migrants’ successful adaptation to their host country. He concludes that the Peranakans are a socio-political, rather than a biological, phenomenon.

Tan places more importance than Clammer on the intermarriage between the early Chinese settlers and local people, stating that it was a crucial factor in the acculturation of the Chinese and eventually led to the emergence of Chinese Peranakan society. However, he claims that this does not mean that the Baba of today are a mixed-blood group of people, supporting Clammer’s research that intermarriage was an important feature only in the early period of the Chinese settlement. Furthermore, he supports Clammer’s conclusion that it is the cultural rather than biological features that make the Baba distinct.

Peranakan Origin Stories While Tan states that Baba society was formed as a consequence of Chinese traders settling in the through different periods of time, he does address the Peranakans’ founding stories or myths (one of which was presented in the introductory gallery of ACM’s exhibition The Peranakan Legacy). Tan cites the seventeenth century Sejarah Melayu or , and their account of the marriage between the Sultan Mansur Shah (1458–1777) of Melaka and a princess from China named Hang Lui.46 According to these texts, five hundred youths of noble birth and several hundred female attendants were ordered to accompany the princess to Melaka, and the escorts were allotted land at Bukit China or “Chinese Hill,” now in modern day Malacca. Although this story cannot be found in any corresponding Chinese record from the period, the story of the marriage between the Malay ruler and Chinese princess accompanied by her attendants, has become a favourite origin myth of the Baba, positioning the Peranakans as not only pure blooded but also of royal origin.

Tan suggests that while earlier accounts are sketchy, there is firm evidence that the Chinese had settlements in Melaka by the early seventeenth century. His research indicates

45 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 46. 46 The Malay literary work covers a period of over 600 years and chronicles the genealogies of rulers of the . This work was believed to have been commissioned in 1612 by the Junior King or Regent of , The Yang di-Pertuan Di Hilir Raja Abdullah (Raja Bongsu), later, by the office title, HRH Sultan Abdullah Mu'ayat Syah ibni Sultan Abdul Jalil Syah). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_Annals

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that there were approximately two thousand living in Melaka during Dutch rule, some even serving as soldiers. The Chinese population of Melaka is then reported to have halved in 1817 with the migration to the new British Settlements of Penang and Singapore. This dramatic change in the size of the population supports the theory that the early Peranakans of Singapore largely originated from Malacca, or Melaka as it was known during colonial times.

Tan claims that the intermarriage between Chinese settlers and indigenous people hastened the localisation of “interracial” families, meaning that the settlers and their offspring spoke the local language. This process of acculturation, according to Tan, led to the formation of the Peranakan community. Importantly, Tan argues that the Peranakans did not allow the female offspring from these mixed-race marriages to marry Malays, positing that they were either married back into the Peranakan community or married off to eligible newly arrived Chinese migrants. Significantly, Clammer also points out that as Peranakan girls did not intermarry with local people, this prevented any significant loss of the Chinese population suggesting that as a result, the Peranakan population kept growing rather than decreasing.47

The Peranakan, a British Colonial Construct? Refuting the biological basis for defining the Peranakans, Clammer asserts that the Babas are a political, rather than a cultural, phenomenon. This assertion is based on the understanding that the Peranakans were the product of particular social relations within colonial society, and emerged within a rigid system of politicised and officially sanctioned stratification. Clammer’s argument is further supported by the fact that, as the political structures of colonialism declined, so did the Peranakans’ rationale for existence as differentiated communities.

Whilst Tan acknowledges that British colonialism did confer increased status and social advantage to the Baba, he argues it does not explain how their acculturation took place before the arrival of the colonials. His research provides evidence of a small population of acculturated Chinese who formed the core of what was later described as the Baba community. However, Tan also suggests that this group were originally perceived as Chinese, and were only understood as a culturally distinct group called Babas during and after the British colonial period. Tan makes clear that the well-off Babas were able to use

47 Clammer, Straits Chinese Society, 47.

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their élite status to acquire the attributes of colonial modernity and distinguish themselves from the low-status Chinese migrants, referred to derogatorily as Sinkeh (literally “new migrant”). They also used their association with the British to enhance their social status and influence.48

Rudolph takes a different position to Clammer and Tan. He questions the validity of trying to define the Peranakans based on a particular historical moment, and presents a socio-historical perspective that takes into account the shifts in the meaning of the terms associated with the Peranakans based on social, cultural and political change. For instance, Rudolph notes that from 1959 the term “Baba” disappeared from common use altogether, to be replaced some time later with the newly created or revived “Baba” of the 1970s. This re-emergence of the term was based on a public discovery of the heritage of Baba culture, and was almost exclusively culturally defined. Rudolph also suggests that the Peranakans, since their revival in the 1970s, are redefined as an apolitical community with a “quaint” set of customs and unique material culture. They have, according to Rudolph, become an object of nostalgia, invoked for Singapore’s museum and tourism markets.49

In addition to Clammer, Tan, and Rudolph, Annette Johannes’ 1994 doctoral thesis The Peranakan Identity: To be or not to be considers the concept of Singaporeans’ ethnic identities and their relationship to lifestyle, with a focus on the Peranakan identity. This research involved in-depth interviews conducted with thirty randomly selected Singaporean students attending Oklahoma University. Twenty-seven of the participants were Chinese, two were Indian, and one was Malay. Nineteen of the group were male. While there was a discussion concerned with self-identification (with one female student acknowledging she is Peranakan), it is unclear how many of these students identified as Peranakan. However, the research reveals significant findings about contemporary Singaporean attitudes toward “Peranakaness.” For example, Johannes suggests that Peranakan society was formed as a consequence of the Chinese settling in Malacca, and she defines the Peranakans as being universally of Chinese origins. Such a view is in keeping with the common, if narrow, understanding of the designation, and ignores other ethnic Peranakan communities. Interestingly her respondents suggested that the Peranakans are said to have distinct physical features: according to five respondents they have bigger eyes than Chinese, with

48 Tan, The Baba of Melaka, 31–34. 49 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 63.

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double eyelids, higher and sharper noses, and a darker skin colour. 50 Johannes conceded that whilst these characteristics were generally unreliable, she found that an overwhelming majority of respondents felt they could spot another member of their own , which she ascribes to various learned behaviours rather than physical features.51

Johannes’ findings also reveal that the Peranakans are perceived as the “most prestigious and unique ethnic identity” in Singapore. In addition, the main reason for one to identify as Peranakan in Singapore is said to be because of the association with other people of prestige and status. For example, one respondent stated that:

Peranakan is the only ethnic identification that links one to the foundation of Singapore. Association with Peranakans is like telling people that my ancestors were the forefathers of Singapore. Moreover a lot of prominent people in Singapore have Peranakan identity, for example, the senior minister of Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s mother is a Peranakan…

Another noted: “When someone says he or she is a Peranakan, many people will assume that the family is respectable, rich, and influential in Singapore.” Johannes’ research thus suggests that Singaporeans in the 1990s perceived the Peranakans as local élites with high symbolic capital and as a community with corresponding social and economic capital.52

Building on the comprehensive research of the contested and dynamic history of Peranakan identity provided by Clammer, Tan and Rudolph, the so-called “revival” of Peranakan culture in the 1970s, and the opening of the Peranakan Museum and the in 2008 encouraged further scholarly research addressing the Peranakans within contemporary Singapore. In 2008 Bonny Tan put together a comprehensive annotated bibliography covering a broad range of issues in relation to Peranakan culture, which was generated as part of a series of bibliographies organised by the Singapore National Library.

The Peranakans and Tourism In 2003 Joan Henderson examined the appropriation of the Peranakan community and their heritage to support the tourism promotion of the , a government agency.53 In this study, Henderson cast doubts on the community’s long-term

50 Annette Johannes, The Peranakan Identity: To be or not to be (Oklahoma: The University of Oklahoma, 1994), 66. 51 Johannes, The Peranakan Identity, 67. 52 Johannes, The Peranakan Identity, 76. 53 Joan Henderson, Ethnic Heritage as a Tourism Attraction: The Peranakan of Singapore, (London: Routledge, 2003), 27–44.

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future, given the rigid framework of the state-sanctioned racial categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other (CMIO), a framework that has endured in Singapore since the colonial era. Henderson points out the state’s education and language policies further institutionalise the CMIO categories and regularly create tensions because ethnic divergences are rarely acknowledged. Henderson argues the result is the trivialising and erotising of the Peranakan community, reinforcing the stereotypical cultural markers such as is seen in both the Asian Civilisations Museum and the National History Museum. Henderson does not attempt any in-depth analysis of Singapore museums but does point out that the Peranakans could be held out as the closest thing Singapore has to an indigenous culture.

In 2005, Henderson took a closer look at the Asian Civilisations Museum and provides a brief account of its history, collections, galleries and role in nation-building, given its mandate to address Singaporean ancestral cultures. This article was written only two years after the ACM opened, and Henderson suggested it was too early to comment on the success of the museum. However, she did point to its role in supporting Singapore’s tourism industry – noting that museums account for 10% of the nation’s GDP, and that the ACM was now the jewel in its crown, signalling the homologies between the field of culture and the economy.54

In 2010, Can-Seng Ooi drew on state policies to present a case that the establishment of Singapore’s three main museums, the National Museum of Singapore (NMS), the Asian Civilisations Museum and the (SAM) were established to both support Singapore’s Tourism Board as attractions and to make Singapore more uniquely Asian. Ooi argues that the ACM and SAM’s Asian focus is meant to generate links between Singapore and the region to support friendly relations, while the NMS positions itself as separate from the rest of the region. This study confirms the idea that Singapore’s state-run museums are dominated by the need to support both the state’s nation-building exercise in perpetuating Asian values as well as economic imperatives such as those of the Tourism Board.55

54 Joan Henderson, Exhibiting Cultures: Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum, (London: Routledge, 2005), 183–195. 55 Can-Seng Ooi, Histories, Tourism and Museums, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 81– 102.

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The Peranakans, Promoting a Uniquely Singaporean Identity Patricia Ann Hardwick addresses the contradiction that, while aspects of Peranakan material culture are currently celebrated in Singapore as national emblems of its unique past, individually Peranakans are being encouraged to assimilate back into Singapore’s Chinese majority.56 Hardwick considers the revival of Peranakan culture in the 1970s with a focus on the subsequent appropriation of the Peranakan Nonya identity to promote “The Singapore Girl,” the Singapore Airlines’ stewardess who wears the uniform of the sarong- kebaya, a traditional Nonya outfit. Hardwick proposes that the “Singapore Girl” has become the “modern day cultural ambassador of eastern exoticism to a Western audience,” and argues that the construction and re-construction of Peranakan identity in Southeast Asia has been tied to colonial and post-colonial political agendas. This work highlights the dynamic nature of ethnic identities that can emerge, evolve, be suppressed, and then be resurrected by the dynamics of colonial and post-colonial government. Hardwick argues that the Peranakan Nonya has been appropriated and adapted, via the romanticised image of the Singapore Girl, as part of a government-driven tourism campaign to promote a racially tolerant and inclusive national identity – both internally to Singapore citizens and externally to the world.57

Partha Desikan also considers the contradictory way the values of the Chinese Peranakans (such as cultural cooperation with ) are being re- emphasised, while the dilution of Peranakan identity simultaneously occurs through loss of language as a result of Singapore’s national education policy, which does not recognise the Peranakan Baba Malay as a mother language. More broadly, the dissolution occurs because the Peranakans are not recognised as a discrete ethnic group within the state’s rigid Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other classification system; meaning that Peranakans are classified racially as Chinese, as is officially designated on the identity card which Singaporeans must carry at all times. For education purposes, their compulsory “mother tongue” is then designated as Mandarin, which they must learn as their official second language at school. Desikan acknowledges the emphasis now placed on Chinese identity by Peranakan leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew, and who, she argues, have worked towards abolishing the Peranakans as a separate political identity. Desikan examines the contribution the pioneer Peranakans made in the region through

56 Patricia Ann Hardwick, “Neither Fish nor Fowl”: Constructing Peranakan Identity in Colonial and Post- Colonial Singapore (Indiana: Indiana University, 2008), 37. 57 Hardwick, “Neither Fish nor Fowl”, 49-51

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their ability to adapt and assimilate with the initial Malay majority. She relates this ability to the Peranakans’ reconciliation with or acceptance of the new Chinese migrants, who now make up the majority of the population in Singapore. The Peranakans’ ability to continue to adapt and assimilate, she argues, has led to the “re-Sinicisation” of the Peranakan community in contemporary Singapore.58

By contrast, Mark Ravinder Frost argues that the Peranakans were able to play several roles in Singapore while visibly retaining their Chineseness. He points out the significance of the Peranakans’ historical ability to both identify themselves publicly as authentically Chinese, and be accepted by new waves of Chinese migrants. Frost asserts that the Peranakan leaders were trans-cultural in that, over time, they extended their role as commercial go-betweens, linking the Chinese community with the European settler élite. He proposes that the Peranakans accepted colonial dependency in order to fashion themselves into Singapore’s own literate gentry or unofficial class, while they also became cultural agents in the broader transmission and translation of modernity, Confucian revivalism, and even nationalism. This occurred whilst the Peranakans simultaneously supported the British Empire and represented the interests overseas of the Chinese nation.59

Frost argues that not enough attention has been paid to the broader issue of China’s policies and its effects on both the Peranakans and the attitudes of the colonials. Frost suggests the continuing role of the Peranakans as local informants initiated their interest in Chinese politics, and cites the example of the impact of China’s amended nationality laws in 1914, which prevented the Chinese from applying to be foreign subjects (such as British subjects in the case of Straits Chinese Peranakans). Because of this change in Chinese policy, the Straits Chinese visiting China during this time were liable for military conscription under Chinese law. Additionally, Frost points out that colonials used Chinese nationality as a reason for banning Straits Chinese from higher positions within the administration, part of a general discourse regarding the untrustworthy nature of “Asiatics” that was emerging through the Empire at the time.60

58 Partha Desikan, The Chinese Peranakan Heritage in Singapore (Singapore: The Peranakan Association, 2011), 7-8, accessed September 20, 2012, http://www.peranakan.org.sg. 59 Mark Ravinder Frost, Transcultural Diaspora: The Straits Chinese in Singapore, 1819–1918, (Singapore: Singapore Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2003), 34 -35. 60 Frost, Transcultural Diaspora, 30.

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Frost argues that the Peranakan élite were engaged in, or assimilated into, an international Chinese community that existed largely – if not completely – in the mind, which required public participation rather than and descent. Frost draws on the work of Benedict Anderson to suggest that a global community of Chinese emerged not only in the imagination, but as a practical social and political reality. Like Rudolph, Frost also argues that too much emphasis is placed on the hybridity or creolisation evident in Peranakan domestic lives, as manifested in stereotypical cultural markers, and that these identifiers have been carefully separated from the Peranakans’ public Chinese ethnicity.61

In May 2009 a one-day international conference called Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia: The Case of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia was organised by the Chinese Heritage Centre and the National University of Singapore. Subsequently the scholarly papers presented at this conference were published as a book, Peranakan Chinese In a Globalizing Southeast Asia (edited by Suryadinata). The conference addressed questions (central to this case study) such as whether the Peranakan Chinese are still in existence or whether they have merely become a topic for museums. Suryadinata makes clear in his introduction that the term Peranakan is a controversial one and does not necessarily mean “of Chinese descent.” He carefully acknowledges the Dutch, Arab, Indian and Portuguese Peranakans from the Malay world. He points out, however, that the Peranakan Chinese are the most dominant group and make up the largest community within the region.62

Like Frost, Gungwu considers the Peranakans through a Chinese lens and focuses on the Peranakan phenomenon from a pre-national, pro-national and post-national perspective. He argues that, due to the influence of British colonialism, the Peranakans became aware of the idea of national identity before it was introduced to China (which was still operating with a dynastic structure). Wang suggests that the pre-national Peranakans provided a positive model of a trans-national or global Chinese, a model in which they retained their Chinese cultural identity while adapting as citizens to their country of residence. He suggests that pre-national Peranakans were successful because they adopted, and adapted to, the Malay world whilst maintaining their Chineseness culturally rather than nationally.63

61 Frost, Transcultural Diaspora, 35. 62 Leo Suryadinata, ed., Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia, (Singapore: Singapore, Chinese Heritage Centre, 2010), Introduction. 63 Wang Gungwu, The Peranakan Phenomenon: Pre-national, Marginal, and Transnational (Singapore: Singapore, Chinese Heritage Centre, 2010), 14-26.

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Alistair Chew points out that in 1965 a Peranakan Prime Minister (Lee Kuan Yew) led the newly independent Singaporean government which included a number of key ministers of Peranakan origin (Deputy Minister Dr Toh Chin Chye, Minister for Defence Dr Goh Keng Swee, and Minister of Finance Lim Kim San).64 Drawing on Song Siang’s account, Chew suggests that, just as during colonial times, the Peranakans were able to create a privileged position among other races because of their ability to act as middlemen.65 Importantly, Chew acknowledges that the view of the Peranakans as middlemen presents a distorted picture, giving prominence to certain traits while suppressing others. Chew argues that Lee and his colleagues constructed a nation-state based on the idea of a that privileges a kind of “Chineseness.” Whilst Chew makes it clear that it was not a conscious act to draw on their Peranakan heritage, he believes that Lee and his Peranakan colleagues used their innate Peranakan values to create a new Singapore élite. He also acknowledges that while the Peranakan influence had waned, they left behind a solid legacy of networks of influence, and openness to a multi-polar world where combined with Chineseness to become powerful assets. He further suggests that it was the Peranakans’ success at acquiring an English-based education, while retaining the influence of Confucian values that positioned them as trans- national, multicultural and globalised people ahead of their time.66

Kwa Guan, like Clammer, argues that the Peranakans’ rise to a position of social, political and economic advantage was the result of their role as collaborators with British colonial powers. Guan cites Siah U Chin who in 1848 estimated there were one thousand Malacca-born Chinese in Singapore in 1840 that had clearly differentiated themselves from the new immigrants from China.67 Guan makes the point that, whilst the Peranakans are remembered by a display of objects representing a bygone lifestyle focusing on food and exotic rituals, it was their ability to communicate and adapt to both Asian and colonial trading worlds that defined them. This meant that they were able to play a key role in

64 Alistair Chew, The Peranakan Role in Singapore Education History (Singapore: Singapore Chinese Heritage Centre, 2008), 114–115. 65 Chew cites , One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore, (London: John Murray, 1923). 66 Chew, The Peranakan Role in Singapore Education History, 114–115. 67 Siah U Chin, “General Sketch of the Numbers, Tribes, Avocations of the Chinese in Singapore,” Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, II, (Singapore: J.R. Logan, 1848), 283–89

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transforming Singapore from a small East India Company settlement to the crown jewel of the Empire.68

Material Culture The revival of interest in the Peranakans in the last three decades has resulted in the publication of a number of collectors’ guides and illustrative coffee table catalogues. Dr Ho Wing Meng, an academic within the School of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, was the first to address the gap in literature on the material culture of the Peranakans in the 1970s. Meng subsequently produced a series of popular illustrated collectors’ guides addressing Straits Chinese furniture,69 porcelain,70 silver,71 beadwork and embroidery,72 providing information on the objects’ manufacture and use, and addressing the lost art of their creation. These publications position the Peranakans as a fading historical phenomenon with a material culture that deserved to be recorded before it disappeared altogether. For example Peranakan collector Edmond Chin produced a large format illustrated catalogue Gilding the Phoenix in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name held at the National Museum of Singapore in April 1993. This provided a comprehensive guide to the manufacture and use of Peranakan jewellery.73 In 1998, Khoo Joo Ee produced another large format illustrated guide called The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History, which provided a historical context for the Straits Chinese material culture. Ee also positions the Peranakans as a fragile community suggesting that today they have been “effectively absorbed by the larger Chinese community.”74

Like Ee, Rudolph and Frost, Hwei-Fe’n Cheah’s 2005 PhD thesis Phoenix Rising, considers there has been an overly simplistic reading of the Peranakans’ cultural markers. Cheah offers readers a detailed socio-historical account of Nonya beadwork, repositioning this well-known cultural marker as less concerned with the desirable characteristics of a good wife, than the expression of adaptation and political awareness. Cheah suggests that while beadwork is no longer produced in the quantity it once was, it is still perpetuated by the Nonyas who continue to adapt the symbols of their embroidery to reflect their wider

68 Kwa Chong Guan, The Colonial State in the Making of a Peranakan Community, (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre, 2008), 58. 69 Ho Wing Meng, Straits Chinese Furniture: A Collector’s Guide, (Singapore: Times Edition, 1994). 70 Ho Wing Meng, Straits Chinese Silver: A Collector’s Guide, (Singapore: Times Edition, 1994). 71 Ho Wing Meng, Straits Chinese Porcelain: A Collector’s Guide, (Singapore: Times Edition, 2004). 72 Ho Wing Meng, Straits Chinese Beadwork and Embroidery: A Collector’s Guide, (Singapore: Times Edition, 2008). 73 Edmond Chin, Gilding the Phoenix, (Singapore: National Museum Singapore, 1993), 272. 74 Khoo Joo Ee, The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History, (Amsterdam: The Pepin Press, 1999), 209–72.

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contemporary cultural context.75 While Cheah’s work mentions museum collections in Singapore and elsewhere, her study does not address them directly. Jackie Yoong Gee Kee’s Masters thesis, A history of Peranakan Museum Exhibitions in Singapore 1985–2008, provides a through historical account of the broad range of Peranakan exhibition in Singapore, resulting from the Peranakan revival in the 1970s and 1980s.76

Independent curator and historian Peter Lee and the Singapore History Museum’s curator Jennifer Chen co-wrote the catalogue The Straits Chinese House: Domestic Life and Traditions, in conjunction with the Rumah Baba exhibition, on display at the Singapore History Museum from 1996 to 2003. The catalogue presents a detailed account of the history, layout and function of a traditional Peranakan house, situated somewhere between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, complete with details of its traditional contents. The catalogue features two first-person accounts contributed by the Peranakans Herbie Lim Eng Kwan and Felix Chai. It is presented complete with family photos, which reinforces the stereotypical understanding that the Peranakans were a wealthy élite. Missing is any attempt to present a contemporary account of a Peranakan house in use today. Its introduction suggests that “the Peranakan culture seems to have lost its place in modern life”, and the catalogue presents the Peranakans as a phenomenon of the past.77

For the 2009 conference Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia: The Case of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, Peter Lee contributed a paper addressing his curatorial thinking underpinning the development of the Baba House (Rumah Baba). This was the home of Peranakan Wee Eng Cheng, gifted to the National University of Singapore (NUS) and opened as a Historic House Museum in 2008, the same year that the Peranakan Museum opened. Peter Lee provides a clear description of the house, the choice of typologies associated with House Museums, and an outline of the museum’s aims that arose organically (such as showcasing the social life of Peranakans, links to other cultures and fostering contemporary engagement with the history of the house). However the

75 Cheah Hwei-Fe'n, “Phoenix Rising: Narratives in Nonya Beadwork from the Straits Settlement, 1870 to the present,” Doctoral thesis, Art History Australian National University, 2005. 76 Jackie Yoong Gee Kee, “A History of Peranakan Museum Exhibitions in Singapore 1985 - 2008,” MA thesis, National University of Singapore, 2009. 77 Peter Lee and Jennifer Chen, The Straits Chinese House: Domestic Life and Traditions, (Singapore: National Museum of Singapore, 2003), 23.

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article does not provide any insights into the issues or challenges that arose in addressing Peranakan social history within the broader framework of Singapore society.78

This gap in Peter Lee’s writing is addressed to some degree in the slim catalogue, Of fingerbowls and hankies, published in 2009 in association with a series of art exhibitions commissioned for the contemporary art space built in the third floor of the Baba House. The catalogue’s introduction by the curator Foo Su Ling, describes how a series of exhibitions were commissioned to encourage local and international artists to respond to the two lower floors of the Baba House’s contextual displays. Ling outlines how this resulted in a series of exhibitions that challenged and disrupted the stereotypes and cultural markers that are commonly associated with the Peranakan community.79 Ahmad Mashadi, the head of the NUS Museum, provided a foreward which acknowledged the dichotomy of the institutionalisation of Peranakan culture, the hybridity of which makes it attractive for tourism. Importantly, Mashadi recognises that the fascination with all things Peranakan is accompanied by a sense of loss and regret – signalling the lack of resolution of the Peranakans’ identity within contemporary Singapore.80

The ACM gallery guide, written for the opening of the Peranakan Museum titled Peranakan Museum A-Z Guide, provides generic descriptions of the making, functions and rituals associated with the objects on display, drawing largely from the Peranakan goldenage, from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.81 This guide was supplemented by the publication in 2008 of Peter Lee’s catalogue Junk to Jewels: the things that Peranakan value, published in association with the Peranakan Museum’s first temporary exhibition, from Junk to Jewellery. This exhibition provided personal narratives from members of the Peranakan community about the significances of the objects in the catalogue, such as letters and diaries. Lee describes the lack of closure some members of the Peranakan community experienced about the change in fortunes of the Peranakans, and the accompanying sense of loss. Additionally, Lee suggests that, unlike the situation of

78 Peter Lee, Confining and Connecting: Curating Strategies for Presenting Singapore's Baba House, (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre, 2008), 160. 79 Foo Su Ling, Introduction, Of fingerbowls and hankies: Chris Yap voyeurs through the Baba House (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2009), 5. 80 Ahmad Mashadi, “Forward”, Of fingerbowls and hankies, 3. 81 Randall Ee, David A. Henkel, and Heidi Tan, Peranakan Museum A-Z Guide, edited by I. Tahir (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum for the Peranakan Museum, 2008).

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any other community in Singapore, the Peranakans’ cultural identity has been narrowly shaped by collectors and museums, which he hopes his temporary exhibition will address.82

The literature review indicates that, whilst much of the history of their origins is unclear, the Chinese Singaporean Peranakan community evolved organically from their origins as Chinese traders settling in Southeast Asia. They continually adapted to changing circumstances and not only survived local Malay, colonial Portuguese, Dutch and English rule, but thrived as a community who provided valuable support to these regimes. Much of their success is attributed to their flexible capacity to act as go-betweens, communicating with the local population on behalf of the colonials.

The literature also suggests that, after World War II, Peranakan leaders, due to their dependence on their colonial rulers, lost their adaptability, and refused to relinquish their colonial loyalties, which had helped them establish and solidify their position as an élite social group. With a new power dynamic pushing for independence, the Peranakan leaders’ refusal to concede joining Malaysia and their inability to relinquish their privileged position as British subjects, led to a rapid demise. By the mid 1960s, this once élite group, who had become known as “the King’s Chinese,” disappeared as a community with any symbolic capital. It was not until the 1980s that their fortunes began to revive, with the state willing and able to embrace the Peranakans, primarily for their material legacy. The literature review demonstrates that there is a gap in scholarly research that examines the representation of the Peranakan community in Singapore’s museums. More specifically, there has been no research-based exploration of the complex matrix of influences that led to the development of the ACM’s exhibition The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum.

Chapter Structures This study is organised into eight chapters which together present the argument of this thesis as it builds from a broad historical context to the specificity of the case: The Peranakan Legacy exhibition and the subsequent Peranakan Museum.

Chapter 1 presents a rationale for the case study, as well as outlining the research methodology, theoretical framework and the literature review with the aim of introducing the Peranakan community in general with a focus on the Singaporean Chinese Peranakans.

82 Peter Lee, Junk to Jewels: The things that Peranakans value (Singapore: Peranakan Museum, National Heritage Board, 2008), 3.

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Chapter 2 provides a background and historical framework for the case study, exploring the genesis of Singapore’s generative objective structures from its colonial beginnings as a trading outpost of the British East India Company through to the establishment of the Republic of Singapore. The chapter identifies colonial structures which were selectively reproduced in the establishment of the Republic of Singapore, such as patterns of race relations among the disparate populations of Singapore, and the continuing overarching dominance of the field of the economy. The chapter also traces the establishment of the Peranakans as a recognisable community within Singapore’s social spaces and their subsequent rise and fall with geo-political and social changes. Additionally, this chapter considers the role that Lee Kuan Yew, as leader of the PAP, played in the changing fortunes of the Peranakans.

Chapter 3 examines aspects of the Singapore government, and its carefully controlled strategies for nation-building deemed necessary for survival given Singapore’s sudden and early expulsion from the newly formed Malay Federation. The chapter traces the government’s establishment of a particular set of beliefs or doxa that both emerged from and contributed to a culture of fear for the small nation’s survival within what was seen as a largely hostile Muslim region. The two fundamental concerns, national unity and economic success, were prioritised to support a state ethos, based on Singaporeans’ collective “Asian values,” that citizens should put aside individual interests in support of their nation. The chapter follows Singapore’s progression from the establishment of a booming economy to the perceived need to generate cultural bulwarks against unwanted “Western values.” In particular, this chapter looks at the state’s change in policy to support Singaporeans as players in a global economy and its determined harking back to ancestral cultures and traditions in order to construct and legitimise a set of Asian (vis-à-vis Confucian) values for all Singaporeans.

Chapter 4 considers Singapore’s so-called “second generation” leadership and the governmental focus on the potential of Singapore’s emerging cultural fields. It looks at the confluence of influences that brought about the Renaissance City Report and plans for developing Singapore’s cultural fields to offset unwanted Western values, and to provide further support to Singapore’s economy after the 1985 Southeast Asian economic slump. In particular the chapter looks at the way the Singapore government was able to closely align its various agencies to create strong homologies (or patterns of practice and beliefs) among them, ensuring that the dominant fields of the economy and politics maintained

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their overarching influence over the nation’s affairs and over the field of cultural production.

Chapter 5 examines the specificity of the genesis of museums in Singapore, from Sir Stamford Raffles’ colonial town planning with his original vision to build an educational institution to enlighten the sons of the “natives,” to the eventual building (almost one hundred years later) of the Raffles Museum and Library. The chapter traces the changing role of the Raffles Museum from the time of World War II to Singapore’s establishment as a newly formed Republic in 1965. The chapter maps out the plan to expand the museum sector to better support both Singapore’s nation-building exercises and the state’s ambition to become the cultural hub of Southeast Asia. Specifically this chapter teases out the strategic mission of the ACM in presenting Singaporeans with their ancestral cultures, reinforcing cultural roots and the generic Asian values that underpin them. This chapter also presents the background and rationale that led to the establishment of the Peranakan collection as an important part of the ACM and to the delivery of its first exhibition, The Peranakan Legacy.

Chapter 6 provides a description and analysis of The Peranakan Legacy installed within the first wing of the ACM. Drawing on in-depth interviews with ACM staff, this chapter provides detailed insights into the complex events and curatorial rationale that determined the storyline of the exhibition, resulting in the positioning of the Peranakan material culture within its own newly created canon of Southeast Asian art.

Chapter 7 addresses the opening of the new Peranakan Museum. This chapter tracks the transformation of the first wing of the ACM (housing predominantly Chinese exhibits) into a dedicated, stand-alone “boutique” Peranakan Museum. The chapter analyses the distinct curatorial approaches that emerged in the museum, resulting in sometimes contradictory or discordant storylines. Of particular importance is the analysis of the Peranakan Museum within Singapore’s larger nation-building exercise and the search for a unique Singaporean identity. This chapter considers the tentative positioning of the Peranakans as a possible “role-model” for a newly defined cosmopolitan, global, racially tolerant, economically successful, and adaptable “imagined” Singaporean citizen.

Chapter 8 summarises the complex relations at play as the Peranakan collection is exploited to reflect particular values and narratives. The chapter asserts the findings of the longitudinal case study addressing the Peranakan community as they are represented within

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the ACM, in both The Peranakan Legacy exhibition and subsequently within the Peranakan Museum.

This thesis is designed to provide the first in-depth case study and critical examination of the positioning of the Peranakan community and their material culture, initially within the ACM’s exhibition The Peranakan Legacy (2000–2006), and then within Singapore’s Peranakan Museum which opened in 2008, operating within the state-dominated context of Singapore. Chapter 2 addresses the history and genesis of the ACM’s highly controlling objective structures, invisibly embedded within contemporary Singapore, their effects manifested and accepted within normalised practice.

33 Chapter Two: Singapore’s Genesis

Introduction

For the visitor in search of “culture,” the Singapore Tourism Board recommends, via its YourSingapore, website a visit to the neatly compartmentalised and thematised “towns” that celebrate the heritage of the nation’s four main racial groups: Chinese, Indian, Malay and “Other.”1 They suggest that you enjoy a good or a visit to a Hindu temple in an area known as Little India, make your way to to see a Lion Dance, or to to visit a traditional mosque and sample the souvenirs from the Malay quarters, or as an alternative discover the site where Sir Stamford Raffles first landed in Singapore’s old colonial area. Each of these four distinct areas has been carefully shaped for tourists and whilst they may not be theme parks, the theme is apparent: there are indeed different cultural groups in Singapore, but they exist within the totality of a unified modern urban island.

Singapore however, is an island in more than the geographic sense of the word. It is an oasis of unity, order, cleanliness and control in an archipelago of diversity and chaos. All around the island there are shark-infested waters that were once controlled by pirates known as the Bugis. There are two hundred million Muslim Indonesians of various cultures, tribes, languages and political persuasions to the south, west and east, and twenty five million Muslim Malaysians of varied ethnic origins to the North. The swamplands of Malaysia are still clearly visible to the visitor who crosses either of the two road links to the Malaya peninsula. They are clearly visible too in Indonesia, should the visitor take the short boat ride to either or Bintan—Indonesian territory within a few kilometres of Singapore’s CBD. But in Singapore the swamps have been replaced with artificial beaches, hi-tech harbours and even new suburbs: the area of the island has been increased as the government has even reconstructed the shape and size of the landmass itself. Nothing, it seems, is beyond control.

But whilst the “miracle” of Singapore’s economic and urban development is clear to see, it is perhaps the social landscape that has been even more carefully managed by rulers past and present. Should visitors stay in Singapore long enough to see beyond the skyscrapers

1 Singapore Tourism Board, “YourSingapore” 2008, Accessed May 2011, http://www.yoursingapore.com/

34 and casinos, the transport networks and the shopping, they will find an extraordinary, perhaps reluctant, homogeneity that cannot be imagined in neighbouring countries. The national mottos of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore highlight such differences. Both Indonesia (Unity in Diversity) and Malaysia (Unity is Strength) reflect their national concern for dealing with ethnically diverse peoples. Both mottos mask the uncertainties of racial cohesion that dominate political debate. By contrast, Singapore’s motto is simple: Go Ahead Singapore. It is an outward looking statement of confidence. It is competitive and echoes the words of the national anthem: “Our noble aspiration is to make a success of Singapore.” But beyond this, it assumes a unity that Malaysia and Indonesia cannot take for granted. This collective “unity” has perhaps been Singapore’s greatest achievement in the last hundred years. It has constructed its culture, and like all of Singapore’s major undertakings, it has been carefully planned and effectively executed by both colonial and independent governments.

Singapore’s History: The Mediating Link

Bourdieu argues that an agent’s habitus is based on the structuring process which history engenders from one generation to another, reproduced in the minutiae of day-to- day practice. Bourdieu believes history becomes the mediating link between objective structures and agents’ subjective responses, encouraging agents to reproduce the structure of their historically situated objective environment via notions taken for granted and constituting “commonsense,” “known truths” or the belief that “that’s just the way things are”. Agents are immersed in their immediate environment which has been historically constituted but not recognised as such, meaning that the underlying structures go unchallenged and are accepted as natural.2 Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, this chapter establishes an overview of the historical and social events that have helped to shape the objective structure of Singaporeans’ collective habitus, with a particular focus on the Peranakan community. The overview provides insights into common aspects of what might be termed the Singaporean habitus, while considering particularities of the Peranakan as a community embedded in Singapore’s shared history.

This chapter also considers Singapore’s transformation from a key part of the British- controlled crown colony to the city-state Republic of Singapore, with a focus on the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, himself a Peranakan. This transformation provides the background socio-historical context in order to understand the development and

2 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 78–79.

35 reproduction of the objective structures of Singapore’s fields of concern central to this research: the fields of economy, politics and culture. Having addressed the field dynamics, the chapter then provides the historical context necessary for an examination of the organisational behaviours of the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) and the development and evolution of its permanent exhibition The Peranakan Legacy. The exhibition opened from 2000 and until in 2006 when the Tao Nan building which housed it closed for renovation, to reopen as the Peranakan Museum in 2008.

The Case Study’s Historical Context Bourdieu suggests that lived histories, which are often based on an arbitrary set of events, decisions, and circumstances, created objective recursive structures which agents in turn subjectively and often unconsciously reproduce and shape as they go about their daily lives, responding to the struggle within the fields in which they live and work. History, with its embedded structuring structure, then becomes an unconscious mediating framework, helping to determine which actions that occur in the present appear to be “natural” and seen as the way things are always done. In keeping with Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, this literature review begins by examining texts that have focused on the history of Singapore from its colonial beginnings as a commercial port established on behalf of the British East India Company.

It is not the intention of this study to provide a detailed historical account of the establishment of Singapore from colony to nation. Rather, the aim is to draw on existing authoritative accounts to provide a succinct historical context for the case study, in particular examining those factors that led to the establishment of the ACM and its representation of the Peranakan community.

The research begins with a broad range of readings on the topic of Singapore’s colonial beginnings with the aim of understanding the prevailing values and attitudes that were embedded within the nation’s objective structures. The historical overview broadly follows the development of Singapore: first as an outpost of the East India Company in 1819, then as part of the crown colony, followed by a short period when the country merged with the Malay Federation in 1963; and finally when Singapore move to became a sovereign, democratic and independent nation in 1965.

Whilst numerous observational and historical accounts of the establishment and evolution of colonial Singapore exist, three key texts provided triangulation regarding the

36 early colonial period of Singapore’s history. These texts view the establishment of the Peranakan as a differentiated community leading up to their so-called “golden age” from the 1870s to the 1920s, and provide insights into the attitudes and values that were dominant during the period.

Charles Buckley’s work provides a colonialist view of Raffles’ town planning and the establishment of the clearly delineated racial enclaves, based on an Occidental understanding of race relations current at that time.3 In keeping with early colonial understandings and attitudes, Buckley considers the Peranakans as simply being part of the Chinese community. Song Ong Siang’s One Hundred Years' History of the Chinese in Singapore, published in 1923, provides a Peranakan view of events, his account beginning with a description of the Peranakans as a class of people clearly differentiated from the mainland Chinese.4 By contrast historian Constance M. Turnbull provides a modernist historigraphic account of Singapore based on archival evidence rather than drawn from subjective accounts, and her work has been, until very recently, the most authoritative and standard text of Singapore’s history. Turnbull suggests that colonials in mid-nineteenth century Singapore recognised the Peranakans as a distinct Baba Chinese community. 5

These three texts provide a comprehensive account of the major events that led to the establishment of Singapore—such as the dominance of the economic imperatives involved in setting up the port of Singapore; the role migrants, such as the Peranakans, played in building the infrastructure; and the establishment of Singapore as the major trading port in the region. Importantly, these texts demonstrate the differing attitudes toward the Peranakans. Song Ong Siang makes clear the difference between the Peranakans and the mainland Chinese; Buckley argues that the British viewed the Peranakans as simply Chinese until the Peranakans differentiated themselves with their anglophile behaviour and the establishment of discrete associations (such as the Singapore Chinese British Association [SCBA]). Turnbull’s account presents a traditional chronological series of historical events as they unfolded, without focusing on the significance of agents’ ethnic origins and influences. However she mentions that the Peranakans were recognised as culturally

3 Charles B. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore 1819–1867 (Singapore: Frazer and Neave Limited, 1902). 4 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (London: Aylesbury, Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1923). 5 Constance M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1988 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13.

37 distinct from mainland Chinese peoples from around the mid 1900s.6 These three texts, along with local newspapers, magazine articles and archived speeches, provide important insights into the context that shaped the fortunes of the Peranakan community within Singapore’s colonial social spaces.

Raffles and Colonial Structuring Singapore, as we now know it, was born out of an ongoing struggle between the Dutch and English colonial powers as they strategised over economic imperatives and trade advantages in their desire to sustain or improve their position within the field of economic colonial power. A central player was The Dutch East India Company which had monopolised the trading routes in Southeast Asia since the seventeenth century and controlled all the major ports in the region. In order to break this monopoly, in the early eighteenth century, the British East India Company began the search for a site to establish a port without creating conflict with the Dutch. To this end, the British East India Company assigned Sir Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen in , the task of finding a suitable location that had not already come under Dutch jurisdiction. In 1819 Raffles identified a suitable site. The small island of Singapura, as it was then called, covered an area of approximately 640 kilometres and was part of what would later be known as Malaysia. It was found to have sufficient fresh water and a harbour deep enough to make it a suitable site for the development of a new port for the British East India Company’s commercial needs.

Popular history tells how Raffles cunningly took advantage of infighting among Malay rulers, absorbed in struggles within their own power field, to secure the control of the island.7 The Temenggong, the village headman or ruler of Singapura, negotiated with Raffles and agreed to rent land to the British East India Company, initially allowing it to establish a factory at the mouth of the Singapura River. In order to legitimise his claim to Singapura, Raffles required permission from the master of this local ruler, the Sultan Mohamed Shah of Johore and Linga, who had already signed a treaty handing over control of his entire nation to the Dutch. The ageing Sultan had two sons and Raffles successfully backed the elder, while Dutch influence extended through the younger. After a short period of intrigue and family fighting, the elder son finally succeeded his father, and the British “Friendship Treaty” prevailed over its Dutch equivalent, allowing the British East

6 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1988, 13. 7 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1988, 8–9.

38 India Company to take control. Five years later, a treaty with the Sultan of Johore gave the British ownership of the entire island. In 1826, Singapore combined with Malacca and Penang to form the Straits Settlements. From 1867 the Straits Settlements were controlled directly by the British government, with the Dutch controlling what is today known as Indonesia.

The dominant and “official” discourse on Singapore’s “founding,” as presented in the interactive multimedia experience The Singapore Story: overcoming the odds showcased in Singapore’s National History Museum until 2003, and within official educational history texts, presents the narrative of Sir Stamford Raffles as the founding father of colonial Singapore.8 This popular and official historical narrative presents Raffles as a great visionary who turned a swampy, sleepy backwater, populated by an inconsequential group of Malay fishermen and troublesome pirates, into an economically successful trading centre that became the envy of Southeast Asia and the pearl of British colonial Asia. The Singapore Story: overcoming the odds takes its cue from Buckley who positioned Raffles as the man given the job

… [t]o free the peoples of the south eastern archipelago from civil war, piracy, slavery, and oppression, and to restore and revive their old culture and independence under the influence of European enlightenment, liberal education, progressive economic prosperity, and sound law.9 Contrary to this official discourse, archaeological evidence suggests that Singapura or Singapore, was once an established and thriving centre known as Tamusek during the Empire in the fourteenth century. The city was razed by invading forces from

Java in the fifteenth century, leaving the island virtually uninhabited until Raffles’ arrival.10 However, in 1965, this alternative “founding” narrative was deemed too threatening for Singapore’s racially cautious official history texts in the years of early independence. The Raffles story, with Raffles as a neutral (non-Asian) agent, provided a less contestable starting point for the foundation mythology.11

8 Bizarts Creative Pte Ltd., The Singapore Story: overcoming the odds: an interactive 3D multimedia experience, (Singapore Ministry of Information and the Arts, 1999). 9 Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore 1819–1867, 6. 10 John Miksic, Archaeological Research on the “Forbidden Hill” of Singapore, (Singapore: Singapore National Museum, 1984), 50. 11 S. Rajaratnam , S. Rajaratnam: The Prophetic and the Political, eds., C. Heng and O. U. Haq, (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Graham Brash Pte Ltd, 2007), 139–40.

39 The Establishment of Singapore’s Multiracial Character Collectively, literature on colonial Singapore confirms the formation and maintenance of a quintessentially Orientalist understanding and management of race, as suggested by literary theorists such as Edward Said, who highlight the ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident. Such a view is reinforced by Raffles’ own account, in which he makes clear that Singapore’s original town planning was based on an Orientalist hierarchy or classification of the Asian races and their corresponding generalised characteristics (the enterprising, hard-working Chinese, the docile Indians, and the lazy Malays.) Raffles’ account is in keeping with Said’s perception that Europeans dealt with the Orient by dominating, restructuring, and representing this understanding to the Orientals, who then embodied this belief in their own behaviours. PuruShotam points out in her work Negotiating Multiculturalism that Singapore has been a colonial construct, structured along lines of racial distinction.12 The legitimisation of this colonial construct, and its subsequent use in post-colonial society, comes about over time as the “rules of the game” initially established by dominant agents for specific reasons become the prevailing or unspoken set of beliefs.13 Bourdieu argues that those in power are able to project a particular point of view as natural, a view which is subsequently misrecognised as logical and commonsensical.14 This imposes itself as a universal view which he calls doxa, a term used throughout this study to describe the prevailing taken for granted belief systems such as Singaporeans’ acceptance of the state’s high level of control in all aspects of Singapore’s social spaces.

Raffles and the colonial government actively encouraged the inhabitants of neighbouring countries to immigrate to Singapore, as the new port desperately needed labour to build its infrastructure in order to continue to compete and grow economically. The original immigrants to Singapore were generally a mixture of entrepreneurial traders from China, Arabia, Malaysia and India, followed later by indentured workers introduced by the British, from India and China. Over time the colonial government developed a particular doxa for migrants based on a racially-oriented, antiquated, hierarchical system which became misrecognised as “natural” in the social structures of emergent Singapore.

12 Nirmala Srirekam PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms: Disciplining Difference in Singapore (Berlin: Monton de Gruyter, 2000), 208. 13 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms, 209. 14 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 57.

40 Informed by prevailing eighteenth century “Orientalist” thinking, the colonial government encouraged specific racial groups to migrate to Singapore based on an understanding of their particular characteristics and known skills. Edward Said describes this attitude which prevailed so strongly in the establishment of Singapore:

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.15 Fee and Rajah provide an understanding of these colonial hierarchical doxa of race, which played themselves out in nineteenth century practice:

Indians were regarded as docile and well behaved, and were suited to poorly paid and regimented life of plantations and government projects. The Chinese, on the other hand, had more self-reliance and the enterprise to rise above manual labour. The Malays were regarded as rural, poor and backward, and in the colonial division of labour were most appropriate to the role of food producer and agriculturalist.16 These racial groups were aligned to a corresponding social hierarchical structure within Singapore’s social spaces, encouraging the continued reproduction of the British colonial power’s discourse on race. PuruShotam argues that by the time of the 1957 census, the four categories of racial differentiation (Chinese, Indian, Malay and “Other”) had been clearly established as a direct legacy of the initial colonial approach to racial management.17 Fifty years later, Singapore is still organised in terms of four officially recognised racial groups and individuals must identify themselves as one of these on their identity card: the Chinese represent 78.8% of the population, Malay 13.9%, Indian 7.9% and Other 1.4%.18 The state officially adopted a “salad bowl” rather than “soup” metaphor as the preferred style of racial integration. These racial groupings are commonly referred to as CMIO, groups of people who are presented as living together harmoniously but separately.19 Considering the genesis of this misrecognition or the “taken-for-granted” understandings reproduced by the state, PuruShotam argues that:

15 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 3. 16 Lian Kween Fee and Ananda Rajah, “‘Race’ and Ethnic Relations in Singapore,” in The Making of Singapore Sociology: Society and State, eds. Tong Chee Kiong and Lian Kween Fee (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2002), 225. 17 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms, 32. 18 Singapore Demographics Profile, 2012, accessed September 9, 2012, http://indexmundi.com/singapore/demographics_profile.html. 19 Raj Vasil, Asianising Singapore: The PAP’s Management of Ethnicity (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1995), 2–3.

41 …[i]t was clear that the racial differentiation of Singapore arose from a common [Orientalist] discourse, a praxis, a library… of ranks of received ideas, in short a doxology common to everyone who entered the ranks of knowing and the knowledgeable.20 This taken-for-granted belief about race, the belief that PuruShotam identifies within contemporary Singapore society, is evident in Raffles’ discourse on the planning of Singapore and the allocation of distinct, segregated areas of land for the different racial groups for housing. The best land was given to the dominant group, the European community, creating “Europe Town,” and the least desirable allocated as kampongs, or villages, for the Indian migrants. In this way the dominant colonial powers controlled the criteria for entry into Singapore’s social spaces and created a structure that would eventually become inculcated into the fabric of society as accepted doxa. With these notions of race embedded both structurally and in Singaporean agents’ collective habitus, these attitudes on race were reproduced through social practice unconsciously. In Singapore today, while attempts are made to change attitudes towards race, notions of the “hard working industrious Chinese” and the contrasting “lazy native” still abound, and can still be seen in the distribution of professional occupations, which is differentiated along lines of racial groupings.

In summary, key historic sources on colonial Singapore confirm that a quintessentially Orientalist understanding and management of race developed to assist with control and regulation of the population. Embedded in both the physical structure of Singapore and the fundamental beliefs of the society, the four categories that emerged from this period (Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other), along with their underlying generalised characteristics, have been inherited with subconscious misrecognition by subsequent generations. The Peranakans were deeply affected by the state rigid racial division, as they perceived themselves within their own distinct category, however this view was not shared by the state.

Peranakan: Positioning within the Struggle

The Straits-born Chinese are usually regarded as being of mixed breed – half Chinese and half Malay. Except, however, as regards the original progenitors, this is not in accordance with fact, the first ancestors only being full-blooded Malay: the subsequent generation usually intermarrying among themselves or introducing new

20 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms, 32.

42 Chinese blood, and thus maintaining the dominant racial characteristic in the breed.21 Until the early nineteenth century Singapore’s labour pool was transient and, by 1827, dominated by Chinese immigrants or as they were known. These immigrants came to the island in the hope of making their fortune and returning home as soon as possible. However, many stayed and the Chinese population quickly grew to dominate Singapore, both in numbers and as an economic force. In 1867 Singapore became a British Crown Colony, run by the Colonial Office in London. An imperialist civil service was established, backed by colonial military power. Yet Singapore continued to be managed by divide-and- rule principles with the use of Councils (made up of mostly British officials) plus local professional and business people nominated by the Governor. This ensured that racial groups could not generate any organised and combined opposition to colonial domination. It was still observed that while different ethnic communities lived close to one another, they kept to themselves and only came into contact in the market place out of economic necessity.22

However, one particular racial group of importance in the early colonial government was the Straits-born Chinese community known as the Straits Chinese or Peranakans. They were drawn to Singapore to take advantage of the newly established free port. They had largely originated from Malacca where they had established a community in the fourteenth century, adapting to colonisation under the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, the Dutch in the sixteenth century, and the British in the eighteenth century. Whilst it is agreed that the Peranakans acculturated, adopting many Malay customs and traditions, they never fully assimilated (or were absorbed) into Malay culture, and always maintained their Chinese ancestral and religious traditions. According to Clammer, although they were never identified as a discrete biological ethnic group, it was their unique cultural identity as a Chinese sub-group with a Malay-Chinese culture that set them apart.23

Members of the Peranakan community were known for their capacity to speak English and Malay, as well as Baba Malay, their own unique Malay dialect. Baba Malay was different from Standard Malay in its loanwords and blended with Chinese over hundreds of years.24 Their bilingualism and considerable local knowledge also made the Peranakans

21 Song, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore, 503. 22 Fee and Rajah, Race’ and Ethnic Relations in Singapore, 226. 23 Clammer, Straits Chinese Society, 126. 24 See Clammer, Straits Chinese Society; Tan, The Baba of Melaka; and Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities.

43 especially useful to the early colonial government, who sought them out as negotiators or go-betweens for the colonials when dealing with the Malay and Chinese communities. They were also valued as they had no loyalty to China, having viewed Southeast Asia as their permanent home as traders for centuries. John Crawfurd, Second British Resident of Singapore, provides a first-hand insight from 1828 of the perception of the Peranakans within the racial hierarchy of colonial Singapore:

The Creole Chinese are intelligent, always acquainted with the , and occasionally English: they are considered inferior in industry to the rest, but are beneficially employed as brokers, shopkeepers, and general merchants.25 Crawfurd’s comments suggest that as a community while they were not considered as hard working at the mainland Chinese, softened by their Malay influence, the Peranakans had acquired the necessary symbolic capital to act in an important advisory role for the colonial government with whom they increasingly felt closely aligned.

The King’s Chinese As the Peranakans developed their distinct social position in Singapore, they gained privileges in the form of symbolic and economic capital, many becoming very wealthy through trading and their association with the colonial government. As a community, many became anglicised, the males adopted a Western style of dress, wealthier families sent their children to English schools (locally and overseas), and numerous Peranakans converted to . Over time they became a small but élite English speaking community that made a point of distinguishing themselves from the more numerous ‘singkay’ coolies – the newly arrived Chinese immigrants.

During early colonial rule, the Peranakans were both admired for their success with the colonial rulers but also resented, coming to be known derogatively by other Chinese communities as the “King’s Chinese,” “Brown Englishmen” or the “British running dogs.”26 The Peranakans were often ridiculed for not being of “pure” Chinese descent, given their obvious “Malayised” Chinese cultural markers such as the use of the Baba Malay dialect, their lack of ability to speak Mandarin, and the custom among Peranakan women of wearing the Malaysian costume and chewing beetle nut. A first hand account of

25 John Crawfurd, Journal of an embassy from the governor general of India to the courts of Siam and Cochin China: exhibiting views of the actual states of those kingdoms, (London: H. Coblum and R. Bentley, 1830), 381. 26 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 407.

44 1879 by Jonas Daniel Vaughan, public official and lawyer, indicates that the Peranakans took their status as locally-born, British subjects very seriously:

Strange to say that although the Babas adhere so loyally to the customs of their progenitors, they despise the real Chinamen and are exclusive fellows indeed…. [t]he writer has seen Babas “on being asked if they were Chinamen” bristle up and say in an offended tone, “I am not a Chinaman, I am a British subject, an Orang putih” (literally meaning a white man).27 Many accounts from this period make it clear that the Peranakans believed they were “true Britishers – in heart and soul.”28

It is important to note that the Peranakans have never been considered a homogeneous group, being divided along the lines of class, economics, education, occupation, and religion. Despite their heterogeneity, from the late nineteenth century through to the Great Depression, the Peranakans flourished, experiencing their “golden period” under colonial rule. The Peranakan community also produced some of Singapore’s leading pioneers who helped to establish Singapore, such as Lim OBE (physician, social and educational reformist) and Song Ong Siang (lawyer and social activist, first Asian to be knighted) and later Tan Cheng Lock (businessman and philanthropist). With the establishment in 1900 of the Straits Chinese British Association (SCBA) the Peranakans had a powerful collective voice to support the interests of Straits Chinese in the Straits Settlements.29 During colonial rule the Peranakans manoeuvred themselves into a dominant (but dominated) power position in Singapore, and were highly influential in the fields of politics and the economy. Peranakan numbers increased from 600 to 10,000 and they became economically, socially, and politically élite – the only Asian group to represent the needs of the community as City Councillors, and then Executive and Legislative Councillors.30

PuruShotam notes that English was the dominant colonial language and that “learning the language, in the broadest sense of the word, placed one in the inner circle, by marginalizing one from the outer circle.”31 However, from the perspective of white British officials, speaking English and wearing European style clothing did not make you an Englishman. The Peranakans, while useful to the colonial government, were still

27 J. D. Vaughan, “The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements,” (1879) reprinted in Clammer, Straits Chinese Society, 6. 28 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 407. 29 At this time “Straits Chinese” was the common term used to refer to the Peranakans. 30 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 402. 31 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms, 10.

45 considered a distinct but Chinese ethnic sub-group. Whilst they were accorded privileges, such as gaining the status of British subjects and being given land grants, they were never considered on entirely equal footing with the English, and never allowed to become British citizens.

Colonial Interests First: The Dominant Field of Economics

Contingent on the British colonial government’s approach to Singapore was the domination of the field of economics. Singapore continued to succeed economically – with the British protecting their own business interests carefully, siphoning the bulk of profits back westwards to the home country. This dominance of economic imperatives is revealed in Raffles’ directives in 1823 to L. N. Hull, Acting Secretary Town Planning Committee, with the allotment of discrete parcels of land to the various racial communities, the separation of which would only be considered for economic reasons:

…While you generally direct your attention to the importance of concentrating the different classes of the population in their separate quarters, you are not to lose sight of the advantage which may arise from deviating from this rule in special cases where the commercial interests of the settlement are concerned.32 Whilst Raffles envisaged a new city with sealed roads, parks, schools and hospitals, the reality was that the colonial forces were slow to provide the funds to build the necessary infrastructure, resulting in the establishment of unhygienic slums. The immigrant labour market worked hard, often in appalling conditions, for low wages. Conditions were especially bad for the transient Chinese coolies who were sometimes forced to share their beds on a night/day shift basis. Eventually realising that the British Administration was only interested in ensuring the continued supply of labour to the market the various racial groups worked to provide their own facilities.33

Despite the difficult working conditions, trade in Singapore multiplied eightfold between 1873 and 1913. News of the island’s success attracted immigrants and by 1860 the population had grown to 80,792. The Chinese accounted for 61.9% of the number; the Malays and Indians 13.5% and 16.05% respectively; and others, including the Europeans, 8.5%. Singapore’s prosperity continued unabated until the Great Depression of 1929 but

32 Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore 1819–1867, 84. 33 This early dichotomy in wealth and status between the colonialists and the immigrant labour force contributed to the development of communist sympathies in Singapore’s later history.

46 remained relatively buffered until the dramatic political and economic changes brought on by the Japanese occupation in 1942.34

Hysteresis Effect: Japanese Occupation and the Fall of the British Empire

Bourdieu argues that agents’ enduring dispositions are developed early on through the relatively autonomous universe of family relations, where external necessity produce the structures of the habitus which become in turn the basis of perception and appreciation of all subsequent experiences. Bourdieu suggests the hysteresis effect occurs when there is a break in the everyday logic of being. He argues:

Thus, as a result of the hysteresis effect necessarily implied in the logic of the constitution of habitus, practices are always liable to incur negative sanctions when the environment with which they are actually confronted is too distant from that to which they are objectively fitted.35 Bourdieu developed the concept of the hysteresis effect to describe the phenomena of revolution and resistance, suggesting that when objective social structures suddenly and dramatically change, there is a rupture within individuals’ embodied habitus, which carries a set of expectations or non-reflective beliefs about the way things are and should always be, and their reality. The Peranakan community suffered such a hysteresis effect as a result of the shift in their social standing which came about in the post World War II era with their absolute belief in the ability of British Colonials to protect Singapore.

In the 1920s the British had built a major naval base in Singapore anticipating this as the major strategy in the defence of its interest’s in the region. However, in 1942 it was not anticipated that Japanese soldiers, cycling down the Malay Peninsula on bicycles, would cross the narrow bridge that connected Singapore to Malaysia. Utterly unprepared, Singapore fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, and was renamed Syonan (Light of the South). The country remained under Japanese occupation for three and a half years until September 1945 when the British returned. However, the short-lived Japanese occupation had undermined the supremacy of British administration, and with it the perception of Britain’s unquestionable right to rule.

34 Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore 1819–1867, 84. 35 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 78.

47 A Shift in Social Spaces for the Peranakans

The Peranakan community suffered badly under Japanese occupation because their special relationship with the English was considered traitorous to Japanese notions of Asian cultural supremacy. With their houses looted and being forced to make “donations” to the Japanese-controlled Overseas Chinese Association, many Peranakans were ruined economically. In addition many were forced to sell their remaining belongings to survive the hardships of occupation.36 Their situation did not improve in the post war year as the Straits Settlement was never re-established and Singapore became a separate crown colony. With Malacca and Penang joining the Malay Federation, the designation “Straits-Chinese” became a geo-political misnomer and the Peranakans, now severely economically disempowered, lost their symbolic and political capital. In addition, after Japanese occupation there emerged a strong national move towards Merdeka or Independence, which the Peranakans were reluctant to embrace. Joining the Malay Federation and becoming Malay citizens was seen by many Peranakans – who had considered themselves an elite group under the British – as beneath their dignity, and certainly likely to result in a loss of privilege. Under the heading “Let Us Stay British: Straits Chinese Sole Allegiance to the King”, published in The Straits Times on 16 September 1948, the Vice President of the Straits Chinese British Association of Singapore was reported to have demanded that the “Straits Chinese of Singapore be left alone and allowed to remain British, rather than be a part of any ‘Malayanisation’.” Peranakans preferred an alternative – isolationist – solution, with the SCBA calling for the secession of all former Straits Settlements from the Federation of Malaysia and the reconstitution of the Straits Settlements (comprising Malacca, Penang and Singapore) in order to secure the rights of the “sons of the soil.” The failure of this secessionist movement and the rapid rise of the left wing People’s Action Party (PAP) not only led to the complete downfall of the Peranakans politically, they were also viewed as unpatriotic and self-serving by others involved in the struggle for independence.37

Before World War II, “Babas” (the designation commonly used to refer to Chinese Peranakans) tried to strongly defend the exclusivity of their legally, politically and economically defined “Babaness.” But with Singapore’s independence their status had become so uncertain that many hid their cultural markers, refraining from speaking Baba Malay in public for fear of being ridiculed, and instead adopting a Chinese identity. From

36 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities. 162-3 37 Tan, The Baba of Melaka, 36; Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 9.

48 being a favoured community under the British, the Peranakans found themselves openly belittled, de-culturised and devitalised.38 The memory of Peranakan privilege and loyalty in the colonial era became a burden in post-colonial Singapore and, as a group, the Peranakans found symbolic capital inverted by negative association. Those Peranakans who continued to play leadership roles in Singapore distanced themselves from their roots and presented themselves as part of the modern English-speaking Chinese community who made up the new élite in Singapore’s development towards independence.

Lee Kuan Yew: Father of Modern Singapore, Master Strategist of the Game

Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, or Harry Lee as he was called from birth in 1923, was one such individual. His parents, Lee Chin Koon and Chua Jim Neo, were both from wealthy Peranakan families who lived in Singapore for generations.39 As was traditional amongst the Peranakans, Harry went to an English-speaking primary school and then into Singapore’s most prestigious selective high school, The , where he topped the Cambridge Senior exams across the entire Straits Settlement. His mother had intended to send him to Britain to enrol in an English university, but the outbreak of World War II prevented this, and Lee attended the local Raffles College instead. After the War Lee completed his undergraduate education at Cambridge University Law School.

Lee Kuan Yew describes the significance of his early English education in relation to his unquestioning acceptance of British rule in Singapore:

The superior status of the British in government and society was simply a fact of life. After all, they were the greatest people in the world. They had the biggest empire history had ever known, stretching over all time zones, across all four oceans and five continents. We learnt that at school.40 The prevailing doxa, especially amongst the English educated in Singapore, was reflected in Lee’s unquestioning belief that “the British were his natural superiors, and the benefactors of mankind.”41 Michael Barr investigated the syllabus presented to the young Lee during his education and interviewed Lee’s fellow students to conclude that “the

38 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 9. 39 Michael D. Barr, Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs Behind the Man (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), 8. 40 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (: Time Asia, 1998), 51. 41 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 51.

49 British Empire was presented by his teachers as the natural vehicle for the progress of mankind, and the assumptions of British superiority were explicit and all-pervasive.”42

At the time of the Second World War, it was firmly believed that Singapore was invincible under British rule. Lee Kuan Yew describes the shock and disbelief that followed the fall to the Japanese:

… The Japanese armies overran Singapore and some 90,000 Commonwealth troops, British, Indians and Australians tramped into captivity. I saw them tramping along the road in front of my house for three solid days – an endless stream of bewildered men who did not know what had happened, and what they were doing there in Singapore in any case. I was bewildered too. We were unprepared for this. We thought Singapore was an impregnable fortress and the British Navy was supreme. No one expected the Japanese to march down Southeast Asia and capture us. Nobody had warned us of this.43 During Japanese occupation, Lee Kuan Yew was in his early twenties. He enrolled in a Japanese language school, found employment working for the Japanese propaganda department decoding intercepted Allied intelligence, and made clear his capacity to adjust, adapt and make the most of situations as they arose.

Upon their return, the British found their position as the natural rulers of Singapore under question. Lee describes his reaction to their return and to foreign dominance in general:

… [the Japanese] made me and a whole generation like me determined to fight for freedom – freedom from servitude and foreign domination. I did not enter politics. They brought politics upon me. From that time onwards, I decided that our lives should be our own to decide. That we should not again be pawns and playthings to foreign powers.44 According to Turnbull, while the British forces were celebrated on their return to Singapore after Japanese occupation, their failure to protect Singapore had “shattered forever” the justification for colonial power.45 With the illusio regarding English superiority exposed, a new anti-colonial doxology developed. Lee Kuan Yew addressed this issue eloquently:

I learnt that no country or society can ever go back to the status quo ante, to what it was before. The British who came back were different people. Even the old hands who had departed as the Japanese came down the Peninsula, had

42 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 51. 43 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 11. 44 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 12. 45 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1988, 214.

50 changed their outlook and attitudes. They had lost respect because they had run away. The British could not re-establish their authority.46 On returning to Singapore with a law degree with the highest honours from Cambridge, Lee Kuan Yew took part in the anti-colonial movement that was pushing for an independent Singapore. He initially joined the SCBA as a life member and became the Singapore Branch secretary. However, upon realising the Association was resistant to the independence movement, remaining loyal to the British, Lee resigned and publicly admonished the organisation for being out of touch and doomed to becoming inconsequential and powerless.47 Lee then worked with unions as a legal advisor, and in 1954 founded the People’s Action Party (PAP) along with some of his most trusted Peranakan colleagues (such as Dr Toh Chin Chye and Dr Goh Keng Swee).

During this period, post-war Singapore suffered from high unemployment, inadequate housing and overcrowded slums, creating great sympathy for an underground communist movement called the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). The colonial government was reluctant to give up its strategically placed port and feared that, if Singapore gained independence, the Communist Party would claim power. This was possible because the communists had a popular following with non-English-speaking Chinese, who made up the bulk of Singapore’s population. Even more problematic was the fact that it was hard to “take on” the leaders of the MCP in public forums. During the Second World War they had worked with the British, fighting their common enemy, the Japanese, in the jungles of Malaysia, and had become celebrated national heroes.48

Lee Kuan Yew gained the backing of the colonial government as an appropriate candidate for Singapore’s leadership with his English education and non-communist sympathies. However, Lee showed his brilliance as a political strategist, and collaborated with members of the left who joined and supported his political party, allowing him to gain the vote of the non-English Chinese majority. The PAP campaign strategically belittled “English-educated” Singaporeans and promoted the interests of the “Chinese-educated” majority.49 Such clever manoeuvring resulted in Lee’s party winning the first general election in 1959 – a great irony given Lee’s background. Lee also enjoyed the support of the former colonial government and, once he was in power, the British helped rid

46 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 56. 47 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 177. 48 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 9. 49 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 9.

51 Singapore of all communist elements. This left no opposition to challenge the PAP, which has since won every general election. The sociologist Joseph Tamney describes how Lee’s strategies were perceived:

…[c]ritics called it cheating, admirers called it flexibility, neutrals called it political opportunism, but the fact is that it was a competent display of sustained dissimulation lasting nearly seven years and it was successful…50 The British slowly and reluctantly handed over control of the country, granting Singapore limited independence in 1959, with London still controlling the defence force and foreign policy. By 1963 Singapore had gained independence from the British through a merger with the Federation of Malaysia. Lee Kuan Yew had always believed that Singapore was too small and defenceless to survive on its own. However, after only two years, Singapore was forcibly expelled from the Federation because of racial issues, and became a sovereign nation in 1965. As the head of the suddenly independent Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP began a public campaign of survivalism. In line with this ideology Lee described the situation as follows:

Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it. Some 45 British colonies had held colourful ceremonies to formalise and celebrate the transfer of sovereign power from imperial Britain to their indigenous governments. For Singapore, 9 August 1965 was no ceremonial occasion. We had never sought independence. In a referendum less than three years ago, we had persuaded 70 per cent of the electorate to vote in favour of merger with Malaya. Since then, Singapore's need to be part and parcel of the Federation in one political, economic, and social polity had not changed. Nothing had changed – except that we were out. We had said that an independent Singapore was simply not viable. Now it was our unenviable task to make it work. How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?51 Once again Singapore experienced a hysteresis effect, resulting in the PAP immediately putting into place drastic and some would say draconian actions to ensure Singapore’s survival, demanding the absolute support of Singaporeans in the struggle to develop Singapore’s economy to ensure its survival in a hostile Malay world.

50 Joseph B. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul: Western Modernization and Asian Culture (Berlin: Gruyter & Co., 1995), 4. 51 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story, 22.

52 Post Colonial Singapore: Structured Structuring

As in the case of Lee Kuan Yew’s reforms in Singapore, Bourdieu suggests that governments can, over time, incrementally formulate their mandates to adopt all the appearance of naturalness where alternatives become simply unthinkable:

If the state is able to exert symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates itself simultaneously in objectivity, in the form of specific organizational structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity, in the form of mental structures and categories of perception and thought. By realizing itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out a long series of acts of intuition (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearance of the natural.52 As Singapore became an independent, single party nation practicing “guided democracy,” communist rioting and general confusion constantly caused civil unrest. Government leaders feared that the small nation was fast losing its economic supremacy as a trading centre in Asia. Lee Kuan Yew believed that if the government could provide the electorate with decent housing, employment and a better standard of living, it would keep communism and unrest at bay. Under Lee’s directives, the new government sought expert economic advice to pull Singapore out if its economic slump, and Lee invited Dr Winsemius, a Dutch industrialist, to provide the nation with an economic development plan.

Adopting the Winsemius plan, Singapore sought foreign investment and industrialisation under the newly created and powerful Economic Development Board (EDB). The focus was on moving Singapore from the post independent economic slump to economic prosperity, to be brought about by relying on high-technology industries such as quality cameras, electrical components and machine tools. By 1975, Singapore was slated to have 500 technologically sophisticated factories established. However, because of serious labour shortages, the goal was not met. To overcome the problem, the government devised educational programmes to train young men and women with the necessary skills. The emphasis in all schools was on technical education. Within one decade of independence Singapore had become an industrial powerhouse, a major financial centre and capital market of Southeast Asia. Dr Winsemius described the reasons behind the success of Singapore in an article in The Straits Times: -

52 Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 40.

53 In my opinion, it would be impossible to transplant the Singapore wonder elsewhere. I have given advice to the government of Greece and, for five years, the government of Portugal. It is senseless to launch an economic development programme in a country, which lacks political stability and does not have a government that sticks to that programme in the knowledge that, one day, it will be recognized and rewarded by the voters. … In our opinion Singapore has the basic assets for industrialization. Her greatest asset is the high aptitude of her people to work in manufacturing industries. They can be ranked among the best factory workers in the world.53 As the economic plan took shape, citizens of Singapore were able to see solid evidence of the government’s success, at least economically. The standard of living soared, the government provided free education and there was 100% employment. In order to continue to attract foreign investment, Lee Kuan Yew argued that Singapore must have strong and stable government, and with no real political opposition, the party tolerated nothing that would jeopardise the nation’s economic policy. Often the state’s methods were draconian, for example the forcible removal of citizens from their kampongs to sterile high-rise flats, as part of the housing development plan to help solve the problems of overcrowding and to clean up the slums. In a surprisingly short time, the authoritarian role of the government was accepted as normal. Lee, in 1986, articulates his understanding of the impact of the structures he put in place:

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yet, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters – who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think. That is another problem.54 In Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965–1990, John Clammer, sociologist and academic, suggests that Singapore represents one of the few society-wide attempts at total social planning, highlighting the high level of state control on Singaporeans’ lives:

… [f]ew societies have attempted social planning and regulation on the scale that Singapore has done – planning that extends from the management of the economy through fields of education, language usage, housing, transportation, the media and medicine, even to intimate areas such as family planning and mate selection.55

53 Kees Tamboer, “Albert Winseminus, ‘founding father’ of Singapore,” IIAS Newsletter 9, Summer 1996, accessed June 6, 2012, http://www,Iias.n9/soueasia/insemiu.html. 54 Tamney, The Struggle Over Singapore’s Soul, 77. 55 John Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965–1990: The cultural politics of pluralism in a multiethnic society (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1998), 1.

54 Bourdieu asserts that totalitarian institutions that seek to create “a new man” through the process of “deculturation” or “reculturation” place great emphasis on the most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners: “The whole trick of pedagogic reason lies precisely in the way it extorts the essential while seeming to demand the insignificant…”56 Bourdieu’s position is exemplified in the way Lee Kuan Yew is often criticised for his obsessive micro-level state control, from defining the permitted length of men’s hair to banning products such as chewing gum. These methods have, over time, contributed to the obedient and passive acceptance of authority, continually justified under the rationalisation that it is for the good of the nation, and that the nation should always come before the individual.

Echoing Bourdieu’s position on creating a “new man” in the face of Lee’s neo-colonial structuring of Singapore via the PAP, PuruShotam points out that Lee Kuan Yew quickly came to establish and represent a new élite. She questions:

How can a particular configuration of “nation” disguise an interested representation, which privileges some more than others? What complex of meanings can be carried through, as if it were in tune with the minds and hearts of a country’s diverse peoples, such that it prepares the way for the daily accomplishment and hence participation of its reproduction by “ordinary” men, women and children?57 PuruShotam argues that the PAP’s structurings are a result of an élitist taken-for- granted worldview of what is commonsensically perceived as necessary for the survival of their notion of “nation.” She also questions the PAP’s promise to establish a meritorious equitable society:

How is the larger pledge of meritocracy wedded to multiracialism, achieved - such that a populace can read itself as being advanced by a discourse that heightens attention to racial difference; that even motivates that same group(s) involved to perpetuate that very difference by which its marginality is constructed, and yet read it as a project of racial equality?58 Notions of race in post-colonial Singapore were purportedly derived from commonsense, as were the generalisations that formed its discourse and informed the production of social reality or race. According to John Clammer, issues of race are of great significance in Singapore and ethnicity enters deeply into personal identity: deciding who you are or what you can be in Singapore almost invariably involves a decision about race.

56 Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 94. 57 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms, 5. 58 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms, 13.

55 In addition, culture and its religious expression are mapped along ethnic lines. The distribution of political power (and even allocation of Housing Development Board dwelling units) is structured ethnically, as are policies about reproduction, education, language usage and the provision of places of worship. The economy itself is marked by ethnic stratification.59

Lee Kuan Yew: An Enduring Habitus

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Lee Kuan Yew originated from a privileged Peranakan community with all its attendant values and beliefs. As a shrewd political leader, Lee Kuan Yew was not often publicly drawn into discourse on issues that could cause him to be viewed as racist. However, on several occasions he made his views clear. In 1989 during a National Day rally he defended the government’s programme to encourage Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong on the basis that the birth rate of Singapore’s Chinese was lower than that of the Indians or Malays. He was determined that the Chinese majority be maintained in face of the threat of a backward shift in the economy. Barr provides the following account: “Without a hint of irony Lee also took the opportunity to assure Malays that they need not fear Hong Kong immigrants taking their jobs because the immigrants will all be high-income earners.”60

During question time after a lecture at the University of Singapore, Lee revealed his belief regarding the racial hierarchy of Asians. In response to the importance of the X- factor (genetic superiority) in racial development, Lee revealed his racist ideology:

Three women were brought to the Singapore General hospital, each in the same condition and each needing a blood transfusion. The first, a Southeast Asian was given the transfusion but died a few hours later. The second, a South Asian, was given a transfusion but died a few days later. The third, an East Asian, was given a transfusion and survived. That is the X factor in development.61 Lee, having been brought up within a privileged Peranakan household, establishes a belief or doxa on race relations based on Lee’s habitus with its attendant enduring disposition. Accordingly Barr states that no amount of intelligence can protect an individual from early belief systems. He analysis Lee’s response to the X factors:

underpinned by progressivism and elitism, threaded into an argument that is at the same time highly sophisticated and extraordinarily primitive - demonstrating

59 Clammer, Race and State, 11. 60 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 186. 61 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 186.

56 that a Western education and a brilliant mind are not defence against the unconscious demands of prejudice learnt in childhood.62 Bourdieu provides insights into the significance of Lee Kuan Yew’s enduring habitus steeped in colonial Orientalist doxa on race, where his Peranakan community were privileged over all other “natives.” While Lee Kuan Yew eventually distanced himself from the Peranakan community in Singapore (following their fall after supporting the colonial regime) he still bears the marks of his early élitist home environment. It may be argued, for example, that Lee’s views on race have provided him with a rationalisation for his Peranakan Chinese racial supremacy. However, given Singapore’s geopolitical position in the region, and the suspicion that Singapore would become an unwelcome satellite state of China in the Malay region, Lee ensured that Chinese chauvinism did not outwardly dominate discourse on Singapore’s racial management. In its place he established a more politically correct ideology, a “meritocracy,” which privileged those with access to an English education and social networks, so that they were to be fast tracked into Singapore’s booming state republic.

Race and racism were fundamental to colonial structures and to the same, commonsense notions on race which have been misrecognised, reproduced and reconfigured to suit the new ruling élites of Singapore, who are mostly English-educated Chinese. Supporting this argument, PuruShotam points out that removing the colonials does not mean the end of the reproduction of the structures that have been set up.

… [g]etting him[ the colonial] to pack his bags and leave was and is not tantamount to dismantling structures accomplished and maintained inclusively via the discourse of race. For the racial supremacy of the colonial masters was but one aspect, even if the dominant and most visible one, of a theory and practice that classified, evaluated and ranked colonially governed peoples as many differentiated races.63 Publicly, issues of race were considered highly sensitive and only addressed in terms of ensuring racial harmony, allowing Singapore uninterrupted economic development and continued success. Lee describes his priorities by drawing on the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s principles to make his point, indicating that Singaporeans had to have their basic economic needs met before considering the next stage of the country’s development:64

62 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 192. 63 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalisms, 6. 64 See Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1968).

57 A human being has first to satisfy his physical needs like food, water, clothing. Second, he seeks safety, to feel secure and protected. Third, he needs to belong, to be accepted. Fourth, he needs esteem and recognition. Fifth, he needs and seeks self-development, intrinsic fulfilment of his artistic, aesthetic, or creative nature. The lower of these five needs must first be satisfied before he seeks the higher needs.65 Lee made clear that his focus was first and foremost Singapore’s survival, and that equated to political stability and the growth of Singapore’s economy.

Conclusion Our objective is not territory, but trade; a great commercial emporium, a fulcrum… one free port in these seas must eventually destroy the spell of Dutch monopoly.66 This claim, by Sir Stamford Raffles made on the 10 June 1819, indicated his desire to break the Dutch monopoly on trade in the region, Sir Stamford Raffles established a factory on the and later negotiated the acquisition of Singapore for the British East India Company, establishing his now “official” role as founding father of colonial Singapore. Singapore had become the pearl of the British Empire, beating the odds to become the British colony’s most successful and lucrative strategic outpost. Within that context the Chinese Peranakans quickly become significant players in Singapore’s emerging field of economy. The British East India Company, and later the colonial Sir Stamford Raffles government, acknowledged the Peranakans as a discrete community, ascribing them with symbolic capital based on their perceived loyalty to the colonials and their enormous help in administrating early Singapore. The Singaporean Peranakans, mostly originating from Malacca, were seasoned at adapting to changing conditions, having survived and thrived during both Portuguese and Dutch colonisation. They were able to translate their symbolic capital into economic capital by creating trading and commercial opportunities under the British colonial regime taking advantage of the trust and goodwill they had been afforded.

As Singapore prospered and grew, the Peranakans grew into an élite community, enlarging their political and social capital alongside their economic capital. They established closed social and sports clubs and created élite organisations like the SCBA to look after their collective interests. Within Singapore’s overarching colonial field of power they became a dominated, dominant community clearly differentiated from the new

65 Tamney, The Struggle Over Singapore’s Soul, 18. 66 Kiong and Fee, eds., The Making of Singapore Sociology: Society and State, 2002, Times Media Press, 24.

58 migrant Chinese, and they continued to maintain and improve their position within Singapore’s colonial spaces until World War II and the Japanese occupation. With the fall of the British Empire, the structures that had supported the Peranakans disappeared. The Peranakans became entrenched as the “King’s Chinese” and, instead of progressing and adapting to the new movement for independence, resisted Merdeka and clung to their status as British subjects, alienating themselves from the rest of Singapore and Malaysia. With independence, the Peranakans became invisible, losing their symbolic capital along with their economic, social and political status. After independence, the Singapore government no longer recognised the Peranakan community, identifying them officially as Chinese and – through national education – forcing their children to learn Mandarin as their second language, diluting the value of the Baba Malay creole.

Whilst the labels Peranakan, Baba, and Straits-Chinese disappeared for a period after independence, some Peranakans were able to adapt and succeed under the new regime. As Rajaratnam, one of the pioneer members of the People’s Action Party noted, it was the English-speaking, educationally modern and highly qualified Babas who formed the core of the PAP.67 One of these young and adaptable Peranakans, Lee Kuan Yew, became the “official” founding father of modern independent Singapore. Lee rejected what he perceived as the ossified views of the entrenched colonial Peranakans. He was able to locate Singapore within a new paradigm, reproducing the authoritative non-discursive structures of colonial authority under a new regime of “nation-building” with a focus on political survival through the continued dominance of the economic field. The next chapter considers the establishment of the state’s overarching power structures that came to dominate Singapore’s social spaces, with the economy holding primary place within the state’s nation-building exercise.

67 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 49–50.

59 Chapter Three: Survival and Nation-building

In keeping with Bourdieu’s ideas of dominant and dominated fields, this chapter draws on a number of key commentators and their writings to consider the methods used by Singapore’s leadership to control and shape the development of the newly independent nation. Specifically, the chapter looks at events and mechanisms that influenced Singapore’s field of cultural production, including relevant developments within the dominant fields of politics and the economy. Carefully directed by the state, these combine to represent the overarching field of power and clearly influence the highly dominated field of cultural production. 1 Bourdieu intended the concept of the “field of cultural production” to have a wide relational meaning that takes into account the homologies or interrelatedness of the other fields, especially the more dominant ones such as those of politics, the economy, religion, and race.2 Of particular relevance in this case study are Singapore’s nation-building strategies and the management style of the People’s Action Party (PAP), which felt justified in its need to try to control the development of culture, rather than allow it to form naturally and autonomously. The chapter situates the field of cultural production historically from 1965 when Singapore was emerging as a new republic, and key aspects of Singapore’s culture (such as the country’s racial dynamics) were considered too sensitive to leave to chance or open for public discourse for fear of further destabilising the country.3

Unlike many other new independent nations, such as Indonesia or India, Singapore did not seek independence but was propelled into it. Lee Kuan Yew was captured on television theatrically moved to tears as he announced Singapore’s expulsion from the Federation of Malaysia after only two and a half years. He had fought “all of his adult life” to attain membership, under the belief that it was essential for Singapore’s survival.4 The region had few natural resources and as a disconnected multi-ethnic society, lacking defense support from Britain and with an economy dependent largely upon trade – Lee described the idea of an independent Singapore as a political joke.5 Singapore began its

1 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 37–39. 2 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 31–33. 3 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 26. 4 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819-1988, 287. 5 James Minchin, No Man is an Island: A Portrait of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 163.

60 independence as a nation state in crisis, a situation the state was able to turn around and utilize to full advantage to control Singapore’s social spaces.

Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP believed that Singapore’s survival was based on economic recovery and growth, and this would only happen if Singaporean citizens were willing and able to adopt a new and progressive set of attitudes, values and perspectives, in essence the inculcation of a new way of thinking. A key academic and commentator on the evolution of Singapore’s survival theme, Beng-Huat Chua, provides some insight into what the expulsion from the Malaysian Federation meant for Singapore arguing that the loss of a common market, called into question the very survival of Singapore as a city-state. He also accounts for the PAP’s decision to adopt an ideology of survivalism arguing that it represented the PAP’s response to a combination of a hostile, anti-Chinese regional environment, the communist threat and racial riots in 1964. According to Beng-Huat Chua, the vulnerability of Singapore’s national security with the withdrawal of the British military, led the PAP to “thematise the historical conditions into an ideology of survival.”6 The situation in Singapore in the 1950s was indeed dire according to economist Albert Winsemius:

It was bewildering. There were strikes about nothing. There were communist- inspired riots almost every day and everywhere… After a couple of months the pessimism within our commission reached appalling heights. We saw how a country can be demolished by unreal antithesis. The general opinion was: Singapore is going down the drain; it is a poor little market in a dark corner in Asia.7 Beng-Huat Chua asserts that the “crisis mentality” that prevailed led to an economic pragmatism which in turn led to an ideology that privileged collective welfare over individual rights, and ultimately to Singapore’s communitarian democracy, commonly described as “limited democracy,” “guided democracy,” “Asian style democracy” or the “nanny state.”8 Beng-Huat Chua suggests that Singapore’s communitarian democracy is justified by the state on the bases that a Western-style democracy could never succeed unaltered within a racially unstable, post-colonial, newly independent Asian state.9

Supporting Beng-Huat Chua’s position, political scientist Raj Vasil argues that given the formidable challenges facing Singapore during early independence, Lee Kuan Yew and his

6 Beng-Huat Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17–18. 7 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 37. 8 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 19. 9 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 200–201.

61 colleagues could not have followed other Asian countries to establish a fully-fledged Western style democracy. In such a context Singapore, he argues, had little choice but to establish a “limited democracy that would actually work.” Vasil points out that Lee took advantage of the legacy the PAP kept the colonial policy and laws, such as the Internal Security Act, which continued to allow Singaporeans and their political and other organisations only limited rights and freedoms, and imposed a government that was all powerful.10

Chan Heng Chee’s monograph, Singapore: The Politics of Survival 1965-1967, provides a detailed account of the events before and after the merger with Malaysia and outlines the rationale that then led to Singapore’s survival ideology. Chan points out that, while not explicitly stating this, PAP leaders seemed to equate the survival of Singapore with the survival of PAP values for Singapore.11 Once again making clear the high level of state control Lee imposed on Singaporeans in order to realise the PAP’s vision to successfully positioning Singapore as a newly formed sovereign state within a hostile region.

By contrast, Michael D. Barr’s academic study of Lee Kuan Yew critically examines his life and career, and points out that Lee believed that survival and stability in Singapore could only be achieved through forward thinking and progress, bringing with it the creation of jobs and the rewards of economic prosperity. 12 With better education, improved medical systems, better housing, and the promise of a better life for the next generation, the population Lee believed would be far less likely to cause political and social problems.

Lee’s own memoirs, The Singapore Story in 1998, and in 2000, From Third World to First World: The Singapore Story 1965-2000, provide candid accounts of his views of Singapore’s development, and his role in it; and it becomes clear that the Lee Kuan Yew story is the Singapore story. Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP, under the national ideology of a multiracial meritocracy within an “Asian Style democracy,” wasted no time in executing their progressive vision and implementing massive social change. Over the next fifteen years, the PAP implemented a range of pragmatic policies, in keeping with its communitarian style democracy. These policies demanded the sacrifice of personal freedom under the political ideology of “Asian values.”13 As a result the community was positioned as more important

10 Vasil, Governing Singapore, 226. 11 Chan Heng Chee, Singapore: The Politics of Survival 1965-1967 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1. 12 See Barr’s account of Lee Kuan Yew’s world view in his work Lee Kuan Yew. 13 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 82.

62 than the individual, consensus was privileged over contention, and individual freedom was subordinated to duty.14

Economic Dominance: EDB and Singapore, Inc. The EDB is neither the head nor the heart of the system but best thought of as its energizer.15 Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP are now legendary for their success at turning Singapore from a poor little market in a dark corner in Asia into a regional and international player in the global economy. No country has developed so quickly: in thirty years Singapore moved from third world status nation with per capita GDP of $500 US to having reached “almost” first world status with a per capita GDP of $15,000.16 Singapore’s success swiftly become the envy of surrounding nations, and is still held up as a model of Asian-style economic development. It has rapidly progressed from a low-wage, low skilled, manufacturing country to a high-tech nation investing significant resources into the skills and education of its people. Because of the speed and breadth of its economic success, Singapore is often referred to as one of the “Asian Tigers.”17

Central to Singapore’s success has been the Economic Development Board (EDB) – one of the most influential and powerful government agencies of the Singapore government. As discussed briefly in Chapter 2, in the late 1950s before independence, Singapore invited the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank to analyse what Singapore needed to do to become an economically successful republic. As noted earlier the UN Survey Mission, headed by Albert Winsemius, a Dutch shipping industry specialist and former director-general for industrialisation in the Netherlands, strongly backed the view that unemployment was the primary problem. Building on this, the Winsemius plan recommended that investors be attracted to create a labour-intensive manufacturing base that would provide jobs and training for Singaporeans. Central to the recommendations of the Winsemius plan was the creation of an Economic Development Board with the following attributes:

14 Choon Ban Kah, Anne Pakir and Tong Chee Kiong, eds., Imagining Singapore (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2004), 81. 15 Dr Lester Thurow as cited in Edgar H. Schein, Strategic Pragmatism: The ’s Economic Development Board (London, The MIT Press, 1996), ix. 16 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 54. 17 Terence Chong, “Introduction: The Role of Success in Singapore’s National Identity,” in Management of Success: Singapore Revisited, Terence Chong, ed. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010), 18.

63 1) that the Economic Development Board should be a non-political body; 2) That it should be many sided, having on the Board representatives of all economic sectors in Singapore. 18 The PAP established the EDB in 1961 as a statutory board, enabling the government to intervene, but at the same time allowing the EDB a level of independence for its activities.19 As a new board, the EDB initially implemented plans to create jobs through attracting labour-intensive manufacturing companies, and to develop a climate of collaboration between labour and management that would attract foreign investors.

The establishment of the EDB took place, just prior to independence, under the assumption that Singapore would need rapid economic development once it achieved self- rule. Originally headed by , one of Lee Kuan Yew’s most trusted advisors, the EDB became the most influential government agency in Singapore, a position it maintains to this day. This is a point underscored by Lee Kuan Yew who commented that he and the PAP gave the EDB his “best man” because he felt that the PAP needed to generate sound economic success rapidly in order to continue to win the electorate’s vote.

The key to Singapore was to put economics over politics. If politics leads while people are still hungry, they will simply look for new leaders; but if you figure out how to feed the people, the leaders who succeed in doing that will gain credibility and will succeed in building the society.20 Lee gave the EDB enormous power in order to ensure that business, labour, and government actively collaborated with each other in fulfilling the common goal of building the nation. This centrally controlled partnership has often been referred to as “Singapore, Inc.”, a term coined by Edgar H. Schein, former professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. In 1991 Schein was commissioned by the Singapore Government to assess the EDB’s efforts to date and to devise a plan in order to reveal how economic development had been successfully promoted, and how it could be continued and improved upon. The outcome of Schein’s research and analysis culminated in a book which examines the cultural history of the EDB and its contribution to Singapore’s apparent economic miracle. Schein maintained that underlying Singapore’s economic development were some unique unchallenged assumptions generated by Lee Kuan Yew and supported by his party:

18 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 32-33 19 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 37–38. 20 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 164.

64 (1) That economic development must precede political development, (2) that long- range successful economic development could only occur if there was political stability, and (3) that political stability could be achieved and maintained only by firm but benign government controls that steer all segments of society.21 The EDB was, according to Schein, defined to investors as the “lead agency, the coordinator and facilitator across all other government agencies, working with the philosophy of minimizing internal and external boundaries.”22 He describes the underlying assumption about the role of the state in economic development: “…state run capitalism requiring inter-organisational collaboration was considered vital in order to provide the incentives and infrastructure…”23 The concept of the EDB as a one-stop agency hinged on such collaborative relationships. A former chairman articulated it as follows; The EDB must have influence over other government agencies, i.e. must be perceived and function as the most senior coordination mechanism for economic development.”24

Schein discovered how different government agencies came to support “Singapore, Inc.”, and described how the EDB methodically built relationships using the following three approaches:

1) infiltration, by which I mean either that EDB alumni become key members of the management or various other agencies as their career progresses, or current EDB managers hold joint appointments in both the EDB and other agencies; 2) creating EDB babies, that is new government boards have actually been the result of concepts and needs identified by the EDB itself or were spin-offs from the EDB; 3) stimulation or animation, in that the EDB views itself a pioneer who gets things started, not as an organization that actually runs things. But clearly, the key underlying assumption continues to be that things work best if you work in a partnership collegial relationship with others in the service of higher-order goals such as Singapore Inc.25 As Schein’s comments demonstrate, the EDB’s role as the dominant government agency was to identify the growth area within the market across any field in support of Singapore’s overall economic growth. Once such an area was identified, the EDB provided the expertise to set up the project and then allowed others to take over the implementation and on-going maintenance of the project. Through this method the EDB formed strong homologies between fields in its creation of EDB “babies”. Schein illustrates the power that the EDB mobilised through collaboration between institutions within the private and

21 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 164. 22 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 168. 23 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 166. 24 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 167 25 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 168.

65 public sectors with an account of an industrial incident told by a subordinate to Hon Sui Sen, the EDB’s first Chairman:26

…[A] textile company […] had a consistent pattern of difficult labour relationships partly because communist agitators had infiltrated the factory and were periodically inciting strikes. Hon asked one of the senior officers to settle the strike, but the officer had no idea of how to accomplish that. He asked Hon, “How do you want me to do that?” To which Hon replied, “It’s easy. Let me show you.” He called up the bank that had the major outstanding loans to this particular company and had the bank pull the loans. This immediately shut down the company and put everyone out of work. It permitted the company to hire a brand new work force and start all over again. The lesson was not forgotten on the communists and, as Hon put it: “If you strike on ideological grounds instead of on economic grounds, you will be shut down and out.”27 This scenario makes clear both the ruthlessness and the power the EDB could exercise to ensure nothing stood in the way of Singapore’s survival and economic progress. Established as the leading force behind Singapore’s economic trajectory, the EDB provided the PAP leadership with expert information for implementation of their vision and policies. As importantly the source of power behind the agency was Lee Kuan Yew – a sign of the lack of EDB’s independence – and of Lee’s belief that Singapore’s economic development could not be left to the free market.

This same type of thinking inflected Lee’s management of Singapore, which under his leadership was subjected to a high degree of authoritarian regimentation. He was not afraid to implement the Internal Security Act when individuals hampered Singapore’s economic directives, incarcerating them without trial for up to two years, and creating a culture of fear, to minimise open criticism of the state.28 Lee Kuan Yew believed all state action had to be geared toward attaining economic success and was unapologetic about not adopting a totally Western democracy, which he claimed would not work when it came to building the new nation.

Housing the nation Lee Kuan Yew’s approach to housing serves as an example of the depth of thinking, the level of control, and the deliberate force with which he and his agencies were prepared to act to bring about change.29 In his 2005 analysis of the economy, The Social Structure of the

26 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 45. 27 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 63. 28 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819-1988, 322. 29 The first Chairman of the Housing Development Board, Lim Kim San, who was an extremely successful businessman, once recruited by the PAP, left his business for two years and refused to

66 Economy, Bourdieu asserts: “There are, no doubt, few markets that are not only so controlled as the housing market is by the state, but indeed so truly constructed by the state.” Bourdieu points out that in the 1960s the French government introduced a neoliberal policy that “allowed access to the ownership of a single family house as a way of attaching new homeowners to the established order by ensuring that each had the individual right to acquire a minimum patrimony.”30 In Singapore, housing was also used as a tool to shape behaviour and thinking, and the way in which the Singapore government used its power to control is made clear through an understanding of the Singapore Housing Development Board programme, which also began in 1960. In just three decades, the programme involved moving thousands of people from their traditional living arrangements in kampongs into newly built high-rise government housing: between 1965 and 1995 the percentage of the population who moved to government housing estates increased from 10% to over 85%.31 The programme could easily have been seen as a ruthless displacement of whole communities and their way of life. However, through careful implementation, the programme was perceived positively because it successfully addressed a number of important political goals: an acute shortage of housing, the poor state of the country’s many slums, and increased employment in the construction industry.32

In the same period, shortly after independence, the government also introduced a Home Ownership Scheme, subsidising the cost of first-home ownership, an incentive that has given Singapore one of the highest global rates of private home ownership. This scheme engendered the belief in Singaporeans that they had a real stake in the country’s prosperity, and strengthened loyalty and ownership in the newly formed nation.33 Concerned about the possibility of creating racial enclaves, the PAP attempted to address racial harmony via the housing scheme by ensuring that all government housing estates contained a representative racial mix, and in 1989 passed legislation to ensure its maintenance when units were resold privately.34 As part of a nation-wide courtesy campaign, the state also promoted the kind of

draw a salary—an indication of the self-sacrificing nature the government encouraged from the élite in order to help develop Singapore in those founding days. 30 Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structure of the Economy, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 89. 31 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 129. 32 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 149. 33 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 129. 34 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 114.

67 behaviour it expected of people living in housing development buildings (such as not urinating in lifts, and not peering into the windows of neighbours’ homes).35

Culture Of Control Although the PAP’s ideology of survival justified tight control of all aspects of economic, political and social life, including everything that might emerge from the field of cultural production, there was, at least initially, limited understanding of the potential value of a national culture in Singapore’s push towards economic growth and development. Though the PAP felt that there was a need to inculcate a sense of solidarity among Singapore’s disparate citizens, this form of “national culture” was not to be left to develop organically. A history of transient migration had left the island with a small and powerless indigenous Malay community and a large population of poorly educated ethnic Chinese.36 This scenario, in a tiny island republic surrounded by large and potentially threatening Islamic nations, together with crippling communist riots in the 1950s and 1960s, left Singapore’s leaders believing that the nation was not ready to enter into a public discourse on national identity. For this reason, the PAP and Singapore’s political leaders actively discouraged debate on what constituted Singapore’s “national culture,” and started to establish the formal mechanisms to control the space where this discourse was to emerge.37

One of the first things the PAP did to control the establishment of a national culture was to set up a Ministry of Culture in 1959 aimed at broadly promoting a national cultural pattern. Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, one of Lee Kuan Yew’s most trusted lieutenants, was appointed as its first Minister. Soon after his appointment Rajaratnam announced that he believed that “culture means the total accumulation of material objects, ideas, symbols, beliefs, sentiments, values and social and political forms which are passed from one generation to another.”38 His definition, not unlike Bourdieu’s notion of cultural production, suggested the likely breadth of governmental involvement when it came to “imagining” the new Singapore citizen. 39

Rajaratnam, a former journalist, was the wordsmith and media propagandist for the PAP, and his key speeches have been collected into two texts: Chan Heng Chee and Obaid

35 Lim Siew Yeen, “Singapore’s Courtesy Campaign,” SingaporeInfopedia, , accessed October 16, 2012, http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_162_2004-12-30.html. 36 Chan and Haq, S. Rajaratnam: the Prophetic and the Political, 139–140. 37 Fee and Kiong, The Making of Singapore Sociology: Society and State, 2. 38 Chan and Haq, S. Rajaratnam, 140. 39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6.

68 Ul Haq’s S. Rajaratnam: The Prophetic and the Political and Kwa Chong Guan’s S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality. Both were written as tributes following Rajaratnam’s death in 2006, providing insights into the rationale behind the way he shaped Singapore’s emerging field of cultural production as Singapore’s first Minister of Culture.

In keeping with Benedict Anderson’s seminal work Imagined Communities and his suggestion of the importance of tangible, symbolic national markers,40 it is important to note that Rajaratnam began his role as Minister of Culture by replacing the Union Jack and God Save the Queen with the creation of Singapore’s own national flag and anthem. In so doing he reproduced the nation–building logos of the colonial regime. Beyond the creation of these state symbols, Rajaratnam worked as the ideologist for the Party, developing, reinforcing and making palatable the prevailing doxa of PAP directives, and harnessing support for the collective fight for survival. For example, in 1966, Rajaratnam outlined (in a government press release) why the PAP “harped” on the “survival theme,” which he argued was not a “political gimmick to rally support for the government.”41 He suggested that, if survival had not been a priority, the communists would not have been stifled in the 1950s. The PAP, Rajaratnam argued, were anticipating Singapore’s problems and ensuring survival for the next four decades, rather than simply thinking of how to win the next election:

In a nutshell our problem is how to make sure that a small island with a teeming population and no natural resources to speak of, can maintain, even increase, its living standards and also enjoy peace and security in a region marked by mutual jealousies, internal violence, economic disintegration and great power conflicts.42

Culture as Values As the next four decades unfurled, the PAP slowly changed its attitudes towards the significance and role of “culture” – in particular grasping the ways value could be used to support the creation of national identity. For example, in his work, Asianising Singapore: The PAP’s Management of Ethnicity, Raj Vasil addresses the PAP’s move to create a cultural counterbalance against unwanted Western values, such as rampant individualism and disregard for authority. These values were seen as an unwelcome outcome of the nationwide movement to reinforce English as the language of education and business. Vasil describes the government’s effort to counterbalance this by introducing a set of Asian

40 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 81. 41 Chan and Haq, S. Rajaratnam, 200. 42 Chan and Haq, S. Rajaratnam, 201.

69 sensibilities, first in the form of and then, given Singapore’s large Indian and Malay communities, a more widely acceptable set of “Asian values” such as community before self, which were in line with the state’s “limited democracy.”43

Vasil also describes how, after independence, there was suppression of real debate on a number of “out of bounds” topics. 44 Vasil argues this included race, language, religion and education. According to Vasil, the PAP’s approach to the management of ethnicity, devised during the mid 1960s, emerged without any real public consultation or involvement: the constraints of policy “were of such a sensitive nature that they could not at all be discussed and debated publicly.” Further, Singaporeans were seen as not being “capable of considering the critical ethnic issues facing their state with rational and good sense.”45

Lee Kuan Yew believed that any extreme manifestation of ethnic tension and conflict could easily destroy the new republic. At the same time he felt that it was impossible to impose a monoculture on the diverse population of Singapore with its Chinese majority, and Malay and Indian minority groups.46 Racial and religious riots were still fresh in the memory of Singaporeans so that it was imperative to focus on uniting the country by developing a national ideology.

In keeping with the significance of race relations in Singapore, sociologist John Clammer’s case study, Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965-1990, posits that the single most important feature in Singapore’s social structures is the state-driven ethnic patterning of the whole society.47 He comments:

Ethnicity enters deeply into personal identity: deciding who you are or what you can be in Singapore almost invariably involves a decision about race. Culture and its religious expression is mapped along ethnic lines. The distribution of political power (and even allocation of Housing Development Board dwelling units) is structured ethnically, as are policies about reproduction, education, language usage and the provision of places of worship.48 Clammer argues that, in terms of cultural politics, ethnicity in Singapore is the means by which the complex issues that encompass religion, personal identity and culture were condensed and simplified for the purpose of political management and compliance.49 This

43 Vasil, Governing Singapore, 226. 44 Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (New York: Routledge, 2006), 159. 45 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 20. 46 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 27. 47 Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, 1965-1990, vii. 48 Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, 1965-1990, 11. 49 Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, 1965-1990, 13.

70 is manifest in the recurring doxa or Orientalist values, evident in the division of Singaporeans into clearly defined Chinese, Malay, Indian and “Other” racial grouping as indicated on their name card. This simple structure is reproduced in many areas of Singapore’s society, including the logic of the collection within the Asian Civilisations Museum, as will be discussed later in this study.

Collective Misrecognition

To understand why Singapore society appears to have reacted with compliance to such high levels of governmental control, even on seemingly trivial issues such as chewing gum or flushing public toilets, it is necessary to register the all-pervasive impact of the government’s constant reminders about economic survival. Lily Zubaidhah Rahim describes how the PAP leaders exploited the insecurities of all Singaporeans by constant reminders of the island’s small size, its limited pool of talent, lack of natural resources, and economic vulnerabilities. Potential cultural contamination from the West was stressed, and the inherent vulnerability of a predominantly affluent Chinese nation in a potentially hostile Malay region. To illustrate this point Rahim quotes Lee Kuan Yew who stated: “[W]hat took 25 years to build could be destroyed in two minutes.”50 She further asserts that the PAP’s ongoing doxa of crisis discourse and its emphasis of the fragility of the state and its economy have nurtured a latent insecurity and uncertainty amongst Singaporeans. This carefully managed fear, according to Rahim, has helped legitimise the PAP government’s role in determining what is best for Singapore’s national interest, and accounts for the willingness of the population to accept the high level of governmental control.

Like Rahim, Vasil asserts that the Singapore government has been all-powerful. He argues that in Singapore’s formative years the PAP integrated the civil service and trade unions, creating strong homologies between these fields, to ensure they worked with the state to achieve national objectives. Rahim suggests that the state enjoyed widespread support from the Singaporean people based on “its spectacular success in the social and economic spheres,” to the extent that Singaporeans were willing to exchange levels of personal freedom for financial security for themselves and their families. 51 This logic (“we must be cruel to be kind”; “we are the only ones qualified to do this”) was supported through the misrecognition that the PAP’s political survival was centrally linked to

50 Lily Zubaidah Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 33. 51 Vasil, Governing Singapore, 74.

71 Singapore’s survival. As Lee Kuan Yew boldly stated: “I make no apologies that the PAP is the government and the government is the PAP.”52

Culture Moves to the Inner Circle When Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP won a majority and formed the government, taking power in 1959, they believed that the reputation of Asian cities was distorted by stereotypical perceptions of dirt, crime, instability, and corruption. 53 Under the British, Singapore had developed something of a reputation as a bawdy, dirty city, and Lee became obsessive in his efforts to present the new Singapore in a different light. As foreign investors were needed, Singapore had to be attractive to them, and that meant creating an environment that would immediately be perceived not only as stable but also as clean, safe and efficient. From the point of view of the leadership, the population had to learn fast how to create such an environment, and that meant developing detailed incentives and controls, one of which was to spread the use of English, as a global language, throughout Singaporean society.

By the mid 1980s Singapore had achieved full employment and an enhanced standard of living.54 However, with Singapore’s rapid introduction to the global market and the opening up of the country to the outside influences of the “Western Other,” there came unexpected outcomes that were not so warmly welcomed by Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP. Lee grew to believe that to be good citizens, Singaporeans needed to retain their distinctive identities and cultural moorings. The dominance of English and English-stream schools had rapidly begun to widen the spread of Western values, the Western way of life and related attitudes among young Singaporeans, and caused a considerable erosion of commitment to their different languages, cultures and heritages. The rapidly Westernizing environment of Singapore was creating serious side effects for the PAP, such as a large new class of “ugly” Singaporeans who showed little regard for Asian values and who were increasingly acquisitive.55 Lee Kuan Yew describes the events he witnessed at a People’s Defense Forces celebration where a television set was donated to the community. Two young representatives of the PDF, one English-educated and one Chinese-educated, gave their votes of thanks. Lee Kuan Yew recounts the contrasting response from the two People’s Defense Force representatives:

52 Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma, 30. 53 Diane K. Mauzy, Singapore Politics under the People's Action Party (London: Routledge, 2002), 5. 54 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 88. 55 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 60.

72 …[T]he English-educated said, “Now our evenings won’t be so dull…” Then the Chinese-educated chap stood up and expressed his thanks in Chinese. …he wanted to thank the community and the elders for taking an interest in them…. [declaring]that this is a demonstration of the growing rapport between the citizenry and the armed forces of our young Republic.56 Lee Kuan Yew was stunned by the stark difference in the two responses. One English- speaking student he perceived as frivolous, and the other Chinese-speaking student, he viewed as deeply respectful. He attributed these contrasting responses and their implied values as linked fundamentally to language and believed that the more appropriate behaviour had come from the Chinese-speaking student who had retained links to his Chinese cultural heritage and values. Lee saw these as

… the toughness of a people… they have backbone, which you cannot break. If you get an emasculated, de-culturalised group you can put them through the mincing machine and they will come out regular sausages length. This is what I fear is happening to two-thirds of my population.57 Lee went on to explain that this event was pivotal in initiating the PAP’s national drive to protect Singaporeans against the negative effects of the English language and its associated individualistic Western attitudes. The solution, he argued, was to be found in the promotion of traditional Confucian or Asian values.

Lee Kuan Yew is renowned for his capacity to change direction: the shift in his understanding is evident from his change in attitude towards the full–scale adoption of the English language to support the economy through the inculcation of Asian values. From his original progressive paradigm with no time to look back at history and culture, Lee undertook an about-face. The need to be at the leading edge of global market forces would, Lee decided, be achieved with a return to “Asian values.” From this point onwards, the symbolic value of Singapore’s cultural fields had greater currency. The government realised that it could harness culture in order to further shape and control the development of Singapore’s society, and the cultural fields began to play a much more significant role than just providing Singapore with national symbols. Cultural fields now began to be utilised to prevent Singapore’s acculturation in Western values. Lee Kuan Yew boldly affirmed his views on the importance of Singaporeans retaining their Asian values, and stated in 1971 during his closing address as Chairman of the Commonwealth Conference (attended by the Queen and the Heads of the Commonwealth governments) that “cultural ballast, the value

56 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 153. 57 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 153.

73 patterns, the social discipline, the organizational framework of effective government … are crucial ingredients of national success.”58

This desire to instill collective Asian values proved enduring, and resulted in a number of major government policies. For example, Lee Kuan Yew, who was aware of the notion that language was a carrier of culture and values, brought language, education and religion under strict government control. One of the higher profile initiatives was the 1997 Speak Mandarin Campaign, designed to help the Chinese majority retain access to their heritage and culture and provide a allowing communication between the different Chinese dialect groups. The Speak Mandarin Campaign followed a 1978 report from the Ministry of Education, which stated that the large-scale move towards English was creating a risk of deculturalisation. The Speak Mandarin Campaign was also designed to inculcate Confucian values within the Chinese majority. Later, the language policy was expanded with the introduction of a “mother tongue” as a second compulsory language for all students in schools based on race, such as Tamil for Indian students, Malay for Malay students, Mandarin for Chinese.

Another campaign was the mandatory Religious Knowledge Programme developed in secondary schools in 1982. This programme aimed to create racial tolerance through awareness, and replaced an earlier programme introducing Confucianism, considered to privilege the . However, the programme backfired completely: instead of creating greater religious tolerance, it emphasised differences between religious groups, and encouraged fundamentalist sentiments. The government swiftly abandoned the programme, replacing it with subjects on civics and moral education, and in 1989 passed the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, which allowed the government to restrain religious leaders whose words or actions threatened religious harmony.

In 1980 the was introduced for gifted Chinese-speaking children, designed to create a new generation of leadership for a Singapore inculcated with an Asian value system. The state, suspicious that Malays and Indians were demonstrating stronger adherence to their “mother” cultures, ensured that twelve of the best Chinese schools taught English as a first language but retained high standards in Chinese. However, in 1987, a National Education Policy was established, using English as the medium of instruction and the “mother tongue” as a compulsory second language. Education was now clearly

58 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 152.

74 seen as a means of controlling the development of Singapore society with the aim of furthering its overarching economic goals.59

After this period of experimenting with education, religion and language, the government took a bolder step towards the articulation of a unified national identity led by Brigadier-General Yeo, the Minister of State Finance and a leading intellectual in the PAP.60 In 1989, the Party released the National Ideology (which was later downplayed because of its overt Confucian ethics and perceived Chinese communitarianism), followed in January 1991 by a White Paper on Shared Values.61 The Shared Values paper emphasised Singapore’s multiracial and multicultural society, and within it Lee Kuan Yew acknowledged that the heritage of Singaporeans was diverse and could neither be totally reconciled nor be reduced to a single comprehensive doctrine:

We need to respect the great religions and cultures to which different groups of Singaporeans belong. Each religion or culture encompasses many enduring values, but unfortunately we cannot use any single one of them as the basis for building a common Singaporean identity, without alienating the other groups.62 The White Paper posited that the way out of this problem was to identify values that were common to all major groups in Singapore, which drew on each of these heritages.63 Five tenets were offered as a basis for developing shared values that conceded some individual freedom while supporting the state’s Asian style democracy:

Nation before community and society above self Family as the basic unit of society Regard and community support for the individual Consensus instead of contention Racial and religious harmony.64 The White Paper and its “Shared Values” provided evidence of the state’s efforts to create a Singapore united more by its culture than its economic success. The desire to create such values was driven by the general concern that the dominance of the English language and economic success had made the country more like a Western nation, while traditional values were being undermined. The official fear was that Singapore was fast becoming a more individualistic and less respectful culture, aligned with the “Other,” the

59 Jason Tan Tee and Ng Pak Tee, eds. Thinking Schools, Learning Nation: Contemporary Issues and Challenges (Singapore: Prentice Hall, Pearson Education South Asia, 2008), 1. 60 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 81. 61 Singapore Government, Shared Values, White Paper, January 6, 1991, 3. 62 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 81. 63 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 82. 64 Singapore Government, Shared Values, 3.

75 West, life patterns that the state requested Singaporeans to work together to combat. Like so many aspects of Singaporean life, culture now found itself as the focus of government control, and the government decided that they would prefer to control the development of a Singaporean culture and its attendant national identity than allow it to develop naturally.65

Conclusion This review of the key strategies of Singapore’s post-independence period makes it clear that the PAP created a compelling “ideology of survivalism,” and that this played out within Singapore’s social spaces where the field of cultural production evolved. The state constructed Singapore as a vulnerable new nation surrounded by threats. Political stability, a strong economy, and central control were the keys to its survival in the region. With this premise in place, the government justified the need for a communitarian or Asian style democracy that placed the collective interests of Singaporeans before individual freedom. As the new nation emerged, the meta-field of power (led by the all-powerful Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP party), came to dominate Singapore’s social spaces by repackaging colonial mechanisms of public control, with a ruthless concern for economic pragmatism. During the early period of independence, Singapore’s field of cultural production was viewed as being both too sensitive to allow public discourse, and immaterial in any direct sense in the pursuit of economic goals. “Culture” was therefore subordinated to the agenda of political stability, and the state repackaged and further simplified colonial structures in order to manage race relations. This involved formalising the neatly compartmentalised racial categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other – with their associated Orientalist doxology and racial hierarchy. However, with Singapore’s successful push into the global market place, a fear developed in response to the influence of unwanted “Western” values, and for the first time the government felt the need to create some form of cultural ballast. So began the introduction of state-sanctioned “shared Asian values” that focused on the traditional cultures or ancient civilisations from which Singapore’s migrant community originated. The task of controlling Singaporean culture and these shared national values was to become the focus of Lee Kuan Yew’s successor, Goh Chock Tong, and the second- generation leadership. As Singapore moved into the 1990s, the field of cultural production would become much more important in what became known as “The Next Lap” of social development.

65 Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, 1965-1990, 4.

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Chapter Four: Constructing Singapore’s Fields of Cultural Production

Introduction This chapter demonstrates that Singapore’s field of cultural production belongs to what Bourdieu describes as a “dominant dominated” field and, as such, is highly susceptible to the influences of, or heteronomous to, the more dominant fields of economy and politics. While this is not an unusual phenomenon in any national economy, what is remarkable in the case of Singapore is the pervasiveness with which the state uses its control of the overarching field of power, resulting in complex, subtle and deliberate effects that make a decisive impact on the collective lives of Singaporeans. State power focuses on economic imperatives, framed in the field of politics and justified by the misrecognition that Singapore’s very survival is reliant on its continued economic success. This structural framing requires compliance from citizens. It also means that the state, having recognised the potential of Singapore’s field of cultural production, appropriates, directs and constructs it as subservient to the dominant fields of politics and the economy.

The chapter draws on key academic responses that highlight the extent of state control in Singapore’s field of cultural production, and also the government’s attempts to control and manufacture creativity and innovation rather than allowing it to develop naturally.

The Genesis of Singapore’s Cultural Fields As discussed in the previous chapter, after the 1960 race riots that occurred during Singapore’s move towards independence, the new state republic was sharply aware of the sensitivities that existed around questions of culture and cultural identity. At that time, the Ministry of Culture, led by S. Rajaratnam, was primarily concerned with managing the relationship between the different ethnic communities in Singapore and establishing a sense of nationhood. The following objectives of the newly established Ministry of Culture spell out the role it was intended to play in this instance: to unashamedly support national state driven agendas.

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The Ministry’s objectives were:

 The creation of a sense of national identity  The elimination of communal divisions and attitudes  The propagation of democratic values, conducive to the ultimate creation of a more just society  The creation of a wide acceptance of the National Language  The propagation of an awareness of the ultimate objectives of complete independence through merger and the ideals of a democratic socialist way of life.1 Rajaratnam was an idealist with a vision of one nation and one people. He believed that Singapore’s future success was based on uniting its people of Malay, Indian, and Chinese ethnicity into one Singaporean culture. This was an enduring belief and in 1984 Rajaratnam stated, “If you think of yourself as Chinese, Malays, Indians and Sri Lankans then Singapore will collapse. You must think of Singapore: ‘This is my country. I fight and die for Singapore if necessary’.”2 The fact that Singapore’s first Minister of Culture was of Indian origin sent a powerful message to Singaporeans that the Chinese majority would not dominate Singapore and turn the country into a satellite city of China, a very real fear among the Malay and Indian minorities. Additionally, this also sent an important message to Singapore’s neighbours who were suspicious of a new country dominated by a Chinese majority. Lee Kwan Yew discovered that Rajaratnam was more confident than he about being able to gain the support of Singaporeans:

After the 1964 communal riots in Singapore engineered by Ultras from across the causeway, I had grave forebodings of more intense communal conflicts to come. As the crisis developed, I poured out my fears to Raja [Rajaratnam] of a communal bloodbath. He injected an upbeat mood by painting a more positive outcome. “Harry” he said, “they want us to be fearful and give in. But you know we can peacefully rally the races together…”3 Having experienced first hand the divisive and destructive potential of race and religious communalism during Singapore’s riots on 9 October, 1990 Rajaratnam was reported in The Straits Times, as stating “being a Singaporean is not a matter of ancestry. It is a conviction and choice.” In the same article Lee Kuan Yew stated, “after two communal riots in 1964 and the tensions and suspicions of Separation, we were not at our most optimistic.” Lee felt the need to establish a National Pledge in Singapore to help garner loyalty and

1 Ministry of Culture and the Arts, Objectives of the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Culture and the Arts, November 21, 1958, accessed June 6, 2012, [http://app.mica.gov.sg/Default.aspx?tabid=422] 2 S. Rajaratnam, The Prophetic and the Political, (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), 124. 3 Lee Kuan Yew, Eulogy for Mr S. Rajaratnam, February 25, 2006, accessed October 4, 2012, http://www.pap.org.sg/articleview.php?id=234&mode=&cid=23.

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commitment to the nation and to reduce the tension amoung the different races. Lee chose Rajaratnam to write the Pledge because of his positive ideology. He stated: “In spite of our dark mood at the time, I felt Raja would have the conviction and optimism to express our aspirations.” However, Lee made clear that while he had Rajaratnam construct the Pledge, as with all aspects of Singapore’s management, it was he who ultimately controlled the outcome. “I got Raja to draft it. He crafted the words, I tightened them. The cabinet adopted them as the National Pledge. It was an act of faith.”4

OUR PLEDGE We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion, to build a democratic society based on justice and equality so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation.5

Since 1966 this Pledge, along with the newly established national flag and anthem, has become an enduring part of what Benedict Anderson would call the “logos” or identity of the Singaporean psyche.6 The Ministry of Education instructed that the Pledge be recited at the beginning of each school day with the raising of the flag and that “pupils observe this ceremony with solemnity and respect, and face the national flag with their right hands raised.”7 The Pledge is also recited publicly during events considered to be of national importance, such as the National Day Parade.

Rajaratnam’s role in the construction of the Pledge demonstrates the earliest relationship that the state adopted with its field of cultural production, which was to control, manage and construct as necessary. Initially Singapore’s field of cultural production was mobilised by the state to support forms of nation building, actively encouraging tolerance and acceptance between the different ethnic communities. For instance, Rajaratnam organised Aneka Ragam or the “People's Variety Shows” as part of “national loyalty week” celebrations to establish greater cultural understanding among the

4 Yew, Eulogy for Mr S. Rajaratnam. 5 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, Singapore National Pledge, August 1966, accessed December 10, 2012, http://app.www.sg/who/45/National-Pledge.aspx. 6 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175. 7 Singapore infopedia, Guidelines on use of The National Pledge, August 1966, accessed October 23, 2012, http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_84_2004-12-13.html.

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Chinese, Malay, Indian and other races.8 Decades later Lee Khoon Choy, Parliamentary Secretary, reflected on the significance of those shows:

The first one was in Botanic Gardens in 1959 and Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew came to open the event. After that, it was extended to other parts of the country. In the concert, for the first time in Singapore, a Chinese saw a Malay dance or an Indian dance. And a Malay saw a Chinese dance, so it was an eye- opener for our people that we have different cultures.9

Rajaratnam was also instructed by the PAP to promote tolerance of multiculturalism in Singapore, and to this end he worked to convince cultural leaders to avoid biased towards their own culture. Ultimately, from this early manifestation of government intervention in matters of culture and race, there evolved an enduring form of symbolic violence, more effective in the long term than brute force, where the state imposed its views as universal and commonsense.10 Justified by the fear of a potential racial “bloodbath” the State co- opted the cultural fields to ensure racial harmony.11

Twenty years after Independence, with rapid and continually growing economic success, the Peoples Action Party (PAP) had established its place as leading Singapore, signalled by repeated success at the polls and the nation’s status as one of the “Asian Tigers” or “Little Tigers”.12 Having stabilised race relations by the 1980s, the state broadened its focus, turning its attention to another dimension of cultural production in the form of Singapore’s arts and national heritage, recognizing their potential to define Singapore’s national identity. In 1985, the Ministry of Culture was dissolved and its function spread across two new Ministries: the Ministry of Communications and Information, which focused on media and information, and the Ministry of Community Development, which focused on the arts. In 1989, the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, a high level committee chaired by the second Deputy Prime Minister , released a pivotal report that is said to have jumpstarted Singapore’s cultural development. Commonly referred to as the Ong Teng Cheong Report, it was highly influential in defining a structural framework for the state to direct the development of Singapore’s fields of cultural production.13

8 Edwin Lee, Singapore: The Unexpected Nation (Singapore: ISEAS, 2008), 165. 9 Lee Khoon Choy, Rajaratnam as I knew him – through the eyes of Lee Khoon Choy, April 1, 2006, accessed January 14, 2011, [www.rsis.edu.sg/tribute_book/Tribute from Lee Khoon Choy.html. 10 Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 112. 11 Yew, Eulogy for Mr S. Rajaratnam. 12 C. L. Wan-Ling Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007), 2. 13 Ong, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, 3.

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State Policies: Directing Singapore’s Cultural Fields With clear reference to past priorities, the Ong Teng Cheong Report began by declaring: “The Government’s cultural policy is to promote widespread interest and excellence in the pursuit of the arts in our multi-cultural society, and to encourage cross-cultural understanding and appreciation.” The Report also made wide-ranging recommendations designed to build a culturally vibrant society by the turn of the century. It affirmed that culture and the arts mould the customs and the psyche of a people and that they were important because they:

a) give a nation its unique character; b) broaden minds and deepen sensitivities; c) improve the general quality of life; d) strengthen the social bond; and e) contribute to tourist and entertainment sectors.14 The Report recommended that by 1999 the thrust of Singapore’s cultural development should be to realise the vision of a culturally vibrant society, defined as one whose people are well-informed, creative, sensitive and gracious. In addition the report made clear that it was Singapore’s multi-cultural heritage that made it unique and we should and that its multi-lingual, multi-cultural art forms should be celebrated and promoted.15 The Report identified Singapore as having the potential to be an international exhibition centre, a market for works of art, and a regular performing venue for world-class troupes, in short, a regional hub for the arts. Just as Singapore had established itself as the financial hub of Southeast Asia, the state’s ambition was to mirror this in as many areas as possible including the arts.

The Next Lap: Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, Second-Generation Leadership In the Next Lap, we are trying to give Singapore a more rounded personality. In the past, as we discussed earlier, we emphasized primarily the basics, relating to economics. That’s unquestionably a very important aspect. But that’s a one- dimensional aspect of a society’s development.16 In November 1990, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister of thirty years, “passed on the baton” to Goh Chok Tong. The entry of Goh Chok Tong as the new Prime Minister, represented an opportunity to connect the new generation with Singapore’s political field. It appeared as if the “old guard” were no longer engaging the new generation

14 Ong, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, 3. 15 Ong, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, 5. 16 Raj Vasil, Governing Singapore. A History of National Development and Democracy (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 170–171.

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of Singaporeans who were looking for a more consultative, responsive, and less combative approach to government. In 1991 the new PM’s office produced and launched a book called Singapore: The Next Lap, which represented the “hopes of a new generation of Singaporeans and their leaders”, and promised a more liberal, democratic government. Singapore: The Next Lap combined the input of six advisory councils who attempted to address the needs of the disabled, the aged, sports and recreation, youth, family and community life and culture and the arts.17 Goh Chok Tong described his outlook for Singapore in an interview for The Straits Times, Singapore’s major newspaper:

I am seized with the social side. I do not want Singaporeans to be known just for economic efficiency, cold, disciplined, efficient, with a high standard of living, but everybody looks like a robot. I want to make Singapore a more rounded society. What are we as people? Have we got the social graces? What's our personal development? Do we read? Do we listen to music? When we meet friends from outside Singapore, do we only talk business? Or are we able to discourse on world affairs, regional affairs, literature? There must be a certain layer of Singaporeans who have that intellectual curiosity. So the first angle is personal development.18 Singapore: The Next Lap was designed as a challenge to Singaporeans in all aspects of their political and socio-cultural evolution, in an effort to ensure they achieved both economic maturity and the quality of life that goes with it. It was a manifesto articulating what the state, with the cooperation of the people, expected to be able to achieve, and was presented as a promise from the PAP. With it the PAP hoped to unite the population, channel Singaporeans’ collective energies and win votes.

The specific objective of Singapore: The Next Lap was to provide a blueprint for the PAP in developing Singapore into a global city with total business capabilities; it included the field of cultural production as part of its overall plan.19 As such Singapore: The Next Lap represented a continuation of the survival doxa, which maintained that Singapore could only survive if it continued to grow and expand as an economic powerhouse. After the 1985 Southeast Asian economic recession, the country had refocused on developing local industry, which required an upgrading of the labour market to meet the demands of a knowledge-based economy, and resulted in the development of the 1991 Strategic Economic Plan (SEP). The SEP’s main competitive aims were outlined as follows:

17 Singapore Government, Singapore: The Next Lap (Singapore: Times Edition, 1991), 13. 18 Santha Oorjitham, Interview: Pondering the Next Lap, (conversation with Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong), 1996, accessed July 17, 2011, http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/96/0503/feat3.html. 19 Singapore Government, Singapore: The Next Lap, foreword.

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To attain the status and characteristics of a first league developed country within the next 30 to 40 years. Based on certain optimistic and pessimistic scenarios Singapore aims to catch up with – on a moving-target basis – the Gross National Product per capita of the United States by 2030 or the Netherlands by 2020… Key facets of the Vision are economic dynamism, a high quality of life, a strong national identity and the configuration of a global city…20 As part of SEP, Singaporean companies were encouraged to establish joint business ventures with local companies in the Southeast Asian region as well as less developed nations in the region. The intended outcome of these joint ventures was not only to enhance business opportunities but also to strengthen national security by making Singapore indispensible to potentially hostile neighbours. Singaporeans’ cultural connections to regional countries were now considered an asset useful for security and economic development.

Other objectives addressed in the SEP were to promote entrepreneurship, and to develop Singapore into a regional hub for a range of industries while continuing to upgrade existing businesses. These directives identified the need to cultivate the right kinds of “niches within niches”, such as creating regional headquarters for research and development, tourism, finance and the arts. The government realised that in order to facilitate this, it needed to create what it called a “Soft Infrastructure” which involved “a social climate and institutional structure that supports innovation”.21 Goh Chok Tong made clear that the field of cultural production—and in particular the arts—had an important role to play in building the soft infrastructure and stimulating the creative thinking necessary to produce entrepreneurs who could compete in a knowledge-based global market. In his 2002 National Day Rally speech on August 18, 2002 he stated:

To support our entrepreneurs, we need to develop an overall environment that encourages people to discover, create and experiment. Studies in the US have shown that entrepreneurship is closely correlated with the level of cultural vibrancy… the arts can help individuals to become more creative, in areas beyond the arts. They are an important source of inspiration and a powerful avenue for individual expression. Furthermore, a culturally vibrant city attracts global creative talent.22 Singapore’s lack of “Soft Infrastructure” evolved into the recognition of the need to create an economic environment where learning from outside expertise was both

20 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 1. 21 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 54. 22 Goh Chok Tong, National Day Rally speech, 2002, Many Eyes, assessed 1 Oct 2008, http://www.- 958.ibm.com/software/analytics/manyeyes/datasets/ndr-1998-to-2002-gct/version/1,

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acceptable and encouraged. Singapore’s leadership took up this idea as a national agenda, and Singapore was branded “A Learning Nation;” a concept that emerged from the SEP.23

Singapore: The Next Lap was both a self-consciousness response to how Singapore believed others perceived it, and a discourse on the requirements needed for Singaporeans to evolve into effective citizens in a global market. For the first time, an official vision made explicit commitments to expand artistic and cultural activities, indicating that the fields of cultural production had the PAP’s full attention as a potential resource. As Beng- Huat Chua made clear: “Cultural development, in other words, had to abide by the dictates of the logic of the economy.”24

Singapore’s Cultural Field: Singapore Inc. One of the other outcomes of the changes brought about by the SEP and the Next Lap policies following the 1985 recession was a national movement for Singapore to become a “Learning Nation.”25 With the powerful agency of the EDB positioning Singapore as a leader in the knowledge-based economy, initiatives began to emerge to make Singapore “A Learning Nation” and an “Intelligent Island.”26 One of the agencies co-opted into this movement was the Ministry of Education (MOE). Its 1997 vision articulated in “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation”27 reflects the homology that existed between different fields in Singapore. Launched by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, this policy was designed to ensure that the Singapore education system produced “committed citizens capable of meeting the challenges of the future”, who could deal with the economic challenges of the twenty-first century.28 Unabashedly continuing the symbolic violence of national survival, the document states – under the heading “The Basis for Survival & Success”:

People are our most precious resource. Every citizen is valuable and has a unique contribution to make. Through education every individual can realise his full potential, use his talents and abilities to benefit his community and nation, and lead a full and satisfying life.29 As with all ministries, the organising principles of the MOE’s curriculum in Singapore had been, and continues to be, tied to the government’s economic ideology. As a result

23 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 54. 24 Chua, Communitarian, Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 105. 25 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 54. 26 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 59. 27 Ministry of Education, Singapore, About Us, Our Vision, Ministry of Education, Singapore, accessed July 21, 2010, http://www.moe.gov.sg/about/#our-vision. 28 Ministry of Education, Singapore, About Us, Our Vision. 29 Ministry of Education, Singapore, About Us, Our Vision.

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Singapore’s education system was initially geared to producing citizens who were not encouraged to question the validity of the claims of the government, and reflective thinking was not a feature of educational methodology. Rather the education system was dominated by the need to create a competent and obedient labour force for a newly industrialising country. To change this “taken for granted” ideology to produce students with the capacity to be curious and creative would not only require new curricula introduced in 1998 as Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn,30 but also a new approach to delivering education, an aim that would require time, new expertise, reduced class sizes, and hence requiring effort to implement.31

Culture and the Arts in Renaissance City Singapore Because Singapore had established itself as a technocratic meritocracy where failure was considered unacceptable and risk-taking something to be avoided, the move towards building a knowledge-based economy proved difficult to implement. To expedite the process the EDB studied countries that had been successful in making the transition— including Ireland and Australia—and realised that, alongside shifts in industry had come the development of a dynamic, stimulating arts industry. As an outcome of the 1989 report from the Advisory Council on the Culture and the Arts, Singapore’s cultural fields were dramatically expanded.

In 1990, the Ministry of Communications and Information and the Ministry of Community Development merged to form the Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA) with Brigadier General George Yeo as its first minister. Reflecting Singapore’s changing attitude towards its cultural fields, MITA’s stated aim was “to develop the arts, design, heritage and library scene to realise their full potential in contributing to our nation’s social, cultural and economic development, and to realise our vision of being a Global City of the Arts and Culture.”32

30 Ministry of Education, Singapore, Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn: towards thinking schools, learning nation, (Singapore: Ministry of Education, 1998), 4. 31 Jason Tan and Ng Pack Tee, eds. Thinking Schools, Learning Nation: Contemporary Issues and Challenges, (Singapore: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008), 21. 32 Brigadier General George Yeo, Aims of the new Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, August 10, 2002, accessed January 22, 2011, http://www.mita.gov.sg. It is important to note that MITA’s other agencies include the following institutions: the National Art Council, the National Library board, the Preservation of Monument Board, the Esplanade, the Corporate Planning Division, the Info-communication and Media Development Division, the Organisation Management Division, the National Resilience Division, the Media Relations Division and the Public Communications Division.

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A year later MITA launched the first of the three “Renaissance City Reports.” Emulating its success as a regional financial hub the Report outlined a detailed roadmap to develop Singapore into a hub for Southeast Asian Arts and Culture.33 The Renaissance City Report presented this strategy for building Singapore’s cultural fields along with S$50million to be spent over five years. The Renaissance City Report had two main aims:

a. To establish Singapore as a global arts city. We want to position Singapore as a key city in the Asian renaissance of the 21st century and a cultural centre in the globalised world. The idea is to be one of the top cities in the world to live, work and play in, where there is an environment conducive to creative and knowledge-based industries and talent. b. To provide cultural ballast in our nation-building efforts. In order to strengthen Singaporeans’ sense of national identity and belonging, we need to inculcate an appreciation of our heritage and strengthen the Singapore Heartbeat through the creation and sharing of Singapore stories, be it in film, theatre, dance, music, literature or the visual arts. The report also outlined an ambitious aspiration for Singaporean citizens:

Renaissance Singapore will be creative, vibrant and imbued with a keen sense of aesthetics. Our industries are supported with a creative culture that keeps them competitive in the global economy. The Renaissance Singaporean has an adventurous spirit, an inquiring and creative mind and a strong passion for life. Culture and the arts animate our city and our society consists of active citizens who build on our Asian heritage to strengthen the Singapore Heartbeat through expressing their Singapore stories in culture and the arts.34 Operating firmly within the pragmatism of developing Singapore’s economy, the government then set about building new cultural facilities and expanding existing ones in a surge of development. Between 1991 and 1995 a number of key statutory boards were established, including the National Arts Council in 1991, the National Heritage Board in 1993, the Singapore Broadcasting Authority in 1994, and the National Library Board in 1995. Under the new National Arts Council, funds were set aside to build a world-class performing arts centre named “The Esplanade: Theatres on the Bay.” Under the new National Heritage Board three new museums were established: The Singapore History Museum and The Singapore Art Museum in 1996 and The Asian Civilisations Museum (the subject of this case study) in 1997.

33 Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore. (Singapore: Singapore Government, 2000), 4. 34 Singapore Government, Renaissance City Report, 38.

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The Irony of Control in Singapore’s Cultural Fields

The Renaissance City Report is overt in positioning the field of cultural production to support state ideology, including democracy, nation building, the economy, national security and racial harmony. A communitarian ideology on democracy is reflected clearly in the following characteristics of an ideal imagined citizen:

The Renaissance Singaporean is an active citizen who understands the balance between rights and responsibilities. He has a healthy regard for his fellow men, respects common property and is willing to make sacrifices for the greater good and to help those less fortunate than himself. He recognises that he is not a mere actor in a vast nameless play, but a co-writer of the Singapore Story, with the latitude and responsibility to input his own distinctive ideas.

In addition, the document links cultural production to a supporting role in the economy – i.e. art not for arts sake, but for marketing advantage. Specifically, the responsibility of the field of cultural production in supporting the economy is explained:

Creativity will move into the centre of our economic life because it is a critical component of a nation’s ability to remain competitive. Economic prosperity for advanced, developed nations will depend not so much on the ability to make things, but more on the ability to generate ideas that can then be sold to the world. This means that originality and entrepreneurship will be increasingly prized. The capacity for the field of cultural production to enhance Singapore’s national identity is also claimed:

This will be a society that is clear about its identity, confident and at ease with itself. Awareness of our Asian heritage is enhanced even as we evolve a Singaporean identity. In this regard, artists play a key role as they can base their artistic efforts on the experience of being Singaporean and living in Singapore, thereby helping to create shared perspectives that are distinctly Singaporean.35 Less abrasively, with regard to national security and racial harmony, under the heading “Roles of the Players” the Report states, “the arts community must strengthen its sense of professionalism and accountability.” This is read by most practitioners to mean that artistic activity funded by the state should contain content appropriate for a nation deeply sensitive to criticism—particularly in the area of race.36

35 Singapore Government, Renaissance City Report, 5. 36 Singapore Government, Renaissance City Report, 5.

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The scholarly response to Singapore’s overt engineering of its field of cultural production has been consistent in identifying the hegemony of economic imperatives, with the ambition to reinforce Asian values, to create a cultural counterweight against unwanted Western ideology and to install loyalty. For example, in an article “Cultural Policy in Singapore: Negotiating Economic and Socio-Cultural Agendas,” Professor Lily Kong, Vice President (University of Global of Relations) The National University of Singapore, states that:

…despite the rhetoric about the importance of the arts in developing ‘a gracious society’ the major motivation behind the cultural policy is economic, indeed, often the economic works through the socio-cultural. 37 Kong also outlines the irony that comes with a state – mandated desire for creative autonomy—especially when accompanied by central directives and careful control. Selvaraj Velayutham’s 2007 publication, Responding to Globalization: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore, also considers Singapore’s cultural policies of the period. He identifies the intrinsic dichotomies that arise between the desire to create a global city with sophisticated cosmopolitan citizens who can think creatively in a knowledge-based economy, and at the same time to ensure the loyalty and commitment to their nation.38 By contrast, Raj Vasil’s Governing Singapore addresses the notion of a communitarian democracy where citizens trade political rights for economic prosperity. He argues:

…the key to the Singapore miracle is attributed to its first generation rulers, led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew…[who]…represents that unique combination of a Westernised technocrat and a Confucian Emperor.39 James Gomez explores the level of fear and coercion involved in this exchange in his book Self Censorship: Singapore’s Shame, which deals directly with the PAP’s establishment of a “censorial political culture”40 by “criminalizing and persecuting alternative political voices.”41 Gomez illustrates how five individuals who challenged the government (Chai Thye Poh, Tan Wah Piow, JB Jeyaretnam, Francis Seow and Chee Soon Juan) were sued by the government for defamation and tax evasion, and driven to bankruptcy. Gomez argues

37 Lily Kong, Cultural Policy in Singapore: Negotiating Economic and Socio-Cultural Agendas, Geoforum 31, (2000): 409–424. 38 Selvaraj Velayutham, Responding to Globalization: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), 10. 39 Vasil, Governing Singapore, 84. 40 James Gomez, Self-Censorship: Singapore’s Shame, (Singapore: Think Centre, 2000), 3. 41 Gomez, Self-Censorship, 73.

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that Singapore’s culture of fear has resulted in political apathy and self-censorship—a feature of the country that is not only unique regionally but also globally.42

Chin Nai Rui’s text “The Working Committee: From fear to creative activism” argues that a critical aspect of the culture of fear in Singapore is that its long-term taken-for- grantedness makes it seem irrational: “No one can put their finger on what it is that Singaporeans really fear.”43 Kenneth Paul Tan suggests one of the reasons for this is the government’s inconsistency with tolerance and discipline. In “New Politics for a Renaissance City?” he suggests that, although out-of-bounds markers still remain, when artists engage in political commentary, the state response is “either surprisingly tolerant or surprisingly intolerant.”44 Tan also makes clear that arts organisations in Singapore “face tough funding and censorship regulations.”45 This state of affairs was reinforced by David Lim, Minister of State for Defence and Information and the Arts, in a forum in 2000 organised by the National University of Singapore entitled “You Can’t Please Everyone: Artistic Integrity and Social Responsibility”. At the forum Lim announced that MITA would encourage self-regulation, but also suggested that the state’s injection of S$50million into the arts would bring about a sharper debate regarding the “ways the growth of arts should be circumscribed in order to preserve our values and way of life.” The “debate” about artistic responsibility and what was meant by self-regulation was most keenly understood when artists began to take the risks that the new policies were encouraging.46

Crossing the Line: Censorship in the New Arts Environment Singapore’s history of censorship has resulted in the production and exhibition of what some critics describe as “Safe Art”, and a number of case studies are outlined below to demonstrate the mechanism and impact of regulatory practice in Singapore. Art critic Ray Langenbach suggests that, with the government’s new interest in culture,

art practice has moved into the offices of the government, bureaucracy, police stations, lawyers’ offices and courts. The bureaucrats apparently believe that they can fashion a ‘global capital of the arts’ by sponsoring a minimum of ‘safe art’ at

42 Gomez, Self-Censorship, 3. 43 Kenneth Paul Tan, Renaissance Singapore: Economy, Culture, and Politics, (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007), 8. 44 Tan, New Politics for a Renaissance City?, 89. 45 Tan, New Politics for a Renaissance City?, 10. 46 David T E Lim, You Can’t Please Everyone: Artistic Integrity and Social Responsibility. National University of Singapore, 2001, accessed February 2, 2011, http://www.gov.sg/sgip/Announce/sgart.htm.

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home, while massively showcasing and marketing the artistic creativity of other nations.47 This criticism was partly in response to an incident involving a caricature of Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chock Tong by Hong Kong artist Zunzi , which was removed by authorities from the Singapore Art Museum the night before a regional exchange exhibition entitled ARX5 was due to open. Believing the images of Lee and Goh to be mocking in nature, the museum authorities destroyed the work, justifying this legally on the grounds that the contract with the artist required sensitivity to Singapore’s cultural context.48 Singapore art critic Lee Weng Choy suggested in the article “Misunderstanding art” that “this controversy may raise doubts as to whether Singapore Art Musuem can support the challenges of contemporary art practice.”49 Jason Lim, a fellow ARX artist stated: “Though one should be sensitive to the local sociopolitical context, there are certain basic human rights, like freedom of expression, which go beyond political and cultural boundaries.”50 This incident raised the issue amongst the art community whether it is a cultural expectation in Singapore that artists will not to be critical of political leaders. Zunzi, the artist of the destroyed work, felt the incident occurred because the Singapore authorities fundamentally misunderstood the nature of art.

In 1994, performance artist Josef Ng was fined S$1000 and banned from performing or exhibiting in Singapore after snipping a piece of his pubic hair during a performance, in protest against a police anti-gay action. On November 1, 2000 Ong Soar Fern reported in The Straits Times:

Whenever something provocative like this happened, and the ground was made uneasy, the Government had to be seen to act. In this case, a rule was introduced where any one who wishes to do performance art has to get a license from the Public Entertainment’s Licensing Unit, submit a synopsis and put down a security deposit. In 1999 a feminist artists group installed “The Hope Project” in the prestigious shopping mall “Chimes”, previously a convent and orphanage. The project commemorated the baby girls who had been abandoned at the site, and soon after its installation, the artists were ordered to take it down because it was disturbing. Curator Susie Wong was unable to discover which agency—and which laws—were at work behind

47 Ray Langenbach, “Annotated Singapore Diary: Censorship, performance, and the Latiff Mohidin retrospective”, ARTAsia Pacific,1, no. 4, 1994. 48 Lee Weng Choy, “Misunderstanding art”, ARTAsia Pacific 23, (1999), 42–43. 49 Lee, Misunderstanding art, 42–43. 50 Lee, Misunderstanding art, 42–43.

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the order, and suggested that authority in Singapore was never transparent. Further, she could not persuade any of The Hope Project artists to engage in a protest about the work being taken down.

In 1999 artist – educator recounted a story about a writer friend who read out a poem to a gathering in the Botanical Gardens one Sunday (before regulations were introduced for performance scripts to receive prior approval):

It was a silly poem, called Singapore 2020, it projected a story of decadence and debauchery in Singapore with single mothers giving birth to children in methane centers. We all had a good laugh. However at 2pm that night the police came to his door and took him away till 7am in the morning. They interrogated him on the meaning of his poem. Japar suggested that it was not unusual in Singapore to be unable to understand who is monitoring any citizens’ behaviour. “It’s just the government’s strong arm tactics… it’s all very well to have this idea of being an existentialist artist, not worrying about the impact of your work, but it’s not just you that is affected, it’s your family as well.”51

In 2000 Talaq, a play about spousal abuse in an Indian Muslim marriage, was denied a license to perform, and sparked off another controversy over censorship. When members of the art community questioned the decision, they were told that the play was disallowed because of objections from the Islamic Religious Council, which felt the play gave a poor impression of Islam. Susan Loh, Director of Corporate Communications at the National Arts Council added:

The NAC has always been in support of artists and their artistic expression. However, the principle of artistic freedom and the intrinsic value of art are matters to be balanced against other factors, for example national security, social norms, racial and religious harmony.52 Tan, Director of The Necessary Stage states:

The social function of art is to challenge, and it’s far better that the challenge happens in art than in the political arena. There is a difference between watching a race riot on film and taking part in one. In fact, the catharsis that happens in art allows society to deal with its conflicts more maturely. However, Executive Director of the National Arts Council, Choo Thiam Siew, pushed the frequently used defense against artistic freedom: “Singaporean society has not reached the stage where anything goes.” Art writer Ong Sor Fern reinforced this view in 2000 when

51 Salleh Japar, Art Lecturer LassaleSIA, Interview with author 1999 52 Lim, You Can’t Please Everyone.

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he suggested that “…in a small society like Singapore, with its multi-ethnic, multi-religious sensitivities, erupting art could blow up a nation with it.”53

Third Generation Leadership: An Open and Inclusive Singapore In 2004 Singapore saw Lee Kwan Yew’s son Lee Hsien Loong become the nation’s third Prime Minister. In his swearing-in speech, Lee addressed some of the central concerns of Next Lap policy, acknowledging that while the economy was important, it could not drive creative thinking in a meritocracy that does not tolerate difference or failure. The new Prime Minister then promised a more open and tolerant approach to governance and it is worth quoting at length his beliefs from his “Swearing In Speech”:

But prosperity is not our only goal, nor is economic growth an end in itself… We want our young to think independently, to explore with confidence, and to pursue their passions… Education is not just about training for jobs. It is about opening doors for our children, and giving them hope and opportunities. It is more than filling a vessel with knowledge, it is to light a fire in our young people. They are our future. We will continue to expand the space, which Singaporeans have to live, to laugh, to grow and to be ourselves. Our people should feel free to express diverse views, pursue unconventional ideas, or simply be different. We should have the confidence to engage in robust debate, so as to understand our problems, conceive fresh solutions, and open up new spaces. We should recognise many paths of success, and many ways to be Singaporean. We must give people a second chance, for those who have tasted failure may be the wiser and stronger ones among us. Ours must be an open and inclusive Singapore.54 However, Lee Hsien Loong echoed the doxa of Asian values with nation, community and family coming before individual needs and reinforcing Singapore’s long established fear for its survival, in order to “weather storms” in an “uncertain world”, now cased in a more positive upbeat message:

Even as we pursue individual ambitions, we must also deepen our sense of common purpose and identity. We can stand tall only if we stand together. Our years in school and national service, our shared joys and sorrows, our attachment to familiar places, our bonds with family and friends, all these reinforce our sense of being one Singapore family. Already, a Singaporean is readily recognisable anywhere in the world. We must continue to widen our common ground, and care for one another. Our unity gives us the resilience to weather every storm and thrive as an independent nation. Let us strive to keep Singapore a haven in an uncertain world, open to all for

53 Lim, You Can’t Please Everyone. 54 Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore Government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004, www.mfa.gov.sg/overseasmission/tokyo/press_statements_speeches/2004/200408_5.html

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business, safe for citizens and friends, a welcoming home that gladdens our hearts every time we return from our travels.

Conclusion

Singapore has always been dominated by the hegemony of economic survival, and this concern has been placed as a priority above all else. Because of this, the field of cultural production was seen as merely a mechanism to support the development of national logos and help maintain good relations between different ethnic groups. However, as the Singapore government pushed towards a knowledge-based economy after the worldwide recession of 1985, the EDB realised the potential for developing Singapore’s cultural field in order to support economic imperatives. Once recognised, the ambition to transform Singapore into a vibrant arts centre was rapid, steered by the Renaissance City Report. This makes three main ambitions clear: to provide Singaporeans with a harmonious sense of national identity and to deepen their cultural roots; to ensure the field of cultural production works towards enhancing economic imperatives; and to create ballast against deculturalisation and unwanted Western values. To support this effort, the Singapore government invested S$50 million dollars to build up the field of cultural production, but did so conditionally, requiring adherence to state sanctioned requirements for artistic integrity and self-censorship.

Within a few years the government altered the nature of the field entirely, creating a set of modern cultural institutions—such as museums and concert halls—considered features of advanced, Western nations. However, through a culture of fear and self-censorship, the state maintains control of the institutions in the field, and of the field as a whole, creating clear homologies between the dominant government agencies such as the EDB, and arts institutions, apparent in its ambition to mirror Singapore’s success as a financial hub for the region by now positioning Singapore as the region’s cultural hub. The long-established culture of self-censorship by government employees extended to the new arts institutions, ensuring agents in the cultural field continue to assist with deeply embedded mandates for nation building and economic success in order to ensure the country’s very survival.

Having established the genesis and context of Singapore’s heavily “guided” field of cultural production, the next chapter addresses the evolution and realisation of the subject of this case study, the Asian Civilisations Museum and its Peranakan Museum. It was their role to represent what new Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called “the different multi-

93

coloured threads that make up the Singapore tapestry” in order to “promote awareness and appreciation of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans.”55

55 Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore Government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004, www.mfa.gov.sg/overseasmission/tokyo/press_statements_speeches/2004/200408_5.html

94 Chapter 5: Establishing Singapore’s Museum Precinct

Introduction

The previous chapters have presented a broad economic, political and historical context for Singapore’s field of cultural production, making clear the state’s domination of the field of economy and its capacity to influence and direct Singapore’s dominated cultural fields. This chapter will provide an understanding of the genesis of Singapore’s first colonial museum, the Raffles Library and Museum, and the context of its establishment as it opened in 1887, in an imposing neo-classical building designed to showcase the expansive power and cultural capital of the British Empire.1 In doing so, this chapter will consider how the generative structures that created space for a colonial museum in 1887 had been reproduced and expanded over time to create Singapore’s vision and articulation of its first national museum in 1960. This chapter highlights the state’s recognition of the potential of Singapore’s field of cultural production to enhance both its economic and nation building ambitions, resulting in the systematic and deliberately controlled growth of its cultural institutions, including those established to form Singapore’s new and prestigious museum precinct.

This chapter also explores the circumstances preceding the establishment of the state- funded Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), ostensibly aimed at enhancing Singaporeans’ understanding and appreciation of the country’s diverse ethnic population, while in actuality merely reproducing and reinforcing the logic of the state’s management of race. In particular this chapter considers the development of, and rationale behind, the transformation of the ACM’s first wing at the Tao Nan building into a “boutique” museum showcasing Peranakan material culture.

It becomes apparent that the contemporary landscape of Singapore’s museum precinct reproduced much of its role from its colonial history, modified by the success and, as Benedict Anderson would suggest, “imaginings” of the independent Republic that followed colonial rule.2 For this reason, the museum precinct is better understood through an

1 Richard K. B. Poh, “Foreword”, in Gretchen Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore 1887–1987 (Singapore: The Museum, Singapore, 1987), 5. 2 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 50.

95 examination of the establishment of the island’s first museum, the Raffles Library and Museum.

Establishment of a National Museum: Colonial Beginnings

To date, there has been little scholarly attention paid to the evolution or role of museums in Singapore’s colonial past. In 1987 the National Museum of Singapore commissioned Gretchen Liu to write a book to celebrate its one hundredth birthday.3 Liu drew on annual reports and internal publications to provide a definitive description of the institution from 1887 to 1987. More recently the National Museum of Singapore (NMS) published a guide to its collection to commemorate the reopening of its building in 2006 after major redevelopment.4 The NMS guide provided a brief overview of the museum’s history, largely drawing on the same material as Liu.5 Liu’s research and archival photographs provide insights into the role of the museum and how it has changed from its colonial origins to the late twentieth century. Richard K.B. Poh, the Museum’s Director in 1987, summarised this shift in the book’s foreword:

The National Museum began life as part of a curious double entity called the Raffles Library and Museum. As a colonial institution, the largely British staff was primarily concerned with providing material and services for compatriots and the “home country”. After separation from the library in the 1950s and reshaping into the National Museum in 1960, the museum has steadily divested itself of its colonial past and now reflects the intellectual interests of our young nation.6

In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson asserts, “a nation is an imagined political community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”7 He considers the three institutions of power: the census, the map, and the museum, and suggests that these entities have “shaped the way colonial power in Southeast Asia imagined its domain, the nature of the population it ruled, the geography of its domain and the legitimacy of its ancestry.”8 Anderson draws on Charles Hirschman’s study of the British Southeast Asian colonial census-makers, pointing to the constant simplification and racialisation of its census

3 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore, 5. 4 National Museum of Singapore, “About the National Museum of Singapore,” accessed 12 July 2012, http://www.nationalmuseum.sg/page.aspx?id=2. 5 Aside from exhibition guides, catalogues and annual reports, the role of state museums in Singapore is under-researched and a topic worthy of a doctoral thesis in its own right. 6 Pho, “Foreward”, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore, 6. 7 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 50. 8 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 168.

96 categories, with the disappearance of categories of religious identity such as Hindoo, Kling, and Bangalees Paree, and the simplification of racial categories such as Bengalis, Burmese and Tamils subsumed in broad categories such as “Tamils and other Indian natives”.9 The study also points to the continued concentration of categories in the post-colonial era of independence, such as the official racial categories of “Malaysian, Chinese, Indian and Other” reproduced in Singapore, and still dominating the logic of expedient race management.10 According to Anderson, the colonial rulers were interested solely in economic surplus and available manpower, the main function of the census being to keep track of those on whom taxes and military conscription could effectively be imposed. This information, along with the map, allowed successive colonial governments to imagine the nation, and thereby claim ownership in a tangible way by imposing their logic and control on the community social spaces. This they did through the implementation and organisation of the state’s education, judicial, public health, police and immigration bureaucracies bound by the principles of ethno-racial hierarchies. For Anderson, many of these imaginings were then inherited and reproduced by the independent states that emerged when formal colonial power structures disappeared, allowing these communities to imagine themselves as sovereign nations.

The idea of the map, according to Anderson, allowed colonial states to configure historical space to legitimate the inheritance of their new geographic possessions and create a political–biographic narrative of the way that realm came into being. Once again, the principles behind these narratives were adopted by emerging nation states. Anderson Identifies the map as a logo that penetrates deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem of the anti-colonial nationalism being born. He makes it clear that, like the map, “museums and the museumizing imagination are both profoundly political,” and argues that the proliferation of museums in Southeast Asia is a manifestation of “political inheritance at work.”11 Anderson also suggests that colonial authorities positioned themselves as guardians of the cultural logos, acting on behalf of those they colonised who were then incorporated into the ruling Empire’s cultural capital. Anderson argues this can be seen in the way that ownership of the “ancient prestige” was claimed with the acquisition of monuments such as Borobudur, a 9th century Buddhist temple in central Java.

9 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163–164. 10 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 168. 11 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 178.

97 Anderson suggests that the interrelated concepts of census, map and museum generate a key insight into how the colonial state thought of itself, an imagining that was then inherited and reproduced, providing postcolonial countries with a set of mechanisms for imagining themselves as a nation.12 Anderson makes the point that Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was the first noted colonialist to actually study the collection of artefacts he procured during his residency in Southeast Asia. Raffles’ interest in collecting, Anderson argues, meant that when he drew up Singapore’s town plans, he included what he called The Singapore Institution, which he envisaged would contain a scientific department, library and museum. Raffles claimed that his aim was to “educate sons of the higher order of natives” in keeping with ideals of the Enlightenment.13 As a literary and scientific man who was an avid collector and naturalist, Raffles also had a vested interest in establishing an institution in Singapore in order to support and continue his work. A dedicated museum in Singapore would provide a showcase for his findings and discoveries and would therefore, as Bourdieu would argue, increase his symbolic capital.

Raffles’ ambitions were born from Enlightenment ideals and the newly found study of natural history, which had gained great prominence in Europe. Exotic plants and animal life from around the world were suddenly of keen interest to the educated élite, fuelled by the belief that an understanding of nature based on reason and learning would enable man to better control the external world for the benefit of society. Raffles’ Malay tutor, Munshi Abdullah, describes how Raffles used his influence in the East India Company to obtain valuable specimens:

He employed four men to search for specimens of natural history. One he told to go into the jungle and look for various kinds of leaves, flowers, fungi, mosses and so on. Another he told to find worms, grasshoppers, various kinds of butterflies, beetles and other different insects, cicadas, centipedes, scorpions, and the like, and he gave him some needles and told him to set the specimens. Another man he dispatched with a basket to get coral, various sorts of shells, molluscs, oysters and the like, and also fishes. The fourth man went out catching wild animals like birds, jungle fowl, deer and small quadrupeds.14 The specimens found by Raffles’ men were displayed at the British East India Company’s museum in their headquarters in Leadenhall Street, London in 1791 to showcase the wonders of its territory, and were largely an eclectic mix of objects collected

12 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 186. 13 Lady Sophia Raffles, Memoirs of the life and public services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (London: J. Duncan, 1835), 74–86. 14 Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 246.

98 by employees. Raffles had intended to contribute part of his own collection, but on his last voyage home, the ship Fame caught fire and the contents were destroyed. Despite the setback, Raffles was determined to make his mark in the emerging field of collecting, and one of his last acts before leaving Asia was to lay the foundation stone for The Singapore Institution. The venture to establish a learning institution in Singapore was not in line with East India Company commercial interests, and once Raffles left Singapore the project was abandoned. However, Raffles’ contribution did not go unnoticed and he gained significant personal recognition for his scholarly pursuits in Asia, eventually being given a knighthood for his writing. The History of Java, in two volumes, explored both the ancient tradition and religions of the Mahomed (native) through to contemporary colonial history.15

Establishing the Raffles Library and Museum

Raffles’ idea of establishing an institution that incorporated a museum was abandoned until 1849 when two gold coins from the Temenggong of Johore were presented to the Singapore Library. Singapore’s Governor, Colonel W.J. Butterworth, suggested that the coins be “appropriately placed in the reading room of the institution as the nucleus of a museum tending to the elucidation of Malayan history which it is hoped may eventually be formed at this station.”16 From this donation, a slow momentum developed, consistent with the movement towards greater public access within museums in England. For example, in the same year, 1849, James Silk Buckingham, the English social reformer, had, suggested that providing public venues such museums, parks and libraries would “prepare all members of the community for a higher state of existence, instead of merely vegetating like millions in the present state of society” an early comment on the role of the museum in inculcating the good civic values of the day.17

The successful colonial field of economy, and the growing popularity of the Great Exhibitions and world fairs in Europe of the 1850s with their focus on international cultures and technologies, eventually provided the impetus to establish a dedicated museum in colonial Singapore, and in 1863 the Singapore Library with its reading room/museum was moved into the Singapore Town Hall. Four years later, Singapore became constituted as part of a Crown Colony known as the Straits Settlements, controlled by the Colonial Office in London. With a broader mandate than the commercial interests of its predecessor, the

15 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java, (London: Black, Parbury and Allen for the Hon. East India Company, 1817). 16 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore 1887–1987, 17. 17 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 14.

99 British East India Company, the colonial government made clear its desire to participate in the Great Exhibitions that had became popular earlier in the nineteenth century. A collection of 500 artefacts was gathered under the directives of company employees from the Straits Settlements and sent to the 1851 Great Exhibition of London, both to showcase the exotica from the region and to demonstrate British control over its colonial Empire. The collection ranged from “edible products like bird’s nests, shark fins, pulut rice and peal sago, as well as handicrafts like sireh boxes, textiles and fabrics and domestic implements” demonstrating the prevailing pre-evolutionary historicism of the time where principles of curiosity dominated. Before being sent to London, the collection was open to public viewing at Singapore’s court house and was met with great interest by locals, further substantiating the case for a dedicated museum.18

With the introduction of the steamship in the 1860s and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Singapore became one of the main stopovers for ships sailing between Europe and Asia, and was rapidly dubbed as the pearl of Asia. The small and busy port of Singapore generated significant income for the colonial government. The effectiveness with which Singapore demonstrated both its economic and scientific dominance within the region, led finally to the colonial office in England agreeing to establish a purpose built museum: Singapore’s colonial Governor Weld in 1873 asked the colonial office

…why should this colony, situated in the centre of the most especially promising field of scientific research and investigation, where lines of communication meet from every quarter and whose own resources are imperfectly known, be debarred from making her contribution to general knowledge befitting herself, supplying a general want and creating an object of wide interest and attraction to her principle city?19

By 1880 the colonial office accepted a bid, led by Governor Weld, to create a museum, and a sum of 80,000 pounds was allocated to build the Raffles Library and Museum.

Completed seven years later in 1887, the Raffles Library and Museum was a grand Victorian style building, and its founding collection focused on the Malaysian region of the Straits Settlements. After a major refurbishment in 1907, reflecting changes in European scientific thinking of the time, the chaotic mix of exotica was steadily replaced by a well- labelled, scientifically classified series of objects. By the 1920s the museum had established a policy to concentrate on research in the field of natural history, anthropology and

18 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore, 19. 19 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore, 23.

100 archaeology, and this continued until social and political changes in the 1950s shifted the focus. Reflecting this bias, the museum’s successive British curators were zoologists, botanists, and ornithologists. By the time of the Japanese occupation of Singapore in 1945, the museum had established itself as a research centre attracting scholars from all over Europe.20

Japanese Occupation and Independence

During the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1942 to 1945, the Raffles Library and Museum was used as a headquarters for the new rulers of the island, and the Japanese, sympathetic to the value of research, left the collection largely untouched. But with the return of British forces in 1945 and the steady move towards independence in the 1950 and 1960s, the Raffles Library and Museum underwent significant change. In 1960 the library was moved into a separate building, and the newly named Raffles Museum, under the leadership of British curator M.F.W. Tweedie, continued its research focus “as a window on the beauty and diversity of the region we call Malaya.”21

At the time of independence the Raffles Museum was left idle, given the prevailing doxa of the new government being that the economy had to override all else in order to ensure the nation’s survival in the hostile region. In an interview in 2001, the then Director of the Singapore History Museum, Mr Lim How Seng, noted that directly after independence there had been little money available for the museum; further, he suggested its emphasis had shifted away from natural history toward the humanities.22 In the lead up to independence, Singapore had been preparing to join the Malaysian Federated States, and the museum was dominated by exhibitions presenting regional and Malaysian cultural heritage. When Singapore was ejected from the Federation just after independence, Lim described the enormous level of disbelief that was felt by Singaporeans generally. With the tiny island nation left culturally and politically excluded by its regional neighbours and concerned almost exclusively with its security and economic welfare, there was little relevance for an antiquated collection of predominantly Malaysian artefacts.23 Only with the establishment of a Ministry of Culture in 1959 did the government’s gaze return to the Raffles Museum.

20 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore, 62. 21 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore, 60. 22 Lim How Seng, Director of the Singapore History Museum, interviewed by author, 2001, Singapore History Museum. 23 Lim How Seng, interviewed by author, 2001.

101 The Museum and Nation Building

Census, Maps, Museums therefore analyses the way in which, quite unconsciously, the nineteenth-century colonial state (and policies that its mindset encouraged) dialectically engendered the grammar of the nationalisms that eventually arose to combat it. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the state imagined its local adversaries, as an ominous prophetic dream, well before they come into historical existence. To the forming of this imagining, the census’s abstract qualification/serialization of persons, the map’s eventual logization of political space, and the museum’s “ecumenical,” profane genealogizing made interlinked contributions.24 Benedict Anderson argues that whilst the colonials left their colonies, their legacy or “grammar” provided an administrative structure and unifying tradition that was reproduced to function in articulating the imaginings of the new nation that came with independence. In keeping with this argument, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, head of the newly established Ministry of Culture, reproduced the existing British colonial structures of nationhood, establishing a new national flag, a new national anthem and, in 1969, changing the colonial museum’s name from the Raffles Museum to the National Museum.25 On November 21, 1960, under the heading “Out goes the name Raffles”, the local paper The Straits Times reported “the name Raffles will soon be no longer associated with two of Singapore’s well known institutions: the library and museum.”

Liu argues that the newly named National Museum experienced an unhappy decade beset by a “lack of direction and an identity crisis” being shuffled back and forwards between the Ministry of Culture and Science, and reflecting the crisis occurring within the government as it merged with the Federation of Malaysia and then separated two years later. During this period of early independence the Museum continued to evolve despite poor levels of funding and a very low profile. The building was refurbished and the organisation given a new mandate as “an institution devoted to the history, art and ethnology of Singapore and its neighbours, with a revamped public image and an entirely different self-image.” The zoological collection was transferred to the University of Singapore and to Singapore’s Science Centre. Overturning the tradition of British subjects taking leadership roles, a local curator Christopher Hooi was employed in 1972 to head the Museum, which was tasked to support Singapore’s independence by creating a repository of the nation’s cultural heritage, to be operated as a centre for display, education and enjoyment. Hooi removed the last vestiges of colonial influence, deinstalling the old

24 Anderson, Imagined Communities, xiv. 25 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163.

102 exhibits organized in logical, linear fashion and arranged neatly in glass cabinets. He replaced them with a thematic display that supported nation building and the new “Singapore story.”26

Constructing the Official Story

With the economic success that followed independence came the recognition that the museum could play a role in projecting the officially condoned and carefully constructed history of Singapore. The “official” Singapore histories, written by S. Rajaratnam and D. Nair, “reinforced the eloquent hard-hitting and hard headed rhetoric of Lee Kuan Yew” and propagated the doxa of a new nation struggling against all odds for its survival. 27 One of Rajaratnam’s earliest historical accounts included PAP’s the First Ten Years written in 1964 as a souvenir publication marking the PAP’s tenth anniversary celebration. In this account the author situates Lee Kuan Yew as national hero and founding father, surmounting all obstacles, and leading Singapore through a series of historically difficult, and potentially nation-threatening events to its current position as a successful, independent and prosperous country.28 The new National Museum, with its mandate to build national identity, provided the appropriate venue to present these state-constructed narratives. The staff of the National Museum embraced their role, resulting in a series of exhibitions featuring overt propaganda. For example, the exhibition From Colony to Nation, presented in a clear linear chronological format so that the public could walk literally through history from colonisation and riots to economic prosperity, addressed Singapore’s post World War II history from 1954 to 1990.29

Later, drawing on Singapore’s high-tech industries, the museum held daily screenings of the immersive 3-D short film The Singapore Story.30 This film had previously been screened across the island in many venues, drawing large crowds with its then new 3-D technology featuring leaping tigers and a bayoneting Japanese soldier, projecting out into the audience. Lysa Hong and Jianli argue that, since like the state sanctioned narrative of the 3-D film, Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs were titled The Singapore Story, this made clear he was

26 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore, 62-63. 27 Lysa Hong and Jianli Huang, The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and its Pasts (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 46. 28 S. Rajaratnam, PAP’s the First Ten Years, reprinted in Chee and Haq (eds.), S. Rajaratnam, 22–64. 29 The exhibition From Colony to Nation opened in 1997. 30 Singapore Ministry of Information and the Arts, The Singapore Story: overcoming the odds: an interactive 3D multimedia experience, Bizarts Creative Pty Ltd, (Singapore Ministry of Information and the Arts, ca.1999).

103 officially positioning himself as the creator of Singapore, claiming his story as Singapore’s history, and vice versa.31

Building the Vision: The Role of Museums in the Next Lap

As part of the effort to develop Singapore’s culture and the arts industry, the state undertook an extensive study of its cultural fields in 1988, resulting in a report from the Ong Teng Cheong Advisory Council on Art and Culture.32 The Ong Teng Cheong Report eventually became a blueprint for developing Singapore’s cultural fields, its aim “to realise the vision of a culturally-vibrant society by 1999.” The report addressed the present state of Singapore’s cultural fields in relation to its heritage sector, pointing out “there is inadequate co-ordination at the decision-making level among the heritage agencies in different Ministries.” Alongside the identified need to “develop more modern purpose built performing, working and exhibiting facilities for the arts, library and specialised museum/galleries,” the report recognised the need for organisational improvement. This resulted in its recommendation to “establish a National Heritage Trust in the long term as the sole authority on heritage matters to co-ordinate the preservation of the different dimensions of our heritage.” Further, under the heading “Improvement of Cultural Facilities” the report recommends:

Government should proceed with the development plans of the National Museum which provides for a:

. Fine art gallery in the former St Joseph’s Institution. Part of the playing field facing it should be reserved for future extensions to the gallery . children’s museum . history museum . Southeast Asian/ natural history ethnology museum . People’s gallery and . upgraded store and conservation facilities.33

The executive summary of the report concludes:

To effectively carry out the recommendation to achieve the Vision there should be a whole-hearted commitment to the Vision, which must mean a change in the fundamental attitude of our people to culture and the arts. The Government must take the lead, but ultimately, the ingredients for success must rest on the

31 Hong and Huang, The Scripting of a National History, 31. 32 The 1989 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (ACCA) was chaired by the late former President Mr Ong Teng Cheong, then Deputy Prime Minister. 33 Ong, Teng Cheong, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (Singapore: Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, 1989), 5-6.

104 joint effort of the Government, corporate and civic organizations and the public.34 This report suggested that the state perceived itself as having a central role to play in directing and initiating Singapore’s fields of cultural production, but with an expectation that private enterprise and the public would follow. The Ong Teng Cheong Report directly informed the second-generation leadership of Prime Minister Goh Chock Tong and his party’s new policies. In 1991 Prime Minister Goh Chock Tong’s office published Singapore: The Next Lap presenting a vision for Singapore’s future which included recommendations from the Ong Teng Cheong Report. Under the heading “The Museum Precinct,” it states:

A Museum Precinct, around the foot of Fort Canning, will comprise of a Fine Arts Gallery in the former St Joseph’s Institution building, a Children’s Museum in the former Tao Nan School building, a History of Singapore Museum in the present National Museum building, a Southeast Asian Ethnology and Natural History Museum and a People’s Gallery. The Fort Canning Museum Precinct will be the centre of the historical and cultural heritage of our nation. Our Museums will be more than repositories of cultural knowledge. They will mount programmes to promote greater understanding and appreciation of our culture and the arts.35 In 1990, as a direct response to the Ong Teng Cheong Report, under the leadership of Prime Minister Goh Chock Tong, the Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA) was formed. MITA then established the National Heritage Board (NHB) in 1993, tasked with developing the museum precinct. Under the heading “Establishment of museums”, clause 11.(1) of the Act clearly states: “The Board shall establish such museums as it thinks fit.”36 The NHB, having identified former colonial buildings within close walking distance from the National Museum for redevelopment as museums, swiftly divided its original collections amongst them. In 1996 the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) was launched (in the old St Joseph Institute), and a year later, the first wing of the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) was opened in the old Tao Nan School building. In 2003 the Asian Civilisations Museum’s second wing was opened, within the old Government Offices at Empress Place. In 2008 the ACM converted its first wing into the Peranakan Museum which was dedicated to the display of Peranakan material culture.

34 Ong, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, 8. 35 Singapore Government, Singapore: The Next Lap, (Times Edition, 1991), 105–6. 36 National Heritage Board Act, Chapter 196A, August 1, 1993, retrieved from the Attorney Generals Chambers Singapore, December 11, 2012.

105 In 1993, the National Museum was renamed the Singapore History Museum and was charged with addressing the problem of Singapore’s fragmented sense of cultural identity, its aim to provide Singaporeans with a positive and cohesive cultural heritage. Lee Kuan Yew expressed his concern over Singapore’s cultural identity at a lecture to the National University of Singapore in 1996:

Singapore had been an independent country for only 31 years. It takes centuries to forge a people into a nation… [p]eople in a nation must have shared a past over many generations and must believe that they share destiny of the future… People in Singapore may not have been shaped into a common mould for more than one generation. We have not shared a common past. During the Great Depression in the 1930s many Chinese, Indian and Malayan and Indonesian immigrants returned to their respective villages.37 Lee Kuan Yew recognised Singaporeans still had little loyalty to Singapore and considered themselves as Indian, Chinese, Malay or from other countries, rather than as Singaporean nationals. Hence anchoring Singaporeans to their homeland was to become a fundamental task of Singapore’s new museums. Reflecting this drive, the Singapore History Museum’s stated as its aim “to explore, discover and enhance the national identity of Singapore by preserving and interpreting the nation’s history and material culture in the context of its multi-cultural origins.”38

By contrast, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) sought to establish Singapore as the arts hub of Southeast Asia, specifically “to preserve and present the art histories and contemporary art practices of Singapore and the Southeast Asia region so as to facilitate visual arts education, exchange, research and development.”39 Set in a classical baroque- style school built in 1867, it has become one of Singapore’s landmarks, housing and expanding a significant national art collection. Since its establishment in 1996, the Singapore Art Museum has been appointed to support the state in transforming Singapore into an attractive and culturally stimulating place to live by providing the nation with a world-class venue to showcase both local and international art exhibitions.

Constructing the Asian Civilisations Museum

This brings us finally to the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) the subject of this study. The newest addition to the NHB suite of museums, the ACM celebrates Singapore’s ancestral cultures, conveyed decisively within its mission statement: “To explore and

37 Speech by Senior Minister to the National University Students, December 5, 1996. 38 National Heritage Board, Annual Report 1995/96 (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1996), 6. 39 National Heritage Board, Annual Report 1995/96, 6.

106 present the cultures and civilisations of Asia, and to interpret the civilisations that created them, so as to promote awareness and appreciation of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans and of the heritage of the Southeast Asian region.”40 In focusing on Singapore’s ancestral cultures the ACM represents a response to the government’s concern that ignorance and lack of a holistic sense of community within the various different racial and religious groups could lead to civil unrest, resentment and a repeat of the riots that occurred during Singapore’s push towards independence. Lee Kuan Yew powerfully conveyed this perspective in 1996, commenting at the time that unrest might tear Singapore apart at any moment: “It will be a grave mistake to believe that these dangerous primeval forces, driven by religious and racial feelings, cannot erupt again. If we ever forget this, we put our future at peril.”41 Reflecting Lee Kuan Yew’s concern over Singapore’s race relations, the ACM’s prime objective is to deepen Singaporeans’ cultural roots, generate pride in the country’s Asian heritage, facilitate understanding between the different races, and reinforce respect for Singaporean and Asian values. However, as with all aspects of Singapore’s national building exercises, the ACM was linked to and expected to contribute to its field of economies via tourism and cultural diplomacy. Supporting Singapore’s trade links with China, the Empress Place Exhibitions Centre, after a complete renovation, now the ACM, was tasked with holding five exhibitions from China, demonstrating the state’s awareness of the potential of cultural diplomacy well before the ACM was officially opened.

In February 1896, BG (NS) Lee Hsien Loong signed an agreement with the Peoples Republic of China concerning Cooperation in the Fields of Tourism, Civil Aviation and Exhibition under which Singapore would hold a series of five Chinese historical and cultural exhibitions.42

In signing an agreement between China and Singapore for cooperation in cultural spheres, Lee Hsien Loong (Lee Kuan Yew’s son) made clear the state’s understanding of the role exhibitions and museums could play in cultural diplomacy, specifically the way that Singapore’s field of cultural production could support a range of strategic national objectives. Having recognised that the field of culture had genuine currency, it was brought firmly into the game of nation building, and clear homologies were established between the

40 National Heritage Board, Annual Report, 1995/96, 3. 41 Lee Kuan Yew, Speech by Senior Minister to the NUS/NTU Students, December 8, 1996, 9. 42 George Yeo, Minister for Information and the Arts and second Minister for Foreign Affairs, speech at the opening of the Gems of Chinese Art exhibition, January 30, 1992, Singapore Government Press Release, National Archives Library Release No:34/Jan 03-1/92/01/30.

107 fields of economics, politics and culture, expressed at a detailed operational level as KPIs (key performance indicators).

One of the key aspects to Singapore’s success in developing the economy in such a short time was the interconnectedness of specific government agencies, and more generally, the power that was harnessed when Singapore’s socio-cultural fields (particularly those of economy and politics), operated in unison to achieve policy objectives. The development of ACM illustrates the workings of the overriding field of power which privileges the political and the economic as it incrementally builds and establishes intersections with other fields: in this case Singapore’s carefully constructed field of culture. Clear traces of this meta-structuring mechanism are apparent in the studious selection of the buildings which house the museum, the mission it was set, and the areas of national significance it was mandated to support.

The Rationale behind Establishing the Asian Civilisations Museum

The Director of the ACM Dr Kenson Kwok acknowledged the significance of the Ong Teng Cheong Report, describing how the committee on heritage contributed to the report by making recommendations “to encourage Singaporeans to be more appreciative of [their] collective heritage in the context of modern Singapore.”43 To this end, the committee endorsed the plan to restructure the National Museum into three separate institutions,44 one of which was to be a museum of Southeast Asian Natural History/Ethnology, with a mandate to promote a better understanding of the cultures and history of the region. In spite of this mandate, Kwok suggests that the resulting new Ministry of Information and the Arts led by Minister Brigadier-General Yeo from 1990 to 1999, argued that the museum should move beyond the original concept of a Southeast Asian-centric display, which the core of its existing collection could actually support, and represent the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans.45 Brigadier-General Yeo stated in 1992:

The Southeast Asia Museum, originally proposed, will be enlarged into the Asian Civilisations Museum. This is because it is not possible to understand Singapore in terms of Southeast Asian history alone. The ancestral cultures of Singapore also include China, the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East. The Asian

43 Dr Kenson Kwok, “Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Introduction”, The Arts of Asia, 32, no. 6, 45. 44 The state originally planned to establish five museums including a People’s Museum and a Children’s Museum, however to date, they have not yet eventuated. 45 Kwok, “Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Introduction”, 45.

108 Civilisations Museum will therefore have three main sections, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and South and West Asia. The Asian Civilisations Museum is not intended for Singaporeans alone. It is intended for all Asians and for those who want to understand Asia. We should establish such a museum because Singapore is a centre of Asian cultures with a remarkable mix of races, languages and religions.46 In keeping with the prevailing doxa of creating a defense against unwanted Western values, and concerns around racial harmony, Yeo believed that, for a multi-ethnic society like Singapore to thrive, citizens needed to be more strongly connected to their cultural origins, as well as having a greater awareness of the origins and cultures of the other ethnic groups.47 The new museum’s role was to help both Singaporeans and other Asians “understand Singapore” by identifying the cultural mix in its history. During a speech at the opening of the Gems of Chinese Art exhibition in 1992, Yeo linked the museum’s role to the central idea of nationhood. For Yeo, the objective of establishing an Asian Civilisations Museum was “to help Singapore find its soul, for it cannot be by bread alone that we live.” He elaborated:

Although we are a young nation, we are an ancient people. Thus a Singaporean is not only a Singaporean: he is also a Chinese, Malay, an Indian, a Eurasian, an Arab or a Jew, the inheritor of an ancient culture and a contributor to it. Thus, in discovering Singapore, we also discovery Asia and the world.48 The above quotation provides a clear articulation of the state’s early drive to reconnect Singaporeans to their ancestral cultures and communal values, and to create greater respect and tolerance between the different races. Additionally, Yeo pre-empted the main thrust of MITA’s Renaissance City Report. Launched in 2000, the Renaissance City Report called for greater engagement with Singaporeans’ ancestral culture to create ballast against unwanted individualistic Western values, apparently introduced into Singapore by the spread of English language within the field of education and embraced with the country’s rapid entry into the global economy. Yeo concluded his speech with a request for all Singaporeans to embrace both their Asian heritage and their nation:

Against such a perspective, the mission of the National Heritage Board is to explore and present the heritage of the people of Singapore, in the context of their ancestral cultures, their links to Southeast Asia and the rest of the world, and their nationhood, by the collection, preservation, interpretation and display

46 George Yeo, speech at the opening of the Gems of Chinese Art exhibition, January 30, 1992. 47 Kwok, “Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Introduction”, 45. 48 Yeo, Speech at the Gems of Chinese Art.

109 of objects and documents. In a larger sense, this is the mission of all Singaporeans and of all those who share our ideals.49 Director Kwok agreed that the ACM’s role of assisting racial understanding and harmony in Singapore represented a key part of the rationale and logic behind the establishment of the museum, commenting in 2002: “ACM was to be a facilitator in this process, and the promotion of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans was to become our mission.”50

The Empress Place Building: Fulfilling its Mission

The role that the ACM was destined to play in cultural diplomacy was first tested at what was then called the Empress Place Exhibition Centre, before the Ong Teng Cheong Report was released.51 In the 1990s, The Empress Place Exhibition Centre’s mission was to stage five exhibitions as part of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Republic of China’s Ministry of Culture and the Republic of Singapore’s Ministry of Information and the Arts “in pursuance of the desire of the Parties to strengthen the existing cordial relations between the two countries … in areas of culture, the arts, heritage and library.” As an important trading partner, China represented a fertile market for Singapore, and formal articles were drawn up to steer the relationship between the two countries drawing on the potential of the field of cultural production:

In accordance with the basic principles of establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries and with the laws and regulations in force for each country, [China and Singapore] have reached the following understanding: Article 1: Arts, Heritage, Exhibitions and Libraries The Parties shall encourage and promote: (a) The exchange of visits of administrators, experts and practitioners in the fields of performing, visual and literary arts as well as the fields of heritage and libraries...52 As a result, the Empress Place Exhibition Centre was charged with the responsibility of holding five Chinese exhibitions: The Imperial life in the Qing Dynasty (1989), The Han Dynasty (1990), The Silk Road: Treasures of Tang (1991), Gems of Chinese Art: War and Ritual (1992), The Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties (1994). At the launch of Gems of Chinese Art: War and Ritual,

49 Yeo, Speech at the Gems of Chinese Art. 50 Kwok, “Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Introduction”, 44–45. 51 This was formerly the colonial Government Offices and would eventually be converted in 2003 into the ACM’s flagship museum the Empress Place. 52 Singapore Government, Memorandum of Understanding on Cultural Cooperation Between the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic China and the Ministry of Information and the Arts of the Republic of Singapore, (Singapore: Singapore Government, 2002), 11.

110 with reference to the Ong Teng Cheong Report, BG George Yeo took the opportunity to present the plan for the establishment of a museum precinct in Singapore: “The Government has accepted in-principle the recommendation of the Advisory Council on the Arts and Culture to establish five museums in the museum precinct.”53 These five museums were to be the History Museum, the Fine Arts Museum, an Asian Civilisations Museum, a People’s Museum and a Children’s Museum – Yeo subtly imposing his own vision and changing the original report’s “Southeast Asian natural history and ethnology museum” to the ACM.54 Yeo went on to describe how the master-planning of the entire museum precinct would be rolled out later that year, and stated that the site of the precinct would stretch from the old St Joseph’s Institute to historic Fort Canning – which he indicated “could not be more ideal”. Yeo made it clear that land would be allocated for the new museums and that they would be linked together by common architectural themes, by commercial complexes and by surface and underground passages. Yeo pointed out that “in order to manage the museums, a National Heritage Board will be formed the following year” in 1993. The Board was also to take over responsibility for the National Archives and the Oral History Department, and other plans included the conversion of the existing National Museum from a civil service department to a statutory board, allowing it more flexibility to recruit specialised staff and pursue commercial activities where appropriate. In his speech, Yeo also described the role museums should play in Singapore’s cultural life:

We must make the entire museum precinct a lively part of our civic district so that activities go on all the time throughout the day and week. In addition to good curators we need good entrepreneurs who understand what will draw in the crowds. We need a whole array of facilities for the young and old, for local residents and visitors, for the serious and not-so-serious. We also need good makan places. We work with the Tao.55 Yeo’s reference to both food (makan) and the natural “way” of change in the universe (Tao) are lighthearted, suggesting that the way to attract visitors to a new museum is through the stomach – particularly Singaporean “heartlanders”.56

In 1994, at the opening of the last of the five Chinese exhibitions The Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties, held at Empress Place Exhibition Centre, it was the Minister for Trade and Industry Mr Yeo Chew Tong, who was invited to give the keynote address, once again

53 Yeo, Speech at the Gems of Chinese Art. 54 Ong, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, 6. 55 Yeo, Speech at the Gems of Chinese Art. 56 Commonly referring to a Singaporean living in Housing Development Board residential area usually from a lower socio-cultural level as opposed to the cosmopolitan élite of Singapore.

111 underscoring the government’s expectation that there would be a link between culture and economics. The Minister took the opportunity to note that the occasion marked the end of an interesting chapter in which the Empress Place Exhibition Centre had very ably accomplished its mission of facilitating the strengthening of relations with China through the organising of the five exhibitions. He then announced that, at end of the exhibition, the Empress Place Exhibition Centre would close so that it could undergo a thorough renovation, after which in 1997, it would be transferred to the National Heritage Board.57 Until the renovation of the Empress Place building was completed in 2003, from 1997 the ACM operated from within the renovated and repurposed Tao Nan School.

Recycling Singapore’s Built Heritage

The Empress Place was designed by colonial engineer J.F.A McNair, and was built by convict labour between 1864 and 1867. Originally intended to be a Courthouse, it was converted into a Government Office that housed almost the entire colonial government bureaucracy, with the Colonial Secretary’s office and the Legislative Council Chamber occupying the centre of the second level of the building. The building expanded, with many additions over the years, all faithful to the original neo-Palladian design. After Singapore’s independence, the building continued to be used for government offices, most notably for the Immigration Department. Kwok argues that the eventual choice of the Empress Place building was not a purely economic decision. It was based as well on a careful evaluation of the significance of the building’s architectural qualities, as part of the museum precinct plan was to select and thereby protect Singapore’s heritage buildings.

The Ong Teng Cheong Report, with its ambition to save Singapore’s cultural heritage, represents a major shift in the state's thinking. During Singapore’s accelerated economic development after independence in the 1960s and 1970s, many areas of the city were ruthlessly cleared to make way for modern high-rise buildings and efficient high-density housing and, in the process, many historical buildings were lost. In its rush to clean up the slums and present itself as the modern, efficient and clean economic hub of Southeast Asia, Singapore was fast losing its heritage buildings.

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had not appeared to valued heritage. In his push to ensure Singapore’s survival as a new nation state, his priority has been to maximise the

57 Yeo Chew Tong, Minister for Trade and Industry, speech at the launch of the fifth Chinese exhibition at the Empress Place Museum, September 30, 1994, Singapore Government Press Release.

112 efficient use of Singapore’s most limited resource – land. Urban land use and transportation were coordinated and planned in a concerted effort to establish the most efficient spatial and social order. The state compulsorily acquired land to construct high- rise housing estates and new towns, in place of the cramped and environmentally hazardous rural kampongs.

Under the heading “Our lost Treasures” on April 1, 1990, The Straits Times reported that within the city centre, the government drive for the construction of international-style hotels, office and complexes, led to the removal of many well-known landmark buildings, such as Amber Mansions, the Adelphi Hotel, the China Building, the Law Courts and the Raffles Institution, along with often numerous mansions, shops and houses. By the close of the 1970s the Singapore landscape had changed dramatically, and while the government was highly successful in achieving its aim of accelerated economic development it was losing its cultural heritage. As the slums were swept away and Singapore homogenised into a modern city, the level of tourism began to fall. Singapore was no longer an exotic Asian destination, and travellers appeared to be less interested in the clean, efficiently designed city. The changes also made it more difficult to attract foreign investment, as foreign talent was less interested in living in the sterile work- orientated environment that Singapore was fast becoming. With the removal of Singapore’s built historical cultural legacy, the country was also becoming less attractive to Singaporeans themselves. To stop the brain drain the state began devising ways of ameliorating the situation as highly educated Singaporeans found overseas destinations offered a more attractive environment in which to live and work.

As the difficult early years of nationhood passed and Singapore grew more confident in its growing prosperity, the state’s attitude towards heritage began to change, along with its views on culture in general, as reflected in the recommendations of the Ong Teng Cheong Report. Heritage became, from the state’s perspective, an important social, economic and political tool, and the government recognised that the built environment was an important part of Singapore’s cultural capital. Slowly an awareness grew that buildings represented the city’s cultural wealth and diversity, and could be put to use binding Singaporeans into a multi-ethnic state, as well as selling Singapore as an exotic tourist destination. The architectural built heritage took on new significance and, once the disappearance of heritage buildings was identified as a problem, the state acted quickly.

113 On 29 January 1971 the government enacted the Preservation of Monuments Act and established the Preservation of Monuments Board. Following the identification of culture as a new “sector” for financial development in both the Ong Teng Cheong Report and the Economic Development Board’s Strategic Economic Plan, the Preservation of Monuments Board was transferred from the Ministry of National Development to the Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA), and established as a statutory board. It was given the objective to protect and preserve monuments of traditional, archaeological, architectural or artistic interest and to generate public interest and support in the preservation of those monuments.

In organising heritage, the government adopted a dual approach. Firstly, it identified broader showcase areas such as Little India, Chinatown, Malay Town, and the Peranakan shop fronts (the legacy of colonial town planning based on a divide and rule hegemony), as important in supporting cultural tourism. Secondly, it identified specific heritage-listed buildings (55 in total) and gazetted them as National Monuments, some identified for use as museums. The old Tao Nan School was one such building, gazetted on 27 February 1998. The Empress Place Building had already been identified as a heritage site, having been gazetted on 14 February 1992, and together these two buildings would become the home of the ACM. As Empress Place was being gutted and renovated from 1998 to 2003, Tao Nan would become the first wing of the ACM.58

Chinese Primary School to Museum: The Tao Nan Building

Tao Nan is a short walk from both the National Museum of Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum, and was one of the first Chinese primary schools to be built in Singapore. The Tao Nan building sits heavily over the pavement at 39 Armenian Street in central Singapore, taking up the entire block. The old school is fronted by a busy road, bound on both sides by narrow laneways, and the building backs up hard at the rear against a steep ridge. As is typical of Singapore, the footprint of the museum maximises the commodity of the small island nation’s precious and limited real estate. The Tao Nan building is a small museum with a footprint covering 4005 sq. metres, of which only 1373 sq. metres operate as gallery space, the remainder being used for supporting facilities and access areas. Though it does house ten galleries, including two temporary exhibition spaces,

58 Preservation of Monuments Board, About us, http://www.mica.gov.sg/aboutus/pmb.html. Accessed 21,10,2011

114 the building’s scale and lack of potential to expand do not make it an ideal space for a national museum.59

The Tao Nan Building enhances the streetscape elegantly, and was designed in the “Eclectic Classical” style, with fluted columns and a symmetry characteristic of classical architecture, whilst the balconies that front the building are based on typical Straits Settlements bungalows with rooms arranged around a common hall. Its original architectural plans were drawn up and approved by the Municipal Engineer’s Office in 1910, and construction of the building was completed two years later.60 Appropriate to its original function as a Chinese dialect primary school, the internal plasterwork features Chinese symbols associated with scholarship.

Tao Nan was one of the first “modern” Chinese primary schools to teach in Mandarin rather than in a Chinese dialect, signalling the influence of educational reforms that took place in China and that influenced Singaporean leaders. One of these leaders was pioneer medical doctor and social reformer Dr Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957), a Peranakan, the first person from Singapore to win a Queen’s scholarship. As Lim stated: “A people like a tree severed from its roots must wither away and degenerate.” Lim believed that a Chinese education would “ennoble man’s mind and purify his character,” and Tao Nan’s history reflects the lofty sentiments that came with the new form of Chinese education that developed in Singapore from the 1900s onwards. 61 At this time, the Straits Settlements colonial government provided free primary level schooling only in the Malay language, as this was the vernacular of the indigenous people. The government left the various Chinese communities to establish their own schools, and in 1905 and 1906 the Hakkas, the and the Teochews all founded Chinese schools for their individual communities. Not to be left behind, Hokkien merchants supported the establishment of the Tao Nan primary school managed by Tan Boon Liat, not only the leader of the Hokkien community or pang, but also a Peranakan and grandson of the nineteenth century rice merchant and philanthropist . Chen Boachen, an education official and one of the tutors of the last Qing emperor, Puyi, is credited with naming the school Daonan Xuetang (Tao

59 One major drawback of the Tao Nan building is the lack of office space, and most of the 52 staff members, 9 of whom were curators, had to be located in an office building further down the street. 60 Angeline Foo, Collecting Memories: The Asian Civilisations Museum at the Old Tao Nan School (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1977), 13. 61 Dr Lim Boon Keng cited in Foo, Collecting Memories, 13.

115 Nan School). Xuetang means “modern school” and Daonan loosely translates as the phase, “my code of behaviour is promulgated in the South”.62

The school’s purpose-designed building was completed in 1912, with the early support of wealthy Peranakans such as Oei Tiong Ham and members of the Tan Tock Seng family. Driven by progressive administrators, Tao Nan was a pioneer in Chinese education and the first to accept students from all dialect groups (in 1909), changing its medium of instruction from a dialect to Mandarin in 1916. Tao Nan School operated until 1982 when the state “directed” that it move to its current building in , east of the city. , President of the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan, made known his feelings about the “surrender” of the school for a museum:

My colleagues and I in the Hokkien Huay Kuan had mixed feelings when Tao Nan Primary School relocated to Marine Parade in 1982. Objectively, we recognised the need for the school to move to bigger and more modern premises in the East Coast area. Subjectively, however, we felt a sense of loss in giving up the historic building in Armenian Street, which had been specially designed and constructed by our Huay Kuan’s leaders in the early twentieth century.63

Asian Civilisations Museum within the Tao Nan Building

Once the National History Museum was devolved into three museums and its collection was divided, the Asian Civilisations Museum took over the Southeast Asia ethnological material, a sizeable group of export ceramics, and part of the Straits Chinese (or Peranakan) collection. However, the Director of ACM, Dr Kenson Kwok, points out that the new expanded mission set for the Museum – “to explore and present the cultures and civilisations of Asia and to interpret the civilisations that create them, so as to promote awareness and appreciation of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans and of the heritage of the Southeast Asian region”64 – did not reflect the strengths of the existing collection:

Although we had an ambitious mission, our collection as it was at that point, could not support our ambitions. The focus of the collection had been suddenly changed – from a largely ethnological materials collection in the region to materials that could tell the story of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans (i.e. those parts of Asia our forefathers had hailed from – China, Southeast Asia,

62 Foo, Collecting Memories, 15. 63 Foo, Collecting Memories, 13. 64 National Heritage Board, Annual Report 1999/2000.

116 South Asia and West Asia). We had to transform ourselves from an ethnological collection to a history museum.65 The collection’s strengths derived from early colonial interests and collecting practices, and were ethnographic in nature, with the bulk of objects coming from provinces in Malaysia and Indonesia. The collection did not represent the diverse cultures of Southeast Asia at any point in history, nor did it illustrate changes over time. There were no Indian or South Asian collections, and the only Islamic objects in the collection related to the Southeast Asian collection. Kwok points out that annual acquisition grants were not regularly provided until the 1990s and even then they were so small that the entire year’s budget could have been spent on one Ming vase.66

Since extending the collections was a key issue, Kwok suggested that a significant motivation for expanding and upgrading the museums of Singapore was the knowledge that with the end of the British-held one hundred-year lease in Hong Kong in 1997, many wealthy collectors would be looking for safe holding places for their private collections. Until the expansion of the museum sector and its consequent professionalisation, Singapore had been unable to offer international standards of storage and little space to present these potential collections. Additionally, wealthy Singaporeans were taking collections overseas because of the lack of interest and facilities in Singapore. Echoing the state directives as outlined in Singapore: The Next Lap, George Yeo, Minister for Information and the Arts, highlighted the issue:

We have not actively promoted the National Museum in the past because museums were not high on our scale of national priorities. For many years, the Museums lacked space and expertise. Because we did not seem to welcome donations enthusiastically, a few Singapore collectors chose to give to other countries instead. This was a great loss to Singapore. I hope this will now change. We are now embarked on a programme to create more display space and to build up our museum expertise. In the next lap of our national development, it is important to give more attention to culture and the arts.67 Based on the collections available, Kwok had limited options for developing a display at the old Tao Nan School between 1994 (when the building become available) until 1997 (when the ACM’s other wing opened). He felt he had two choices: either to install a mini- survey of the existing collection with all its gaps, or focus on one region that could be reasonably well portrayed. Reflecting the prevailing doxa on race management in

65 Kwok, “Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Introduction”, 45. 66 Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, interviewed by author, the Asian Civilisations Museum, January 2004. 67 Yeo, Speech at the fifth Chinese exhibition.

117 Singapore, the galleries were divided along racial lines, with the Southeast Asia, West Asia, China and South Asia galleries; and corresponding curatorial teams were organised into discrete departments to support them. When asked about the choice to organise the ACM displays according to racial groupings, Kwok acknowledged that the collection could have been organised according to trade, religion or various other themes, but he felt that organising it into racial groups was the most logical and manageable way to display the collection, allowing maximum clarity and understanding for visitors.68 His view hints at the way the ACM reproduces the state’s logic of Singapore’s CMIO racial categorising, a structuring concept that sees cultural groups living separately but harmoniously side-by-side rather than mixed or blended together into a monolithic culture.

Ultimately it was decided that the first exhibition would focus on representing the ancestral heritage of China for two significant reasons. Firstly, the state-of-the-art refurbished Tao Nan building was now able to attract and accept private collections as loans, particularly from Hong Kong collectors.69 Secondly, given that over 70% of Singapore’s population are of Chinese ethnicity, Kwok felt it was only sensible to start with this group in the hope of establishing a strong support base for the new museum. Kwok pointed out that it was always known that the Chinese galleries would eventually be reinstalled in the Empress Place building (with four times the gallery space of Tao Nan), and that the objects relating to Chinese ancestral history would be needed in order to fulfill the mission of accommodating all the relevant Asian exhibits under one roof.

Testing the Waters: The Asian Civilisations Museum’s First Exhibitions

The first wing of the Asian Civilisations Museum was opened in 1997 at Tao Nan after a $15 million renovation. A large number of borrowed private collections from Hong Kong and elsewhere were combined with the Asian Civilisations Museum’s own collection and other donations to create what Kwok described as a “superb account of Chinese history.” The material exhibited in the thematic galleries included religious artefacts, architectural elements, ceramics, furniture, calligraphy, jade, and lacquer. Whilst it was understood that there could be an unsympathetic perception that the museum was solely a Chinese orientated museum, Kwok rationalised the decision on the basis that the pan-Asian intent could still be seen through the museum’s special temporary exhibition programme. This programme changed every three to four months and included exhibitions such as Ramayana

68 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 69 National Heritage Board, Annual Report 1995/96, 32.

118 (Indian art), Harmony of Letters (Islamic calligraphy), and Highlanders, Islanders and Headhunters (Southeast Asian ethnic minorities).70

Kwok made it clear that the first exhibition at the Tao Nan building featuring Chinese material culture, was really a “testing of the waters” to see if the concept of an Asian museum would work. He also pointed out that once Tao Nan was set up as the temporary first wing of the ACM, his staff immediately began work on planning and preparing the more extensive gallery spaces of the second and flagship wing at Empress Place.71 The renovation of Empress Place was planned to take place incrementally from 1998 to 2003, with galleries established progressively. The contents of four galleries, exhibiting large pieces from the Chinese collection within Tao Nan, would be transferred to the Empress Place building galleries in 1999, leaving four galleries cleared at Tao Nan. Given Tao Nan would be completely empty of its Chinese collection by 2003, it was agreed that it would be most expedient to find a collection that could fill the four galleries initially but was also large enough to be eventually expanded to occupy the entire Tao Nan building.

Filling in the Gaps: Establishing the Peranakan Galleries

A range of ideas were considered by the ACM for the galleries of Tao Nan, and a number of factors influenced thinking, including the size and type of the building, likely audience interests, and an awareness of what private collections were available for borrowing. There was talk of a ceramics collection, and the notion of turning the Tao Nan wing into a Museum of Ceramics was seriously considered. There was also careful consideration of a Maritime Museum, given the importance of trade and shipping in the region. However, these options risked loss of control of the smaller building to a separate institution, an outcome that was not desirable for Dr Kwok. The separateness of the building from Empress Place was to be a key factor in deciding what to exhibit in Tao Nan. Kwok commented:

…[y]ou have one big building of 100 thousand square feet and another of 40 thousand square feet. … it was clear to us that the smaller one had to be something that was independent and free standing, because these two buildings are not side by side, but about half a mile apart, and it takes 15 minutes to walk from one to the other. With no direct transport, it is unlikely for one visitor to have time to visit both museums. This made us think the smaller one had to be something that is freestanding. Our guiding principle was that it should be

70 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 71 Kwok, interview with author, 2004.

119 related, but independent and free-standing – so it could be a satisfying museum visit on its own.72 As part of the decision-making process, Kwok and his team looked at information about exhibitions that had been held over the previous years to determine what had been popular, what people had been asking for, and what people seemed to be interested in. “It’s what I and some of my colleagues were able to glean from all these sources. It is not something we decided in a vacuum.”73 It became clear that Kwok and his ACM colleagues believed that the best solution for the four galleries was an exhibition of Peranakan culture, one that could then extend from occupying the galleries on the second floor to the entire building when the Chinese collection was removed.

Part of the rationale for this choice related to pleasing local interests. Kwok also pointed out that the Peranakans had been the subject of successive semi-permanent exhibitions held at the National Museum including the display The Straits Chinese Gallery (1985–1995) and Rumah Baba: Life in a Straits Chinese House (1996–2003), which had been very popular. There had also been a successful temporary exhibition of Peranakan jewellery, Gilding the Pheonix: The Straits Chinese and Their Jewellery (April–August 1993). Kwok also described how tour agents enjoyed taking tourists to these galleries, and he noted the reaction when they were taken down in the mid 1990s:

People were quite upset because it is a very colourful material culture and it was something that is exotic. Because we had done these kinds of exhibitions before, we knew there was a kind of a market demand – in the sense that tourists seemed to like learning about this and even locals like it as well.74 Kwok understood that there had been an organic or grassroots revival of interest in the Peranakans from the 1980s onwards, something that occurred without state intervention. He described how over the previous ten years there had been a number of popular books published by an academic and collector Ho Wing Meng, addressing Peranakan subjects such as furniture, ceramics, beadwork and jewellery. He believed that this increased awareness had helped revive interest in the Peranakan culture, which in turn fed the local interest in museum exhibitions. Kwok also made the point that Peranakan material culture is unique to Southeast Asia and whilst the ACM could never compete with other museums in the world on Chinese or Indian objects, it was in a prime position to develop the most comprehensive collection of Peranakan material culture in the world. Kwok believed that

72 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 73 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 74 Kwok, interview with author, 2004.

120 the innate eclecticism of the Peranakans, as reflected in their material culture, was another compelling reason for focusing on this area of culture. He considered that its very nature provided an excellent example of social and cultural integration, particularly relevant given the Singapore state’s fears about the consequences of racial disharmony:

I feel that is one of the underlying messages or subtexts of the Peranakan, as subject matter … this is a really interesting historical example of ethnic and social interaction, where a particular group adopts habits, costumes, food, the culture etc. of different cultural groups and there is not such a taboo about it. What we can and can’t do, whether this is foreign and that foreign, so on and so forth. It is a fully integrated and eclectic culture.75 At a realistic level, Kwok pointed to the accessibility of the Peranakan material culture, examples of which were readily available, as the Museum itself had its own substantial collection. More importantly, Kwok knew that there were a number of private collections that could be drawn upon for long-term loans: “There was material available, and there is no point wanting to do something when you cannot get the materials, so that is a factor which comes into consideration.” At a basic level, Kwok also felt that there was a good match between the boutique size of Tao Nan and the Peranakan collection: “We felt somehow the size of the building and the amount of material that is available would fit together quite well.” Given the rich nature of the material culture of the Peranakans, Kwok thought visitors would have a satisfying experience seeing the many highly decorative objects in a relatively small space. Finally, Kwok felt that there was a logical match between the architecture with its “eclectic classical” style, featuring a combination of Chinese and colonial influence, and the objects with their eclectic designs. Kwok felt that the building itself was of a style that the Peranakans would have known and would have occupied: “So even that little coincidence helped, not that it is so important what the envelope of the building of a museum looks like, but in this particular case it tends to go together well.”76

Summing up the rationale for the decision of what to place in Tao Nan’s four galleries, Kwok stated, “For all those different reasons or coincidences we thought that a Peranakan collection would probably be the best and most sustainable for the Tao Nan building.” The use of the word “coincidence” point to the perceived “natural” fit between the Tao Nan Museum and the Peranakan collection, and the irresistible logic to showcase this community’s material culture. Significantly, Kwok did not raise the Peranakans’ social history or the individual pioneers in their community as an argument for dedicating an

75 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 76 Kwok, interview with author, 2004.

121 entire state museum to this group; the focus was firmly, and clearly, on their material culture. This was partly due to the fact that it was the Singapore History Museum’s mandate to address Singapore’s social history, but more importantly, because of the mixed nature of the Peranakans’ history, with the lingering memory of them as the “King’s Chinese.” Having evolved into an élite and exclusive community under the representation of the once powerful lobby group, the Straits Chinese British Association, the Peranakans’ public and well documented reluctance to give up their “special” relationship with the British colonial forces rendered their social history problematic as it did not accord with the state’s overall nation-building quest to inculcate loyalty to the nation and tolerance of cultural difference within its citizens.77

Formal Approval

Having come to the conclusion that a display of Peranakan material culture made the best choice at the time, Kwok had to gain approval for the idea: “It is not just a matter of saying ‘good, we want to do it’ and just go ahead!”78 The decision to create an entire Peranakan Museum was seen as a policy change, as the building would no longer be devoted to the ancestral cultures of Asian Civilisations as a whole. There was no mention of developing a Peranakan Museum in the plans outlined for establishing a museum precinct, in either the Ong Teng Cheong Report or the report Singapore: The Next Lap.

Whilst acknowledging that they could have gone ahead and installed the Peranakan exhibition in the four empty galleries in the Tao Nan building without seeking approval, as temporary exhibitions did not require approval at the Ministry level “unless they are of extremely sensitive subjects,” Kwok decided, given the wider ambition to convert the entire building into a Peranakan Museum, to seek approval for the change in use of the building. “Given the long term plan we had to get approval in principle. Before we could do the four [galleries] we decided to get approval to do the ten.”79 This meant navigating the decision- making process through the various levels of the bureaucracy to the Minister himself.

Working within the Hierarchies

The ACM operates as a division of the larger National Heritage Board, which at the time was headed by a twenty-four-member board chaired by Lim Chee Onn. The National

77 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 78 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 79 Kwok, interview with author, 2004.

122 Heritage Board has four subsidiary boards, each with responsibility towards the governance of one of the National Heritage Board’s four institutions (the Asian Civilisations Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Singapore Art Museum and the National Archives.) Members of these sub-boards work closely with the National Heritage Board members to provide advice on strategic development plans, policies and programmes. The individual boards encourage a degree of independence in the operations of the various institutions while maintaining links with the National Heritage Board.

Kwok describes the extensive steps he undertook to gain approval to establish the Peranakan Museum within the governance structure: “We started with the approval of the CEO of the National Heritage Board, Lim Siam Kim, and as I recall the CEO said ‘you better tell your board about it’.” Detailed proposals were drawn up and presented to the Asian Civilisations Museum Board, where Kwok said an “in principle agreement was gained.” After this step, Kwok had to gain approval from the National Heritage Board itself and then finally from the Ministry of Information and the Arts. However, he points out that “it does not necessarily go in this strict order, because the ACM’s Board is really an advisory body, so it can be informed afterwards, it is not that hierarchical. The important thing was getting the National Heritage Board’s okay.” Kwok described how “there was a little bit of worry at the ACM Board level by one member who felt it [a Peranakan museum] was too partisan and questioned why we were concentrating on a particular ethnic group that was a tiny minority.” Kwok raised the concern with the National Heritage Board “but the bosses were not too worried about the issue so we got the green light.”80

Dr James Khoo, who at the time was Chairman of the Asian Civilisations Museum’s Board and a Member of the National Heritage Board, suggests the decision was not made without some debate around important concerns. Khoo stated that there was never any issue around populating the empty galleries at Tao Nan with Peranakan material: “We have very little else to show, as we are a new nation, this is unique to us.” However, there were concerns about turning the whole building into a Peranakan Museum. Dr Khoo suggested that while the board wanted to highlight something unique to Singapore and important from a tourist perspective, there were genuine concerns about whether Singaporeans were ready for a Peranakan Museum. He pointed out that there was a prevailing, what he called “romanticised” belief that the Chinese were a pure race with a long history of civilisation to

80 Kwok, interview with author, 2004.

123 be proud of and that the Peranakans, with their history of intermarriage with the Malay community, did not represent this view: “I think some people think the Peranakan, who don’t speak Chinese and don’t understand Chinese, are not so good.” However, Dr Khoo also pointed out that, although the Peranakans were a small minority group, they had a powerful voice: “Look at the previous administration [PAP], a lot of the important positions belong to Peranakan Chinese, even Mr Lee Kwan Yew himself.” Importantly, Dr Khoo’s discussion manifests the prevailing tension between recognising the uniqueness of the Peranakan community’s material culture within a state funded museum versus the still lingering discomfort of highlighting Peranakans as a community themselves, given their history as an exclusive, élite community, or as the “King’s Chinese” as they were sometimes referred to.81

Both Dr Kwok and Dr Khoo personally believed that Singaporeans could learn a lot from the early Peranakan settlers, with Dr Khoo suggesting: “To my own personal thinking, this is not the museum’s position – the Singaporeans of today are the Peranakans of tomorrow.” He implies there was a direct parallel between the ability of the Peranakans to adapt to the changes that occurred in their time, and the current way modern Singaporeans were having to adapt to changes in Singapore as it entered the global market. Pragmatically Dr Khoo also pointed out that there was never time, at a board level, for philosophising about what exhibitions were most appropriate for ACM. He stated emphatically that the board had no influence at all on what exhibitions the Asian Civilisations Museum might hold. Dr Khoo mentioned that he had been personally invited to be the Chairman of the newly established Asian Civilisations Museum Board in 1995, because he was a neighbour of the CEO of the National Heritage Board and had an extensive personal collection of Asian artefacts, or what he called a “house full of stuff,” including many Peranakan objects. Dr Khoo described how, in the early days of being a board member, he fought to establish rules that would allow the board input into decisions about what type of exhibitions would be shown at the museum but, after writing a number of letters to the CEO of the National Heritage Board, he gave up pursuing this course of action as he never received any response. “I think the paid executive did not want anyone meddling with their rights to determine exhibitions, and so the ACM Board became a group of people to help with fund raising. It is like what young people ask from grandparents nowadays – just keep your mouth shut and give us the money! I think that is

81 Dr James Khoo, neurosurgeon, Chairman of the Asian Civilisations Museum’s Board, member of the National Heritage Board, interview by author, Dr Khoo’s office, 2004.

124 basically what they wanted. They would not want the board to have too much intervention with curatorial decisions…” Dr Khoo made it clear that it was only at the state-appointed executive level of the National Heritage Board that real power and decision-making took place.82

Kwok’s views on the criteria for the selection of the ACM’s Board members are not dissimilar, describing how people were approached because they had a genuine interest in museums and the ability to raise funds. “If you don’t have the interest you don’t find the time. They [board members] should be our supporters and root for us.” Kwok stated that he only wanted people on the board who could help raise money and generate contacts to help build the Museum and develop the collections. In his words, the criteria was: “Do they have any fund raising ability, or do they have any important contacts they can bring to us?” This was the dominant strategic need at the time, especially with the unexpected additional cost of the renovation of the ACM’s second wing at Empress Place. Kwok argued: “We are going through a very bad period [financially] and until things improve we will not expand or change the nature of the board.”83

Once all the ACM Board members were satisfied that the Peranakan museum was an acceptable idea, it required the endorsement of the NHB. Kwok pointed out that the Chairman of the National Heritage Board at the time (Mr Lim Chee Onn) could have “snuffed the idea out” if he felt it unsound. “It is very much a personality thing: our current National Heritage Board Chairman, Professor Tommy Koh, is very hands-on and he wants to be involved. Our previous Chairman on was not so hands-on, so it depends on the personality of the Chairman and how far they want to exert their authority.”84 However, Lim Chee Onn lent his support to the idea of transforming the Tao Nan School into a Peranakan Museum and in the 1999/2000 Annual Report of the National Heritage Board Onn provided an extensive rationale for the establishment of the Museum. This is worth quoting in full because it so clearly articulates the state’s understanding of the potential currency of the Peranakans’ material culture. Additionally, it provides an indication of the almost unconscious acceptance of state control of race:

Being a young nation, we do not have the wealth of historically significant artefacts nor the expertise to match those of our museum counterparts in other countries. When it comes to sharing expertise and artefacts, we invariably could

82 Khoo, interview with author, 2004. 83 Kwok, interview with author, 2004. 84 Kwok, interview with author, 2004.

125 not match the richness of the traditional collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Smithsonian. We would also need to build up a critical mass of visitors to warrant purchasing such collections. Moreover since outstanding artefacts are already found in many other museums, it would not be prudent if we too acquired similar collections. As an alternative, we should look within and identify key treasures that are uniquely Singaporean, and specialise in those that we can excel in. It is this uniqueness that will give us currency to secure exhibit exchanges, especially for blockbuster exhibitions. Singapore has a unique cultural position owing to the multicultural ancestral backgrounds that our forefathers brought with them when they arrived here. Over the decades we have allowed each component to grow through the principle of creating unity in diversity. We have consciously allowed distinct cultures to flourish side by side and yet allowed some degree of blurring of cultural lines, which has become part of and parcel of our heritage. This will be further promoted when ACM converts part of the Old Tao Nan building to house interesting Peranakan artefacts when the Empress Place Building is ready. It is a culture unique to this region. We have a substantial and exquisite collection of Peranakan artefacts to give us currency to travel the exhibition and negotiate loans for world-class blockbuster exhibitions from other institutions. Moreover, we believe we do have the ingredients to develop a strong team of specialists in this field.85

With all relevant individuals and boards supporting the decision, approval then had to be gained from the Ministry, which involved two levels of meetings: one with the Permanent Secretary and another with the Minister of Information and the Arts. Over a four-year period, Kwok and his team were required to conduct three presentations at a ministerial level due to changing ministers. Kwok recounts the process:

Of course we have had funding problems and the recession has come down on us in the last couple of years, so we have not been able to proceed. I had to brief three different ministers about this project and get their approval, and it has been a complete nightmare. One minister will approve of it and it is approved but we still need to inform the new minister, and he may or may not have his own fresh interests.86

Despite these complications, Ministry approval was finally granted and, at the end of 2000, the Chinese collection was taken down and four galleries were installed as The Peranakan Legacy exhibition.

85 National Heritage Board, Annual Report 1999/2000, (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2000), 6–7. 86 Kwok, interview with author, 2004.

126 Conclusion

Museums in Singapore began with the imaginings of Sir Stamford Raffles. Driven by the inner logic of the colonial expansionist game and the nineteenth century Englishman’s wonder at the region’s riches and natural resources, Raffles was determined to build an educational institution in Singapore which included an area for displaying collections from the region. Such an ambition was designed to enhance Raffles’ own personal reputation while demonstrating the colony’s political and intellectual dominance over the region. Both the colonial expansionist ambition and enlightenment values shaped the philosophy of the public museum’s activity as it evolved from a showcase of exotica in the Raffles Museum and Library, through to its iteration as the Raffles Institute with its focus on scientific research. As Anderson argues, by doing so the colonialists unconsciously engendered a “grammar of nationalism,” providing the disparate communities of pre-independent Singapore with the structures for “imagining” themselves as a nation, drawing on museums as one mechanism to provide the legitimate genealogy. The newly established National Museum repackaged the mechanism of the colonial museum and put it to work to tell the “Singapore Story.” As Singapore’s first Minister of Culture, S. Rajaratnam, so aptly stated: “If the spirit of Sir Stamford Raffles is, at this very moment, hovering in this august chamber, he will, I am sure, accept the inevitable change with good grace.”87

As Singapore’s crisis mentality relaxed a little in the late 1980s along with the state’s felt need to expand its economic growth in more diverse areas, Singapore’s cultural fields were analysed and dissected in the 1988 Ong Teng Cheong Report and included as part of Singapore’s “creative industries” in the 1991 Economic Development Board’s Strategic Economic Plan, ready to be harnessed and developed to meet clearly defined state objectives. With the recognition of the cultural capital invoked by Singapore’s heritage, and with a sophisticated understanding of how this could be exchanged for greater economic capital, the state set about establishing a museum precinct, supporting the directives of the report Singapore: The Next Lap in making Singapore a culturally vibrant nation-city.

From its first iteration as an exhibition centre at Empress Place, the ACM was linked to other national strategic objectives. While it was initially set a mission to enhance Singapore’s diplomatic and trade relationship with China, the state drew upon its cultural assets to fulfill an ambassadorial role. Whilst this is established practice throughout the world, what is unique to Singapore is the almost seamless cooperation between different

87 Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum Singapore 1887–1987, 62.

127 sectors in the government and bureaucracy. With the establishment of the National Heritage Board came a new museum sector identified in Singapore’s civic district. Heritage buildings were then declared national monuments and their residents moved to more “convenient” surroundings. The establishment of the ACM and its curatorial logic reflect the continued reproduction of the broader colonial structures, embedded as they are within the current state’s structures, reflected directly within the ACM’s organizational structure. They divided its galleries, collections and departments along clearly differentiated racial lines, South Asia, West Asia and Southeast Asia, with the “Other” addressed within temporary exhibitions. The ACM directly reproduces the Peranakan’s colonial past, separating them out from Singapore’s general ancestral cultures and providing them with special treatment by placing them and their material culture, in their own clearly differentiated museum.

There was no official mention of the possibility of a Peranakan Museum in either the report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts or in the Report Singapore: The Next Lap, and yet there was a sense that the Peranakan material legacy was such an “obvious” collection for a national focus that it could not be ignored. This chapter has demonstrated how Kwok, as the Director of the ACM, operated as the mediating link between the macro level state and ministerial directives and the micro level operations of the musuem as an organization. In consultation with the ACM staff and board, it was Kwok’s role to interpret the state’s ministerial directives, which ultimately led to the decision to convert the ACM’s first wing in the Tao Nan building into a Peranakan Museum. The ACM functions as a subfield within Singapore’s fields of cultural production, firmly immersed within state – dominated social spaces but with its own autonomy and internal logic as an organisation. Kwok, having been “talent spotted” in 1992 and eventually selected as Director of the ACM in 1994, brought to the role a combination of western-educated connoisseurship and the discipline of a Singaporean with a deep “natural” understanding of how governmental processes operate. 88 Such a background positioned him to effectively mediate the ACM’s role within the more dominant fields, and to “play the game” of complementary homologies between other fields (such as tourism and education) to strengthen and enhance the ACM. With the devolution of the national history museum into three separate museums and the subsequent division of its collection,

88 Kwok is a serious collector of Chinese printed export ceramics.

128 Kwok was able to assess the capital at stake within the field (in this case Singapore’s emerging museum sector), and recognise the symbolic value of the Peranakan collection. This recognition led to his ‘struggle in the field, to legitimately claim the collection for the ACM, even thought there was no direct mention of the Peranakan as a discrete group in policy directives, and despite the fact that the Singapore History Museum had already laid claim to the Peranakans with their exhibition Rumah Baba. As a seasoned player in both the museum sector and Singapore’s social spaces, Kwok was able to draw on his personal skills and symbolic, cultural and social capital to successfully negotiate the approval of the Peranakan Museum through the state’s hierarchical bureaucracy, and strengthen both his own position, and the ACM’s status in the field of cultural production.

There is an almost invisible thread of logic that works its way through the journey that resulted in the transformation of the Tao Nan Building from a school to the Peranakan Museum. Perhaps it is only apt that the home of one of Singapore’s earliest Chinese schools, built by the Hokkien Huay Kuan with the support of wealthy Peranakans, is now home to a museum committed to exhibiting the material culture of the Peranakans. The connections between Peranakans and the Hokkien are deep, with Peranakan ancestors believed to come from southern China, bringing with them the many Hokkien words found in Peranakan Baba-Malay Creole.89 The building too is a mix of European and Asian features, reflecting and complementing the eclectic nature of the Peranakan culture. As Singapore became an independent nation, the hands that pulled this invisible thread of logic into place moved in time with the prime forces of national concern: trade and economic performance, racial harmony, and regional security.

The next chapter describes The Peranakan Legacy exhibition as it opened in 2000, providing details of both the displays and the curatorial rationale underpinning the exhibition’s interpretation. The larger question of whether Singapore is ready, as Dr Khoo suggested, to accepting the ethos that “the Singaporeans of today are the Peranakans of tomorrow” will be addressed in the remaining chapters.90

89 William Gwee Thian Hock, A Baba Malay Dictionary: The First Comprehensive Compendium of Straits Chinese Terms and Expressions (Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2006), 9. 90 Khoo, interview with author, 2004.

129 Chapter 6: Testing the Waters: The Peranakan Legacy

Introducing The Peranakan Legacy The President of the Peranakan Association, Lee Kip Lee, was a guest of honour at the opening of The Peranakan Legacy exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) on December 7, 2000, and his presence strategically linked the exhibition to the Peranakan Association’s one-hundredth anniversary celebrations.1 In The Peranakan, the Association’s newsletter, Lee Kip Lee reported that The Peranakan Legacy opening “marks the Asian Civilisations Museum’s transformation into a boutique museum focusing on two main subjects: Peranakan culture and Chinese connoisseurship.”2 In doing so Lee acknowledged that his community were now being graced with the same symbolic recognition as that attributed to Chinese highly sanctified connoisseurship. Lee also noted that the Peranakan Association had been invited to support the opening of the ACM’s The Peranakan Legacy and in response intended to “set up Peranakan food and crafts stalls with entertainment and demonstrations of Peranakan cooking and dressing … culminating in a heritage tour of Malacca.”3 Thus the Peranakan Association unwittingly confirmed the stereotypical “cultural markers” of food and dress that had become synonymous with the Peranakans in Singapore.

On the same occasion, the Peranakan Association also celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary with a new logo, a fresh look, and a set of new aims focused on renewal. With a new mission statement – “to preserve and revitalise the Peranakan culture and traditions through cultural, social and literary activities” – President Lee Kip Lee made it clear that the Association’s aim was “to break away from our mould of just being a heritage society.”

1 The Peranakan Association, established in 1900 as the Straits Chinese British Association, was a powerful lobby group initially created to represent the interests of the Peranakan Chinese living in Singapore. Since independence in 1965, it has transformed into a cultural group comprised of approximately 1890 members interested in maintaining Peranakan cultural heritage and traditions. “The History of the Peranakan Association,” accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.peranakan.org.sg/about/2/history-of-the-peranakan-association/. 2 Lee Kip Lee, “The Dawn of a New Peranakan Age,” The Peranakan, (October–December 2000), 1. 3 Lee, “The Dawn of a New Peranakan Age,” 1. 130

As we celebrate the one-hundredth year of the founding of our Association our thoughts, at the dawn of a new Peranakan Age, must dwell on the future and on the plans we have to fulfill the objectives of our new mission statement…4 Whilst Lee was actively repositioning Peranakan culture as alive and relevant within Singapore’s contemporary social spaces, the curatorial team behind The Peranakan Legacy exhibition had a different agenda, their focus being the material culture left behind from the Peranakan “golden era” (c1860s–1930s). Even the choice of the word “legacy” in the exhibition title positioned the Peranakans as a phenomenon from the past.5 The ACM’s curators responsible for this exhibition positioned the Peranakans as a community from Singapore’s colonial history, defined by a collection of unique and exotic material culture, largely in the form of household domestic and ritualistic objects, presented as a newly defined canon of Southeast Asian art.

The Launch of The Peranakan Legacy On December 7, 2000, the National Heritage Board heralded the opening of the new Peranakan exhibition with a press release headlined “The Peranakan Legacy comes to life at the Asian Civilisations Museum.”6 Whether intentional or not, the subtext of the message may be read as both an assumption that the Peranakan community lacked life, no longer being the vibrant, dynamic and influential cultural group that they had been during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that it was within the museum’s power to restore a heartbeat to this lost culture. The headline also references the state’s role in diminishing the Peranakan community to the position of a quaint, visually interesting culture that flourished during Singapore’s colonial history.

The previous chapters have traced the historical, political and economic developments that resulted in the state’s recognition of the potential of Singapore’s cultural fields, which led to the opening of the Asian Civilisations Museum and The Peranakan Legacy exhibition in the Tao Nan building as part of the broader ambition of establishing Singapore’s museum precinct. The previous chapter outlined how the Asian Civilisations Museum, operating within Singapore’s social spaces, was influenced by the more dominant fields of politics,

4 Lee, “The Dawn of a New Peranakan Age,” 1. 5 Legacy meaning, “property left to someone in a will, something handed down by a predecessor,” its origin being from the Latin word legatus literally meaning “person delegated.” Oxford Dictionaries Online, retrieved May 5, 2010, http://www.askoxford.com:80/images/interface/concise_oed.gif. 6 The National Heritage Board, “Press Release: The Peranakan Legacy Comes to life at the Asian Civilisations Museum,” accessed December 12, 2003, http:www://aap.mica.gov.sg. 131 economy and education, such that, of all possible curatorial narratives, certain options presented themselves as obvious, natural and culturally appropriate. Additionally the rationale and approval processes that lead to the installation of The Peranakan Legacy has been discussed in detail in the previous chapters. The process for gaining approval for the policy change required to allow for the much larger project of the eventual conversion of the Tao Nan wing of the ACM into a dedicated Peranakan Museum has also been outlined.

This chapter describes The Peranakan Legacy as it opened in 2000. It traces the development of the museum’s approach to displaying the material culture, focusing on the choice of narratives selected and constructed by the curatorial team. A rich descriptive account of The Peranakan Legacy is provided, with details of each gallery and examples of key objects and the text panels that appear in the galleries and accompany objects. Through in-depth, open-ended interviews with the curatorial team this chapter also provides the significant contextual information that influenced curatorial decisions at the time. Through its detailed account of the exhibition and a Bourdieuian analysis, this chapter aims to reveal the complex and sometimes arbitrary matrix of influences and curatorial decision-making that resulted in a culturally safe and predominantly aesthetic display, positioning the domestic material culture of the Peranakans as a newly defined, minor art form from Southeast Asia. Additionally this analysis considers the constructed curatorial narrative that placed the Peranakan Chinese as a wealthy, privileged minority group, an exotic relic from the colonial past of Singapore, largely ignoring their contribution to nation building as Singapore’s leading pioneers.

The Universalising Effect of the “Aesthetic Museum” This chapter begins by considering selected theories addressing the effect of the “aesthetic museum” on the interpretation of collections. By focusing on what Carol Duncan calls the “liminal” or aesthetic experience, the aesthetic museum removes traces of the history of the object on display.7 Similarly, Bourdieu argues that without any historical context for an object, a museum unwittingly establishes a pure aesthetic experience or transhistorical norm for every engagement with a work of art, in other words an aesthetic doxa.8 Such an approach ensures that the point of view of those dominant in the art world prevails over other voices. Building on this argument, Tony Bennett suggests that the particular presentation of art draws on theoretical principles that govern its display, and

7 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 17. 8 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 255. 132

“organises a set of relations between the visible – the physical works on show – and the invisible – the history of the artists and the context of its production.”9 He suggests that this aesthetic approach is unlike modern history museums where “objects are typically displayed with a view to rendering present and visible that which is absent and invisible: the past history of a particular people, nation, region or social group.”10 Carol Duncan also highlights the civilising rituals that museums construct for participants to enact. She argues that the context in which objects are viewed dramatically changes the viewer’s perception of them. Museums may, for instance, transform domestic, utilitarian objects into objects of art by placing them within a potentially politically sanitised realm of aesthetics. More specifically, she explains the shift in meaning-making stating: “…the very capacity of museums to frame objects as art and claim them for a new kind of ritual attention could entail the negation or obscuring of other, older meanings.”11 Further, Duncan argues, that a museum’s capacity to control the meaning of objects through the style of display indicates that “[t]o control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths.”12

In his article “Exhibition Rhetorics” Bruce W. Ferguson interprets and deconstructs exhibitions as institutional utterances which, he argues, allow us to begin to know “who speaks to whom, why, where and when and under what conditions.”13 For Ferguson all exhibition procedures may be analysed as speech acts, meaning that curators need to carefully consider “labels, didactics, advertising, catalogues, hanging systems, media in their modernist sense, lighting, wall colours, security devices, posters, handouts etc.”14 Ferguson persuasively argues “the exhibition is more often than not glossed over as a ‘natural’ form within the life of an institution, even in attempts to discover the deeper levels of power that institutions generate and work within.” He argues that “the formation of any nation’s or region’s or group’s constructing of its accumulating self under ever new historical conditions, are continuously shifting, assembling and dissipating notions of identity.”15 This chapter will discuss the history of the development of The Peranakan Legacy exhibition, a set of complex decisions that resulted in an aesthetic approach presenting itself as the

9 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 9. 10 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 166. 11 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 16. 12 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 8. 13 Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense” in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Willis Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (eds.), Thinking about Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 1996), 183. 14 Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 181. 15 Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 178. 133 appropriate and natural way of showcasing the material culture of the Peranakan community.

It is important to note at the commencement of this chapter that, while written permission was obtained from those interviewed (allowing the researcher to freely draw on the content of their interviews), the researcher decided, given the potential sensitivity of the material, to protect the anonymity of the curatorial team, many of whom are still working in Singapore’s state museums. The Peranakan Legacy team members are identified as Senior Curator and Assistant Curator A, Assistant Curator B and Assistant Curator C.

Entering the Tao Nan Building: The First Wing of the Asian Civilisations Museum

As noted in the previous chapter, The Peranakan Legacy exhibition was strategically inserted within the ACM to test how well locals and tourists would respond to a Peranakan collection before the larger plan of converting the whole of the Tao Nan building into a boutique style Peranakan Museum was undertaken. To provide a clear understanding of the context of the exhibition, the following is a brief description of the permanent galleries, which framed The Peranakan Legacy exhibition. The Peranakan Legacy exhibition, which opened in December 2000, was dismantled at the end of 2006; for this reason the following description is in the past tense.

The Asian Civilisations Museum’s first wing in the Tao Nan building was situated squarely in the newly established museum precinct, a short walk from the Singapore Art Museum, the Singapore History Museum, and the Philatelic Museum. For the five-year period that The Peranakan Legacy was on display at the ACM, large banners promoted the exhibitions on show in the museum, including colourful illustrations of decorative artefacts and exotic wedding costumes.

Entry to the Tao Nan building led up a short flight of stairs, past two regal bronze eagles peering down from the top of opened gates, into a well-lit and welcoming foyer. Climbing the stairs to the doorway, one might have glimpsed a tiny museum shop (on the left) that sold books, cards, jewellery, textiles and small ornaments related to the collection inside. Once inside, there was a large open air-conditioned museum foyer. At the far end of the room, the front-of-house staff sat at a reception desk to sell visitors tickets and to provide directions. They would direct the public into Gallery 1 on the left, which was set up like a mini theatre and featured a high impact, commercially produced, eight-minute introductory video called The Story of Asia. The ACM had commissioned this video as a

134 prelude to the opening of its flagship museum at Empress Place, to provide a taste of what was to come and explain how objects could tell the story of Asian civilisations. With its high production values, stunning location shots, slick editing and dynamic music, The Story of Asia appeared like a travel commercial.

Figure 1: Ground Floor Layout of the Tao Nan Building

In Gallery 2, “The Shaw Foundation Gallery Introductory Display”, on the immediate left, was a large map of Asia focusing on the “official” ancestral locations of Singaporeans: China, India, Southeast Asia and West Asia.16 Located on the other gallery wall was a long cabinet with a printed backdrop featuring an extended timeline of Chinese history, showing items such as ceramics, bronzes and religious artefacts which represented the highlights of Chinese culture.17 From Gallery 2 entry, accessible from the foyer, visitors would see a door leading into a multifunctional education room called ACE Space (Asian Civilisations Education Space). This room focused on the presentation of education programmes that

16 Collections from these areas would be featured in the ACM’s second flagship wing at Empress Place, still being renovated in 2000. 17 This was designed by the ACM’s Education Officer to cater to Singaporean school curriculum requirements. 135 supported the interpretation of the temporary and permanent exhibitions that were on display.18 From the ground floor, there was either a lift to the second and third floors, or old wooden stairs to access the remaining galleries on the next two floors.

Figure 2: First Floor Layout of the Tao Nan Building

On the second floor were Galleries 7 to 10, left largely as they had been installed at the time of the museum’s opening in 1997. These showcased the world of the Literati or Chinese scholars of official rank, in keeping with the museum’s previous focus on Chinese culture and civilisation. Gallery 8 featured jade pieces: snuff bottles, ink cakes, inkstones, brushes and rhinoceros-horn cups. Gallery 9 contained monochrome and polychrome imperial porcelain used by the Literati, and Gallery 10 showcased Chinese painting, featuring landscapes, bird and flower paintings from the Ming collection of the late Mr Yeo Chee Lim, a private collector in Singapore.19 These darkly lit galleries, filled with sombre- coloured objects, provided a strong contrast to the brightly coloured material culture of the Peranakans encountered on the second floor of the museum.

18 This was a project managed by this researcher whilst working as Public Programmes Manager at the Asian Civilisations Museum in 2000. 19 Asian Civilisations Museum, Gallery Guide, (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1999). 136

Gateway to The Peranakan Legacy Exhibition

Overview of Contents Gallery 3: Introduction Gallery 4: Sireh Daily Dress/Batik Embroidery/Beadwork Bridal Display Gallery 5: Jewellery Gallery 6: Ancestral Altar Silver Porcelain

Lower Annex Gallery: Temporary exhibition space

Figure 3: Second Floor Layout of the Tao Nan Building

The Peranakan Legacy brochure, available on arrival, described the exhibition as evidence of “the complex hybrid world of the Peranakans – a unique culture forged between the Chinese, Malay and European worlds over 200 years ago.”20 The brochure also introduced the main themes of the exhibition: Sireh (betel) sets,21 Nonya beadwork, embroidery, jewellery, silverwork and ceramics. Apart from two semi-contextual displays featuring a bridal chamber and an ancestral altar, the galleries on the second floor were organised neatly into clearly defined categories of objects presenting the Peranakan material culture as a new minor canon of Southeast Asian art. Before looking at the galleries and the objects contained in each, it is worth considering how the curatorial decision-making process developed this particular approach to the representation of Peranakan culture.

20 Asian Civilisations Museum, Gallery Guide. 21 “Betel-chewing was an important Southeast Asian custom, thought to have originated in the Malay world, and a wealthy Peranakan home would have elaborate sets which were presented to their guests on their arrival as a sign of hospitality.” Heidi Tan, “‘Peranakan Legacy’ at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore”, ASEMUS News (Asian-European Museum Network), accessed December 31, 2012, http://www.lias.nl/liasn/31/IIASN31_50.pdf. 137

A Mixed Response: Curatorial Input into The Peranakan Legacy Concept

The ACM opened its first wing within the old Tao Nan Chinese school building on April 21, 1997. Upon its completion the curatorial staff turned their attention to developing the storylines and acquisitions for the exhibitions to go into the much larger flagship museum at Empress Place. The mission of the Empress Place, according to the then Director Kenson Kwok was to, “tell the stories of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans (i.e. those parts of Asia our forefathers had hailed from – China, Southeast Asia, South Asia and West Asia).”22 Echoing Singapore’s neatly defined racial categories (CIMO or Chinese, Indian, Malay and Other), the Empress Place project had four curatorial teams addressing the structure of the collection: a West Asian team looking at Islamic culture, a South Asian team addressing largely Indian culture, the Southeast Asian team focusing on the local region, and a team addressing Chinese culture. When the eventual decision to place The Peranakan Legacy exhibition into the Tao Nan building was made, the Senior Curator of the Southeast Asian Galleries (who at the time was also responsible for the Peranakan collection) had to temporarily halt her team’s work on Empress Place in order to deliver The Peranakan Legacy exhibition by 2000.

The Senior Curator for the Southeast Asian collection was the longest serving member of the ACM curatorial team, and had been with the museum since 1985. With a Masters Degree in history from the National University of Singapore, the Senior Curator was employed at the National Museum when it was devolved into three separate institutions, and she took up her existing position at the Asian Civilisations Museum under Dr Kenson Kwok’s directorship. In her team were three Assistant Curators: Assistant Curators A and B were both young graduates from the National University of Singapore and had been with the museum for about four years. Assistant Curator B had completed a Masters while attending Curtin University in Perth. Assistant Curator C was the newest recruit, joining the Southeast Asian team at the end of 1998, just in time to start working on The Peranakan Legacy. Assistant Curator C, although born in Singapore, left for the United Kingdom at the age of 16 where she completed high school followed by a degree in Fine Arts and two Masters Degrees. The first was in Arts Management and the second in Art and Archaeology with a specialisation in Southeast Asian material culture. Assistant Curator C returned to Singapore specifically to take up the role of Assistant Curator within the ACM’s Southeast Asian team.

22 Kwok, “Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Introduction,” 46. 138

Although the Senior Curator worked with the ACM’s Director and board members in the debate as to what should go into the Tao Nan building, the timing of the decision to install a Peranakan exhibition left her team with just over twelve months to complete the task, which left very little time for exhibition development. In interviews, Assistant Curator B mentioned the sense of urgency that already existed towards the end of 1998 as the curatorial teams worked toward the 2003 deadline for the opening of Empress Place: “internally there were a lot of practical issues to deal with… all of us at the time were indeed very busy, buying artefacts for this building (Empress Place).”23 Assistant Curator B pointed out that, while the team knew the timeline was extremely tight, they felt they could deliver The Peranakan Legacy whilst still meeting the deadline for the Southeast Asian galleries for the Empress Place building in 2003.

Assistant Curator C also mentioned the short lead time given for developing The Peranakan Legacy, and pointed out that the permanent Chinese exhibition on the second floor had only been put up in 1997 but “by 1998/1999 we were already talking about taking it down and putting up The Peranakan Legacy which was really quite a quick turnaround.” Assistant Curator C had only been employed at the Asian Civilisations Museum a year before the opening of The Peranakan Legacy, and felt she had not been involved in the development of the exhibition: “… the conceptualisation of the whole exhibition of Peranakan Legacy was really spearheaded by Dr Kenson Kwok and three other curators.”24 According to Assistant Curator B, there were pragmatic reasons for installing The Peranakan Legacy. He pointed out that the empty galleries could have been filled with any number of different collections. He suggested, for example, that the empty second floor in the Tao Nan building could have been used for an exhibition about the Ramayana or Islamic textiles, but he felt that the other curatorial teams (addressing South Asia, West Asia and China) were much smaller than the Southeast Asian team, and would never have had the time to divert from the development of the Empress Place exhibitions. Assistant Curator B acknowledged that the ACM already had a core collection of Peranakan artefacts, and that several lenders were lined up ready to offer their collections on long-term loan. Assistant Curator B suggested that the Senior Curator had to be convinced to lead the project, but agreed, stating: “Let’s do the Peranakan because together there are four of us, that’s a very

23 Assistant Curator B, Southeast Asian Collection, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, March 3, 2003. 24 Assistant Curator C, Southeast Asian Collection, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, March 3, 2003. 139 decent, small team to put together an exhibition.”25 The Senior Curator, at the time of the development of The Peranakan Legacy, also felt that Peranakan culture was a logical and pragmatic choice to place in the galleries left vacant by the removal of the Chinese exhibits: “It was not very ideological, it wasn’t based on a brilliant philosophical idea. It was very much a functional decision.” She suggested that the Peranakans were the obvious choice because of the availability of their material culture, and reiterated that the Peranakans were at the height of their economic power at the turn of the century and as a result commissioned and generated a large number of beautiful artefacts which were new enough on the market for a small group of people to collect them. She made it clear that the few collectors the museum worked with had had the foresight to amass strong collections and were looking for an opportunity to have them displayed. “So it was really something that was almost by default… if we had to do a big exhibition, then you need a lot of artefacts. This community happened to have a tremendous source of visual artefacts.”26

When asked how highlighting the Peranakan community fitted with the Asian Civilisations Museum mission – “To explore and present the cultures and civilisations of Asia, so as to promote awareness and appreciation of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans and their links to Southeast Asia and the world” – the Senior Curator argued that whilst the museum had four distinct departments dealing directly with the “official” ancestral cultures of Singapore, this only showed where people came from, not how they developed once on the island, nor how they interacted culturally. The Senor Curator demonstrated a clear understanding of the symbolic potential of the community, and stated that looking at ancestral cultures alone was not enough to understand Singapore. She felt there was “a lesson to be learned” by looking at the Peranakans.

You would never understand the true meaning of what it is to be multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic. The best lesson we can learn from the Peranakan community is how things are mixed, borrowed and transformed to create something unique to Singapore as well as various coastal communities in Southeast Asia.27 The Senior Curator felt the Peranakan exhibition provided the best way of understanding the interactions between people in a new environment and the process they go through to acculturate, resulting in change and hybridisation. Moreover, she felt that the Peranakan

25 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 26 Senior Curator, Head of Southeast Asian Collection, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, March 3, 2003. 27 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 140 material culture was the result of cultural borrowing and adaptation and would complement the presentation of Singapore’s official ancestral cultures. Reinforcing the symbolic potential of the Peranakans, the Senior Curator believed the community reflected Singapore’s national identity, and that “Singapore, like the Peranakan, would never be monolithic, it will always be varied and full of differences.” However, it became clear during the interview that the Senior Curator was in some conflict regarding her view of the Peranakans’ symbolic potential and her personal understanding of the community:

At a personal level, the Peranakan culture, apart from the hybridisation, apart from the fact that they are so multicultural and have a very strong sense of confidence that really comes out from that culture, apart from that, aesthetically I find it most unpleasing, and personally I do not appreciate certain values of the community, you know, the snobbishness that comes with being part of the Peranakan Community. But this is inevitable because they had to establish a confidence and an identity for themselves, but it appears to me they deny others.28

The Senior Curator’s response reflects a general sentiment of non Peranakan Chinese who still feel that the Peranakans present themselves as superior to the rest of the Chinese community incurring resentment and vilification. Given the time constraints, while members of the Peranakan community were consulted as the exhibition developed, no Peranakans were recruited into the curatorial team. The Senior Curator acknowledged that, whilst she believed the Peranakan Chinese community to have an élite status which made them hard to know, she felt her team were able to make objective curatorial decisions.

I mean none of us would be able to truthfully faithfully portray the context and contents of any community. Whatever you do is influenced by your own cultural background, your own education and upbringing. You have to make a selection and it’s a very objective selection that we have made of the Peranakan community.29 Dr Kenson Kwok echoed the Senior Curator’s assertions of objectivity, and made it clear that having a Peranakan curator was not necessary: “Traditionally I may be British, but I can be a curator of Japanese materials, I can be a Chinese ceramics expert.” Further, he suggested that it would have been problematic to have had a Peranakan curator because of the conflict that might have arisen between differing ideas between individual

28 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 29 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 141

Peranakans on identity and traditions: “… I would rather have a person who does not belong to that [Peranakan] community, who can take a more objective view.”30

The lack of Peranakan curatorship on The Peranakan Legacy stood in stark contrast to the exhibition Rumah Baba: Life in a Peranakan House on display around the corner in the Singapore History Museum from 1996 to 2003. This re-creation of a Peranakan house was co-curated by guest curator and Peranakan, Peter Lee, in collaboration with the Singapore History Museum’s curator Jennifer Chen. Peter Lee is an established collector of Peranakan culture, and his father Lee Kip Lee was then the President of the Peranakan Association. The Rumah Baba brochure provides a succinct introduction to the exhibition inviting visitors to experience an authentic Peranakan home:

Welcome to the traditional Rumah (house) of the Babas. The term Babas or Peranakans usually refers to the descendents of intermarriage between Chinese pioneers and local women of the Malay Archipelago. As a result, they have a unique and vibrant culture that is reflective of the Chinese, Malay and European (especially British) cultures. Set in the 20th century, this house will display a fine collection of furniture, jewellery, costumes and household daily wares. You are cordially invited to re- live their splendid way of life here, behind closed doors.31 With the help of Peter Lee’s knowledge as a Peranakan, historian and collector, the Singapore History Museum presented an authentic re-creation of a mid–twentieth century Peranakan house which was designed to allowed visitors to walk through the simulated house, complete with a street front entrance and sound scapes. The exhibition brochure provided details of the aims of the display:

The House can be said to symbolize Peranakan Culture. It is this setting in which Peranakan art, ritual and tradition are most clearly expressed. Through several centuries of change and refinement, the culture is an example of how a Chinese community came to adapt to their environment without losing their identity. The traditional Peranakan house, with its formal Chinese arrangement and eclectic mix of furnishings reveals how this unique culture enjoyed a lifestyle that was deeply rooted in Chinese tradition and ritual, and yet was receptive to the cultures of other local communities.32 While the Rumah Baba exhibition pre-dated The Peranakan Legacy by four years, Dr Kenson Kwok was not concerned about duplication between the two cultural institutions,

30 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview by author, 2003. 31 Rumah Baba: Your Guide to the Peranakan House, (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1996). 32 Rumah Baba: Your Guide to the Peranakan House, 1996.

142 mainly because he knew that the Singapore History Museum would close in 2003 and reopen as the National History Museum without the Rumah Baba exhibition.33 However, the curatorial team at the ACM were influenced by the knowledge of the concurrent Peranakan exhibition and made sure their interpretation was different. According to Assistant Curator B: “We had to acknowledge that the Rumah Baba does the contextual setting… whereas The Peranakan Legacy was to showcase the material quality of the artefacts,” said Assistant Curator B, aware that having two Peranakan exhibitions so close to each other could raise questions.34

Of the three Assistant Curators, Assistant Curator A was the most involved in developing The Peranakan Legacy. He pointed out that he had joined the museum four years before work had begun on The Peranakan Legacy and had been in charge of the Peranakan collection for the Asian Civilisations Museum. He felt the Rumah Baba exhibition and The Peranakan Legacy had completely different aims: the Rumah Baba exhibition was designed to showcase a typical traditional Peranakan house and its contents and associated rituals, whereas The Peranakan Legacy “was supposed to be a comprehensive, first time survey of the Peranakan culture, of what they’ve left behind across Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century onwards to the twentieth century.” He felt the aim was partly to elevate Peranakan material culture into a recognised genre of art:

I mean there was a very explicit purpose: to elevate, to intern Peranakan, the history of Peranakan material culture to the main canon of the development of Southeast Asian art, because that art in terms of pure art, the technique, the level of artistry and sophistication on Peranakan material is among the finest – you know, in this part of the world at that point in time, that they should become an integral part of the art history of this region.35 Assistant Curator A discussed how he had been making acquisitions for the museum in collaboration with major collectors: “If they [private collectors] have a certain type of thing that was an excellent example, I would look for something else.” Assistant Curator A realised that there was an opportunity for the museum to “acquire the best, most comprehensive collection of Peranakan material in the world” because of the proximity of the museum to the geographical area from which the objects came, and because the Peranakans had not yet become well known in the collecting world. “The fact about good

33 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview by author, 2003. 34 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 35 Assistant Curator A, Southeast Asian Collection, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, March 3, 2003. 143 collecting is that the best collectors get there before the market gets there. I was collecting Peranakan material before it had been firmed up as an idea for a permanent gallery.”36

Assistant Curator A was clear on how the Peranakan, as a minority group, fitted with the Asian Civilisations Museum’s mission in terms of ancestral cultures: “Peranakan culture is something that we created, that our ancestors created in this part of the world that was unique to us [Singaporeans].”37 The curatorial team as a whole were aware of how significant the unique nature of Peranakan Chinese material culture was. Assistant Curator A for example, mentioning that, whilst there was some initial concern about privileging one minority group above others, the Peranakan material culture itself provided a compelling case:

I think the strongest argument is when the objects come out. They are really high quality objects, and you realise, in a sense, you cannot say that they belong to the Chinese or the Malay or the Europeans. In a sense, they represent all these different areas, and of course from the point of a museum, it's really a museum that deals in artifacts, and you realise out of all the minority groups, that Peranakans are the only ones that have bequeathed this huge, diverse and rich amount of material artifacts down to us. No other group has left such a huge amount of indigenous material, original material, whether in textile, gold, ceramics, metal, wood. They have been produced and made for people in this region and not elsewhere, and you can't find anything elsewhere, you will never find Peranakan porcelain, the sort that we have here, in China. Assistant Curator A became aware during the development process of the exhibition, that for The Peranakan Legacy to be “commercially viable” and to work in the longer term, it had to be distinct from the Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian and Islamic exhibits that would feature in the second wing of the Asian Civilisations Museum at Empress Place. He believed that the uniqueness of Peranakan culture meant that the exhibition could stand on its own, commenting: “You could bring your friends or visitors from overseas and say, look – look at this, this is something you don't see in the Metropolitan Museum.” Assistant Curator A also felt that The Peranakan Legacy had a strong message for both Singaporeans and overseas visitors:

It should send a message about the diversity of cultures in this part of the world that people should be aware of and more importantly, through this sort of Peranakan exhibit, I think it's very important in terms of the nation, in terms of instilling the sense of pride in our young, in Singapore as a nation, we do have something that is unique to us. We are not like the backwaters of China or Malaysia or Indonesia or India because here you have this thing [Peranakan

36 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 37 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 144

material culture] that the Indians, the Chinese, they will never have.38

In contrast to Curator A, and in keeping with an understanding that the Peranakans were chosen for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons, Assistant Curator B made it clear that while the team may have discussed the implications about national identity and race in focusing on the Peranakans, they never formalised this in any way. “If you asked me did we sit down at length and discuss racial pigeonholing or racial harmony I would say no – it was talked about but never written down. Did we choose Peranakan because of racial profiling? No!”39

Assistant Curator C shared the same view: “We simply did not have time to sit down and discuss woolly things like national identity.” She made the point that the curatorial team were so busy preparing for the next exhibition that there was little time for reflexive thinking or for positioning the Peranakan exhibition as a message about racial integration. So according to Assistant Curator C whilst the curatorial team could see the potential of a Peranakan exhibition to send a politically significant message, this was not the aim:

I cannot think of a single example where someone has said this is really important to Singaporeans today because it illustrates a really vital aspect of our ancestral culture, because it is unique to us as an ancestral culture or statements that have been made which are explicitly relating to ancestral cultures. It is kind of implied.40 It is clear from their responses that the four curators involved in developing the ideas underpinning The Peranakan Legacy indicated different levels of understanding of the Peranakans’ potential role as symbolic in nation-building. The Senior Curator, as part of senior management and having worked with the Director in gaining approval for the Peranakan exhibition, had a sophisticated level of understanding, whilst ideologically having a problem given the perceived élitism of the Peranakan. Assistant Curator A, having been responsible for expanding the Peranakan collection for four years and for working closely with collectors, focused on the role of the museum as a leading collector and authority on Peranakan material culture and most importantly on raising awareness of the collection as a distinct form of Southeast Asian art. Assistant Curator B, had previously focused on developing the collection and storyline for the ACM’s new Southeast Asian galleries at Empress Place, and Assistant Curator C had just joined the ACM, both invested

38 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003 39 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 40 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 145 the least amount of time in considering the significance of the Peranakans. As a result, whilst both had an awareness of the Peranakans’ “mixed” social history as the “King’s Chinese,” they both felt that the most compelling rationale for undertaking The Peranakan Legacy was the uniqueness, quality and availability and of the objects themselves.

Creating The Peranakan Legacy’s Storyline Dr Kenson Kwok described his role in the development of the exhibition, suggesting that once the curatorial team had approval to proceed with The Peranakan Legacy, they were primarily responsible for creating the storyline. “I didn't really interfere or make any suggestions particularly, but I just asked to be kept informed as to how the whole storyline thing was working out; so I was comfortable with it, I thought it was alright.” Dr. Kwok suggested that the curatorial team use existing resources and objects to develop a storyline, which he felt “proceeded on a fairly commonsensical and rational basis”. Dr Kwok made the point that as Director “you can't be hands on everything” but that it was important for him to be kept informed of the exhibition’s development.41

The Senior Curator discussed her role in developing the storyline, emphasising that the most important thing was to allow teamwork and collaboration to happen, while ensuring that the general tone and direction, laid out by her and approved by Dr Kwok, was maintained. She did however stress the importance of individual creative freedom:

It was a collaborative work between four curators – what I did was set up the main framework and had the other three curators work in different sections of the exhibition, and actually it was [Assistant Curator A] who fleshed out most of the storyline.42 Assistant Curator A implied that, once approval for The Peranakan Legacy had been secured, the development of the exhibition went very smoothly. As the original curator for the Asian Civilisations Museum’s Peranakan collection, Assistant Curator A took on a dominant role amongst the curators. “Basically I wrote the storyline. I conceptualised the storyline for the entire display.” Assistant Curator A then allocated different themes to curators based on their areas of expertise. His expertise was in jewellery and silverware, Assistant Curator C ceramics, the Senior Curator batiks, and Assistant Curator B sireh-sets, beading and the wedding and funerary displays.

41 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview by author, 2003. 42 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 146

Assistant Curator A made the important point that he was influenced by the desire to showcase both the donors’ and the museum’s collections. “I think the general idea was that we will use as many artefacts as possible to give a chance to show all these things.”43 This has a significant outcome on the curatorial approach and the resulting format of the exhibition. Dr Kwok reiterated the importance of displaying private collections in the museum, arguing that it encouraged collectors to donate loaned objects permanently to the museum’s collection, and other collectors to donate or loan objects.44 Assistant Curator A discussed how his role and relationship with external collectors impacted on the development of the storyline:

I had been in charge of the Peranakan collection, part of that had been extending the collection specifically in my area of interest – jewellery and metal work, so I had been building the collection up, cultivating private collectors. Chief among them was Betty Marriott who I have been working with through the years to take stock of how much could be integrated into a display in the museum.45

From interviews with the curatorial team, the breaking up of the exhibition into themes based on Peranakan material culture was a fluid process involving the entire team, with key influences coming from the external exhibition designer, from the lenders of Peranakan collections, many of whom were not Peranakan, and from members of the Peranakan community. Assistant Curator B suggested that his role in development was relatively straightforward: “Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult. It took a whole year to put together, but it wasn’t difficult at all…”46 Assistant Curator C reinforced this by suggesting the team worked out the storyline through regular discussions: “What we did was we came up with our storylines for each section …we would go in and do our research and then come back and meet together and talk about how we all fit together and what we needed to do.”47

Assistant Curator B described how the team created the key object-based themes (sireh, beadwork/embroidery, batik, wedding display, jewellery, altar display silverware and porcelain), suggesting they emerged “naturally” from discussions and from prevailing views about what was known about Peranakan culture in Singapore:

43 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 44 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview by author, 2003. 45 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 46 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 47 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 147

[t]here are a lot of stereotypes that already exist so you don’t have to invent what these stereotypes are … So we’re basically working with what people are already familiar with, developing those themes and giving them more information about these themes. 48 Assistant Curator A added that he was familiar with the Marriott collection having worked with it for over four years, and had discussed themes with Betty Marriott and other lenders considering how best to integrate and display their collections within the gallery spaces, noting that the collectors were very passionate and focused on how their collection would be displayed. Assistant Curator A also maintained that the rationale behind the thematic display was to elevate the Peranakans into the new canon of art in Southeast Asia. He felt strongly that the level of art that emerged from the Peranakan community, and its technique and sophistication, were among the finest of their type in the region.49 He was determined to see The Peranakan Legacy establish the Peranakan material culture as an art form and that the Asian Civilisations Museum would be recognised as the first institution to hold a major survey of this unique Southeast Asian art. With the most intimate knowledge of the Peranakan artefacts, Assistant Curator A took on the role of setting the tone of The Peranakan Legacy, and developed the introductory gallery described in the following section.

Welcome to The Peranakan Legacy Dominating the entrance of The Peranakan Legacy was a set of exquisitely carved and gilded Pintu Pagar (outer gates) from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. A text panel stated that the gates were rescued from a Singaporean Peranakan bungalow that was demolished to make way for high density, modern, air-conditioned apartments, and that – in the modernist view of Singapore undergoing economic transformation – the Pintu Pagar no longer had any practical function.

48 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 49 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 148

Figure 4: Introduction to the Peranakan Legacy, featuring the Pinto Pagar and the Timeline.

The gates, described in a text panel, were designed as a welcoming entry into The Peranakan Legacy and to foreground the hybrid nature of Peranakan culture, with its “varied cultural elements adopted by the community…” The gates featured Chinese motifs such as lion-dogs on the top panels, along with European vases and garland designs on the bottom panels. With gilding, elaborate carving and their imposing scale, the gates were also an indicator that the Peranakans were a wealthy cultural group.

The Introductory gallery included a number of extended text panels with illustrations, maps and photographs designed to provide background historical information. Assistant Curator A suggested that, as this was a first time survey of Peranakan material culture across Southeast Asia, it was important to begin with the background history. He stated: “[t]he start of it will have to be, in a sense, a short narrative encapsulation of the history of the Peranakans and what they have left behind and why they were significant in the history of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century onwards to the twentieth century.”50

50 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 149

“The Question of Names”

A short text panel entitled “The Question of Names” presented a rationale for the sometimes-confusing range of names associated with the Peranakans, and clarified that “the term Peranakan simply means ‘local-born’. It mentioned that the terms “Straits Chinese” and “Peranakan” were often interchanged and explained that, as non-Chinese Peranakan communities like the Chitty Melaka of Indian origin existed, the label “Peranakan Chinese” would be used in the exhibition, as it addressed only the Chinese Peranakan of Southeast Asia. Additionally, the panel stated that the exhibition would use the terms “Baba” and “Nonya” to refer to the community of the Peranakans, explaining that “Baba” was an honorific term first used by the Malays to differentiate those locally- born Chinese males from the later immigrant Chinese who did not adopt Southeast Asian practices into their daily lives. At the same time, the women became known as “Nonya.” This text panel indicated again that the exhibition would be privileging the Chinese Peranakan community. During interviews, curators acknowledged that there was little reliable research and scholarship available on the Peranakan Chinese, mainly because Baba Malay was an oral language. They further acknowledged that what constituted a Peranakan is considered debatable by both academics and Peranakans alike.

“Peranakan Chinese Culture”

The message of hybridity was reinforced within the Introductory gallery with the inclusion of the formal portraits of Mr. and Mrs Tan Beng Wan. The portraits were designed to provide evidence that the Peranakans were the result of intermarriage between the Malay locals and Chinese traders, indicated by the dress and accessories of the two figures which reflected the mix of Southeast Asian, Chinese and European elements in Peranakan Chinese culture. The portraits also provided a visual summary for much of the material displayed in the rest of the galleries, such as the sireh-sets, beading, jewellery, ceramics and textiles.

The text panel stated that Mrs Tan Beng Wan was painted in her own home. In the portrait she was presented wearing a traditional dress: a Malay style tunic called the baju panjang over a long cloth wrapped around her waist to form a skirt (sarong). The dress was fastened with a set of three brooches called kerosang, jewellery which has become closely identified with Peranakan Chinese identity. The text panel suggests that “some say” that the adoption of the Malay dress is evidence that the earliest Peranakans must have descended

150 from local Malay or Indonesian women whom the first Chinese settlers married, the logic being that female offspring would have adopted their mother’s Malay-style dress.

On the table next to Mrs Tan is her family’s betel-chewing set. The practice of betel chewing is a distinctively Southeast Asian and Indian practice, not taken up by mainland Chinese but adopted by the Peranakan Chinese from the region. An elaborately decorated ceramic spittoon is at her side next to her feet and she is wearing embroidered shoes, the beads on which would have been of European origin. These objects have become the symbolic cultural material markers of Peranakan women and are seen in context within the portrait, foreshadowing the collections within the galleries ahead.

In contrast to Mrs Tan’s Malay costume, Mr Tan was wearing a traditional Chinese outfit, once again supporting the theory that the Peranakan Chinese were the result of intermarriage between Malay women and Chinese traders. The portrait of Mr Tan illustrated the success of the Peranakans as the King’s Chinese, the text panel stating that Mr Tan was held in the highest regard by the colonial government and was appointed as one of the representatives of the Chinese Advisory Board of Singapore in February 1890. The text panel ended with the statement that he was also a Municipal Commissioner until his death in 1891.

“ Temples in Melaka and Java”

Opposite the portrait, was a text panel detailing one of the origin theories of the Peranakan Chinese. Old black and white photos of ruins and accompanying text panels described the “Zheng He Temples in Melaka and Java,” and discussed the legend of the great Chinese maritime explorer Zheng He who led the largest and most technologically advanced fleet in the world during the early fifteenth century. The text panel suggested that a temple in his honour exists in Malacca, and that local belief asserts that Zheng escorted the Chinese princess Hang Li Po to Malacca for her marriage to Sultan Mansur Shah. The legend suggests she was accompanied by five hundred servants who were given an area in Malacca known as Bukit Cina as their place of residence and burial ground. By contrast some Peranakans believe it was this movement of Chinese people that initiated the Peranakan Chinese community, and by inference, linked them to a royal “pure” Chinese lineage. The museum narrative could be perceived as reflecting a traditional or prevailing sensibility of the high value placed on the “purity” of the Chinese race, and a sense of degradation associated with interbreeding with foreign natives such as the Malays.

151

“Who are the Peranakans?”

On the wall opposite the gates hung an extended text panel addressing the entire The Peranakan Legacy as a display: “this display” it stated, “showcases the material culture of the Peranakan Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia,” making it clear from the outset that the exhibition was focused on the Peranakan Chinese of Southeast Asia, and not the many other non-Chinese Peranakans. Extended text panels provided a history of the Chinese Peranakan, suggesting that they had lived in Southeast Asia as far back as the fourteenth century, and that their origins had been with Chinese traders who had originally settled in Malacca and the coastal areas of Java and , setting up trading communities. This brief history lesson indicated that some of these Chinese Peranakans then moved to Penang, Trengganu and finally Singapore. The text panel thus provided the most generally accepted theory on the origins of the Peranakan Chinese:

Although these initial settlers considered themselves very much Chinese, they had also, through their long residence in the region, adopted many local customs and are believed to have married local women. Their descendants became known as the Peranakan or “local-born” Chinese.

The text panel also indicated that, over time, the Peranakan Chinese had lost the ability to speak Chinese, and by the late nineteenth century had established their own creole or Baba Malay – a language comprising primarily Malay elements but with noticeable elements of southern Chinese vocabulary.

The Peranakan Chinese were proud of their Chinese heritage. They thus retained in their ceremonies, many traditional beliefs and practices even though many of them could not speak Chinese by the late 19th century.

The text panel also outlined the items of the Peranakans’ material culture that were on display in the galleries ahead, and stated that the Peranakans used a huge range of beaded, textile-based, and gold and silver ornaments, which found their way into Peranakan households. The introductory panel then ended with the statement that the Peranakans had a practice of specially ordering ornaments from Indian, Chinese, European and Malay craftsmen, resulting in the hybrid nature of Peranakan Chinese material culture, which could have be seen in other galleries on this level of the museum. These words were designed to create an expectation about what had been on display – a highly ornamented collection of objects influenced by cultures from as near as Malaysia and as far away as Europe, but all representative of the local-born Chinese.

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“The Peranakan Chinese in Southeast Asia: A Timeline”

There was an extended text panel dedicated to presenting a brief but significant timeline tracking the fortunes of the Peranakan Chinese in Southeast Asia and complemented by a large map which indicated the location of Peranakan settlements. This text panel, high up on the wall featuring the Peranakan timeline, began in the period 220BCE to 221CE, and cited the first reference to Southeast Asia from the Han dynasty histories, and then moved through major developments in Chinese maritime history until the fourteenth century when permanent Chinese settlements became widespread. The timeline outlined the feats of various Chinese maritime figures, reaching 1600CE when the earliest Chinese settlement was established in Malacca. The entry dated 1641CE read: “Dutch conquest of Melaka. Beginning of Baba society,” signalling a relationship between the Peranakan identity and European colonialism. The timeline then continued with key events for Peranakan cultures in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and stated that by 1700 “there was an increasing adoption of local practices by Chinese” with the “development of a self-conscious Peranakan identity distinct from later Chinese immigrants.”

Singapore appeared on the timeline with the date 1819 and the note that this was the “founding of Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles.” It also highlighted that the “Malaccan Babas were among the first financiers of gambier and pepper industries in Singapore and Johor,” placing the Peranakans at the earliest beginning of the small island’s history. The timeline then stated that in 1826 the Straits Settlements were formed, which brought the Babas in Melaka, Penang and Singapore into one political and economic unit. Following this was the establishment of the Straits Chinese British Association (SCBA), on 17 August 1900, with a Melakan branch formed in October the same year.

The timeline continued indicating that in the 1930s and 1940s the Peranakan Chinese became increasingly Westernised. They joined the Civil Service in large numbers and were referred to as the “King’s Chinese.” However, the positive tone of the timeline’s narrative changed dramatically during 1942 – 1945, when it was pointed out that the Japanese Occupation ended the colonial patronage system that had supported the Babas. In 1945 events saw the “absorption of Peranakan Chinese into mainstream Chinese and national cultures following independence in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.” The next entry explained that in 1965 the Singapore SBCA changed its name to the Singapore Chinese Peranakan Association, and that today it is known as the Peranakan Association with membership open to all Singaporeans irrespective of ethnic origin. The timeline ended

153 in the year 2000 with the last entry simply acknowledging the one hundredth anniversary of the Peranakan Association.

Created by Assistant Curator A, the timeline establishes a powerful framework positing the phenomenon of the Peranakan Chinese as part of the Chinese diaspora that emerged from history, blossomed with the rise of colonialism, and then faded as colonial forces faded with Singapore’s successful quest for independence. This framework points to what Dr. Kwok describes as a major question about the Peranakans: is their culture still alive? Whilst Assistant Curator A acknowledged that while there had been some renewed interest from the younger generation in Peranakan Chinese heritage, he felt strongly that the culture was a product of its time and had perished with the advent of independence. He further agreed that the ideology of nationalism that came with independence did not help the Peranakans become recognised as a discrete cultural group with a unique language:

Peranakan-ness is not being transmitted [from one generation to the next] as a tradition. As much as people would like to see it, a key marker of their identity is their language, which is not really being transmitted. It is more like it is being relearned by members of the younger generation who had Peranakan parents or ancestors – relearning because of pride or because they are interested in their own heritage.51

“The Awakening of Peranakan Chinese Identity” As part of this discussion, an additional text panel in the gallery addressed the dates when the Peranakans started to define themselves as a community, stating: “Before the late 19th century, the Babas were simply those Chinese who had come to Southeast Asia the earliest.” The text panel suggested that this “dramatically changed when a flood of Chinese immigrants fled into Southeast Asia from 1850 in response to the unrest associated with the gradual collapse of the Qing dynasty and incursions by the Western powers.” The text panel explained that from 1850 to 1900, the Chinese population in Southeast Asia increased six times from 200,000 to over one million. As these “new” Chinese did not assimilate easily into the Southeast Asian cultural environment, the Peranakans began to perceive themselves as distinctly different from the newcomers whom they typically disdained. In the Straits Settlements, the newcomers were known as “Sinkeh” (New Chinese), who “ridiculed the Peranakans for their lack of knowledge of Chinese culture, and because they could no longer speak the language.”

51 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 154

This relationship outlined within the text panel, created a rivalry that resulted in the Peranakan Chinese forming a separate identity from the late nineteenth century. From this time the Peranakan Chinese also become more affiliated with the colonial government, many having mastered English and converted to Christianity. Reflecting their newfound influence – often with key posts in the colonial administration, their material culture – whether architecture, furniture, porcelain or silverwork – took on Western motifs and forms. Text panels in the gallery showed Peranakans wearing Western garments and described how they had become known as the “King’s Chinese.” Assistant Curator A makes it clear it was the need to distinguish themselves from the Sinkeh that really galvanised the Peranakans into establishing themselves as a different group.

“The Peranakan Chinese Today”

Also in the Introductory Gallery was a text panel, which addressed the current situation of the Peranakan Chinese. It described how, as with any other cultural group in Southeast Asia, they were affected by the economic, social and political changes that occurred at of the end of the colonial era following World War II:

[o]ut of touch with changing times, many members of the Peranakan Chinese community in the late 1930s and 1940s continued to fritter their wealth away in extravagant displays of their material possessions. Many family fortunes were also gambled away in chapji kee [12 numbers game], cherki [a card game], majong and other card games. The narrative of the extended text panel suggested that by 1940s, the Peranakan culture was diluted and traditional rites were simplified (such as the shortening of the traditional twelve-day wedding ceremonies). The text panel continues that in Singapore, “there was a gradual abandonment of Baba Malay for English and later Mandarin. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the Baba Malay spoken by the Babas fell out of favour to be replaced by the officially sanctioned -Malay.” It also described the genetic dilution of Peranakans with intermarriages becoming common with non-Peranakans. The text panel asserted that it was “the growing tide of nationalism after the war that was to lead to independence for the Southeast Asian countries and which brought pressure for the Babas to return to mainstream Chinese culture.”

Lastly the Peranakan story culminated with the suggestion that the Peranakan Chinese were no longer a living culture and that it was only Peranakan heritage which was still of interest:

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Many aspects of Peranakan Chinese culture no longer exist, but the important artistic heritage left by the community is enjoying a revival of interest. The distinctive elaborate hybrid style pioneered by the Peranakan Chinese is a unique cultural achievement indigenous to this region. This is currently enjoying a revival of interest as a new generation of Peranakan Chinese seeks to re-discover their heritage. The introductory gallery made it clear that the exhibition would largely address Chinese Peranakans. Its small printed text panels outlined the shifting fortunes of the Peranakans. Starting from their emergence from the general Chinese diaspora into a distinct Peranakan community, establishing for themselves a privileged place within the colonial regime as the King’s Chinese, through to their misplaced loyalty to the colonial powers during Singapore’s drive towards independence, resulting in the loss of their symbolic capital and their re-sinicisation or submergence into Singapore’s mainstream Chinese community.

“The Melaka Chitty”

Also within the Introductory gallery was a small text panel featuring a group of Indian women dressed in Malay style sarongs and kebayas. This was the only reference to other Peranakan groups besides the Chinese within the entire gallery. Its function was to acknowledge Peranakans of different racial origins: “The Peranakan Chinese were not the only immigrant group who absorbed aspects of Southeast Asian culture into their lives. The Melaka Chitty are another Peranakan group.” The text panel asserted that this group probably descended from traders from the coast of South India who visited Melaka regularly from the fifteenth century onwards and who, like the Peranakan Chinese, stayed permanently and married local women. Whilst this text panel made known that the Peranakan Chinese were not the sole Peranakan community, it provided no rationale for why others were not represented in The Peranakan Legacy.

Narratives from the Introductory Gallery

The welcoming Pintu Pagar (outer gates) and the formal portraits of the Peranakans, Mr. and Mrs Tan Beng Wan, were designed to set up the narrative of the Peranakans’ hybridity as a community. The Portraits pointed at the evidence that the Peranakans resulted from intermarrying between early Chinese traders and local Malay women, while the inclusion of the legend of the Zheng He and the marriage of Chinese princess Hang Li Po to Mansur Shah, the Sultan of Malacca, paid respect to alternative prevailing origin stories among the Peranakan community. The Pintu Pagar framed the dominant cultural influences of

156 hybridity that came into play within the Peranakans’ material culture, given their propensity to selectively appropriate aspects of other cultures which they admired.

Assistant Curator A explained that the function of the introductory text panels within the gallery was to provide “a short narrative encapsulation of the history of the Peranakans, what they left behind, and why they were significant in the history of Southeast Asia from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.”52 Within these text panels we were told who the Peranakan Chinese were, why they formed a distinct group, the success they enjoyed as the King’s Chinese, and the reason for their demise as a community and their subsequent re- sinicisation once they fell out of favour with the state during and after independence. While the text panel noted that the Peranakan Chinese were not the only Peranakan community, it did not specify how many other Peranakan communities exist.

Sireh Sets The curatorial team had anticipated that visitors would move anticlockwise into The Peranakan Legacy. The museum’s three-storey stairwell, which provided natural light to all the floors of the building, created a formal structure, a centre from around which the remaining galleries of the exhibition radiated. From the Introductory Gallery there was an open doorway into Gallery 4, which featured a large collection of Peranakan Chinese sireh sets from Southeast Asia.

Upon entering Gallery 4, on the left was a line of tall glass cabinets running the length of the room with beautifully lit and finely crafted sireh-sets, made in a range of exotic materials such as silver, mother of pearl, lacquered wood, glass beads, copper and turtle- shell. On the other side of the gallery were two low, wide, freestanding display cases that were designed to be looked into from above in order to see, both inside and out, the fine workmanship of the sireh-sets.

The introductory text panel for this section titled: “Peranakan Chinese Sireh Sets in a Range of Materials” provided interpretive information about the meaning of the sireh sets and their relation to the Peranakan Chinese. It also explained that across Southeast Asia various materials were used to make containers to hold the necessary ingredients for sireh- chewing. Another text panel titled “Sireh-chewing,” explained the act of sireh-chewing, situated the practice both geographically and historically, and made it clear that this was not a traditional Chinese custom.

52 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 157

Under the title “Sireh-chewing as a Peranakan Chinese Habit” another text panel defined the sireh sets as Peranakan cultural markers: “One of the defining Peranakan Chinese traits that set them apart from the Sinkeh or Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia during the 1800s was sireh-chewing, which was widespread in Southeast Asia.” The explanation draws attention to the fact that it was the female Peranakans who practiced sireh-chewing, helping to reinforce the evidence that most all the intermarriages were between Chinese men and Malay women:

Since sireh-chewing was already a popular Malay pastime, it was likely that the first Nonyas of these mixed marriages passed this habit on to their daughters, and thus perpetuated the gender bias. Finally the interpretive panel underscored the point that the Peranakans were coastal, mercantile people who were relatively wealthy compared to the new migrants of the nineteenth century. As sireh was offered to guests on entering the house and used in wedding rituals, the sireh sets were often on public display. The wealth of the Peranakans enabled them to commission sireh sets of extraordinary quality, workmanship and design in order to “impress others” and “serve as indicators of the hosts’ wealth and status.”

Figure 5: Sireh Sets as displayed within Gallery 4

Each sireh-set on display had its own text panel, with a description of how the set was crafted. For example, one set titled Sireh Set in Silver had a panel indicating that it was from 158

Melaka and was made out of wood, lacquer, silver, gold and iron. It was dated early twentieth century and came from the Marriott Collection. The text panel provided a brief history of silverwork in China, indicating that it was only in the last few centuries that Chinese silversmiths began migrating to Southeast Asia. The Chinese silversmiths had to adapt their style for new clients such as the Malay and Dayak groups and the Peranakan Chinese. The text panel stated that due to the “immense wealth” of some Peranakan Chinese families, silversmiths produced fine and unique works in order to suit their clients’ eclectic tastes. The text panel also indicated that the cutters in the sireh-set, which were made of iron (needed to cut the hard areca nuts), were often commissioned from ironsmiths from the islands of Java and Madura. Renowned for their work fabricating weapons, particularly the kris or daggers, their skills were suitable for making areca nut cutters. This provided another example of how the Peranakan Chinese were able to use their wealth to bring together disparate influences in order to produce a unique material culture.

Given that the focus was on establishing the Peranakan collection within its own art canon, combined with the short lead-time, there was little attempt at representing a Peranakan voice. A rare example of a contextual Peranakan “voice” appeared in relation to sireh chewing. It was placed on a text panel in the form of a quote from Mary Chua Swee Neo, who spoke about some of her duties as a daughter-in-law:

[w]ell at six o’clock [in the morning] I get up, clean myself, come down to the kitchen, get a cup of coffee to my mother-in-law. And then give her tempat sireh [sireh set]… and give her a glass of water to wash her mouth [after chewing the sireh quid], to gargle you know…

The display of sireh sets ended with an elegant carved wooden screen, common within traditional Peranakan houses, and next to the screen was a coffee table and chairs with two catalogues from previous exhibitions on the Peranakans held at the National Museum: Gilding the Phoenix and Rumah Baba: Life in a Peranakan House. There was not time for The Peranakan Legacy team to generate its own catalogue.

Assistant Curator B, who worked on this display, commented that one of the aims of The Peranakan Legacy was to showcase as much of the collections of major lenders as possible. As a result almost every set on display came from a private donor such as the Marriott Collection, which included the finest Peranakan Chinese sireh sets from across

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Southeast Asia. Assistant Curator B also made it clear that Betty Marriott’s collection was a huge influence on the way the display was developed:

So I think a very big influence was the fact that she had a huge collection that we could freely draw on. She showed us her best stuff so we can just pick from the best, and she wasn’t difficult. If you wanted to show her very best series, she would have said okay, take it – it’s fine… She would never guard it jealously. Assistant Curator B discussed the role played by the exhibition designers, another significant influence on the way The Peranakan Legacy was presented: “We found an Italian lady, Elena Dibrai, an architect who was working as a designer.” The curatorial team met Dibrai to discuss the project and it was decided she was the perfect person to work with, as she was a neutral party amongst a group who all had preconceived notions of Peranakan Chinese.

We decided to choose someone that was not Peranakan at all, so that this person will have fresh eyes to look at displays, and topics and stuff. This person would ask us obvious questions that the curators wouldn’t think were important. Assistant Curator B spoke of how Dibrai was able to work with the team to plan the storyline and created links between the different themes. Assistant Curator B also mentioned the challenge of working with the gallery space, which he described as a square doughnut. After many meetings and consultations with the exhibition designer, it was agreed that, as the material to be displayed was predominantly connected to Peranakan women, it seemed natural that, after the introduction, the sireh sets should be shown because this was the way Nonya greeted visitors into their homes. Assistant Curator B described this rationale:

So that would be a starting point, the introduction, then you would turn into the sireh gallery and the sireh gallery is where we introduce hospitality – Peranakan wealth and hospitality.53 The display of sireh sets established the tone for the rest of The Peranakan Legacy with its focus on themed collections reflecting the influence of the nature of the collection itself, the major lenders and the existence of the Rumah Baba exhibition in the Singapore History Museum.

53 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 160

Nonya Beadwork and Embroidery

The gallery following the display of the sireh sets showcased Peranakan beading and embroidery. The text panel entitled “From Their Own Hands: Nonya Beadwork and Embroidery” introducing this section explains that Peranakan Chinese women were traditionally homemakers who, aside from running the house “…indulge in beadwork and embroidery.” The text panel establishes that the Nonyas themselves created this art form:

Unlike most of the Peranakan collectibles that we are familiar with – such as ceramics and silverware that were purchased from outsiders – beadwork and embroidery were largely made by Nonyas with their own hands. In that sense, much of the extant Peranakan Chinese beadwork and embroidery have the honour of being undisputed “authentic” Peranakan Chinese artworks. The introductory panel also describes the cultural link between the quality of a Nonya’s handiwork and her eligibility for marriage: “exquisite pieces not only trumpeted her skills and patience, but they also served as indications of a desirable, strict and proper upbringing.” Also suggested here was the idea that the link between embroidery and marriage prospects spurred the Nonyas to take this art form to the highest level, especially in the preparation of material for the bridal-chamber. This point is most directly conveyed by the following quote: “[the] bed in particular, would be decked out in elaborate beadwork and embroidery so as to impress guests on the domesticity of the bride and also the wealth of her family.” Importantly, the introductory panel identified this art form as a Southeast Asian tradition, suggesting that the detailed work was likely to have been influenced by the existing practices of the who then spread throughout Indonesia and Malaysia. The text panel also described the wide range of material used in beadwork and embroidery, reinforcing the message of the hybridised nature of Peranakan Chinese culture:

True to the hybridised nature of Peranakan Chinese culture, the materials used in beadwork and embroidery came from near and far. Chinese silk, European velvet and glass beads, and other materials, combined with the skills and patience of the Nonyas, produced works of art that demand both admiration and respect.

This gallery also featured large display cases running along the wall and revealed a range of beautifully lit beaded objects. Like the sireh sets of the previous gallery, these artefacts were exquisitely crafted and ranged from everyday objects like shoes, purses and spectacle cases, to very large pieces like tablecloths and material for weddings such as bolsters and large bed covers. Whilst the tradition of Nonya beading and embroidery had its roots in Southeast Asia, the dominant symbols used were Chinese, with a colourful range of exotic 161 animals appearing, such as dragons, lion dogs, bats as well as flowers, birds, insects and gods. ACM staff provided each object with its own short description, typically of the various Chinese symbols that dominated the work and its function, as well as explaining specific technical terms in the stringing, threading and stitching. For example, the panel for a circular ceremonial cover from Semarang, Java, Indonesia, listed the material – “gold thread, metallic threads, gilded silver, glass beads and fabric” – and dated the work from the early twentieth century. It also contained a short description:

The central element is probably a centipede, executed in gold thread. There are three small colourful areas on this centipede that have been decorated in glass beads. Surrounding this central design are prancing deer, insects and flowers. This cover could have served as a food cover during a Peranakan Chinese wedding in Semarang. Further along the display, another text panel featured a photograph of a Bibik or older Nonya dressed in traditional clothing at work beading a pair of slippers. Finally, a third text panel, entitled “Quotes from Two Nonyas,” provided some contextualisation. The first quote is from Mary Chua Swee Neo, speaking about the preparations she made for her own wedding:

[s]tart preparing for own wedding… slippers, sew your own baju [clothing]… everything we have to do… In the old days, [beaded] slippers you got to sew, one pair of slippers takes two weeks. You must have four pairs of slippers and we must also sew one pair for the man’s side… We were trained from young… aunties and sisters pop in and tell you what to do. The second quote came from Florence Chan, speaking about how she made pocket- money sewing beaded slipper-tops, introducing the notion that wealthier Nonyas would purchase rather than make all their beadwork and embroidery:

In those days… the klengtong man [roving salesperson] carries on the pole two cabinets … he sells all the threads, needles and these beads and all… He’ll come to your door and take out his trays and let us see the things… He supplies everything… you just do the sewing… When you finish, when he comes within one week or what, you give [the completed pair of beaded slipper-tops] to him; he pays you $0.80 for the pair… These quotes from the Nonyas themselves conveyed the point that beadwork was a product of the Peranakan Nonyas themselves. Beadwork was traditionally considered a testimony to the Nonya’s discipline with its attention to detail and hard work signalling a Nonya’s potential as a good wife. However wealthy Nonyas would buy beadwork from less well-off Nonyas who generated beadwork for income. While these small inclusions were the only evidence of a Nonya voice in this part of the exhibition, importantly, they signalled

162 that not all Nonyas were wealthy. Otherwise, the displays reinforced the notion that the Peranakan Chinese had wealth, status and abundant leisure time, providing them with the ability to create intricate and highly-coloured embroidery and beadwork. Assistant Curator C suggested: “Perhaps the best expressions of Peranakan taste are those that were produced by the Nonyas themselves.”54 However, the displays, with their emphasis on beauty and intricacy, portrayed these everyday objects as art. Assistant Curator A rationalised that this was important because “in the case of embroidery, for instance, some of the techniques that they used had never been attempted by other communities before.”55 The display also reinforced the dominant narrative of the hybridised nature of the Peranakan Chinese with their ability to adopt and adapt outside influences – from either Southeast Asia or Western societies – creating their own uniquely crafted material culture.

Batik Work On the opposite wall to the beadwork, were large cabinets displaying Peranakan batiks. An introductory text panel entitled “Batik of the Nonya” provided a brief history and description of batik from Java, making the point that wearing batik became a convention in Peranakan communities and stimulated demand for a greater variety of style. The text panel also differentiated court batik of central Java from the batik of newer coastal communities in Java created to meet the needs of Peranakans:

The one trait which immediately distinguishes the north-coast batik from the central Javanese works is the use of vibrant colours. They are indeed a celebration of colours in contrast to the more stately and tradition-bound central Javanese pieces which are made with strict observation of a colour code of brown, blue and white.

Another introductory text panel entitled “Nonya Silhouette” stated that the most “vivid expression of Peranakan Chinese fashion is the silhouette conjured up by the cotton batik sarong and the light, often transparent, tunic called kebaya.” The text claimed the batik sarong and kebaya as key defining cultural markers of Peranakan Chinese women, and acknowledged the difficulty of tracing the development of Nonya fashion, and stating, “the identity of the community had not clearly emerged until the middle of the 19th century.”

54 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 55 Assistant Curator A, Peranakan Training Tape (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2000).

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The text continued the thread of Peranakan Chinese hybridity, saying that Nonya fashion “combined a sensibility of the tropical climate and a cosmopolitan eclecticism.”

Distinct from the previous displays, the text panels in this section introduced the influence of Europe on Peranakan culture, explaining how European women started to wear the cotton kebaya with a batik sarong because of the hot climate. The text panel suggested that the take-up of traditional clothing by the Dutch resulted in the dominance of imported cotton fabrics, firstly featuring richly decorated chintz from India, which was later overtaken by the machine-woven cloth from European industrial mills. This expanded over time to include fine cotton voile from Switzerland, bobbin laces, and stiff German organza. The introductory text panel ended by reinforcing the Peranakans’ hybridity and their ability to benefit from participating in global trading:

With such a cosmopolitan community as the Peranakan Chinese dealing with both Europeans and the indigenous ethnic groups, the fashion of the nonya and babas never ceased to seek inspiration from the immediate environment and resources from the community’s international trading connections.

Figure 6: Sarongs as displayed in Gallery 4.

This gallery featured a series of large cabinets showcasing an array of styled sarongs hung to best display their elaborate designs. Beside the sarongs was a text panel entitled “Regional Types of Batik” which featured a map of Java and explained the way Peranakan

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Nonyas commissioned their batiks from three major Indonesian centres in Lasem, Pekalongan and Cirebon. It suggested that over time the Peranakan Nonyas developed their own distinct style of batik renowned for their pastel colours and their decorative floral palette, which became highly valued collectables. According to Assistant Curator A the former National Museum had been collecting batik from Southeast Asia for a number of years and had amassed a substantial collection. Once again he referenced the Peranakan contribution: “Batik is one of the most important contributions by the Peranakan Chinese to the artistic heritage of Southeast Asia.”56 The batik display reinforced the main messages of the exhibition, highlighting the wealth of the Peranakans and the hybrid nature of their material culture.

Although the dominant storyline was of the hybrid nature of the Peranakans (signalled by the customising of batik from a high court art to the fashion of wealthy Nonyas), the Senior Curator admitted that she could have expanded on the work of non-Chinese Peranakan communities:

It would have given them immediately a viewpoint that they could take – you see and it is more interactive that way. Then you are not only just looking at the display, you’re participating in a way – and I think you would learn more. The batik display predominantly supported the main themes of the exhibition and presented the Peranakans’ role as creators in the commissioning of a highly colourful and technically demanding material culture. With the beadwork and embroidery displayed on the left and the batik on their right, at the end of the gallery was the semi-contextual display of a Peranakan Chinese wedding chamber.

Display of the Wedding Bed This display, comprising an elaborately decorated, intricately carved, three-sided bed over six feet high, functioned as the focal point for The Peranakan Legacy. The display area brought together a wedding suite featuring a traditional Chinese wedding bed, wedding cabinets, a dressing table and a washbasin. A text panel stated that this was a Penang-style wedding bed – the most ornate of the Peranakan Chinese styles.

56 Assistant Curator A, Peranakan Training Tape, 2000. 165

Figure 7: Mrs Quah Hong Chiam’s Peranakan wedding suite from Penang, a semi-contextual display between Gallery 4 and 5.

The red-and-gold, Penang Peranakan Chinese bed was dressed with embroidered silk curtains, a canopy, cushions, and golden hanging flower baskets (bakul bunga) decorated profusely with auspicious Chinese motifs. The bed was said to be a “shrine to fertility and wealth,” promising the newly married couple happiness, prosperity and many children. A text panel introduced the original owner, Mrs Quah Hong Chiam from Penang, and provided an account of how she was given the commissioned bed from her father as part of her wedding trousseau.

Positioned on one side of the bed was a Chinese “Phoenix” Wardrobe. An accompanying text panel entitled “Namwood or ‘Red-&-Gold’ furniture” indicated that the majority of red-and-gold furniture was commissioned from China and made of namwood, a medium-hardwood native to China. This text panel ended with the statement: “Prior to the wedding, a well-to-do family would commission a set of furniture, including a four- poster bed, cabinets and washbasin stand, to mark the festive occasion.” On the other side of the bed was a European-influenced dressing table, and nearby was another text panel entitled “Peranakan Chinese European-influenced Furniture”. In contrast to the furniture made in China, this furniture was locally made and the text panel stated: “True to the hybridised nature of the Peranakan Chinese, some families were noticeably influenced by

166 the English colonial administration in the Straits Settlements. One aspect of this influence on Peranakan Chinese material culture was the taste in locally-made, European-influenced furniture.” The text panel suggested that British colonial officers working in the Straits Settlements probably commissioned local Shanghainese craftsmen to make European-style furniture for their homes, with Peranakan Chinese commissioning similar pieces for their own homes. The text panel stated “it can be said that the European-influenced furniture owned by the Peranakan Chinese was the ‘true’ Peranakan Chinese furniture, since it is certain that they were made locally, specifically to suit their tastes.” European style furniture included dining tables and chairs, writing tables, wardrobes, sideboards and screens.

Assistant Curator A discussed how the semi-contextual display was an “anchor point” designed to bring together the material culture featured in the other thematic displays, creating a focal point with furniture, embroidery, beadwork and metalwork.57 Assistant Curator B, who curated the wedding display, added to Assistant Curator A’s notion by stating that it was not a display about furniture alone and that it was linked, like the rest of the displays, to the female dominance of Peranakan material culture. He suggested “the wedding bed [display] was not about the wedding itself, it was about the female components that went into it, the aunties helping, so that other ladies could come and see the quality of the beadwork. It’s about a female experience.”58

Traditional twelve-day weddings were generally said to be significant markers of Peranakan Chinese culture. Along with funerals, weddings were the most important rites of passage for the Babas and Nonyas, and in the Peranakan training tape for guides, Assistant Curator A made clear the significance of the wedding and the way the Peranakans kept the Chinese traditional practice in place:

57 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 58 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 167

Now, to a Peranakan Chinese lady, one of the most important events in your life would have been your wedding. Now all rich and wealthy Peranakan Chinese would have dressed up their wedding suite using the finest materials and the highest craftsmanship to commission objects for the wedding chamber. It is interesting that this most hybrid of cultures, in the event of a wedding, the Chinese part of their background comes to the fore.59

As this quote suggests, Peranakan Chinese wedding ceremonies were an elaborate manifestation of the southern Chinese ceremonial formalities and values, forming part of a public display. Implicit here is the view that, despite their many other adaptations to Southeast Asian custom, the Peranakan Chinese had continued to uphold Chinese traditions, and maintain an orthodox attitude towards rituals and rites of passage.

Assistant Curator A remarked that with the two semi-contextual displays the team had tried to avoid emulating the contextual display of the Baba House at the Singapore History Museum, which simply focused on different generic rooms. By contrast, the Peranakan Museum amplified different facets of Peranakan culture by focusing on individual Peranakan Chinese: “I conceptualised them as focused around, in a sense, a particular theme, like the bridal bed of a particular family and the ancestral altar of a particular family.” It was for this reason the wedding was displayed with information about Mrs Quah Hong Chiam of Penang.

Jewellery Near the semi-contextual display of the Peranakan Chinese wedding chamber was Gallery 5, which featured possibly the most elaborate of all Peranakan Chinese material culture – their jewellery. Jewellery provided one of the Peranakans’ most ostentatious public displays of wealth and subsequently celebrated and clearly recognisable as a cultural markers. By comparison with the above mentioned gallery, Gallery 5 featured more subdued lighting with two glass cases running the length of both sides of the room, with two freestanding plinth cabinets strategically lit to make the jewellery inside glow in the dark. Above the wall cabinets, also running on both sides of the gallery, were reproductions of old photographs contextualising the way the jewellery was worn by wealthy Peranakan Chinese. The cabinet on the right hand side featured ritual jewellery used primarily for wedding ceremonies, whilst the left hand side cabinets featured Nonya jewellery, focusing on the varieties of the Malay-style brooch (kerosang). These were used as a traditional way of clasping the tunic top, an iconic piece of clothing strongly associated

59 Assistant Curator A, Peranakan Training Tape, 2000. 168 with the Nonyas. The cabinets also demonstrated changes in the Nonyas’ taste in commissioning jewellery from about the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. The introductory text panel entitled “Peranakan Chinese Jewellery” set the tone: “The most distinctive quality of Peranakan Chinese jewellery is their hybrid quality.” The text panel explained that the Peranakan Chinese commissioned jewellery from Malay, Indian and European jewellers that often incorporated motifs and symbols of these cultures, whilst making it clear that the Peranakan Chinese did not simply copy, but rather freely adapted these to suit their own style and taste. The text panel concluded with the assertion that the Peranakan Chinese influenced jewellers by inspiring them to new levels of technical development.

The case featuring ceremonial jewellery was divided into two sections, the first containing jewellery for brides, and the second for bridegrooms. The bridal display contained a dense array of artefacts such as necklaces, brackets, hairpins, and headband ornaments which highlighted Chinese filigree work. The text panel for this display was entitled “The Chinese Style” and explained that Peranakan Chinese commissions took this art to new levels of sophistication and were often technically more complex than that of the original Chinese pieces which inspired them. The bridal jewellery featured intricately crafted Chinese symbols such as dragons, prunus blossoms, florets, butterflies and Buddha’s hands, creating an exotic display of wealth and technical virtuosity.

The section focusing on bridegrooms’ jewellery was even more elaborate, featuring a large ornament worn on the chest, made up of a pair of dragons mounted in “tremblant” style, meaning these dragons would literally appear to move as the groom walked. Also on display were protective talismans, and a set of silver gilt tiger claws fashioned into Chinese mythical animals. As with the bridal display, the narrative here suggested that in its filigree techniques, jewellery design was taken to new heights.

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Figure 8: Bridegrooms’ jewellery – a pair of dragons mounted in “tremblant” style, as displayed in Gallery 5.

The cabinet on the left focused on the kerosang which were worn by the Nonyas and which usually came in sets of three. The display showed a range of kerosang, illustrating how they changed over time. The text panel highlighted the importance of this piece of jewellery to the Peranakan Chinese: “It is the piece of jewellery most identified with the Nonyas and became an important focus of display by the wealthy.” It then went on to describe how, from the simple Malay format, “Nonya kerosangs slowly developed into more elaborate forms,” changing from uncut diamonds in heavy box settings, through to more elaborate Chinese designs, and culminating with the major innovation introduced by Indian jewellers at the turn of the century: new cutting and setting techniques that gave diamonds a sparkling quality and which made the kerosang lighter to wear.

The two freestanding cabinets within this gallery held the highlights of the jewellery exhibition. One cabinet featured a kerosang from Penang made of gold, with both rose-cut and brilliant-cut diamonds. The centrepiece of this set was referred to as the Ibu or mother

170 brooch because it was extraordinarily large (13 cm high rather than the typical 4–5 cm). It demonstrated great technical virtuosity with its fine flying phoenix made from flat wire filigree nests. The other cabinet held “The Peacock Belt,” a gold and diamond belt made up of eighteen linked gold panels with the central buckle festooned with seventy-five diamonds. The large buckle depicted a peacock motif, a traditional Indian symbol, and featured an almost flawless five-carat, old European-cut diamond. The hallmark of the belt indicated that an Indian firm operating in the Straits Settlements made it, and both displays highlighted that – given their constant desire to display their wealth – the Peranakan Chinese would combine both the stylistic influences around them and their own innovations.

Figure 9: Ibu or mother brooch as displayed in Gallery 5.

Lastly, there was one smaller, higher cabinet near the exit marked “The European Style: Alphabet and Heraldry.” This cabinet featured a series of brooches which had clearly been influenced by European jewellery. The text panel begins: “As the King’s or Queen’s Chinese, the Babas became increasingly intimate with European culture from the late 19th century onwards. It is thus not surprising that the Peranakan Chinese also incorporated motifs and symbols from the West into their jewellery.” However the text panel went on to

171 assert that, just as with the Malay and Indian influence, the Peranakan Chinese did not blindly copy but rather selected only those aspects of European traditions that resonated with their own cultural tastes: “It is not surprising that the Babas, with their love for ostentatious display, were drawn to accept those aspects of European tradition that emphasised family and personal status.” Some of the brooches in the display took on the forms of monograms and a coat-of-arms, and the text panel ends with the comment that “the aristocratic aspirations of the Babas were also evident in the use of Western heraldry.” The panel was matched with a brooch that depicted a lion and a unicorn.

The jewellery display was dominated by objects from the Marriott collection, with a sprinkling of other objects from private loans. Assistant Curator A felt strongly about the need to acknowledge the contribution of the Peranakans to the art of jewellery making in Southeast Asia:

If you look at South-East Asia beyond the Chinese community, how much of the jewellery traditions, whether it’s the Javanese or the tribal people even as far as Timor or the eastern Indonesian islands, that gold jewellery was actually made by goldsmiths or silversmiths of Chinese origin. Either they are of Peranakan descent or … the reason they came here was because Peranakan Chinese gave them a market and from then on these jewellers started to diversify the market to other parts of the region.60 Consistent with the exhibition as a whole, the display focused on the material objects of the Peranakans, lit to enhance their aesthetics. In addition, the text panels introducing the technical skill involved stressed the superior innovation achieved by the jewellers under the direction and demands of their Peranakan clients: “…the pieces took these techniques to new heights of sophistication and Baba jewellery in the Chinese style is often technically more complex than that of their Chinese inspirations.” Assistant Curator A pointed out the importance of presenting the Peranakan material culture as an art form. He suggested the ACM should video people’s responses to the peacock belt and the huge 12 cm long diamond brooches to witness: “that sort of indefinable yearning.” He felt that it was important to acknowledge the simple pleasure of viewing art.61

The jewellery display was divided into two sections; one displayed ritual jewellery, and the other fashion jewellery with a focus on the kerosang. Of the ritual jewellery, Assistant Curator A commented, “…jewellery is stridently Chinese. Now, the Peranakan Chinese were very proud of their Chinese background and as a result in their ritual jewellery they

60 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 61 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 172 use a lot of traditional Chinese motifs.” In contrast, the more fashion-oriented jewellery evolved dramatically from the nineteenth century to the 1950s changing in its form and its use of materials as well as motifs. Assistant Curator A commented: “Basically this is due to the fact that through time, within this period of about a hundred years, the Peranakan Chinese commissioned their jewellery to different groups of jewellers.”62 As a result, Peranakan Chinese jewellery changed as they absorbed different cultural influences from the Malays, Chinese, Indians and Europeans.

Tan Kim Seng’s Family Ancestral Altar Gallery 6 featuring a second semi-contextual display entitled “The Ancestral Altar at Panglima Prang.” Once again, the focus was on the exotic rituals and wealth of the Peranakan Chinese. The altar, like the wedding bed, was a spectacle in that it loomed high into the gallery ceiling. On the altar was a unique display of fine silverware, set out for offerings to the ancestors, which took on exotic forms such as butterflies, lotus blossoms and mythical creatures. Combined, these recreated the ancestral altar of Tan Kim Seng, a wealthy Peranakan. A text panel on the wall immediately to the left of altar, entitled “Traditional Peranakan Chinese Religion,” suggested: “The very first generation of Chinese men who came to Southeast Asia – who would eventually become Peranakan – was laden with cultural baggage from their homeland in China.” The text panel also explained that the traditional Chinese religion of the early southern Chinese traders was “a syncretic mix of Mahayana , , Confucianism and ancestral worship.” These overtly Chinese-influenced practices surfaced in Peranakan Chinese weddings and funerals. The text panel reinforced the adaptive capabilities of the Peranakan Chinese and their strict adherence to traditional Chinese religious practices:

Peranakan Chinese duly inherited the religious beliefs and duties of their forefathers, even though their dress, language, food and other customs had evolved through interactions with the other peoples in Southeast Asia.

The family altar display was designed to complement the display of the wedding bed, and these acknowledge two of the major rituals in the Peranakan Chinese life, one a time of celebration and the other connected to mourning. The altar had its own text panel entitled “The Ancestral Altar at Panglima Prang,” explaining that it was dated from the mid nineteenth century and resided in a villa named Panglima Prang until 1982. A photograph shows the original site of the altar, and provides details of how it sat at one end of a dining

62 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 173 room. Readers of this text were also informed that this was not a typical ancestral altar. Like more common altars it consisted of a wooden ancestral tablet “house” and two lacquered wooden tables. Chinese ceramics and bronze objects were typically positioned on top of these tables as offerings, but the objects on this altar were mostly made of silver as “befitting of their wealth and status. As such, the Tan family’s ancestral altar was a one-of- a-kind sight to behold.” Unusually, this exhibit also had a brief biography of Tan Kim Seng, the original owner of the altar.

This entire display featured in this gallery was significant in that it was an accurate reconstruction of the Tan Kim Seng altar as shown in the contextual photograph located next to the altar. The veracity of the display was achieved by bringing together the private collections of two lenders – Peter Wee (who owned the furniture) and Betty Marriott (who provided the silverware). This selection highlighted Assistant Curator A’s aim to both display as much of the private collectors’ material as possible, and to differentiate the ACM from the Rumah Baba display in the Singapore History Museum. The latter was more interested in showcasing the Peranakan material culture of typical members of the community.

With the altar clearly marking religious practice, Assistant Curator B mentioned how he wanted to “emphasise the point” within the wedding and funeral displays that, although today many Peranakans are Roman Catholics, “they resisted converting to Catholicism until very late,” and upheld traditional southern Chinese religious practices well after they had been abandoned in some places in mainland China – a phenomenon not unusual with communities that become isolated from their country of origin.

One important research issue raised by Assistant Curator B was the lack of available scholarship on the subject: “Research on the Peranakans? There’s no department in the world – academic department… nobody were [sic] experts… we had to learn, think about it as we went along, it was simultaneous to the development of the exhibition.” Assistant Curator B also revealed that the team drew on anecdotal evidence:

So if you ask me how much of my input went into the exhibition … information, I would say we tried as much as we could to draw from the books, but there’s really not much from the books, in terms of facts.63

63 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 174

Figure 10: Tan Kim Seng altar, the second semi-contextual display, between Galleries 5 and 6.

After the ancestral altar, with its overt focus on Peranakan Chinese wealth, were the remaining displays of Peranakan silver, continued within Gallery 6.

Silverware Gallery 6 featured cabinet after cabinet of silver objects, introduced with a text panel titled “Peranakan Chinese Silver.” This informed the reader that these were metal objects specially commissioned by the wealthy Baba communities in the Southeast Asian region,

175 and made mainly by Chinese craftsmen. The text panel pointed to the high quality of the silverwork provided for the Peranakan Chinese market compared to other export markets such as “the export silver from the China Trade to the west.” In keeping with the exhibition narrative, the panel read: “One of the most unique features of Peranakan silver as a whole is its hybrid nature, fusing Mainland Chinese traditions with Southeast Asian or later, European elements.”

Tan Kim cabinet containing silverware was given its own theme based either on the silver technique used to craft the objects in it, including Repoussé and Chasing, Engraving, Filigree, Enamelling and Appliqué, or on the function of the silverware, such as Ceremonial Silver, Wine Sets and Curtain Hooks. In each cabinet, were large reproductions of photographs contextualising the silverware within Peranakan Chinese homes. The cabinet addressing “Ceremonial Silver” indicated that very little silver was actually used for eating, as it is a poor conductor of heat. The large silver bowls and plates within the display were destined for the religious altar, and the silver tea sets and wine containers were used for wedding rituals.

Assistant Curator A, the curator responsible for the silverware display, wanted to show the high level of the metalwork and to show that the silver the Peranakans commissioned was much finer than any other export metalwork made in mainland China in the late nineteenth century, including that produced for the European market. He stated: “I think you will laugh when you look at European export silver at that time that was being exported from mainland China.” Describing the superior quality silverware produced for the Peranakan Chinese, Assistant Curator A made the point: “That sort of inheritance, that sort of importance in terms of the art history of the region, it must be recovered.”

Gallery 6 was a lengthy space and transitioned from the silverware into the display of an equal number of cabinets featuring porcelain. This was achieved via a cleverly placed display addressing the similarities of the motifs apparent on the silver and porcelain Peranakan Chinese objects. Significantly the text panel for this transition was titled “Legacies: Silver and Porcelain” and featured a contextual photograph of a bedroom in a Baba House from the 1920s in Penang which featured silver and porcelain ware in a home context. The accompanying text could be read as a summary of the discourse addressing the Peranakan Chinese community within the exhibition and as such is worth quoting at length:

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It is virtually impossible to see a scene like that depicted in this photograph today. Many of the great Peranakan Chinese houses have been demolished. With modernisation and resettlement, the extended families have broken up, dispersing the vast contents of these houses among individual family members. The silver and porcelain on display in this gallery were among the most unique items commissioned by the Babas for use and display in their homes. As large numbers in the community converted to Christianity, many of the religious rites centred on ancestral cults and rites of passage were abandoned, which removed the main reason for commissioning these objects in the first place. As the 20th century wore on, the younger generation of Babas found these ornate elaborate objects less suitable for their new modern homes. The situation is changing somewhat now with a revival of interest in the culture. The most tangible aspect of the culture today remains its material legacies. What porcelain and silver remain in the families have become precious heirlooms, and they are also actively sought out by non-Peranakan collectors. As underscrored by the text panel, the Peranakan community were seen as a group fading away whilst the legacy of its unique material culture was growing in value and interest, captivating both Peranakans and non-Peranakans alike.

Porcelain After addressing the technical excellence of the silverware, the focus shifted to the colour in the porcelain display. Peranakan Chinese porcelain or “Nonya-ware” (referring to the Nonyas who commissioned the pieces), was a highly coloured form of enameled porcelain. As the display label outlined, these objects were especially commissioned in China by wealthy Peranakan Chinese as sets of up to one thousand pieces. The display of Nonya-ware covered a wide range of ceremonial and utilitarian objects, from tea sets, dinner sets, vases, and spittoons through to ceremonial ancestral altar-ware.

The introductory text panel included a map of China, indicating the locations of the major kilns that produced this porcelain. The text panel also outlined that porcelain shared stylistic elements found across the spectrum of all Peranakan material culture in its abundance of conventional Chinese religious and auspicious motifs organised into compact symmetrical arrangements. The panel concluded: “The Peranakan taste for elaboration has been attributed to horror vacui or a ‘fear of space’, as well as a desire for the display of wealth,” a theme reiterated in other galleries of the exhibition. The display continued the previous themed approach throughout large high glass cabinets, where porcelain displays, focused on specific aspects of the Nonya-ware. The dominant organising principle in the porcelain section was the colour of the object’s enamel glaze. For example, objects with a white ground were placed together, as were brown-ground wares, green-ground wares, lime-green-ground wares, coral-red-ground wares, yellow-ground wares and blue-ground

177 wares. Additional themes addressed specific subjects such as porcelain altar-ware, marks and dating, stylistic elements, and rare and exclusive designs.

Figure 11: Nonya-ware as displayed in Gallery 6

Another introductory text panel positioned just above a display of Nonya-ware deconstructed the colours, design and motifs of the Nonya-ware. Under “Colour,” the text addressed the interplay of colour; “Designs” introduced the typical Peranakan Chinese design of regularly spaced ogival (oval) panels, interspersed with other floral motifs and bordered by minor bands. Under the heading “Motifs,” the panel explained that, like the rest of the objects in the exhibition, the porcelain featured conventional auspicious and religious Chinese motifs. A large display labelled “Marks and Dating” addressed the range of marks found on the bases of Peranakan Chinese porcelain, including reign marks, owners’ marks, shop and kiln marks, complemented by a large display of enlarged marks defining their meaning and provenance. In the context of the overall exhibition, this provided an unusually academic examination of the evidence available on Peranakan Chinese porcelain to accurately place and date the objects. The influence of English style ceramics on the Peranakan Chinese was also indicated by the insertion of a few plates featuring an English heraldic design in the last cabinet near the exit, their plain white background and muted heraldic design providing a striking contrast to the highly coloured, decorated and unusually shaped Nonya-ware. 178

Assistant Curator C, who worked on the porcelain-ware, discussed her role in the exhibition development: “I was asked to come in with my specialism in Chinese ceramics and deal with a very specific area, which was the porcelain, that was in the collection of one particular lender and to deal with that part of the exhibition.” She described the logic behind ordering the porcelain display around colours:

I thought even for the person who’s not interested in ceramics they will walk through here and the least they’ll do is they’ll walk – they can’t help but walk past the case and see paint, lime green, yellow, sky blue, indigo, Penang green, brown. Even if that’s all they take away with them, the colour schemes used would be something new.64 Assistant Curator C discussed how budget was an issue and led to the recycling of the cabinets that were used with the previous Chinese exhibition: “We took out all the existing permanent galleries displays, worked more or less with the existing structure of the showcases…” She suggested that the storyline that was adopted was “quite a conventional approach to the ceramic section,” but that she had “free reign on what I did with the ceramic collection.” While acknowledging that the private collectors did influence her in a number of ways, she mentioned that she only had direct intervention from one collector “who wanted to make sure that certain pieces were on display and certain pieces weren’t, more from a connoisseur point of view.” Assistant Curator C also discussed the positive relationship she had with Betty Marriott: “We had some quite fruitful discussions. It was quite constructive to bounce ideas around.” One private collector encouraged her to study the rain and shot marks on the pieces, but she felt she was unable to undertake this detailed level of research: “I always felt very limited in what I could do; you didn’t have the funds to go and travel to China to look for archaeological evidence or that sort of thing.”65

Assistant Curator C also discussed how, while she was working on the display, she had received a bequest of porcelain, and grew frustrated about not being able to find out the use of the material during that person’s life. Assistant Curator C confirmed that she was able to verify that it was the matriarch who owned property such as the porcelain or silverware, and that this was often given to them as a dowry or wedding present. However, Assistant Curator C indicated that she would have liked to have undertaken more research, and to have interviewed some of the older members of the Peranakan community to see what they remembered about how porcelain was used or when it was used, so they could

64 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 65 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 179 shed some new light on the context. Assistant Curator C discussed the difficulties researching the porcelain:

I was trying to find out if anyone remembered how they were used by their grandmothers or great grandmothers – very difficult to get that kind of information – very mundane acts – and there are no candid photos around of people sitting around drinking tea out of a kumcheng – or bird nest soup out of a cho-pho, you just read that certain authors write this – I was just trying to verify this evidence myself by asking a few people. But I thought at the time that it was really nice that people from the Peranakan community were happy to bring it more alive for me – give me more interesting information than perhaps I would have thought of myself from reading the books. Assistant Curator C described how the Peranakan exhibition Rumah Baba influenced her work on The Peranakan Legacy but suggested the team did not want to duplicate that approach and were confident that the displays were different, with the ACM’s approach less oriented toward social history and with a greater focus on aesthetics: “We tend to work with designer who liked to keep the objects as the centre of attention and the things that surround them are kept subsidiary to the objects.”66 The porcelain display in Gallery 6 finished back in the introductory gallery, the circular linear narrative which addressed the material culture of Singapore’s Chinese Peranakans completed.

Main Findings An analysis of the storyline, associated text panels and interviews with the curatorial team reveals a matrix of complex influences that were at play during the development of the exhibition. These resulted in a conventional display of exotic objects, thus perpetuating the doxa that the Peranakans are a wealthy, élite, minority group from a bygone age. The objects were presented traditionally, laid out in well-lit cabinets, with the curators catering primarily to an audience that consisted of members of the Peranakan community, collectors and connoisseurs. Besides the general requirement for the curatorial team to put the exhibition together in a short timeframe, the major influences that shaped curatorial decision-making were: the lack of a rigorously researched body of knowledge about the Peranakans; the institutional practices of the museum and associated impacts of specific agents; an unspoken hesitancy in addressing the political nature of the Peranakan; the desire to differentiate the exhibition from the competing Peranakan display at the SHM; the relative inexperience of the team; and budget constraints. The points are explained below.

66 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 180

Lack of Established Knowledge

The Peranakan Legacy brought together material culture from a period of less than one hundred years, starting from the late nineteenth century and ending in the early twentieth century. As Assistant Curator C stated: “it was kind of a short lived phenomena… the term Peranakan Chinese came about at the turn of the century because that particular group wanted to distinguish itself, its political and its cultural identity, as distinct from the new immigrants of Chinese.”67 Assistant Curator A also pointed out that the material culture produced by the Peranakan Chinese emerged over such a short period that it was never codified. This, he suggested, was unlike mainland Chinese material culture, which evolved over thousands of years and could be analysed much more confidently, for example in terms of its function or the symbolism of motifs.

Specifically Assistant Curator B suggested, lack of existing research meant the team had to rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, which varied widely from family to family and, in interviews, the entire curatorial team acknowledged this as a major determining factor in the way the exhibition was developed. Assistant Curator B commented:

A lot of Peranakan facts come from anecdotal knowledge, people’s stories that border on fiction – like “my life as a Peranakan girl.” There were not a lot of undisputed facts, and even though the exhibition has been up for a long time there are still facts that can be disputed. A lot of these “facts” have never been recorded, for example nobody had ever researched the origins of the Peranakan community. Everyone talks about the story of the princess, but to me that is fifty percent myth, no one has ever bothered to check the sources… no one has defined a Peranakan… we tried as much as we could to draw from the books but there really is not much to draw from in terms of facts.68 Assistant Curator C also reflected on the effect that the lack of a body of knowledge had on her capacity to represent the Peranakan Chinese:

A democratic portrayal of a subject depends on how well read the curator is, how diverse are their sources, and how widely researched the subject is. With the Peranakans this is quite difficult as not a lot has been written and published by the scholars. It has been passed down through oral history and anecdotal evidence. It’s something we are trying to deal with and we need to be verifying the facts by consulting as many people in the community as possible, people who represent the community adequately.69

67 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 68 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 69 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 181

It should also be remembered that The Peranakan Legacy was promoted as a permanent exhibition, and only the Senior Curator and Assistant Curator A suggested they knew at the time that the whole museum would eventually be dedicated to this minority group. Other options for the museum’s focus, such as ceramics or becoming a children’s museum, were still very real possibilities. Upon being informed that the entire Tao Nan building would be converted into a Peranakan museum, Assistant Curator C rationalised the lack of research behind The Peranakan Legacy retrospectively, describing the exhibition as “vignettes really – a slice or impression of what a wider grouping of objects would look like together.”70

Institutional Practice and the influences of agents in the sub-field

By viewing the ACM as a sub-field within Singapore’s field of cultural production, it is possible to expose the complex network of the relations between agents and institutions, and their relational positions (such as domination and subordination). Examination of the field also allows for an analysis of the distribution of forms of capital at play, and the stakes on offer at the time The Peranakan Legacy was being produced. Understood as a “space of objective relations between positions defined by their rank in the distribution of competing powers or species of capital,”71 the sub-field of the ACM contained the key agents of the Director, the Senior Curator and three Assistant Curators, as well as external agents such as the designer, the donors and Peranakan consultants. Before the project was handed over to the curatorial team, the Director had already played his part in the game, having claimed the National Heritage Board’s Peranakan collection for the ACM. Once he delegated execution of the project to the Southeast Asian team, under the leadership of its Senior Curator, his attention turned to a game with higher stakes – meeting the deadline to open the ACM’s flagship wing at Empress Place by 2003.

The Senior Curator recognised the significance of the Peranakan collection and accepted the task of delivering The Peranakan Legacy project by the end of 2000. She largely handed over the leadership to Assistant Curator A, so she could continue to focus on the main game of developing the collection and curatorial narratives for the Empress Place building. Each player in the field brought his or her own habitus to bear, along with their forms of capital (e.g. technical knowledge, economic, social, cultural, symbolic). Of the three Assistant Curators, Assistant Curator A had the most invested in the game and brought to the project the highest amount of professional capital, having worked for over four years

70 Assistant Curator C, interview by author, 2003. 71 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 114. 182 with both the National Heritage Board’s Peranakan collection and with collectors and potential donors of Peranakan material. Assistant Curator B brought high levels of technical knowledge related to Southeast Asian metal work. Assistant Curator C brought technical knowledge relating to Asian ceramics and a broader understanding of contemporary museological practice, having worked and trained in England. However, her potential was minimised as she arrived after most of the conceptual work on The Peranakan Legacy was completed, leaving her little time to research and influence outcomes. As a result she had the least intrinsic investment in the game.

The stakes on offer in the field were mainly determined by the hierarchical power relations of the institution. The ACM is a statutory board within the civil service, a museum under the umbrella of the National Heritage Board, which in turn comes under the Ministry of Information and the Arts. These institutions rewarded players on merit for innovation and excellence with an annual bonus, incremental pay increases based on performance, and promotions. Most of the players in the field were motivated by recognition of excellence from peers and colleagues in the field, and by the potential for promotion to more senior roles, which would advance their position within the field. This was especially true of the Senior Curator, who had worked within the National Heritage Board the longest, and Assistant Curator A, who was professionally ambitious. Both these players invested heavily in the game and were keen to advance their positions within the existing hierarchy.

The institutional and national capital at play, in the game within the sub-field of the ACM, was the Peranakan Collection. The objects being showcased within the exhibition were being transformed from, in some instances, discarded household items (of very little intrinsic value outside the minority group who owned them), to become highly valuable and collectible objects of art with all the value that the aesthetic gaze, or misrecognition, can bring to bear on objects consecrated with an aesthetic form of art appreciation.

Individual agents in the field created links between the micro level, day-to-day decisions and influences and the state’s macro level policies, as the overarching power field. As agents worked to improve their position within the field, operating within the limits of time, budget, existing research on the topic, and access to reliable informants with stable local knowledge, the team transformed the Peranakans’ material legacy from simply being a set of stereotypical cultural markers to a new form of Southeast Asian art. The result of the inclusion of the now consecrated Peranakan material culture within the ACM’s exhibition,

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The Peranakan Legacy, improved the value of the ACM’s Peranakan collection as a whole, and by increasing the collection’s economic value, ensured the ACM donors were happy to continue providing objects to the ACM.

Curator A, who played the game like a “fish in water,” knew that personal rewards and recognition would be far greater if the Peranakan material culture was positioned within a newly established canon of Southeast Asian art rather than trying to produce another contextual display such as Rumah Baba. Heavily influenced by collectors and their competing demands, Curator A’s priorities were to showcase as many of both the National Heritage Board’s collection and the private collectors’ artefacts as was possible within the space available. This resulted in the decision to showcase a series of similar objects, clustered closely together in cabinets, with two semi-contextual displays used to “anchor” the exhibition. This, in combination with the designer’s influence and the atmospheric lighting, resulted in a safe, aesthetic exhibition.

The institutional practices behind the exhibition saw the Senior Curator establish the main framework, with curators then operating in an organisational environment free from rigid rules around how to execute the details. The Senior Curator commented that the four curators worked together with a free hand to focus on their area of expertise, but under one clear direction, with an overarching ideal that the ACM be positioned as the leading authority on Peranakan material culture in both the region and the world.72 However, she acknowledged that Assistant Curator A played a dominant role, despite his lack of formal power, because of his understanding of the collection and his extensive work with private collectors. Assistant Curator A was given the responsibility of devising the storyline in response to the request that as many artefacts as possible be shown, ensuring the exhibition was an object-rich display. In developing the storyline, he stated that his aim was to showcase the world’s first comprehensive survey of Peranakan material culture thereby positioning the collection as part of the canon of Southeast Asian decorative arts, and in doing so, establishing it in its rightful place.73

Assistant Curator A believed access to private collectors and the opportunity for the museum to acquire the most comprehensive collection of Peranakan material in the world influenced the way the exhibition was developed. Whilst the curatorial team members were united in their conviction that they were not influenced by anyone, they also agreed that the

72 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 73 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 184 friendly advice and suggestions that were made by collectors were gladly taken up, especially given the lack of reliable scholarship. Assistant Curator A felt he had total autonomy and claimed he was never directed in his decisions about objects or their representation. However, his views on how best to combine the exhibition’s diverse elements and write the detailed storylines evolved while working with the Marriott Collection and discussing themes with Betty Marriott. He also suggested that interactions with collectors led to the emergence of the view that one outcome of The Peranakan Legacy exhibition would be to position the Asian Civilisations Museum as the centre of Peranakan culture in Southeast Asia.

Further, Assistant Curator A revealed how the themes of the exhibition emerged “naturally and logically” from discussions with the collectors and from the logic of the collection itself. 74 Assistant Curator B echoed this explanation, strongly suggesting that the thematic approach of the exhibition was one that was driven by the availability of existing objects:

The exhibition was broken down into a strong storyline that could be backed up with artefacts. So whereas food was a strong part of the storyline, there was nothing much we could display. We could have displayed bowls and dishes and talked about them from a food point of view but it would have been very dry. We can’t show the experience of food – you need to see it, smell it, taste it – so we had limitations.75 Hesitancy about the political status of the Peranakans

Whilst there were hints and suggestions throughout the text panels about the role of the Peranakans in supporting notions of racial harmony, this discourse remained muted, understandable given that the main aim of the exhibition was to position the Peranakan material culture as an important component of Southeast Asian art. To this end, the exhibition focused on the technical dimensions of the objects and their creation. In addition, there was genuine unease amongst the curators who raised their concerns about positioning the Peranakans as role models for the promotion of inter-racial harmony. This was based on the Peranakans’ support for the colonial regime, their apathy toward independence, their desire to distance themselves from mainland Chinese whom they generally viewed with contempt, and their reluctance to acknowledge that, although there had clearly been intermarriages between Malay and Chinese, many Peranakans had refused

74 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 75 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 185 to identify themselves as linked to the Malay community. Indeed, historically it is suggested that some Peranakans resisted the notion that there was ever any intermarriage with Malay people at all, preferring to consider that the Peranakans derived from the intermarriage of Chinese traders and a much more established Chinese community in Malacca. The curators were aware that these were sentiments known to many Singaporeans who had lived through the end of the colonial period and who had experienced Singapore’s difficult move to independence. In addition, the influence of comments made by Lee Kwan Yew, the architect and “father” of modern Singapore, must be acknowledged. Lee is on public record as saying that the Peranakans had no relevance in modern Singapore, and as having publically predicted the demise of the Peranakans when the Straits Chinese British Association refused to take a political position to support independence.

Differentiation from competing exhibitions

Another factor that influenced the curatorial approach was the desire to differentiate the ACM’s exhibition from the Rumah Baba exhibition at the Singapore History Museum. Whilst it was known that the Rumah Baba exhibition would be dismantled with the refurbishing of the National History Museum in 2003, the curatorial team acknowledged that they consciously avoided duplicating the contextual display of a traditional Peranakan House, the main feature of the Rumah Baba exhibition. However, ACM’s differentiation did not extend to dealing with the political and social role of the Peranakans during colonial times, nor did it examine other Peranakan community groups such as the Chitty Peranakan.

A significant difference between the Rumah Baba exhibition and The Peranakan Legacy was the involvement of Peranakan curatorship. Rumah Baba was largely curated by Peter Lee, a collector in his own right and son of Lee Kip Lee, then President of the Peranakan Association. The Director of the ACM, Dr Kenson Kwok, made it clear that he felt under no obligation to have a Peranakan curator involved, though, had there been a Peranakan curator on staff, this person would have been on the team.76 The reality was that, at the time the decision was made to develop The Peranakan Legacy, there were no Peranakans working at the ACM in a curatorial capacity, and the approach was therefore to consult with members of the Peranakan community, including Peter Lee.

Inexperience of the team

76 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview by author, 2003. 186

The Senior Curator felt that the key decisions about the exhibition reflected the slow evolution of museological practice and understanding in Singapore:

We have come clearly a long way from the Raffles Museum, to the Singapore Art Museum, to the Asian Civilisations Museum; and at each step we take, we pick up new ideas and we learn how to respond to the needs of a society more attentively and faster. I could say “if I could do it again, I would do this or that differently,” but eight years ago we did not have the possibility… our society is changing so rapidly.77 The inexperience of the team is revealed in their diverging responses to questions about the intended audience for the exhibition and the main messages. When asked, Assistant Curator C revealed hesitancy and only a vague notion of who the audience might be for the porcelain section of the exhibition: “I was thinking I know a lot of people find ceramic displays quite boring because they look at them and they think ‘Oh pots and pans, yes I’ve seen it all before at home. What is it? Why lay hundreds and thousands of pieces out like that?’” As for major take away messages, Assistant Curator C commented: “[t]hey will definitely get the impression that the Peranakan community were affluent and had a lot of leisure time to spend commissioning beautiful jewellery, garments and accessories.”78 For Assistant Curator B there were two primary audiences: the Peranakans (with the curatorial implications that the museum needed to ensure their culture was presented respectfully and accurately), and tourists. This created a real need to explain the context of the material:

Oh, so who we targeted? Okay. It’s a good question, but a very strange answer will come, because you don’t put up a Peranakan exhibition solely for the Peranakans, right, because that would be relatively pointless. But yet in Singapore, it’s so small, the catchment population is so small; you would need the Peranakan community as your main supporters. So, you can’t ignore them, but neither can you pander completely to them. So first, one important audience was the Peranakan community… we were also targeting tourists, but not specifically. Because if you say we were specifically targeting tourists, then there would have been information in French and German and Tamil. So, the right answer is, we did plan the exhibition for specific audiences, but they’re not one audience – several specific audiences.79 Assistant Curator A confidently asserted that the exhibition’s key message was about cultural diversity in the region. He agreed that the exhibition presented the Peranakans as privileged, and justified this by pointing out that it was the wealthy Peranakans that were able to commission and produce the objects on display: “It is very clear that this sort of

77 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 78 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 79 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 187 artefact belongs to a certain strata of society only…” Assistant Curator A believed that the intended audience was primarily tourists, but included Singaporeans in general:

People who come to Singapore, foreigners, tourists or business people who come to Singapore and who want to see something that they can't see anywhere else, and as well Singaporeans to see something that in a sense makes sense to them, even young Singaporeans, it’s so much a part of our popular culture, like I said, food and the clothing.80 The Senior Curator was more candid about the lack of audience specificity: “Target audience? I don’t think we were so sophisticated when we did the Peranakan exhibition as to think about the target audience.” When asked about the take away messages the Senior Curator became more reflective:

If I had my time over I would have done it very differently. More money would have allowed us to put in more multimedia elements, more real characters, so you can associate a face to a bowl. I would have made it very different: I would have incorporated the other Peranakan – the Eurasians and the Indians; I would expand the notion of the Peranakan to include the others from the Southeast Asian regions; I would have included the voice of the non-Peranakan to see how they viewed the Peranakan. How they deal with the Nonya? How did the fishmongers deal with the Nonya? That sort of thing. How would a Hiyanese cook, staying in one of the colonial establishments/clubs deal with a Baba coming to the club – I would have included those things. Right now when you look at the exhibition it only reads as a Peranakan display from a Peranakan point of view speaking to you. That’s fine because as a non-Peranakan you can learn about it – but if we had added these other elements, we would have given the audience a place – right there and then in the exhibition – and it would have given them immediately a view point they could take. That way you’re not just only looking at a display, you’re being displayed. 81

Assistant Curator B was also candid about the team’s lack of experience when the exhibition development process began:

For [Assistant Curator A] and I, who were here after the opening of Tao Nan, it was our first main exhibition, and it was the first exhibition that tested all our curatorial skills, from researching the collection to exhibiting it in the gallery, working with lenders, it was all new. We did research every day as we went, there were no Peranakan experts, so we had to learn as we went along.82

80 Assistant Curator A, interview by author, 2003. 81 Senior Curator, interview by author, 2003. 82 Assistant Curator B, interview by author, 2003. 188

Budget Constraints

The curatorial approach for the exhibition was also influenced by budget constraints that contributed to the conventional approach. The team was required to recycle, wherever possible, the cabinets that were already situated in the galleries on the second floor and which had been used in the previous Chinese exhibition. Only a few purpose-built display cases were commissioned for large items (such as the semi-contextual display housing the wedding bed and the ancestral altar). Elena Dibrai, the exhibition designer, worked closely with the curatorial team to maximise the creative use of the recycled cabinets, and whilst she helped organise the way the Peranakan displays fitted physically into the galleries and recycled cabinets, the storyline came from the curatorial team. The major role for Dibrai was to generate an aesthetically pleasing environment with the lighting and colours that best complemented the presentation of the Peranakan material culture as high art, in keeping with Assistant Curator A’s prevailing storyline.

Conclusion

The museum effect is clearly a force that is independent of the objects themselves. The mode of installation, the subtle message communicated through design, arrangement, and assemblage, can either aid or impede our appreciation and understanding of the visual, cultural, social and political interest of the objects and stories exhibited in museums.83 The Peranakan Legacy exhibition was strategically inserted like a transitional placeholder in the space left vacant by the removal of the Chinese exhibits to another building, and was even so part of a museum dominated by Chinese exhibits on the floors above and below. The Peranakan Legacy tested the waters to see how locals and tourists might receive a plan to convert the whole of the Tao Nan building into a boutique style Peranakan museum. While Curator A had a vision to position the Peranakan material culture as a new Southeast Asian art form, it became clear from interviews with key stakeholders that the day-to-day decisions made about the storyline and installation of The Peranakan Legacy were informed by pragmatic considerations: the lack of time and budget, the existence of available objects, the existing knowledge and skills of the individual curators involved, the explicit and implicit pressures from donors, and the lack of authoritative research and information about the Peranakans themselves.

83 Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 14. 189

Whilst there was no direct intervention from the Board or the Ministry regarding what should or should not be included in The Peranakan Legacy, the curatorial team universalised the exhibition into a safe and aesthetic experience, aiming to elevate the unique material expression of the Peranakan Chinese into the realm of high art with its own genre, generally ignoring the wider socio-political context. The possibilities of alternative or plural storylines or perspectives on the influence the Peranakans have had on the development of Singapore, were largely left unaddressed. The Asian Civilisations Museum’s text panels were didactic, with limited presence of a first person Peranakan voice.

The dominant narratives throughout The Peranakan Legacy exhibition were the repeated messages addressing the wealth of the Peranakans and the hybrid nature of their material culture. Within these dominant narratives was the understanding that the Peranakans desired to display this wealth through the production and commissioning of what evolved into their distinct material culture. The objects themselves demonstrate that the visual elements and techniques that the Peranakans preferred were appropriated from Chinese, Southeast Asian, Indian, and European influences, creating a genuinely distinct and unique expression of material culture with its own clearly identifiable aesthetics. Here lies the dichotomy, for it is the commissioning and constructing of the Peranakan material culture, which blends together interracial elements to develop something new and unique, that defines the Peranakan approach to material culture. Yet this skill at assimilation and integration was not to be extended to the Peranakans themselves, who became increasingly élitist and isolationist as they established their privileged position. With their increasing status and influence in the colonial regime, they sought to differentiate themselves from the newly arrived migrants from mainland China and to create a relatively closed community by predominantly marrying from amongst their own.

The tension of the Peranakans as representing both a unique and exotic material culture from a bright period in Singapore’s colonial history, and a group who resisted Singapore’s assertive stand on independence, remained largely unresolved in the exhibition. The Peranakan Chinese are placed firmly in the past within the exhibition, the only acknowledgment of a dynamic aspect of their culture being the growing appreciation for their heritage. This thesis asserts that The Peranakan Legacy, with its focus on the display of rich and exotic objects, did not present a balanced investigation of the various Peranakan communities from the Straits Settlements, nor did it provide any real understanding of who the Peranakan Chinese were or are today.

190

The next two chapters will explore the unexpected consequences of the exhibition for the Peranakan community which found itself – like its material culture – consecrated with symbolic recognition and celebrated by two of Singapore’s state funded museums as well as by the powerful leaders of the nation itself. This chapter provided an overview of The Peranakan Legacy exhibition and its museological approach, described by the museum’s Director Kenson Kwok as operating as a combination of art, ethnography and history museum.84 It also provided a detailed account of the issues and challenges faced by the curatorial team. The next chapter addresses the establishment of the Peranakan Museum with the entire Tao Nan building filled with items of Peranakan material culture, and provides a detailed account of its exhibitions and the evolving approaches adopted in the interpretation of the Peranakan Chinese.

84 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview by author, 2003. 191

Chapter 7: Realising the Peranakan Museum

In 1980 Singapore-based sociologist John Clammer argued that the Peranakans are “…a rare and beautiful blend of the dominant elements of the Malaysian and Singaporean culture” that he believed created a “genuine synthesis which not only incorporates but transcends the component parts out of which it springs.” Most significantly, Clammer argued that, “Straits Chinese culture is not simply a thing of the past, but is a living tradition, which in many respects presents a model of what an integrated and authentic Malaysian/Singaporean culture might look like.” 1

Central to this case study are the questions of who is, and is not, a Peranakan, and why Singapore should dedicate a state museum to such a minority group. This study argues that the development of the Peranakan Museum, and their representation within it, has less to do with the specificity of the Peranakans themselves than with agents operating within a contemporary play of forces in the ongoing struggle to increase or sustain their position within Singapore’s fields of cultural production. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, the potential advantages of showcasing the material culture of the Peranakans presented itself as a compelling case. The driving issue became how to best reframe their cultural capital for the purposes of supporting and extending state-driven social, political, and economic objectives.

This chapter will argue that the Peranakan Museum reflects the unresolved and tentative character of the repositioning of the Peranakans within Singapore’s social spaces. As a result on one level this distinct community presents a potential symbol of what an authentic Singaporean culture could look like, forming a bridge between Singapore’s distinct racial groups – Chinese, Malay Indian and “Other”. On a deeper level, their perceived loyalty to the colonial regime and their lack of support for the state has not yet been directly addressed or resolved by the community or by the Asian Civilisation Museum (ACM). This creates a tension within the ACM’s curatorial team, manifested as a conflict between the overall directive to present a living community and a desire to reinstate the community in the context of Singapore’s history.

1 Clammer, Straits Chinese Society, 1.

192 Opening of the Peranakan Museum: the Prime Minister acknowledges his heritage.

The opening of the Peranakan Museum on April 25, 2008 was, amongst other things, a high security event, primarily because Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was the guest of honour. Eight hundred mostly Peranakan guests were required to pass through carefully monitored security gates and have their bags checked before entering a huge tent erected for the occasion. The tent covered the entire car park adjacent to the Peranakan Museum and wrapped around the building, extending to the front entrance of the museum. Inside the tent was an expansive central stage (complete with dressing rooms) behind which lay an enormous backdrop decorated with Peranakan motifs such as flowers and butterflies. Suspended from the tent’s cathedral-like ceilings, electric fans turned slowly to help guests deal with the tropical heat. On arrival, guests heard the voice of young Peranakan entertainer “Dick” Lee Peng Boon, acting as official MC, preparing the crowd for the Prime Minister’s arrival with clapping and cheering practice, and generally whipping up anticipation for the start of the ceremonies.

Set back on the opposite side of the tent from the stage, huge banquet tables had been laden with traditional Peranakan cuisine, highlighting the Peranakan preoccupation with the art of creating and enjoying food. The tent was full to capacity with men and women, mostly older Peranakans, wearing traditional Peranakan attire as was requested on official invitations. This meant batik shirts for men and kebayas and sarongs for women, creating an extremely colourful and patterned throng. Working the crowd were smiling young character actors, adopting highly affected Peranakan manners, along with one or two rather sad looking older, male Peranakan actors waiting for the speeches to start. These traditional cross-dressing Peranakans sat quietly wearing full clown-like face makeup, and with their hair adorned with flowers and pulled primly back. The Peranakans in their hey-day, were renowned for their colourful plays and musicals.

As scheduled, the Prime Minister appeared, and the huge tent came to silence as he began his opening address, carefully pre-written and distributed to key stakeholders as a press release. Lee Hsien Loong began by defining the Peranakans, emphasising the syncretic nature of their culture: “The Peranakan combined elements of the local culture, and incorporated practices from their original civilisations. The result was new and unique culture of food fusion, lively music, colourful textiles and vibrant designs.” He then went on to describe how the Chinese Peranakans had successfully adapted to their new

193 homeland thanks to their tolerance and the historic intermarrying of Chinese and Malay cultures. Lee then spoke of how the museum had taken a pan-Southeast Asian perspective and positioned itself as having the most comprehensive Peranakan collection in the world. He referred to the often-repeated government view that Singapore had strategically developed as the hub for the region, in this case positioning the Peranakan Museum as the centre of discourse and exchange for the Peranakan communities of Southeast Asia, promoting regional exchange and dialogue.

Lee Hsien Loong then voiced the well-established doxa of the importance of promoting Asian values to enhance national identity and protect Singapore against unwanted Western influences. “More importantly,” he said, “the exhibits here will provide links to our past, which will help Singaporeans to develop a keener appreciation of our history, and remember who we are, and where we come from.” With this one sentence, Lee articulated the government’s view of the key function of Singapore’s National Museums. Predictably, Lee Hsien Loong also referred to the other major influence behind the development of National Museums in Singapore – the economy. He described how the Peranakan Museum was just one part of a more extensive plan to create a more vibrant arts and cultural scene in Singapore. He reminded the audience that they enjoyed high international standing because of Singapore’s world-class infrastructure, skilled workforce, reputation for reliability and efficiency, and stated that Singapore was a “key node to the global economic network.”

However, reflecting Goh Chok Tong’s report Singapore: The Next Lap and the Renaissance City Report, Lee also stated that to be a truly great global city, Singapore needed to be more than an economic marketplace: “We must also create a living environment that is the best in Asia – a city rich in culture that exudes our own Singaporean brand of diversity and vibrancy.” The Prime Minister’s economically-driven logic continued, reflecting the government’s dominant agenda: “All this will generate significant economic spin-offs, from retail to tourism, and the development of our creative industries.”

Lee Hsien Loong also described the importance of building up the country’s cultural capital in order to strengthen Singapore’s cultural linkages with other countries. He spoke of exchanging exhibitions and of bringing in artefacts and collections from all over the world. He described how this would progressively transform Singapore into a global city for the arts and culture, and he made the point that the world was noticing Singapore and that there were recent reports describing how “vibrant Singapore has become, and what an

194 attractive place it is to live.”2 As a politician, he was of course ensuring that the audience was aware of how successful the government had been in implementing the strategies outlined in the 2001 Renaissance City Report.

Thus far, Lee had stuck closely to his script, but there came an important moment when he departed completely from the written text. He spoke of the way Singapore museums had received enthusiastic reviews and were attracting a growing stream of both local and international visitors. At this point Lee stopped to look at the crowd of Peranakans in front of him. He then announced with great enthusiasm how happy he was to be with them at this event and how it had been a long time since he had seen such a large Peranakan gathering. Sending the crowd into a roar of approval, he ended with the comment: “Of course I am one of you!”3 This simple statement was a significant and highly symbolic moment in the political journey of the Chinese Peranakans in Singapore, particularly as Lee Hsien Loong’s father Lee Kuan Yew, often referred to as the father of modern Singapore, had never publicly acknowledged the family’s Peranakan ancestry. Indeed, he had gone to great lengths to distance himself from the Peranakans and condemned their Association as being out of touch and obsolete. For Lee Kuan Yew, it had been necessary to jettison his ancestry in the post-War era and position himself as one of the progressive Chinese pushing for Singapore’s independence from the colonial British rulers.

Having made the impromptu pronouncement, the Prime Minister then fell back into line to reinforce the role of the Peranakan Museum as an instrument of government control. “Importantly,” he continued, “it [the Peranakan Museum] will provide Singaporeans with a rich cultural life, nurture the sense of pride in our heritage and history, and strengthen our identity as a nation.”4 With these concluding words, Lee made clear the position of the field of cultural production in Singapore, one operating under the dominant and overarching fields of politics and the economy. With the formalities complete, Lee Hsien Loong declared the Peranakan Museum open to an ecstatic Peranakan audience. When the applause had subsided and all the speeches finished, a VIP group, including the

2 Lee Hsien Loong, Speech by Prime Minister Mr Lee Hsien Loong at the Official Opening of the New Peranakan Museum Singapore, Government Singapore Media Release, April 25, 2008, accessed March 2011, http://archivesonline.nas.sg/speeches/view-html?filename=20080425980.htm 3 Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, public address at the opening of the Peranakan Museum, witnessed and documented by author, April 25, 2008. 4 Lee, Speech by Prime Minister Mr Lee Hsien Loong at the Official Opening of the New Peranakan Museum Singapore.

195 Prime Minister, Board members, Museum Directors, sponsors and donors, was taken on a special curatorial walk-through of the new museum.

Introduction

“Singaporeans know that they have to loosen up. I think it is good, it is a nice stage in Singapore’s history.”5 This was Dr Kenson Kwok’s explanation as to why, after decades of distancing the Peranakans from the Lee family, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong felt comfortable enough to publicly acknowledge that he was a Peranakan. Kwok commented that subjects that had been deemed too sensitive, such as the Lee family’s connections to the Peranakans, had now become less of an issue, and with this had come a new confidence in addressing and positioning the Peranakans within Singapore society. This chapter considers this change in perception of the Peranakans over the years between The Peranakan Legacy exhibition opening in 2000 and the opening of the Peranakan Museum in 2008. It examines the resulting impact of the Peranakans’ change in status on portrayals of their community within the museum, and explores the extent to which the Peranakans were now being positioned to play a new role in Singapore’s ongoing nation-building discourse.

Like Chapter 6, this chapter provides a detailed description of the new museum and its curatorial approach, drawing on in-depth interviews with key museum staff to provide insights into the curatorial rationales that underpinned the development of the Peranakan Museum. Finally, this chapter will discuss the temporary exhibition Junk to Jewellery: The things that Peranakans value, which was designed to complement the Peranakan Museum on its inaugural opening and which was curated by the collector Peter Lee, himself a Peranakan.

Whilst museums are still a relatively new field of research, post-colonial museology has helped shift the focus of institutions from the collections of kings and trophies of conquest, towards the liberation and democratisation of collections. Modern museums are now seen as creating space for alternative narratives to challenge those which have been dominant, helping to repackage narratives responsibly as they are put to work in the formation of new nations. Flora E. Kaplan draws together fourteen case studies, written within a diverse range of related fields including archaeology, anthropology, art history,

5 Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, March 16, 2009.

196 history, and museology, addressing non-Western new and emergent nations. These case studies consider the role of museums in the transformation of non-Western nations from colonised territories through to independence, testing the underlying assumption that “museums are purveyors of ideology and of a downward spread of knowledge to the public, thereby contributing to an historical process of democratisation.”6 Kaplan addresses the ways in which collections are mobilised to play important roles in promoting national agendas and considers the way objects themselves can stand for the nation-state and “embody the ‘idea’ of the state of a people.” Kaplan acknowledges that museums of the past proclaimed the glories of empires but that collections and exhibitions are now “products of social and political change” and thereby worthy of study.7 The results of her studies are mixed, with museums generally reflecting the political ideology of the state either passively (in the case of the Fiji museum by choosing not to represent the Indian migrant community which makes up more than 50% of the country’s population),8 or aggressively with direct government intervention (in the case of Nigeria with the expansion of its museum system into every region with the aim of building national unity).9

The Peranakan Museum sits within Kaplan’s criteria for her study as a post-colonial non-Western nation, and this chapter explores the museum’s role in nation-building, and the way in which the objects in its collection can be considered an embodiment of the state’s tentative idea of a people, in this case Singaporeans. The Peranakans have the potential to symbolise a bridge between races in Singapore and, as Kaplan suggests, their collections and displays could be used to “unite a populace, to reduce conflict, and to ensure political stability and continuity.” However, this chapter argues, as Kaplan also suggests, that due to the unresolved nature of the place of the Peranakan community within Singapore’s highly controlled social spaces, a place which is embodied within the habitus of the two Peranakan curators, their collections and displays can also be read as “focal points of discontent for groups seeking power.”10 The dialectic results in discord within the narrative of the Peranakan Museum as conflicting agendas struggle to be heard.

6 Flora E. S. Kaplan, ed. Museums and the Making of "Ourselves": the role of objects in national identity (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 3. 7 Kaplan, Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”, 3. 8 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, “Paradise Regained: The Role of Pacific Museums in Forging National Identity”, in Kaplan, Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”, 19–44. 9 Flora E. S. Kaplan, “Nigerian Museums: Envisaging Culture as National Identity,” in Kaplan, Museums and the Making of "Ourselves", 45–78. 10 Kaplan, Museums and the Making of "Ourselves", 2.

197 Of particular relevance to the analysis within this chapter is Bruce Ferguson’s argument within his essay “Exhibition Rhetorics.” Ferguson suggests that “the formation of any nation’s or region’s or group’s constructing of its accumulating self under ever new historical conditions, are continuously shifting, assembling and dissipating notions of identity.”11 This becomes evident in the change of representation of the Peranakan community from The Peranakan Legacy to the Peranakan Museum as described in this chapter.

Background Context of the Peranakan Museum in 2008

A number of important contextual changes occurred in the eight years between the completion of The Peranakan Legacy in 2000 and the opening of the Peranakan Museum in 2008. At a macro level, Derek Heng Thiam Soon points out that due to Singapore’s “spectacular economic growth,” policy shifted from a regional to a global economic focus. Soon comments that earlier rhetoric encouraging Singaporeans to rediscover their cultural roots12 had changed by 2004 to an emphasis on being at home and “working well” in two or even more cultures: Singaporean culture and the culture of their forbears (that of China, India, the Malay Archipelago and the Middle East).13 This shift is in keeping with the state’s aim to position itself as a global city and secure closer economic links by nurturing what Soon calls “bi-cultural characteristics.” Additionally Soon argues that, at a micro level, Singaporeans were encouraged to consider themselves bi-cultural to enable them to adjust to the new influx of migrants from these same places. Such moves represent a response to reports in the local and social media about social tensions with new Chinese migrants who were considered to bring a mismatch of “cultures and social norms .”14

In 2004 in Singapore Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew’s son, launched his term of office with a promise to foster a more open society encouraging and allowing citizens to think creatively and allowing individuals to express their views without fear of reprisal, as long as they respected “out of bounds” topics – such as criticising the People’s Action Party (PAP).

11 Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material speech and utter sense” in Greenberg et al., Thinking about Exhibitions, 183. 12 Derek Heng Thiam Soon attributes this to the establishment of the ACM. 13 Derek Heng Thiam Soon and Syed Muhd Khairundin , eds. Reframing Singapore: Memory - Identity - Trans-Regionalism, (Amsterdam: ICAS / Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 28. 14 Hawk Cut Weis, Facebook, “Of Ferraris, PRCs and Social Integration”, accessed November 2012, May 17, 2012. https://www.facebook.com/notes/hawk-cut-weis/of-ferraris-prcs-and-social- integration-putting-things-into-perspective/368844529841068.

198 Singapore’s fields of cultural production have progressed at a rapid rate, and in 2002 the Ministry of Information, Trade and Industry published Imagi: A new Agenda for a Creative and Connected Nation, Investing in Singapore’s Cultural Capital.15 This report addressed a vision of a “remade” Singapore, driven by a creative economy and benchmarked against “first world” nations such as the USA.16 The report also defined cultural capital as a critical strategic national resource:

In the new economy where ideas, creativity, entrepreneurship, technology and knowledge converge and connect, cultural capital shapes the content, the tools and the environment with and in which people create new values and form new industries. Cultural capital is therefore the driving force and the measure of a society’s ingenuity and creativity.17 The report argued that there were many components that encompassed the art and cultural sector: “Creative Cluster: the enterprises and individuals that directly or indirectly produce cultural products… Creative People, Creative Workplace: individuals who have cultural capital inside”, as well as creative workforce and creative audiences or consumers who are inspired by the arts in ways that go beyond the arts. Lastly, “Connected Nation is defined as a nation which has the ability to connect to others, both home and abroad, and the past, present and future.” The report concludes with the call for a paradigm shift to view the arts and culture not as consumption but as a creative investment tool to anchor Singapore’s future success.18 This report makes clear the extent the state had researched and now invested in the importance of creativity in boosting and sustaining the economy and its relationship with the health and development of the nation’s fields of cultural production

In keeping with the growing homologies between the field of the economy and the arts, the next two iterations of the Renaissance City Reports were released. These reports were designed to ensure Singapore became a cultural vibrant city in the twenty-first century and to create some protection from the influence of Western values that came with a global economy. The second of these reports focused on developing the commercial aspects of

15 Ministry of Information, Trade and Industry, Singapore, imagi: A new Agenda for a Creative and Connected Nation, Investing in Singapore’s Cultural Capital, March 2, 2002, accessed February 12, 2010, http://www.mti.gov.sg/ResearchRoom/Documents/app.mti.gov.sg/data/pages/507/doc/ERC_S VS_CRE_Annex1.1(a).pdf. 16 The report imagi: A new Agenda for a Creative and Connected Nation, Investing in Singapore’s Cultural Capital, cited the US economy with its US$480 billion in annual revenues from its creative industries (accounting for 5% of GDP), March 2, 2002. 17 Ministry of Information Trade and Industry, imagi. 18 Ministry of Information Trade and Industry, imagi.

199 the creative industries, stating that while the agencies of the Ministry of Information, Technology and the Arts (such as the National Arts Council, National Heritage Board, National Library and Singapore Tourism Board) were all key players in the development of the arts and cultural sector, only the Singapore Tourism Board adopted a business perspective. The second of the Renaissance City Reports asserted that while the National Arts Council, National Heritage Board and National Library were legitimately considering not- for-profit arts organisations, they were directed to take a more active role in supporting the economy. The report stated: “Henceforth, MITA agencies and the Singapore Tourism Board will work together to unleash the economic potential of the arts and cultural sector.”19 This resulted in a new economic focus, with the recommendation that the NHB commercialise it’s merchandising, and develop Arts and Heritage Consulting services.20 The Renaissance City Plan III provides detailed development plans for the National Arts Council and the National Heritage Board, and nominated “distinctive content” as its prime strategic directive. This, the report argued, was the core of art and at the heart of digital technologies such as media, film, television, and design.21 The report also suggested that a nation’s unique content shapes its national identity and distinctiveness.

Within the National Heritage Board’s 2008 Renaissance City Plan III: Development Plan the Peranakans featured strongly, positioned as local heritage that “captivates the hearts and minds of locals and foreigners” with temporary exhibitions that could be used for “building bridges for Singapore and helping to promote the Singapore brand.” Of significance here is that the Peranakans, absent from previous state policies and reports, have now been officially recognised within Singapore’s rapidly expanding field of cultural production and safely repositioned under the banner of “made in Singapore.” The attraction was that they provide Singapore with “distinctive content” as they are identified as an indigenous tradition. Further, as the Peranakans have their own museum, the report notes that research grants will be available to document the Peranakans’ “culture and the span of its

19 Economic Review Committee, “Singapore – A Global City for Arts and Culture Renaissance City 2.0”, in Creative Industries Development Strategy: Propelling Singapore's Creative Economy. (Singapore: Singapore Government, 2002), 10–11. 20 Economic Review Committee, “Singapore – A Global City for Arts and Culture Renaissance City 2.0”, 20. 21 Ministry of Information and the Arts, Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts, 2008), 17.

200 quaint blend of Asian-colonial traditions and lifestyles,” as the state claims and takes control of the role of the Peranakan community in its ongoing nation-building exercise.22

Growing Professionalism. The museological approach and exhibition technology for the ACM’s Empress Place displays were significantly enhanced by the work of a Canadian exhibition design team, GSM, whose consultants brought with them new trends and conceptual thinking within museological practices at the time. The impact was symbolised by the fact that the ACM’s Director, Dr Kenson Kwok, no longer talked about the museum “visit,” but the visitor “experience.” Additionally, in 2003 under Tan Chor ’s directorship, the Singapore History Museum closed down for major renovations. When it reopened in 2006 as the National Museum of Singapore, the popular Peranakan exhibition Rumah Baba: Life in a Peranakan House had been removed in an important, but politically charged, rationalisation of Peranakan displays throughout the National Heritage Board’s museum sector. In an interview with the author, Kwok described the battles he had in order to prevent the new National Museum from featuring major displays addressing the Peranakans: “The National Museum wanted very much to have Peranakan material but I kicked up a fuss and said if we are going to set up a Peranakan museum why are you setting up a Peranakan display?” His argument won out, and while the National Museum did tell the stories of significant Peranakan pioneers, they were presented as individuals embedded within the greater narrative of Singapore’s history, rather than being highlighted as members of a distinct community.

These changes, explored in greater detail in this chapter, both reflected and assisted in a strengthening of the Peranakans’ cultural capital. As economic and political stakeholders came to see their unique history and material culture as being useful to achieving a range of nation-building goals, there occurred a distinct shift in the narrative defining the positioning of the Peranakans. Reconstructed as a living culture rather than as a quaint historical remnant of an unpopular colonial era, there was a growing belief among key players in Singapore’s museum sector that the Peranakans had the potential to represent the kind of Asian values Singapore required to counter unwanted Western influences. They could also embody the ideals of a flexible, competitive, global workforce. Of significance to this study is how the élites in government worked to ameliorate the problematic history of

22 National Heritage Board, Renaissance City Plan III: Heritage Development Plan, (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2008), 12.

201 the Peranakans’ loyalty to the colonial regime in Singapore – a necessary first step, this thesis argues, to mobilising the Peranakans as model global citizens.

Changes in the Peranakan Curatorial Team Within Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, agents bring to play, in any given field, their individual habitus with its enduring disposition, established in formative years. Individuals entering a field, in this case the sub-field of ACM, struggle to have their individual capital (technical, symbolic, economic, cultural etc.) recognised in order to increase or sustain their position and power. They also bring with them the experience gained in previous fields, allowing gatekeepers (in the case of the ACM, recruitment staff) criteria to match individuals with the values, skills and beliefs of the institution.

By 2006, the ACM’s curatorial team differed from that of The Peranakan Legacy, with a number of individuals leaving, some to take up promotions in other Singaporean cultural institutions.23 The Senior Curator for the Southeast Asian department took up the role of Director in one of the cultural institutions, as did Assistant Curator A. Assistant Curator C was promoted into the Senior Executive, while Assistant Curator B moved out of the museum sector altogether.

New members on the Peranakan curatorial team included the team leader and ACM’s Deputy Director; Assistant Curator D, a Singaporean Peranakan and private collector; and Assistant Curator E, an American-born historian who grew up in Singapore. Supporting the team was an Assistant Researcher who left before the project was completed. Also new to the Peranakan Museum team were the local consultants, award winning architect Mok Wei Wei, the Managing Director of W Architects, and up and coming designer Patrick Gan, the Managing Director of Black Design.

Of all the staff involved in the development of The Peranakan Legacy only two employees worked on the project from beginning to end: Dr Kenson Kwok, who remained Director, and Assistant Curator C who assisted in a managerial rather than curatorial capacity. With the completion and opening of ACM’s flagship museum at Empress Place in 2003, and with the closure of the Tao Nan building for conversion into the Peranakan Museum in 2005, Dr Kwok was able to take a more active role in the development of the Peranakan Museum, from 2005 to 2008 working with the curatorial team, making decisions about content, and overseeing the architectural and design work.

23 As mentioned earlier in this chapter, their names have not been used to protect their anonymity.

202 The ten galleries of the Peranakan Museum were organised into themes and assigned to each member of the curatorial team to allow for specialisation. Assistant Curator E was brought in to complete the Conversations gallery while the Deputy Director completed the Origins and Public Life galleries. Assistant Curator E also developed the Religion gallery, while Assistant Curator D was responsible for the Wedding, Nonya, and Food and Feasting galleries. Guiding the team, Dr Kwok contributed his thinking in meetings with both the team and individuals, and by working with the architects and exhibition designer. Assistant Curator C supported the project as manager of both Assistant Curator E and Assistant Curator D.

The Peranakans Re-imagined

Enter the world of the Peranakans Southeast Asia has been a crossroads for trade since ancient times. Prevailing winds brought traders from distant lands to Southeast Asia. Some of these traders put down roots and married local women. Their descendants are the ancestors of the Peranakans. The Peranakan Museum showcases the world’s finest and most comprehensive collection displayed in 10 galleries. Step into them and immerse yourself in this unique Southeast Asian Culture.24 When Lee Kuan Yew stated in 1954 that he would not want to be called a Peranakan, his words signalled how far the social, cultural and political capital of the community into which he was born had fallen. Although Lee’s denial was rebuffed by the President of the SCBA (who suggested that all Singaporeans were Peranakans as they had been locally born), the word Peranakan, like the earlier categories of “Straits Chinese,” “Straits-born Chinese” or “Chinese British Subjects,” was relegated to history. It was not without irony then that Lee’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, opened the new Peranakan Museum in 2008 publicly acknowledging that he was of Peranakan descent.

In the same year Kenson Kwok declared that the Peranakan Museum was “not a community museum but a museum about a community.” A community museum, Kwok explained, was designed to allow the community to represent itself to others, whilst the Peranakan Museum’s aim was to explore the Peranakan community and its culture “from a regional perspective.” Kwok also clarified the rationale for the ACM’s new Peranakan Museum: “What we are trying to do is to look at Peranakan culture as it exists in Malacca,

24Asian Civilisations Museum, Peranakan Museum Visitor Guide, (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2008).

203 Penang and Singapore.” He added that the museum would also highlight lesser-known Peranakan communities in Java, Sumatra, Thailand and Myanmar: “We want to make it a pan-Southeast Asian Museum.” 25 There is a clear logic to Kwok’s rationale, given the Peranakan Museum came under the aegis of the ACM whose mission was defined: “To explore and present the cultures and civilisations of Asia, so as to promote awareness and appreciation of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans and their links to Southeast Asia and the world.”26 This mission was established with the belief that for a multi-ethnic society like Singapore to thrive, citizens needed to be more strongly connected to their origins and cultures, as well as having an awareness of the origins and cultural backgrounds of Singapore’s other ethnic groups. The government’s belief was – and still remains – that a more culturally aware community would be more tolerant of difference and be able to mix more easily with other communities both in the country and the region. For a nation with a memory of chaotic racial disharmony and a future dependent upon integration into the global economy, such tolerance and flexibility had great significance.

Riding the tide of the changing needs of Singapore, and with a new confidence in the perception of the Peranakans, the Peranakan Museum dramatically shifted its Peranakan narrative. Whilst The Peranakan Legacy had positioned the Peranakans as a quaint cultural phenomenon from a bygone era, highlighting their material culture from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, a period often referred to as their “golden age,” Kwok made it clear that the museum would now present them as a vibrant living culture with deep historical connections in the region: “We wanted to emphasise more of the living aspect of the Peranakan rather than the past.”27 The most frequent examples cited of their more dynamic place in Singapore were the new books and plays that had emerged from Peranakan writers, and the sudden interest in the kebaya as a fashion garment – reinterpreted in contemporary ways.

Kwok also acknowledged that the Peranakans had come to represent an idealised model for Singapore citizens, and that this notion was one of the ideas underpinning the Peranakan Museum.28 However, he also made the point that presenting Peranakan culture was particularly challenging as “not all Peranakans agree as to what constitutes a

25 Dr Kenson Kwok, cited in Marcus Ng, “A Confluence of Cultures: The Peranakan Story,” beMUSE, 1, no. 3 (2008): 11. 26 National Heritage Board, Annual Report 2000/2001, (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2002), 26. 27 Kwok, cited in Marcus Ng, “A Confluence of Cultures”, 11. 28 Kwok, interview by author, 2009.

204 Peranakan,” and that “the Peranakan are by no means a homogeneous group.” As the remainder of this chapter will suggest, these dichotomies and differences would play out in the dynamics of the Peranakan curatorial team, the members of which had very diverse views on how best to represent the Peranakans, culminating in an exhibition with multiple and competing narratives.

Visiting the Peranakan Museum: A Boutique Experience.

With its vision statement to be “the World’s Best Peranakan Museum – Inspiring the Discovery of Selves & Others,” Kenson Kwok describes the Peranakan Museum as a boutique experience, with a focus on the present rather than the past.29 “We want to give visitors the impression that this is very much a living culture,” he said. As a central design element behind this idea, he actively encouraged the building to be presented as alive and welcoming.

So wherever possible, I ask for the windows to be open. Visitors approaching the museum from the road below will find a welcoming building with doors and shutters ajar and sunlight filtered through judicious blinds. We want people to use it like a house, to give this museum a homely feel.30

The old school in which the museum is located does indeed look welcoming with its courtyard open wide to visitors approaching from the street. Upon entering the Peranakan Museum a slight change of mood is apparent, generated by the highly colourful and playful signage featuring caricatures of Peranakan Nonyas (women) and Bibiks (older women) embarking on a shopping outing, with a sign inviting you to “enter the world of the Peranakan.” Entering into the Peranakans’ world apparently required a commercial transaction at the outset rather than at the end of the exhibition experience, as is normally the case. On the left of the entry, visitors are encouraged to shop for Peranakan books and related trinkets, and on the right they can shop for expensive sarongs, kebayas and batik shirts. As a “boutique,” the Peranakan Museum shamelessly embraces its new label.

29 Asian Civilisations Museum, “Mission and Vision”, accessed October 26, 2008, http://www.acm.org.sg/the_museum/ethos_vision.asp. 30 Kwok, cited in Marcus Ng, “A Confluence of Cultures”, 12.

205

Figure 12: Promotional signage for the opening of the Peranakan Museum depicting cartoons of Nonyas and Bibiks [Grandmothers]

The idea of a boutique museum seems to be taken to the extreme within the brightly lit foyer and front desk, which are framed by floor-to-ceiling pastel-coloured decorative panels featuring Peranakan motifs such as peonies and colourful swirls. The entrance of the museum is designed like an exclusive fashion outlet, significant given the museum is only a short walk from Singapore’s most exclusive shopping centre, Raffles City. One could be forgiven for expecting to see racks of stunning batik skirts and kebayas for sale in the adjoining galleries rather than carefully curated exhibitions. But this was the atmosphere Kwok had been keen to construct. In a press release of 2008 Kwok alluded to this mix of visitation and recreation and highlighted that the Peranakan Museum has ample parking and there are restaurants nearby.

We are confident that the new light and bright Peranakan Museum will be a popular culture and leisure destination for all Singaporeans. For tourists, to get a complete experience of Singapore, a visit to the Peranakan Museum is simply a must. It should be top of their list of places to see.31

The commercial orientation of the Peranakan Museum is endorsed by the Singapore Tourism Board, an agency designed to sell Peranakan culture as an exotic attraction, unique to the region.

31 Dr Kenson Kwok, “Singapore’s Newest Museum Opens”, media release, Peranakan Museum, April 17, 2008.

206

Figure 13: Highly decorative foyer

Inside the Museum

As visitors step over the entrance to the museum a guide collects their entry fee, provides them with a map of the museum and directs them to the Origins gallery immediately to their left. So begins the journey into the world of the Peranakans as presented by the Peranakan Museum.

207

Figure 14: Ground Level

Description of the Ten Peranakan Galleries

Origins – Who am I? Gallery 1

Visitors enter and exit the oblong gallery entitled Origins – Who am I? via a single doorway, a legacy of the room’s original function as a classroom in a Chinese Hokkien school. The sounds of Asian music filter into the space accompanied by the voice of the narrator in an introductory video projected on the wall at the far end of the room. The other walls all reveal the smiling faces of larger-than-life portraits, hung shoulder-to- shoulder, of Peranakans from communities across Southeast Asia. As visitors enter the Origins gallery, immediately on the left of the entry way is a large text panel posing the question: “Who are the Peranakans?” Such questions were in keeping with Kwok’s approach in what he referred to as the “intro” (Origins) and “outro” (Conversations) galleries to challenge the visitor to make up their own minds about what constitutes a Peranakan:

208 “How we intend to involve the audience is to look at the subjects of Peranakans and ask a series of questions.”32 Having posed the question, comprehensive information about the Peranakan is conveyed via a series of text panels:

Who are the Peranakan?... in the Malay speaking parts of Southeast Asia, the term Peranakan means ‘child of’ or ‘born of’. This term is used to refer to a person of mixed ethnic origins. Many different communities are recognised as ‘Peranakan’, for example the Jawi Peranakan who are descended from the Indian Muslims, the Chitty Melaka community descended from Hindu Traders and the Baba community who are descended from the Chinese. Having established this inclusive understanding of the Peranakans, the introductory gallery then manages the visitor’s expectations for the remainder of their visit.

The objects in this museum mainly showcase the distinctive material culture of the Straits Chinese Peranakan community, which draws on cultural influences of Southeast Asia. Some materials from other Peranakan communities are also displayed; the longer term goal of the museum is to bring to light other Peranakan communities of the region. As with The Peranakan Legacy exhibition, the focus for the majority of the displays will be on the Straits Chinese Peranakan community, and there is no expectation that the museum will address the material culture of the diverse groups of Peranakans it has just defined. Assistant Curator C, currently the ACM’s Senior Curator of Southeast Asia, suggested that while some of the curators genuinely wished to address the broader Peranakan communities, such as the Chitty Peranakans, the material in the collection did not support such displays. She hoped that, with the Peranakan Museum now open, there might be time to research and collect material to address the broader and more inclusive Peranakan display.33 Kwok also acknowledged that more time was needed for the museum to research and collect material culture from non-Chinese Peranakans: “Currently we don’t have the material.”34 However, he stated that the museum was “laying the seeds” with its observations in the Origins and Conversations galleries.

The introductory text panel concludes with a summary of what to expect in the rest of the museum:

The gallery displays explore and reveal the Peranakan community’s customs, food, language and beliefs. These displays speak to us about how cultures

32 Kwok, cited in Marcus Ng, “A Confluence of Cultures”, 12. 33 Assistant Curator C, Senior Curator of Southeast Asia, the Asian Civilisations Museum, interview by author, the Asian Civilisations Museum, March 16, 2009. 34 Kwok, interview by author, 2009.

209 interact and combine to produce something new, different and distinctive.

Whilst indicating the absence of items from the material culture of Peranakans other than the Chinese Peranakans, the Origins gallery continues the theme of inclusiveness with comprehensive text panels and photographs describing the history of the Peranakan Chinese, as well as the Jawi Peranakans and the Chitty Malaka. The text panels provide information that highlights similarities between the different Peranakan groups, as seen in the example below, and draws links to more diverse pan-Asian communities.

The Chitty Malaka… or Peranakan Indians are descendants from unions between South Indian Hindu merchants and local inhabitants, from the time of the in the 15th Century… areas in Singapore like Kampong Kapor, Kinta Road and Chitty Road were, at various times, enclaves of the community. Whilst the text panels defining the different Peranakan communities help fulfill the introductory gallery’s aim of creating an inclusive pan-Southeast Asian understanding of the Peranakans, the most significant issue addressed in the introductory gallery is the question of whether the Peranakans are a living culture or a relic from a bygone period.

By contrast to the approach adopted by the Peranakan Museum, The Peranakan Legacy introductory gallery had opened with an extensive timeline placed high on one wall, labelled “The Peranakan Chinese in Southeast Asia: A Timeline.” It traced the history of the Peranakan Chinese, starting from 220BCE–221CE with the entry: “Earliest Chinese reference to Southeast Asia in Han dynasty histories.” In keeping with its more inclusive approach, the timeline within the Origins gallery of the Peranakan Museum starts from 412 BCE with its first entry “The Buddhist pilgrim Faxian returns to China from India via Ceylon, the Straits of Malacca and Java.” The Peranakan Museum timeline, far more extensive than its earlier iteration has more numerous and more detailed entries covering major points in the history of Peranakans in the region. Significantly, some entries have been removed from the original timeline. For example, the 1930s–1940s entry which stated that the Peranakan Chinese had became increasingly westernized, had joined the civil service in large numbers and were referred to as the “King’s Chinese” has been replaced with a more affirmative interpretation:

1930s Prominent leaders of the Straits Chinese British Association persuaded the British government to allow non-European British subjects to enter the civil service. This had previously been the domain of Europeans. In Malaysia, an

210 active proponent of this issue had been Tan Cheng Lock (who was to become the founding president of the Malaysia Chinese Association). With the civil service closed as an avenue for employment, many western educated Babas found careers in professions like medicine, law and banking. Also missing is the caption “1945 & after: Absorption of Peranakan Chinese into mainstream Chinese and national cultures following independence in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia,” with nothing in its place – which fits within the Peranakan Museum’s role in positioning the Peranakans as a vibrant living culture. In line with this change of emphasis is the absence of the text panel “The Peranakan Chinese Today” which described the Peranakans as “out of touch with changing times,” as people who “continued to fritter their wealth away in extravagant displays of their material possessions” and whose “dilution of culture was evident by the 1940s.” In its place, the new text panel acknowledges the Peranakan revival, affirming that the “distinctive elaborate hybrid style pioneered by the Peranakan Chinese is a unique cultural achievement indigenous to this region.” The panel ends with the far more positive view that the Peranakan style “is currently enjoying a revival of interest as a new generation of Peranakan Chinese seeks to re-discover their heritage.” Of course such changes represent a direct response to Kwok’s directive to shift the perception of the Peranakans from a heritage culture, which the museum preserves, to a living culture, which the museum showcases. This required an end to stereotypical beliefs that the Peranakans were a decadent community that could not survive without the colonial regime, and initiated a new view that they are an attractive and thriving aspect of Singapore’s modern society.

211

Figure 15: Origins Gallery with contemporary Peranakan Portraits

The Peranakan Museum’s emphasis on the Peranakans as a living culture is taken literally in the Origins gallery with the commissioning of a series of over thirty portraits of contemporary Peranakans. The Peranakan Legacy exhibition featured only two historic painted portraits (of Mr. and Mrs. Tan Beng Wan), which were strategically included to provide evidence of the Peranakans’ hybrid nature and the fusion of Malay, Chinese and European peoples. However, the new Peranakan Museum’s metre-high photographic portraits fulfill a very different function. Dominating three sides of a restricted gallery space, these are head-and-shoulder portraits of a wide ethnic range of contemporary male and female Peranakans of all ages, attempting to demonstrate visually that the Peranakans originate from and exist in many different communities in the region.

Each portrait carries a quote from the subject, who was invited to explain what it means to be a Peranakan today. In doing so this gallery of portraits provides an intriguing look at how individuals define their “Peranakaness” in contemporary life. Through this display, the Peranakan Museum also cleverly repositions the controversial issue whether Peranakan culture is alive or not through the voices of the subjects. The authoritative museum voice is replaced with personalised quotes from the larger than life individuals on display.

212 Lee Kip Lee Hokkien Peranakan “I feel Peranakan because I am deeply rooted in Singapore.” Pillay P. Krishnan Malacca Chitty “Peranakan have … the natural ability to respect people from different backgrounds because of our rich heritage of multi-cultural traditions.” Ibrahim Tahir Jawi Peranakan “Being Peranakan means … being a cultural hybrid drawing from and identifying with different racial groups.” Alvin Teo Chew Baba “Being Peranakan means embracing and practicing the culture, not just in terms of material culture, cuisine and language but also values, attitudes and traditions of past generations.” Rodney Tan Hokkien Peranakan “Being a Peranakan, sometimes I feel lost amongst the real Chinese.” Most of these quotes position the Peranakans in a favourable light, carefully chosen to present each of the sitters as a model of good citizenry for Singaporeans to absorb. Such a strategy appears to be in keeping with the justification for establishing the Peranakan Museum outlined by James Khoo (former ACM Board Chairman) in 2004, when he said “the Singaporeans of today could become the Peranakans of tomorrow.”35 This means that Singaporeans, with their disparate racial communities, could work together peacefully and successfully and, like the Peranakans with their understanding of different languages and tolerance of different cultures, become highly successful and competitive global traders.

The Deputy Director later reflected that these images stimulated a broad discussion about Peranakan representation. In an interview she discussed the curatorial thinking behind the Origins gallery, and made the point that the portraits were really designed to make visitors think about themselves and how their own identity had been constructed:

We hope – well, curators hope – that any day when you start looking at these things, that you think of how actually identities are constructs – social constructs. How you picture yourself is all about where you negotiate your culture with other people within your own community. So it is about Peranakans, but hopefully at the end of the day you [understand] to reflect on your own culture.

35 Dr James Khoo, interview by author, 2004.

213 The Deputy Director hoped that visitors, through identification with the Peranakan communities on display, would find more similarities than differences, citing the example that mainstream Chinese Singaporeans might reflect on their connections with their Cantonese ancestry, while still identifying themselves as Singaporean. The Deputy Director felt all Singaporeans could relate to, and reflect on, these similarities given Singapore’s highly multicultural, multiracial society.

The Deputy Director also raised an issue that gave Singaporeans particular reason to identify with the Peranakan communities. She outlined the way the Singapore government was currently bringing in foreign workers from mainland China due to the falling birth rate in Singapore and the need for economic growth. The Deputy Director described the negative reaction of Singaporeans to the new wave of mainland Chinese migrants:

Right now, interestingly enough, we have a similar situation that happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. You are having the new guests, all these foreigners, the new Chinese immigrants, and they’re all coming in, and the Singaporeans who are first, second, third generation – they are beginning to feel that actually, we are different from these foreigners, and basically we are, in a sort of sense “Peranakan/Singaporeans” now.36 Assistant Curator E echoed the Deputy Director’s understanding of this phenomenon, commenting that historically the Peranakans most keenly felt their own identity when there was a wave of new Chinese migrants arriving into Singapore. He felt that history was repeating itself:

The Sinkehs are now second, third, fourth generation and you’re having a new crew of Sinkehs coming in and the predominant thing that I’m hearing from Singaporean Chinese is, I’m one of these people and they’re so different and then you know, I’ve had one even tell me, I’m not Chinese anymore.37 Both the Deputy Director and Assistant Curator E discussed the way today’s third generation Singaporean Chinese were surprised to find themselves amidst this new wave of Chinese workers, from whom they felt very different. However, the Deputy Director pointed out the significant difference was that at this point in Singapore’s history the new Chinese migrants were still a minority not a majority. Therefore both the Deputy Director and Assistant Curator E expressed the belief that the Peranakans were more relevant than ever to Singaporeans and could provide a positive model for the future. The Deputy

36 Deputy Director, Asian Civilisations Museum, interview by author, the Asian Civilisations Museum, 2009. 37 Assistant Curator E, Asian Civilisations Museum, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, April 2008.

214 Director considered the possibility of Singaporeans coming to understand themselves and their values through the lens of the Peranakan model:

Some people assimilate and some people don’t, but there are also others that take certain traditions from the place that they come from, and from the place that they have lived in, to come up with something new. So the Peranakan model is just one such model that people can think about using in a highly globalised world. I think that this is the whole thing underlying the whole message. As if to reflect this thinking, at the far end of the gallery there was a small cinema, which featured a short film showcasing the origins of the Peranakans. On the high wall screen, the film showed images of Chinese traders sailing across the sea, battling terrible storms, exploring new lands while setting up trading settlements. The film also described the emergence of Peranakan communities across the islands of Southeast Asia including the Jawi Peranakans of Penang and the Chitty Peranakans of Malacca, as well as the Chinese Peranakans from Java, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. The film ends with a message for visitors:

Today Singapore is home to Peranakans from many of these communities. Over the years Peranakans have continued to evolve, absorbing influences and adapting to the world around them. Today’s Peranakans are fully integrated into Singapore urbanised society and by their open-mindedness and inclusiveness continue to teach us valuable lessons, lessons we hope you will discover as you explore the museum. At the film’s conclusion, visitors are encouraged to go to the next gallery on the second floor of the museum, ready to discover those lessons. When asked in an interview to comment on the didactic nature of the film’s message, the Deputy Director stated: “Unfortunately, sometimes in Singapore you have to be very direct.”38

The Underlying Narrative from the Origins Gallery

The Origins gallery is an important entry point into the concepts that underpinned the rationale for establishing a museum dedicated to the Peranakan culture. Through the collective portraits the Peranakan Musuem establishes an inclusive pan-Asian perspective of the Peranakans. Text panels are used to help manage expectation by declaring that whilst the focus in the gallery is on Peranakan Chinese material culture, the museum remains committed to researching and collecting material objects from the many other Peranakan communities.

38 Deputy Director, interview by author, 2009

215 Additionally, the use of contemporary portraits and of personal comments that collectively reflect what it means to be Peranakan today assists in positioning the Peranakan communities as a living culture. Subtler is the way the Peranakan community is presented as possible role models for Singapore citizens. Via the largely racially and politically correct comments selected to go under the each Peranakan portrait, the museum staff present Peranakan culture as exemplifying ideal cultural values – such as feeling deeply rooted in Singapore, and tolerance of other cultures. Not surprisingly these are the values the state would wish all Singaporeans to adhere to, especially given Singapore’s dynamically changing population, with the influx of foreign workers. It is interesting to note the small slippage from the main message of the museum that comes with Rodney Tan’s comment that “Being a Peranakan, sometimes I feel lost amongst the real Chinese.” This echoes the resentments from the colonial period when the Peranakans differentiated themselves from the rest of the Chinese community, and sits uncomfortably with the strong embedded message of the Origins gallery film: that the museum is there for you to discover valuable lessons. “Lessons we hope you will discover as you explore the museum.”

216 Wedding! Getting Married over Twelve Days

Gallery 2–5

Level One: Wedding Galleries

Once visitors ascend the stairs or take the lift to the second floor they enter the world of the Chinese Peranakan, with the entire floor themed around a twelve-day Peranakan Chinese wedding. As with The Peranakan Legacy exhibition, the second floor consists of four galleries interconnecting around a central stairwell. Departing from the carefully orchestrated pathways through The Peranakan Legacy, visitors are free to travel clockwise or anticlockwise to experience the rituals and rich material culture associated with the wedding.

217 These galleries are the responsibility of Assistant Curator D who positions himself as a “pure” Peranakan or a “true blue” Peranakan. Assistant Curator D comes from one of Singapore’s earliest Peranakan families, with a lineage traced back to Malacca, commonly believed to be the original home of all Peranakan Chinese in the Straits Settlements.

I'm Peranakan on both sides of my family. I'm seventh generation Peranakan on my dad's side and thirteenth generation on my father's mother's side. … My family is from Malacca, so we actually come from the Dutch period. It would be one of the few original families in Malacca. Most Peranakans, in fact, only have a history of about 100 years. They are the later migrants that married the daughters of the early Peranakan families. It is the early Peranakan families in Malacca, for example, that are all related. Because the community wasn't that large then, they actually married each other.39

Assistant Curator D joined the Asian Civilisations Museum in 2002. His personal story about that recruitment provides some insight into the way he shaped his role and his curatorial approach at the Peranakan Museum. With a background in Chinese philosophy, history, culture and literature, Assistant Curator D had originally applied for a position with a focus on China, but at the interview with the ACM director, Dr Kenson Kwok realised that Assistant Curator D was Peranakan and diverted his application:

He saw straight away that I was a Peranakan because I have that look, I'm dark, I'm Chinese, I have a face that looks like a typical Malaccan Peranakan face. He saw that and basically asked me if I was Peranakan. Assistant Curator D then described how Kwok asked him to apply for the Assistant Peranakan Curator position because he knew more about Peranakan culture than anyone else who had applied. Kwok has a shrewd understanding that, as Assistant Curator D was from an established Peranakan family with their own business collecting and selling Peranakan material, Assistant Curator D would not only bring with him valuable first hand knowledge but also extensive networks useful for bringing in objects missing from the displays. Despite admitting that he did not have formal qualifications for the job, Assistant Curator D applied for the position as Kwok suggested and was asked to bring in some Peranakan objects to talk about at an interview.

I brought things that were used in my grandmother's wedding. I've got my aunt's wedding photo, I brought some embroideries and beadwork. They were amazed. I said, well these are just family heirlooms. This is something that we have

39 Assistant Curator D, Peranakan Museum, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, June 11, 2009.

218 because we are an old family, so we keep these things and I could demonstrate how they were used.

Assistant Curator D described how his family supported his application for the position. He conveyed his grandmother’s response: “You just have to prove that you’re Peranakan, the real thing. You are the real thing, just bring some of these things along and show him that you’re one of us. You’re not just anyone off the street.” He also spoke frankly of the significance of his position as a Peranakan within the Peranakan Museum: “I feel I have a direct stake now and I feel that I am in a position to set the record straight on many things. There are so many misconceptions out there.” Assistant Curator D, despite being a new Assistant Curator in the team, found that his “authentic” and first-hand, lived knowledge of Peranakan culture gave him significant authority. However, this did not mean he could do what he wanted. “I don't think anyone has a free reign. I only have a free reign as far as no one’s going to contest my version of it [Peranakan culture] within the museum.” Whilst Assistant Curator D acknowledged the validity of the approach taken in the ACM’s previous exhibition The Peranakan Legacy, he believed that the aestheticisation of the Peranakan objects represented a “a very safe way of presenting a culture… we have done the Peranakan objects as art.” Commenting on visitor feedback from The Peranakan Legacy he continued:

I've got feedback, people have said that the misconception that you may leave here with is all Peranakan were all very, very rich or very, very wealthy. I think they would leave with that impression. Which is not really true.40

In an interview with the author in 2003, three years before the opening of the Peranakan Museum he discussed his desire to develop a more contextual display:

One thing I will change is, well there's going to be a mixture of contextual displays with material wealth galleries, for example, one thing that you will see from contextual displays is they bring in lots of other artefacts that are commonly used by other groups in Singapore during that time. Straight away you're going to see that everything that we use is not uniquely Peranakan. We use very commonplace items as well within rooms like the wedding chamber, for example, like a kitchen. We're going to have lots of other commonplace items that were used by everyone. In a sense, it's going to bring a very human element that we're just like everyone else.41

40 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009. 41 Assistant Curator D, Peranakan Museum, interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, April 2003.

219 Assistant Curator D was able to realise this vision in the Peranakan Museum, and the most distinctive difference between The Peranakan Legacy and the museum eight years later is that there are no longer mainly long rows of cabinets displaying series of similar objects such as sireh sets, beadwork and embroidery, jewellery, silverware and porcelain. Early in his tenure, Assistant Curator D made clear that he wanted to eliminate galleries based on these themes. “I want to show how everything interlinks because it’s not about jewellery, it’s about how jewellery fits in the culture, how silver fits into the culture, so that gives you a context. It is much more ethnographic.”42

The four galleries on the second floor addressing the Peranakan wedding take visitors through the stages of the twelve-day event using contextual displays intermixed with showcases focusing on specific aspects of material culture. The overall effect is to create an immersive experience with a focus on how the objects on display were used throughout the ceremonies. While the galleries do not seek to replicate a Peranakan home, they create a contextual framework to express the domestic rituals and elaborate ceremonies of the Peranakan Chinese community.

Gallery 2 introduces the twelve-day wedding with elegant displays of wedding headdresses and accessories from the different Peranakan communities in the Straits Settlements. Also on display are two different styles of intricately carved trays used to bear gifts in wedding processions. Set almost at floor level in Gallery 3 is a display of a food offering, as it would have been laid out during the wedding ceremony. The display is complete with trays and platters, textiles and authentically modelled food, a raw looking leg of beef, along with fruit and bottles of drink. Assistant Curator D described his curatorial approach as trying to showcase the culture as he saw it when he was growing up, and to increase the authenticity; in some cases he displayed his own family’s possessions. For example, on a walkthrough with the author, he pointed to a tray in the display:

42 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

220 This tray comes from my family, from my great grandmother …we remember how we used some of these things in the homes and I have tried to expand the knowledge of what was done during the weddings – from what I remember and what I have been able to get from the communities – so this is how the gifts were displayed – we have tried to display it the way it would have been done. This tray would have been carried from one family to the other with the gifts. This would have been put into one of those big bamboo baskets and carried by the servants from one house to another.43

A Deeply Peranakan Perspective Assistant Curator D argued that his own upbringing enabled him to present the wedding ritual with confidence.

If you come to my home it is like this, I have all these things at home, I grew up with them! We have all the furniture, we have all the porcelain, a very big set! My father says we have to count our blessings that we can still live like this. Although some days it gets very tiring when you spend all day dealing with this at work and then you come home and you are still facing it! We still have big gatherings around the table, we still feel Peranakan.44 Assistant Curator D reflected that when he was growing up, Singapore’s policies on race categories and language meant that, as a Peranakan, he was designated as Chinese and made to learn Mandarin at school as his “mother tongue” (or second language), with English spoken by all citizens as the first language. In this environment it was uncommon for young Peranakans to remain or become fluent speakers of their native Baba Malay. However Assistant Curator D had a determined grandmother who strove to resist the deculturalisation and weakening of the oral histories and traditions of her past. As Assistant Curator D put the matter:

I grew up speaking Baba Malay which is the language of home. I grew up in an extended family and my grandmother decreed that every child had to learn Baba Malay before anything else, so all of us spoke Baba Malay. I am considered a native speaker and even today when I interview any of the old ladies or old men, especially those in their 90s, you get this strange look because they don’t know of anyone my age who speaks that language. It is unusual for my generation. My siblings have lost the ability to speak. I have maintained it through practice, because of my work and my interest so I continue to speak every day.45 With his first-hand access to Peranakan culture, Assistant Curator D is able to source what he feels is authentic information from people who remember rituals like the twelve- day wedding from their own lifetime: “Information like this is kept by old ladies who know

43 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009. 44 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009. 45 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

221 about how things were done,” he says, pointing out that these traditions were passed on through oral rather than written history.

Even when I was born there were still families who were doing this, they were not practicing the 12-day traditional wedding, but definitely knew how the jewellery was worn – how it was pinned, how it was given, that was still being done. Even as late as the 70s and the early 80s in Singapore.46

Assistant Curator D also described the importance of family within Peranakan culture:

Coming from a Peranakan family I will tell you this, both my parents are Peranakan so I am definitely accepted by Peranakan who come from similar background. The definition of Peranakan always has to be first and foremost from which family do you come from. Blood, it is terribly important, we define everyone in terms of their family, their origins. It is because these families are deemed respectable. We are related by blood and that is different to anything else.47

Having underscored the importance of family in Peranakan culture, Assistant Curator D described how each family developed their own version of rituals: “It's a very negotiated culture, in the end, every family has its own history, its own version of what Peranakan culture is and it's not going to be the same from another family.” Assistant Curator D recognised that every Peranakan believes that his or her own family history is special and that their way of doing things is the most authentic. With this in mind, Assistant Curator D described how he had to avoid highlighting some families over others, citing incidents where certain people said: “If I were to donate this, could you do a special on my family?”

Further, as he went about developing displays and interacting with the community, Assistant Curator D had to avoid getting into competitions between Peranakan families. “At the end of the day, it's not about whose family is better than anyone else's, which is the usual case with regards to many Peranakan families.” For these reasons he remained focused on the fact that the Peranakan Museum was designed to showcase the entire community and hence he felt the display “should be very generic.” Assistant Curator D was especially aware that his contextual displays could not privilege his own family, stating, “I don't want this museum to be a reflection of my family's history and my family's interpretation.” Reinforcing this point Assistant Curator D stated:

46 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009. 47 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

222 I can interpret it any way I want to but if the Peranakan community itself cries foul and says, this is not our culture, then it's going to reflect badly on me. I work very closely with the Peranakan community too because I want to make sure that it's accurately represented.48

Also within Gallery 3 is a reconstruction of the formal Peranakan Chinese sitting room set out for a wedding ritual. The room itself is cordoned off, requiring visitors to look into the space to see both collectables such as Peranakan furniture and everyday objects such as ornaments, carpets and trays from the early twentieth century. In keeping with Assistant Curator D’s commitment to focusing on the contextualisation of objects in relation to authentic occasions, the text panel introducing this display provides a detailed description of what would typically happen on the last day of wedding rites, including the many dishes that were served to guests, and the protocols around the consummation of the wedding, with the examination of a white handkerchief the morning after to prove the bride’s virtue.

Figure 17: Digitally Animated Ancestral Portraits

Embedded in this contextual display were two video screens featuring an elderly Peranakan couple chatting to each other, replacing the traditional ancestral portraits that would have featured in such a formal Peranakan sitting room. The screens provided “live”

48 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

223 commentary from an ancestral point of view as the older Peranakan couple engaged in an animated discussion about the wedding preparations.

Great-great-grandfather states: Big eyes and a lovely egg shaped face, nice wide hips just right for child bearing (as if he was describing the young bride before him). Great-great-grandmother replies: Great-great-grandson is so fortunate that he is marrying her, she will make him a good wife and a good mother, she will bear him many many sons! Great-great-grandfather responds: Is that all you think about, what about his job and the money he makes? Can he afford to look after her the way she is used to, after all we are how we are. According to Assistant Curator D the ancestor video had been designed to engage visitors and to introduce them to “the clear definition of roles within the family, with the men being very concerned with the public domains while the women were hooked on details in the home.”49 Significantly, the elderly couple in the video argue about the correct way to place the objects for public display during the wedding ritual. This was designed to both reflect the reality that individual Peranakan families had their own way of doing things, and avoid any criticism that the museum was suggesting there was one “correct” way to present Peranakan culture in context.

Two objects that take centre-stage in the contextualised rooms are a humble unadorned red lacquered bamboo tray (gantang) and a rice measure (nyiru). Assistant Curator D talked at length about how these objects would have been in common use on farms and that, no matter how wealthy Peranakans might have become, such humble objects would have always been used for sacred rites. Assistant Curator D felt that while these objects might initially have been perceived as out of place in this opulent gallery, they were in fact carefully incorporated, as the use of such rural objects was authentic and he felt it would remind Peranakans of their humble roots in mainland rural china.

In keeping with the Peranakan Museum’s aim of being inclusive, Assistant Curator C, Assistant Curator E, the Deputy Director and Dr Kwok all felt it was vitally important to inform the visitor of the racial origins of the Peranakan traditions being referred to in any display, allowing all Singaporean to see their own culture within the displays. Assistant Curator D offered an alternative view, drawn from his Peranakan insider perspective, which was in conflict with the rest of the team:

49 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

224 To the Peranakan we don’t care about where we come from. We don’t anymore and that is why origins are not addressed here. We are not interested so much in where we come from because we know this is a very solid reminder (pointing to tray and rice measure) – we know we were once poor, we don’t need to be reminded about that.50 This issue proved to be one of many conflicts in approach between Assistant Curator D and the rest of the curatorial team, with Assistant Curator D believing that he was promoting what he perceived as the interests of the community rather than those of the institution. For example, Assistant Curator D felt it was important to try to bring the visitor closer to the Peranakans as people, a task he felt eminently well placed to achieve as an insider. He talked about how he went on study trips, with Assistant Curator C and the Deputy Director, to visit ethnographic museums in the region, and how during these visits he met other “insiders” or indigenous people working in museums with displays of their own culture. Assistant Curator D mentions that he felt a great affinity with these other indigenous curators and recognised the different perspective that “insiders” had.

We are talking about our experience and wanting to develop a Peranakan museum – immediately I saw this connection that a lot of the insiders had with me and not with Curator C and the Deputy Director you know, they spoke to me directly and said “we totally understand what you are going through.” Assistant Curator D eventually came to dislike the universalising effect of the museum voice that typically comes with anonymous text panel production, and realised how he wanted the Peranakan voice to be portrayed in the museum.

The “I” voice is important to the visitor because it breaks down this barrier – whether real or not. It says something about the community and what they want to say. The “I” is a very powerful voice in an ethnographic museum.51 Whilst Assistant Curator D was deeply committed to using this authentic “I” voice, it was not to be the way that the museum’s text panels worked. As an example, a long text panel about Peranakan wedding furniture took the traditional third person narration authoritative approach, informing the reader:

When the Peranakan woman left home to be married it was traditional for her parents to make her a gift of wedding furniture… Most sets of wedding furniture consist of a cupboard for clothes and personal belongings, a bed and a dresser with mirror… The wedding furniture you see here in this display has come from Peranakan families in Singapore.

50 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009. 51 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

225 Whilst Assistant Curator D did not achieve his goal in putting the “I” or “we” voice in the text panels associated with his displays, he did manage to make significant changes to curatorial thinking. In particular, he helped remove the words “hybridised” and “fusion” that were repeated in many of the text panels in The Peranakan Legacy. In the Wedding Furniture text panel quoted above these words were replaced with the phrase: “combination of Chinese and European elements.”

Assistant Curator D noted in an interview how Assistant Curator C, Dr Kwok and the Deputy Director claimed that his approach to displaying Peranakan culture was too insular, and that he did not take into account the influences of other cultures on the Peranakans. This it is worth quoting at length:

One of the comments that have been made to me is that I have not put in how the culture has been in relation to other cultures. For example, Kenson likes to know that this is a Chinese influence and that is the Malay influence and things like that. My response to him is that is how a Chinese would view it, that is how a Malay would view it. They will see themselves in the culture because it is a fusion culture, but to the Peranakans it is just our culture. It is like we don’t think about such things. We don’t talk about our culture that way, it is our culture not something we dissect, why take it apart when it has evolved organically.52 Assistant Curator D indicated he was more interested in identifying differences in style between the different Peranakan Chinese communities, noting that most of the objects on display were sourced directly from private collectors and local families. Assistant Curator D extended his criticism of the way the Peranakans were dissected to include academics: “When a pure Chinese academic studies Peranakan they see the Chinese-ness in it. When a Malay studies it, they like to see what is Malay about it, what's Southeast Asian about it.” Assistant Curator D believed that many communities feel they have a stake in Peranakan Chinese culture: “They feel that their community has somehow influenced our communities and that we have taken something from them.”

Assistant Curator D explained that the before Singapore’s independence, Peranakans were conservative and continued to observe ancestral customs (such as ancestor worship), while the Chinese lost these traditions. He pointed out that while the Peranakans evolved, they essentially preserved whatever was Chinese about themselves and kept up traditions even though they no longer generally spoke the language. Importantly, Assistant Curator D stated: “we may not see it as Chinese, we'll see it as Peranakan because in the end it's our

52 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

226 culture. It has somehow blended itself into something different, with different elements.” 53 It is for this reason that, throughout his displays, Assistant Curator D argued that he focused on the Peranakans and what they practiced and believed, rather than the derivation of their customs and practices. Assistant Curator D expressed pride in the fact that, while the Chinese mainlanders had lost their traditions through the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the Peranakans had safely retained theirs.

An Unconventional Approach to Exhibition Design: The Peranakan Bedroom Gallery 4 presents visitors with a contextual display of a bedroom prepared for the twelve-day Peranakan wedding. The bedroom features a full suite of wedding furniture, including the same carved, lacquered and gilded canopied wedding bed from nineteenth- century Penang that was displayed in The Peranakan Legacy exhibition. In stark contrast to The Peranakan Legacy philosophy, the room now also features ephemera such as a huge bunch of pink and yellow plastic flowers, glass ornaments and a bright Irish carpet. Whilst not uniquely Peranakan, Assistant Curator D included the carpet because he “knew” that was how a room would have been decorated, and because it would have been fashionable during the 1920s.

Figure 18: Contextual display of a traditional wedding suite, complete with plastic flowers and Irish carpet

53 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

227 Along the narrow walkway outside Gallery 4, on display were highly decorative floor-to- ceiling examples of beadwork and embroidery. Visitors would be forgiven for finding it hard to determine where the wall ends and the beadwork begins, so highly decorated is the wall containing the displays, covered as it is with pastel swirls and motifs taken from the material culture within the displays. When asked about the designs on the wall, Kwok stated that it was an obvious but unusual response to the Peranakan material culture.

We have taken quite an unconventional decision to present museum material with colour and graphics… When I started the whole project one of the first things I said to all the consultants was just forget about the Empress Place Museum. I don’t want a clone of Empress Place otherwise why should we bother! We want something different. Peranakan is a much more recent culture, people still have some sense of what it is about, so we want a completely different look and approach!54 According to the Singaporean exhibition designer, architect Mok Wei Wei, a key factor to the approach was to ensure that Peranakan culture was presented as an active culture, “the mood, the ambience and content have to showcase a living culture”. Mok described how, while constantly consulting with the curatorial team, he wrapped graphics around the displays, drawing inspiration from the artefacts themselves. “In this case the graphics are treated as content.”55 The overall effect is light and decorative, and Mok described how each colour wall had symbolic connections and associations with Peranakan culture. Consulting with Assistant Curator D, Mok worked onto the walls a palate of apple green and rose pink for the wedding sections, and featured motifs such as butterflies fluttering amidst the blossoms and an auspicious lion dog, which he enlarged and repeated to create patterns. Kwok said he was very happy with the design treatment, which he felt was realised in a sensitive and contemporary way. He felt the graphic designs did not clash with the objects, a result which he acknowledged “is always the danger,” but rather complemented the displays.56 Kwok felt that, as the museum was dedicated to Peranakan culture, it allowed for a greater integration between the gallery environment and the artefacts “so if it’s a wedding, we will have wedding related graphics and symbols on the walls.”57 He summed up by stating: “We are not afraid to use colour and graphics. It sort of gives the room an ambiance, which is relevant to the objects. I quite like that, I think that

54 Kwok, interview by author, 2009. 55 Mok Wei Wei, Managing Director W Architects Pte Ltd, interview by author, the Asian Civilisations Museum, June 10, 2009. 56 Kwok, interview by author, 2008. 57 Kwok, cited in Ng, “A Confluence of Cultures”, 12.

228 it’s fun!”58 However the relentless busy and changing graphic design element provided no visual rest and could be perceived as both competing for attention with the objects on display and trivialising the objects into highly decorative wallpaper.

At the entranceway to Gallery 5 appeared a large contextual display of the front of a Peranakan house, complete with all the authentic banners and lanterns. Inside is a formal, furnished sitting room featuring an ancestral altar. Across from this house front, as if they had just stepped out of the house, is a large display of life-size mannequins dressed in magnificent costumes, enacting a Peranakan wedding procession. The full-scale procession of the groom’s entourage to the home of his bride, is set in a gallery within a gallery. Mok described how he avoided a clash with the underlying structure of the old Tao Nan School by creating partitions or rooms within rooms to achieve “a contemporary insertion into the old school fabric.” Gallery 5 is probably the most graphically orientated of all the galleries. The central display depicts the groom’s entourage complete with lanterns and umbrellas. A series of module-like display cases have been designed to make visitors feel they can walk through the procession and be a part of the festivities, getting close enough to the mannequins to study their elaborate garments. On either side of the procession are large contemporary, sketch-like graphics of a Singapore streetscape. Mok also creates an outdoor feeling to the gallery by inserting a dynamic sky onto the ceiling, achieved by building a backlit membrane, complete with pulsating lights. Assistant Curator D wanted to capture the atmosphere of a traditional streetscape, and to provide this effect Mok built a soundscape for the gallery. This involved combining Senoni (processional music) with barking dogs and the sound of children playing in the background, each noise seeming to emanate from a different place in the street. Like the video portraits encountered earlier in the gallery, the sound provides the sensation of a living culture. “Because the mannequins can’t move, we created a soundscape where the sound is moving,” says Mok.59

58 Kwok, interview by author, 2008. 59 Kwok, cited in Marcus Ng, “A Confluence of Cultures”, 12-14.

229 Figure 19: Peranakan Wedding Procession

The Underlying Narratives within the Wedding Galleries

In summary, the Wedding galleries present a dramatic departure from the decontextualised “black boxes” which dominated The Peranakan Legacy display. The series of artefacts presented for aesthetic examination with The Peranakan Legacy have been replaced with highly contextualised displays showcasing a range of artefacts from the Peranakan “golden age,” some being collectables and others ephemera. These were interpreted using both an authoritative third person and to a limited extent, the voices of the Peranakans. Whilst Assistant Curator D might not have been able to include the “I” and the “we” voice throughout the exhibition, he achieved his ambition of demonstrating the interconnectedness of Peranakan material culture and customs in a highly contextual way. Additionally, Assistant Curator D was successful in removing the oft-repeated message, so dominant in The Peranakan Legacy, of the hybrid nature of Peranakan material culture and the associated unpacking of elements into definable Indian, Chinese, Southeast Asian or European influences.

Whilst text entries discussing the demise of the Peranakans are removed, along with those suggesting the Peranakans are a people from a bygone era, the reconstructed contextual displays continue to feature the Peranakan community during the “golden age”

230 from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period when the twelve-day wedding occurred in Singapore. Whilst the display suggests that the Peranakans are a living culture, there is no attempt to portray or discuss contemporary Peranakan wedding rituals, because they no longer reflect Peranakan traditions: most brides now opting for the Western white wedding gown.

Kwok’s aim of presenting a living culture is expressed through the exhibition designer’s decision to introduce as much natural light as possible, with windows and doors open to be welcoming. In addition the contemporary use of highly decorative graphic work on partition walls and object display cases, whist sometimes overwhelming, provides the galleries with a freshness and light-heartedness missing from the stolidly aesthetic displays of The Peranakan Legacy.

From interviews it became clear that there was a constant battle between the museological aims and ambitions of Assistant Curator D and the rest of the curatorial team. Assistant Curator D’s clear focus on presenting the Peranakan community with the “integrity and authenticity” he believes he brings as an insider, places him at odds with the rest of the team who prefer more traditional curatorial approaches to research and display. In addition, because of his personalised approach, Assistant Curator D’s focus showcases the Peranakan Chinese community in Singapore, Malacca and Penang, whilst the rest of the team take a broader, more inclusive, pan-Southeast Asian perspective.

The World of the Nonyas

Gallery 6 (level 2)

Ascending Gallery 6 on the third floor visitors may be dazzled by the dense graphics covering all surfaces of the display cases and walls in the Nonyas gallery. The playful swirls of blue, white and pink patterns refer to the Nonyas’ renowned taste for elaboration, attributed to horror vacui or a “fear of empty space.” The entrance to this gallery contains cabinets displaying the Nonyas’ intricate handiwork and associated tools, and in doing so signals the focus of the gallery – the processes involved in the production of beadwork and embroidery, considered part of the Nonya’s training and preparation for married life. Various embroideries and beadworks are displayed in different states of completion, and the cabinets contain pull-out drawers showcasing a range of techniques and traditional tools. Linking the industriousness and the diligence of the Nonyas and their work is an

231 extended text panel featuring a long poem. Its opening lines are an unorthodox way of introducing the visitor to the world of the Nonya:

The World of the Nonya Dried bean curd, sweet flour cakes, a daughter-in-law must know how to behave. She goes to sleep late, rises early, combs her hair, powders her face and applies lipstick. Upon entering the kitchen, washes the dishes, upon entering the hall, dusts the furniture and, upon entering the room, picks up the embroidery needle. She speaks well of her elders and juniors, praises to her in-laws for having brought her up so well…60 The poem describes the many qualities traditionally desired of a daughter-in-law and the ideal to which Peranakan women of the past aspired. Its form and function are not uncommon in Peranakan culture. Children growing up in Peranakan homes were regularly exposed to a variety of stories, sayings, nursery rhymes and folk songs, and these were important aspects of family life. These stories were composed in Baba Malay and were not just sources of entertainment but lessons in morality, with social values embedded within the witty narratives. The poetry text panel introduced, for the first time, Peranakan literature, absent from The Peranakan Legacy. In this instance it described the highly domesticated role Peranakan women played in daily life. At the end of the text panel is an overview of the factors that led to a change in the Nonyas’ lifestyle after World War II, with a comment that “today Peranakan arts are seeing a revival of interest.” It is interesting to note that just months after the Peranakan Museum was launched, a new Singaporean mini-drama titled The Little Nonya made its debut on Singapore’s free-to-air television channel, riding the tide of the interest in Peranakan culture in Singapore. Sponsored by the government’s Media Development Authority, the soapy-style mini-drama portrays the highs and lows of a beautiful young Nonya as she negotiates evil Bibiks (in this case her mother-in-law) and love interests. Set in Singapore and Malacca the drama starts in the 1930s, it covers the Second World War and Japanese occupation, and concludes in contemporary Singapore. The series made history as the most-watched television drama in

60 (Tee Gar Ke), Dried Bean Curd Sweet Flour Cakes, a Penang Peranakan Hokkien poem courtesy of Mr. Raymond Kwok.

232 Singapore in the last fifteen years, and became an export commodity, sold to countries such as China, Malaysia, , Vietnam and Hong Kong.61

However, Assistant Curator D commented that whilst he was still pampered and treated like a prince in his extended household, many of his female cousins had no interest in traditional Peranakan objects as these reminded them of hours of enslavement. Rather, they felt liberated through being able to work and develop careers, participating in an environment that was seen as more equitable.62

As visitors enter the Nonya display in Gallery 6, they are invited to pick up one of three different model telephones representing three different timeframes during the Peranakan “golden age”. They would hear a Nonya conversation about shopping, cooking and news of the day. The lively graphics are replaced with an elegant display on the changing styles of the sarong and kebaya, the Nonya’s uniform of old. In keeping with the focus on the living culture of the Peranakans, the last text panel concludes with the fact that the kebaya is still considered fashionable today.

The Underlying Narratives within the Nonya Gallery

Generally the display presents the Nonya’s domestic reality, showing them as hard- working and diligent, with the capacity to produce unique and highly collectable beadwork and embroidery. The storyline positions them from the Peranakan “golden age” to the Second World War, noting that the Nonyas’ world changed irrevocably as they entered the workforce. The only attempt to place Nonyas in a contemporary setting was through the reinterpretation of the kebaya in modern Asian fashion. The use of playful graphic design, combined with caricatures of Nonyas in their kebayas and sarongs seems to reinforce the placement of Nonyas firmly in their domestic role from a bygone era, like the successful Singaporean romantic mini drama The Little Nonya.

Religion: The Realm of the Gods and Ancestors

Gallery 7 (level 3):

Within Gallery 7, the exhibition designer constructed a dramatic transition in colour and ambience, the busy world of the Nonyas giving way to a sombre, unpatterned brown wall.

61 Mediascape: Game to be Different, Annual Report 2008/09, Media Development Authority, accessed June 23, 2010. http://www.mda.gov.sg/Documents/PDF/about_us/MDA_AR_Corporate_review_200809.pdf. 62 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

233 Gallery 7 focuses on religion and features a large altar venerating Kwan Kong (Guan Gong) who belongs to both a Folk and Daoist tradition, complete with food offerings and all the authentic associated altarware. On either side of the altar are displays of figurines, focusing on the eclectic nature of Peranakan belief. A large text panel entitled “Introduction to Peranakan religion and beliefs” provides a comprehensive overview, explaining how the Peranakan Chinese practised a mixture of folk beliefs, ancestral worship, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. It further explains how this changed over time and became simplified or forgotten after World War II.

Assistant Curator E, an American who grew up in Singapore, developed the altar display in the Religion gallery. He recalled, from his childhood, the Peranakans as a distinct group with their signature kebayas and unusual Malay creole. His extended introductory text panel strives to highlight the diversity of their religious expression:

I dedicated this space to look at all the various aspects: folk belief, animistic ideas, and canonical religion in the traditional sense, then I go on to explore how things have changed over time, with people converting to Christianity or change even within Daoism and Buddhism.63 Assistant Curator E installed a series of small altars in order to show how Peranakan religion had evolved and adapted as the environment they lived in changed and brought new influences that affected their belief systems. He also drew on old photos of altars, and communicated with the community to enable him to recreate them authentically:

I was very happy in fact, the way it worked out because we have really old lacquered style altars with the more modern brown and gold style complementing each other and it gives aesthetically, a very good contrast and a very good impression of the range of types.64

Assistant Curator E joined the ACM after The Peranakan Legacy had been installed, and described the exhibition as limited to “just straight up Straits Chinese and straight up material culture.” For the Peranakan Museum, Assistant Curator E stated: “We wanted to bring in more of the social history and more culture and cultural politics.” In keeping with this approach, one of the highlights from the Religion gallery is an elaborately carved brown and gold Daoist altar which, when the owners converted to Christianity, was adapted by the removal of the central carving and its replacement with a Catholic devotional image of the Holy Family. Assistant Curator E also pointed out that he wanted to show the

63 Assistant Curator E, interview by author, 2008. 64 Assistant Curator E, interview by author, 2008.

234 interaction between Peranakan and non-Peranakan religion, that the religious space is shared: “A lot of the material that is in the religious gallery isn’t Peranakan.”65

The display of altars and deities also features a single contemporary painting that hangs next to the Daoist/Catholic altar. Titled Converted (2003) by Robert Teo, a Singaporean artist, the painting is described in the following way within the exhibition:

This painting by Robert Teo, a Singaporean artist of Peranakan Chinese descent, explores the Peranakan community’s experience of Chinese and Christian religion. Using traditional Peranakan colour combinations the artist creates a complex interwoven design recognisant of the window louvres of the old Peranakan house. The painting depicts how Peranakan Christians have assimilated their religion making it both part of their culture and interpreting it in a unique way. The intricate complexity of the design conveys the artist’s perception of the traditional Peranakan notions of rites and rituals and how they have been grafted into Peranakan Christianity. This painting both speaks of the Peranakans’ ability to adapt and evolve with their changing environment, and brings the Religions gallery into the twenty-first century, in keeping with Dr Kwok’s desire to present Peranakan culture as vital and alive.

Figure 20: A contextual funeral display

65 Assistant Curator E, interview by author, 2008.

235 At this point the colour scheme of the gallery changes with the introduction of a graphic pattern of Asian style clouds in dark blue and white, colours which are traditionally associated with funerals. This pattern signals to visitors the entrance of a narrow corridor, which takes the form of a contextual wailing tunnel. A sign warns visitors, as they enter, that young people and sensitive persons may be disturbed by the display on death and mourning. Assistant Curator D who curated this part of the Religion gallery was attentive to all the ceremonial details of the tunnel and funeral. He discussed how his organization of a Peranakan actor to recreate the traditional wailing, emitted from low down as if coming from someone kneeling. In an effort to make the experience of this gallery as authentic as possible, Assistant Curator D drew on his own personal and family memories of funerals to create the display, discussing how wailing was believed to be a way of communicating with the dead. Assistant Curator D noted the response of Peranakans to the wailing tunnel, with older members of the community surprised that the ACM had the knowledge to recreate these traditions so authentically. “Ritual wailing is very Peranakan… and is quite emotional. Men are not supposed to be able to do this, but I know how to do this. A lot of the Peranakans were shocked when they heard it.” One of the main aims that Assistant Curator D wanted to achieve through his display in general was to document and preserve endangered traditions.66

The Underlying Narratives within the Religion Gallery

Through his displays of altars and religious practices, Assistant Curator E, takes on the meta-narrative made clear in the Origins gallery and places the Peranakans within the context of the wider community to highlight the exchanges and similarities between cultures. In contrast, Assistant Curator D maintains his prime interest in sensitively presenting and preserving what he firmly believes to be “authentic” Peranakan culture.

66 Assistant Curator E, interview by author, 2008.

236 Public Life: Making a Difference Gallery 8

Figure 21: Level 2

Visitors leaving the Religion gallery return to the pastel colours and decorative swirls on corridor walls as they head along towards Gallery 8 which is entitled Public Life. This section was initially developed by the Research Assistant and was completed by the Deputy Director. This gallery features five discrete displays set into a wall running along one side of a narrow corridor, which have five distinct themes.67 The displays are entitled: Philanthropists, King’s Chinese, Career Women, Nation Builders and Social Reformers. This small section examines the history of individual Peranakans – something that was absent from The Peranakan Legacy exhibition. So while small in scale, this gallery is significant in content. The display addressed the sensitive issue of the label “King’s Chinese” which came to be a derogatory term. To personalise the issue, the display examines Tan Tock Seng – a Peranakan pioneer – and addresses the fact

67 The Deputy Director described them as “five Peranakan archetypes.”

237 that during the nineteenth century the Peranakans developed a more Anglicised outlook. The text panel states: “Many [Peranakans] cultivated a preference for British manners, lifestyle and leisurely pursuits. Some members from the community aligned and pledged their loyalty to the British Crown though social organizations such as the Straits Chinese British Association, and by participating in their local defence force.” The lengthy text panel also discusses the origins of the phrase “King’s Chinese,” which apparently appeared in the Daily Mail in London in the 1900s, before falling out of vogue:

The Peranakans’ command of the English language and local languages like Malay and Hokkien made them suitable intermediaries between the British and local people. With the Japanese occupation in Malaysia, the idea of the invincible British Empire was weakened. Gradually the colonial system that had supported the community economically and politically was taken apart. A new nationalism began to emerge and some say the golden age of the Peranakan was over. This display hints at the problematic nature of the Peranakans’ social history, supported by the colonial system and failing with its removal upon independence – information that is absent in the introductory gallery addressing who the Peranakans are.

This concern that the Peranakan culture was in decline is raised again in the Nation Builder display, which makes clear that many Peranakan leaders played active roles in post- colonial independence and nation-building efforts. Missing is Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. However the first President of the Malaya Chinese Association, Tun Tan Cheng Lock (1883–1966) and former , Mr (1915–2005) – among others – are identified as Peranakan:

238 Figure 22: Gallery 8, Public Life

The Nation Builder Many important individuals and leaders who played active roles in post-colonial independence and nation building efforts come from the Peranakan community. In Malaya (Malaysia), the first President of the Malay Chinese Association, Tun Tan Cheng Lock (1883-1960), who is considered one of the founding fathers of modern-day Malaysia, was a Malacca Baba. Similarly leaders of Singapore’s ruling party the People’s Action Party included Peranakans Dr Goh Keng Swee and the late Mr Lim Kim San. The former President of Singapore, the late Dr Wee Kim Lee, was also a Peranakan. The closing paragraph also addresses the impact on the Peranakans of the Singapore government’s introduction of race and language policies:

Following the Second World War and the Nation building phase in the decade thereafter, Peranakan were absorbed into the larger racial category of ‘Chinese’. This made the Peranakans’ community a less distinct social and political group officially. The Peranakans’ rich traditions and sense of identity however endures to this day, although expressed in different forms in response to the changing context. This text also acknowledges how diminished the Peranakans were when Singapore – in its nation-building phase – introduced official languages for the CMIO (Chinese Malay Indian and Other) categories of people. In this division, the Peranakans came under the

239 classification of Chinese and were therefore forced to learn Mandarin as their mother tongue, inadvertently reducing Baba Malay into a defunct creole.

Moving along within the Public Life gallery, one object that stands out in the Career Women display is a mid twentieth century wig from the National Museum collection. The text panels states:

Figure 23: Ms Kwa Geok Choo’s barrister wig

This barrister wig, made from horsehair, belonged to Ms Kwa Geok Choo. Ms Kwa was a Queen’s scholar, and the first woman to be awarded a first class Honours degree at Carton College, University of Cambridge. Upon her return to Singapore, she founded the law firm Lee and Lee – together with her husband, Mr Lee Kuan Yew and brother-in-law Mr Lee Kim Yew in 1955. Ms Kwa Geok Choo is presented as a significant Peranakan career woman of Singapore but, whilst the display mentions her husband and business partner Lee Kuan Yew, it does not state that he was Singapore’s first and longest running Prime Minister, or that her son

240 Lee Hsien Loong is the current Prime Minister. This form of curatorial self-censoring reflects the sensitive understanding of Lee Kuan Yew’s historical desire to distance himself from his Peranakan origins, given their colonial loyalties and their resistance to the merger with Malaysia. However it is interesting to note that, after the opening of the museum, Ms Kwa Geok Choo was given a tour of the Peranakan gallery and asked the curator, Senior Curator C, why her husband’s belongings were not on display. She also commented: “You know it’s ok now,” reflecting the changing attitude of the couple over time.68

Continuing the theme of addressing Peranakan public figures, The Social Reformers display addresses Song Ong Siang (1871–1941) and Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957) who were responsible for producing The Straits Chinese Magazine, a quarterly of oriental and occidental culture that was first published in 1897, which contained a variety of articles, short stories, social commentary and essays. The text panel provides a background of these men who strove to bring about social reforms such as education for women:

The most visible advocates of Straits Chinese reforms were Lim Boon Keng and Sir Song Ong Siang. Both were academically brilliant Queen's Scholars and returned home from studies in Britain with degrees in medicine and law respectively. The overseas experience gave them exposure to western intellectual traditions and newfound consciousness about their Asian identity. On display is a typewriter similar to that used to create their magazine, and the medallions reflecting the range of honours and awards conferred on Dr Lim Boon Keng. A text panel informs visitors: “In 1918 Dr Lim received the Order of the British Empire for his public service and efforts on behalf of war charities during World War One, reinforcing the recognition the Peranakans gained within the British regime.

Lastly visitors could view The Philanthropists, which also celebrated Peranakan contributions to contemporary Singapore, and features portraits of Tan Kim Seng (1805– 1864) outlining his significant intellectual and financial contribution to the development of Singapore such as the construction of water pipes between Singapore and Malaysia.

The Underlying Narratives within the Public Life Gallery

The Public Life display departs dramatically from the displays on the second and third floors which are oriented mainly around objects chosen for their contextual or aesthetic value. This gallery presents a typical contextual social history display with objects intermixed with archival photos and text panels. The Deputy Director describes how the

68 Senior Curator C, interview by author, the Asian Civilisations Museum, June 12, 2009.

241 departure of the young Research Assistant who was assigned to this gallery left very little time for the team to complete this part of the exhibition. Whilst some say these galleries were “thrown together at the last minute,” the Deputy Director thought the difference in the look and feel of this section was appropriate as it addressed aspects of Peranakan life in a unique way. The Deputy Director pointed out that the themes, aside from acknowledging individuals, were designed to make the visitor think of the different types of behaviour within any community, not just the Peranakan community. The aim of this display was to provide positive models from the Peranakan community for visitors to reflect upon and consider in their own lives. However Senior Curator C acknowledged that they were limited in what they could present due to lack of time, stating: “The people we chose right now… because these are the only things (artefacts) that we had, but as you’ve seen, we’ve made liberal use of just archival images and things like that.” As a result the Deputy Director hoped to expand on this exhibition and develop it further with more research and the allocation of more time. The Deputy Director noted that many visitors were surprised that these individuals were Peranakans, having previously found individuals like Tan Kim Seng positioned simply as Singaporean pioneers. While the Public Life displays speak to a new confidence in addressing issues that were considered too sensitive in the past (such as the King’s Chinese), the very scale and positioning of this gallery within a narrow corridor tends to diminish its importance. It could be argued that individuals like Lim Boon Keng and Sir Song Ong Siang present the important lessons to be learned from the Peranakan community, although these could be easily overlooked in the Peranakan Museum.

Food and Feasting: Food glorious food!

Gallery 9 The Peranakan Kitchen

As visitors leave the narrow corridor of Gallery 8 they re-enter the contextual world of the Peranakans – this time their kitchen. The exhibition designers have taken advantage of the museum’s external window to heighten the realism of this Peranakan cooking area. Visitors are invited to peer into the cordoned off room to take in all the detail of this display.

Food is one of the key markers of the Peranakan culture, and Singapore is renowned for its Peranakan restaurants. Here Assistant Curator D has brought to bear to its fullest his insider knowledge as a Peranakan. He recreated the Peranakan kitchen including its

242 everyday implements. While the kitchen could be contemporary in other parts of Asia, in Singapore it would be placed at some point in the early twentieth century. Assistant Curator D, with his desire to present “authentic” Peranakan displays, states:

Straight away you're going to see that everything that we use is not uniquely Peranakan. We use very commonplace items as well within rooms like the wedding chamber, for example, like a kitchen. We're going to have lots of other commonplace items that we use for everyone. Senior Curator C describes how Assistant Curator D was able, in the Peranakan kitchen, to use his contacts to find rare objects such as the huge earthenware water jars. To make this spectacle complete Assistant Curator D included a sound and light show featuring the rather unfriendly ghost of the home’s matriarch, drawing attention to the high levels of superstition within the Peranakan community.

Figure 24: Peranakan kitchen complete with ghost of the home’s matriarch

243 Tok Panjang Display As visitors turn from the Peranakan kitchen they will find themselves gazing at an equally detailed formal Peranakan dining room. Tok Panjang refers to the formal dining style favoured by the Peranakan Chinese, and this display features a lengthy dining table laid out with a sixteen piece dinner service ready for the traditional feast held during weddings and for special occasions. Here Assistant Curator D addresses the full grandeur of formal Peranakan dining. A highlight in the contextual display is the porcelain dinner service, commissioned by a Malaccan Peranakan who was the wife of the founder of Kuala Lumpur, known as Kapitan Cina Yap Ah Loy. Aside from the traditional furniture, porcelain and silverware on display in the dining room, Assistant Curator D paid great attention to details, ensuring the experience includes plastic flowers, brightly coloured Irish carpets, a lace tablecloth, and trophy heads of stuffed animals lining the walls. Assistant Curator D described how much the Peranakans, especially older women, appreciated his attention to detail and accuracy: “I have been hugged in the museum – by older Peranakan ladies who tell me how correct the displays are – things are in the right place.”

Figure 25: Tok Panjang Display featuring a sixteen piece dinner service ready for the traditional feast

Assistant Curator D wanted visitors to understand that not everything in his contextual displays was uniquely Peranakan: they included generic objects that could still be purchased

244 easily. He understood that part of the role of the Peranakan Museum was promoting a market for Peranakan material culture.

Along the wall of a narrow corridor on the other side of the dining room is a series of glass cabinets where visitors can view what many collectors would consider the prize Peranakan collectables, the Kamchengs. These are highly decorated porcelain food containers typically commissioned by Peranakan women. These objects are the most recognisable of Peranakan Nonya-ware, and the series on display stood out because of their size. Assistant Curator D described his pride in being able to put the collection together and present the display to Ms. Kwa Geok Choo, Lee Kuan Yew’s wife: “She was surprised,” he explained, about the large number of oversized Kamchengs:

Originally the case was supposed to have only about eight of these and as I went from family to family I started to get more and more of these. I came to the point when I had fourteen. I told myself I just need two more then I can throw everything else out, this will just be the big Kamchengs, and of course I managed to get it because I asked around and I think it is something the community is very happy about.69 Assistant Curator D felt the Kamcheng display was important in the Peranakan Museum because “it is clearly meant to dispel any idea that Peranakans were not great. I wanted to use shock value!”

The Underlying Narratives within the Food and Feasting Galleries

Assistant Curator D indicated that the kitchen he created for the new museum was his lived experience, the carved wooden bench to one side of display exactly like the one he used to sit on at home. He further mentioned how he knew exactly where to place objects, pointing to the different artefacts with the confidence that comes with familiarity. Assistant Curator D grew up with his grandmother, who would never let him forget he was a Peranakan and told him it was something to be proud of. Assistant Curator D talked of how his grandmother would sit and watch the sinkehs, or new Chinese, work outside her family home, criticising the way they sat with their legs up and ate with their mouths open. To her the Chinese were simply lowly workers. Yet Assistant Curator D made the point that his grandmother did not revere Singapore’s colonial masters, people she perceived as her father’s business associates. It was from these influences that Assistant Curator D felt the need to reposition the Peranakans wherever possible in the museum’s displays.

69Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

245 There is this idea ingrained amongst the local community that there is nothing much in Singapore, and that we have to import shows from abroad because we don’t have a lot of culture. I want to send out the message to everyone that – as Peranakans – many of us have grown up knowing we have a very beautiful culture with beautiful objects and that we have a past. This is the essential difference growing up. Unlike a lot of Singaporeans who are, at most, second or third generation Singaporeans, my family is seventh generation. We were here in 1825, six years after Singapore was founded. Assistant Curator D’s aim was to both showcase the very best of the Peranakan culture in context, and to make clear to the visitor the rich history and legitimate roots the Peranakans have in Southeast Asia. In doing so he felt he was representing the community: “Wherever I curate a show, there is always something special for the community. It makes them feel special and acknowledged – that someone from their community has done this for them.”

Conversations: Back to the Future

Gallery 10 (level 3)

The last gallery contained a line of stools for visitors to rest on while they viewed three large portrait-shaped screens in front of them. These presented a video called Conversations: Back to the Future. With this presentation the Peranakan Museum experience ends as it began, considering the identity of the Peranakans, raising issues as to the meaning of the word, and exploring what the future might hold for the Peranakans. The video features audio-documentaries addressing the lives and views of a wide variety of ordinary members of the Peranakan community, who describe how their culture has evolved over time. Importantly, the conversations also consider the question as to whether Peranakan culture is alive. Visitors might find it jarring to hear the voices and the issues of contemporary Peranakans from all over Southeast Asia, as they have just spent most of their time in the early twentieth century focusing on the Peranakan Chinese. The idea behind the Conversations gallery came from Dr Kwok: “I can take full credit for that! I never interfered with how it was done. I just said we need something about Peranakan talking about themselves, today, at the end.” Taking up the challenge was Assistant Curator E, who had little time to develop the gallery because of the departure of the Research Assistant. Assistant Curator E intended the Conversations gallery to work “as a platform to make people step back and think a little more.”

The “conversation” is an open dialogue dealing with a range of pertinent and sometimes conflicting issues around sustaining a Peranakan identity in modern Singapore and

246 Southeast Asia more broadly. Some of the Peranakans take an uncritical and positive view, such as Tanya Nair (a Chitty Melaka – Chinese Peranakan) who states:

When I go to India, they tell me ‘you have an Indian name, are you one of us? You belong to us.’ What a beautiful thing to say to someone who has not been back since the 15th Century! I want to say the same thing. Are you Peranakan? You belong to us. Are you Singaporean? You belong to us!

In contrast, Stella Wee (Chinese Malay) said she had become ashamed that she spoke more Malay than anything else – especially when dealing with other children at school – because she had been officially allocated Mandarin as her mother tongue.

Taking a different and more academic view was Dr Farish Nour (Malaysia Peranakan), an author and researcher currently attached to Zentrum Moderner Orient (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies) in Berlin, Germany, and Senior Fellow at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He refers to the hybrid Peranakans as a “mongrel culture” which makes a mockery of the notion of an authentic Peranakan. Dr Nour addresses the constructed nature of the Peranakan, and makes it clear that identifying oneself as a Peranakan is a way of being in the world, and that there really are no tangible aspects left for Peranakans. He states: “there is a need for new Peranakan ideas or a movement if you like.” He points out how culture will always change and evolve, and ends his conversation with the seemingly off-the-cuff statement: “What race are you? There is only one race, the human race.”

247 Figure 26: Dr Farish Nour in the Conversatons Gallery

In another conversation, a philosophical Dr Suryadinata (Jawi Peranakan), answers a question about whether the Peranakans are dying out, with “yes, because we all don’t practice,” referring to the fact that the Peranakans no longer undertake the elaborate and expensive wedding and funerary services. He points out that the culture is dissolving rapidly as Peranakans no longer inter-marry, but find partners outside the community.

Taking a very different perspective again, a young gel-haired Chinese Peranakan male states enthusiastically that being Peranakan really does not mean anything to him besides enjoying his grandmother’s great food.

The Underlying Narratives within the Conversations Gallery

The Conversations gallery cleverly interprets the different contemporary positions Peranakans take on their culture and identity today. Dr Kwok defines his motivation for the Conversations gallery: “We wanted to bring the exhibition up to date to mix and match – and to tell people that what is on display does have a contemporary relevance!” Assistant Curator E describes how he wanted to explore this notion of “a true blue Peranakan,” stating at the end of the project: “I think everybody in the project really understood that this whole notion of a true blue identity really was a fictitious thing.”

248 Like the Origins gallery, the Conversations gallery raised open-ended questions about what it means to be a Peranakan today. The Deputy Director suggested it was also designed to encourage visitors to look at the constructed nature of personal identity generally: “…first of all, being Peranakan is not a political identity. It’s a social identity, and as you know, all of us negotiate our identities. We all play different roles!” Like the Origins gallery the Conversations gallery clearly aims to be inclusive of all Peranakans with its collection of diverse individuals selected from different Peranakan communities. As such, it seeks to address the imbalance created by the material culture displays with their bias towards the Peranakan Chinese.

Junk to Jewels – The Things that Peranakans Value

The entrance of the temporary gallery, reached from the second floor, featured a long and vibrant pink wall displaying a gigantic graphic silhouette of treasures – rather like an image from Aladdin’s cave. At the gallery’s entry the curators located lines of cabinets holding an eclectic range of Peranakan objects including jewellery, letters, medals, clothes, and other objects that Peranakans treasure.

To complement the permanent collection, this large temporary gallery is scheduled to hold changing exhibitions on a broad range of Peranakan topics. This first temporary exhibition Junk to Jewels – The Things that Peranakans Value was guest-curated by Peter Lee, a Peranakan art historian and private collector. This exhibition was based on a community project designed to bring together loans from more than thirty-five Peranakan families. It features everyday objects as well as finely crafted heirlooms and works of art, and focuses on the personal story behind each object rather than on the aesthetics of the material culture.

Lee explained how his invitation to curate this show only four months before the opening of the Peranakan Museum was for him “a very stressful endeavour.” He stated his brief was to generate a show concerned with the Peranakan community itself. Lee describes the Peranakan Museum as “a collector’s museum which is why, for Junk to Jewels, I wanted to show a lot of really ugly, well, I mean, very ordinary things.” Lee believed he could highlight interesting stories about the Peranakans using individual objects, in contrast to the generic portrayal of Peranakan Chinese material culture in the main gallery.

In his introductory text panel Lee talked of the mixed emotions he experienced while collecting the objects and stories from Peranakan families: “a response fraught with a

249 complex tangle of emotions, nostalgia, pride, Freudian anxiety, interwoven with the wide range of feelings about self, siblings, parents and ancestors.” Lee commented that he had opened up a “Pandora’s box” of emotions as he sat in many living rooms with families assembled ready to recount their memories. His text panels make the point that, “while some Peranakan have clearly come to terms with the past and others draw creatively from it – there are some who have still no closure – resulting in a number of objects being withheld from loan.” Clearly some Peranakans feel that they have been poorly treated since Singapore’s independence, with many forced to give up their huge bungalows and accept state allocated compensations, to make way for Singapore housing development plans in the 1960s and 1970s with the resultant loss of both social and economic capital.

Lee takes a more critical look at the relationship between the Peranakans and their colonial rulers in his introductory panel, boldly stating that the “Peranakans’ distinct cultural identity and aesthetic have been defined in various ways by the community, by collectors, and by museums through a range of limited objects.” Lee’s exhibition aims to redress that imbalance, providing a snapshot of objects in transit between generations of owners. Lee’s historical overview of the Peranakans is much more direct than the approach taken in the permanent galleries, making much clearer the way the Peranakan community of Southeast Asia came to flourish during the colonial period from 1900 through to the 1940s when the Peranakans developed beneficial relationships with the colonial rulers. Lee states that the British “identified the Peranakan Chinese community born in the Straits Settlement of Singapore, Malacca and Penang, as Straits Chinese – setting them apart from the more recent immigrants from China.” He describes the way the British and other colonial administrators in Southeast Asia used their close relationships with Peranakan communities as a bridge to the wider population. This, explains Lee, earned the Peranakans a privileged place as British subjects with access to useful government services and rights, such as passports and documents that entitled the bearer to unrestricted travel and legal protection.

Lee articulates his curatorial approach in his introductory text panel:

By juxtaposing the ridiculous and the sublime, past and present, the rare and the prosaic, and thereby demystifying “Peranakan culture,” the viewer is then encouraged to draw their own personal conclusions about the history of objects, owners and community, to view the objects collectively as a mirror of how one acquires things today, and to speculate whether the future generations will construct similar stories about the present.

250 Lee focuses on each object from a social history perspective rather than that of a connoisseur, and so for instance he includes a diary loaned by a Peranakan named Tan Cheng Kee, which was found at the back of an old cupboard. Tan is quoted as saying: “It somehow makes me proud of my heritage, and inspired me to promote and preserve the culture. It is also one memento of that house, which was acquired by the government and demolished in the 1970s.”

Lee also examines the Peranakan trait of admiring and mimicking the colonial rulers through Coronation souvenirs, making it clear – though the vehicle of these ephemera – why the Peranakans were called the “King’s Chinese.” A text panel states: “Royal souvenirs were also avidly collected by some Peranakan families: those commemorating the coronation of King George (1936) and Queen Elizabeth II (1952) were relatively common.”

Lee has attempted to reveal the unique and complex outlook of a community “caught between cultures” – the unique social space the Peranakans occupy in Singapore. On the one hand their culture is now showcased in a dedicated national museum, yet the Peranakans still feel resentment that the government has undermined and devalued their language and removed their political and economic capital. As this occurred within the living memory of many Peranakans, Lee believes it has been difficult for the community to come to terms with their identity in modern Singapore.70

The Underlying Narratives within the Temporary Exhibition: Junk to Jewels

Peter Lee took his brief to complement the main galleries of the Peranakan Museum literally, and described how he attempted to “fill the gaps” by focusing on the material culture. He was highly critical of the museum’s approach to showcasing the Peranakan community:

Because to me, the whole thing with the museum now, is that it is one aspect, and actually a very small aspect of the whole Peranakan culture. It reflects to me the interest of collectors… I feel basically it is too much of a collector’s exhibition, and it’s a magnifying glass into minor arts.71 Lee felt that the Peranakan Museum could be misleading: “You get an idea that every Peranakan house looked like this,” which he believed was not the case. Lee talks of his

70 Peter Lee, Peranakan Guest Curator, Junk to Jewels, interview by author, the Peranakan Museum, June 11, 2009. 71 Lee, interview by author, 2009.

251 interest in “what goes on in the heads” of Peranakans, their role and contribution to the region, as well as their personal stories. To this end he adopted a social history approach using individual stories and ephemera like letters and diaries, through which he hoped that the wider Singaporean community might come to understand the Peranakans authentically and in more depth. Importantly, Lee felt that his approach would help address some of the stereotypes that still prevail – beliefs that position the Peranakans as a wealthy élite. Lee believed that a defined set of cultural markers, in particular those highlighted by Assistant Curator D, reinforced these stereotypes.

Constructing a “Living” Peranakan Culture

Designed to celebrate the opening of the new Peranakan Museum, a weekend Peranakan festival called Mari Buat Lau Jiat! (Let’s Make Merry!) was organised. The marquee which had served as a reception area the night before, was transformed into a market bazaar with shops selling kebayas, sarongs, ceramics and Peranakan food, vendors drawn from all over the Southeast Asian region. Visitors shopped and watched enactments of Peranakan weddings on the main stage, and enjoyed fashion shows, singing, and especially commissioned drama by Peranakan entertainer entitled Babas and Nonyas. Through this programme the museum aimed to showcase “living” Peranakan culture. Entry into the museum was free for the opening festival, and there were queues of people snaking around the building, waiting patiently to gain entry. Once there, families of Peranakans enjoyed the exhibits, often with three generations of family members together. The galleries were crowded and there was genuine excitement as family members recognised objects from their own homes or from memory. Whilst many Peranakan visitors clearly enjoyed the weekend festivities, spontaneously choosing to bring out their kebayas and sarongs to wear, proudly identifying themselves with Peranakan culture, others seemed to look at the exhibits with great nostalgia as they reminisced about past events and things lost.

Conclusion

The Peranakan Museum demonstrates how, in a new era of confidence, the Peranakans are perceived to have a significant role to play in Singapore society, offering Singapore’s only uniquely Southeast Asian material treasures, and providing Singapore with its own culture. As a result, the once maligned Peranakan community, denounced by Singapore

252 political leadership for their misplaced loyalty and dependence on the colonial rulers, are not only showcased, but consecrated within a dedicated, state-funded Peranakan Museum.

Under third generation leadership with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and the promise of a more open society, subjects that were deemed too sensitive to deal with in the museum context less than thirty years earlier have now become less problematic. In particular former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s family connections to the Peranakan community are now openly mentioned. The Deputy Director made it clear that it is only now, when Singapore has developed self-confidence, the nation can examine the kind of cultural diversity that the Peranakans represent. She also suggested that in the early days of nation-building the thinking was that “the less diversity the better, because with diversity there’s always the fear that people will end up killing each other,” as happened during the race riots during the 1960s in Singapore.72 Such was the prevailing doxa within Singapore’s carefully scripted rhetoric on national survival.

Museum Director, Dr Kwok, expressed his hope that the public will see the Peranakans as a vital and contemporary community, and come away from their museum visit learning from the Peranakans the importance of being culturally open-minded and inclusive. By contrast the Deputy Director hoped that the museum would encourage Singaporeans to explore their own identity through the history of the Peranakans. While both Assistant Curator E and the Deputy Director attempted, within the Origins and Conversations galleries, to bring the Peranakans into the twenty-first century and demonstrate the Peranakans’ inclusiveness and relevance to Singaporeans, this sentiment is not conveyed in the main contextual displays. While such lessons might be found in the very small Public Life gallery, it is more likely that most visitors will be detained by the overwhelmingly contextual presentation of Chinese Peranakan material culture from their “golden age,” which dominates the museum.

Having joined the project as one of its most junior members, Assistant Curator D dominated the Peranakan Museum’s major displays with the authority of his insider knowledge, which he understood “no one in the museum could contest.” Assistant Curator D believed his role was to present the “authentic” Peranakan experience. However, his attempt to avoid privileging one Peranakan family over another, combined with his access to the finest collections of Peranakan material, resulted in a series of largely generic contextual displays of Peranakan material culture, reinforcing the stereotypical cultural

72 Deputy Director, interview by author, 2009.

253 markers of the community. Absent are any deeper insights into the individuals that these objects belong to or their personal stories.

At the heart of conflicting narratives was a clash of deep-seated beliefs about the role of the museum as a community museum or as a museum about a community. Whilst Assistant Curator D understood Kwok’s ambition to present the Peranakans as a model of inclusivity and racial tolerance, he was determined to use the exhibition as a platform to reinstate his Peranakan community to their former glory through displays that highlighted their sophistication and wealth. This resulted in disagreements about the museum’s central displays.

Mirroring this lack of cohesion within the curatorial team, the displays in the Peranakan Museum vary dramatically in style and content. Notably, the introductory and exit galleries address issues facing contemporary Peranakan communities, including a variety of ethnic configurations of Peranakaness, while the rest of the museum’s displays present object-rich, largely domestic, contextual displays from the 1920s and 1930s, firmly within the “golden age” of the Chinese Peranakans. Whilst Dr Kwok stated that he wanted the Peranakan Museum to raise open-ended questions to engage visitors about the identity of the Peranakans, the current display is more likely to encourage visitors to simply enjoy the beauty and splendour of the material culture. This reinforces stereotypes associated with the Peranakans – that they were an exotic Chinese–Malay élite with a propensity for displays of extravagance. Kwok’s invitation to Lee to curate an exhibition about the Peranakans as individuals entitled Junk to Jewels went some way towards addressing the lack of personal stories within the main galleries, but its inclusion added to the lack of cohesion in addressing the portrayal of Peranakan identity.

The guest Peranakan curator of Junk to Jewels, was one person who did feel he was in a position to challenge Assistant Curator D’s approach. Lee pointed out that the net result of Assistant Curator D’s generic contextual display was to present the Peranakan material as a minor Southeast Asian decorative art form, which told the vistor very little about the community themselves. Lee felt some antagonism towards Assistant Curator D’s claim to authentic Peranakan knowledge and his domination of the production of meaning in the contextual displays. When Lee dismissed Assistant Curator D’s interpretive style as a detailed recreation of his beloved grandmother’s domestic world, he confided that he was “really not interested in how many times Assistant Curator D’s grandmother ground her

254 chillies to make her sambal.”73 Lee suggested he was less concerned about the objects from the “golden age” than the state of contemporary Peranakan culture. Lee’s response to Assistant Curators D’s curatorial approach reflects the lack of cohesion both within the museum and within the Peranakan community itself.

The dynamics between Assistant Curator D and Lee, and more broadly among all members of the Peranakan Museum curatorial team reflect Bourdieu’s insights into how agents struggle in a field to maintain and improve their positions, their actions and reactions generating the energy that “animates the field.”74 Bourdieu makes it clear that a field, in this case the ACM, can only exist as long as agents invest in it, and believe in what is at stake within the field (promotion, cultural authority, recognition, status). Agents bring their different forms of capital as they engage and pursue the stakes on offer, and in the case of the two Peranakan curators involved, the stake on offer was the cultural and symbolic authority of their individual curatorial voices, which they hoped to have consecrated in the museum. Both Peranakan curators bought into the game and the illusio of the ACM as a field. Ultimately, there was a shared belief that displaying the Peranakan culture within its own state museum was a game worth playing.

The relational nature of Bourdieu’s tools (habitus, field and capital) allows for the consideration of homologies between fields. If the Peranakan community is considered a field in itself with different agents trying to establish authority over what legitimates membership of this community and who can speak on its behalf, the differences between Lee and Assistant Curator D can be seen as the core struggle between two Peranakan outlooks. Assistant Curator D focuses on the cultural achievement of the Peranakans’ “golden age,” whilst Lee is interested in the Peranakans as pioneers contributing to Singapore’s development, and their contemporary engagement in society through artistic expression. What emerges from extended interviews with these two curators is their shared awareness of the overwhelming hardship the Peranakans have lived through over the last fifty to sixty years. At a personal level, both curators suffered the effects of the shift of Peranakan fortunes within Singapore’s social spaces and the general disapproval toward the language and customs of the Peranakans during their formative years, though this manifested in very different outcomes. Lee speaks of the almost schizophrenic relationship Peranakans have with their own culture, despising certain aspects of it while celebrating

73 Peter Lee, interview by author, 2009. 74 Bourdieu, In Other Words, 193.

255 others. Assistant Curator D, influenced by his matriarchal grandmother, had a more defiant response to the downfall and the diminution of the Peranakans at the hands of the state. However, independent of these differences, both Peranakans bring to the ACM the embodied history of generations of Peranakans. In this way, despite the contestation, the Peranakan community as a field dominated the curatorial outcomes of the Peranakan Museum.

Both Assistant Curator D and Peter Lee brought to their curatorial roles their habitus, formed under specific conditions but employed in different ways. In this non-teleological way the two Peranakan curators brought with them the macro level experience of the Chinese Peranakan community as a whole with all its unresolved resentment over their past treatment and their confusion over their newly emerging role, constructed by the state without their direct input.

With the development of The Peranakan Legacy exhibition, Assistant Curator A held the most cultural capital because of the length of his employment at the ACM and his knowledge of the Peranakan collection. Similarly in the Peranakan Museum, while Assistant Curator D held little formal institutional power, as the only internal Peranakan Curator he held all the cultural capital and as such was recognised as the holder of authentic knowledge. Mok Wei Wei the architect and Patrick Gan the designer both stated clearly that Assistant Curator D was the individual they would seek when considering appropriate gallery elements such as colours, patterns and symbols for contextual displays. As a result Assistant Curator D was able to convert his cultural capital to institutional power in order to legitimate his curatorial vision with its attendant narratives. While the rest of the curatorial team were in agreement about the idea of presenting the Peranakans as a living culture and a symbol of integration and racial tolerance, Assistant Curator D was able to dominate the museum with a narrative placing them firmly in the past.

The Renaissance City Reports make it apparent that the Singapore Government was fully aware that culture could become a powerful force in controlling and supporting nation- building objectives. The lessons learned from the Peranakan Museum refer subtly to the potential of the Peranakans to act as a symbol of successful multiculturalism, and as a galvanising force to encourage more interconnectedness between Singapore’s distinct racial groups. As presented in the museum, these lessons, like the position the state takes on the Peranakans, are still too tentative and unclear to be understood and recognised.

256 The third Renaissance City Plan makes it clear that the Peranakans are now proudly claimed as providing Singapore with much needed distinction, and as a result this community is now identified as an “indigenous tradition” and a unique living culture. As such, they play a crucial role in supporting Singapore’s push to further enhance its economy through its new creative industries – of which the Tourism Board is a central player – and help the government meet its objectives in positioning the country as one of the most attractive environments in Asia in which to live and work.

The reality of the dwindling use of the Peranakan language and the lack of substantial new Peranakan material developed without assistance from the state support the argument that the Peranakans are a culture of the past. Assistant Curator A, who played the leading curatorial role in the Asian Civilisations Museum exhibition The Peranakan Legacy, sums up the problem:

After a while, you realise that this is all there is – what you see in the museum. The Peranakan have ended, and all there is left is the collection of objects which validates their culture. You have to accept that the culture has died as a viable culture. It is now an exotic memory, it is a fetish you know.75 Ultimately, the Peranakan Museum focuses on the material culture of the Chinese Peranakans, recycling the same exotic cultural markers that dominated The Peranakan Legacy such as elaborate furniture, ceramics, batiks, beadwork, jewellery and silverware. However, it links these to the contextualised themes of the twelve-day wedding and funeral rites. Like an exclusive boutique, these objects are beautifully displayed, complete with cute cartoon characters and colourful graphic elements, and are packaged for a visitor’s consumption in a commercially orientated and simplified presentation.

The Peranakan Community continues to exist as an authentic cultural group in contemporary Singapore because of the traits they have demonstrated since their beginnings as early traders. Adaptive and attuned to the dominant power at play, they now find themselves embraced by the state, reclaimed by Lee Kuan Yew, and poised to take on the mantle of a being the best example of truly cosmopolitan Singaporeans.

75 Assistant Curator A, is now Director of one of Singapore major cultural institutions. Interview by author, Asian Civilisations Museum, June 11, 2009.

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Chapter Eight: Analysis and Conclusion

Celebrating the First Anniversary of the Peranakan Museum

On April 25 to 26 2009, the Peranakan Museum celebrated its first anniversary with a two-day festival. In keeping with past celebrations, the event was held in a huge tent covering the car park next to the main building. The backdrop of the large stage inside the tent was decorated with colourful Peranakan motifs and a single, simple message: “We are One!” This declaration signaled the nature of the Peranakan Museum’s emerging role in the ongoing exercise of nation-building in Singapore. In a press release for the event, Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, stated: “What a year it has been for the Peranakan Museum! A record 260,000 visitors have come through our doors.” Kwok also noted that in the early months after opening, 75% of those visitors were locals, with the ratio settling down to 55% locals and 45% foreigners towards the end of the first year. Given that initial projections assumed only 80,000 visitors would see the museum in the first year, the Peranakan Museum was clearly a resounding success with the public.1

The birthday festival for the museum featured Jeanette Aw and Pierre Png, the two leading actors from Singapore Media Corporation’s hit television show The Little Nonya, launched soon after the Peranakan Museum opened. The Master of Ceremonies for the event convinced the two stars to sing and dance to traditional Peranakan songs, much to the delight of the large audience that filled the tent. When the Master of Ceremonies asked both actors about their Peranakan heritage and what they liked most about being Peranakan, Png commented – with a laugh – about the food: “Peranakans can’t eat anything without chilli!” Aw talked of her love of learning to wear the kebaya and sarong, and stated that she also loved Peranakan food, which she felt could be a metaphor for the culture: “This really is the culture, it is spicy, it’s got very beautiful flavours, and you put salt and pepper into it and pound the spices together and then cook a wonderful dish.” Spontaneously enjoying the limelight of a Peranakan revival in Singapore’s fields of cultural production, the two actors unwittingly reinforced the stereotypical cultural markers of Peranakan culture: their distinctive food and Nonya attire.

1 Peranakan Museum, “Press Release: Peranakan Museum Celebrates First Birthday with a Weekend Bash”, April 23, 2009, accessed October 2, 2010, http://www.peranakanmuseum.sg/pressroom/pressrelease.asp?id=10.

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Beyond the spectacle of popular culture stardom, the presence of the Peranakan actors suggests the increased level of symbolic capital that the Peranakan community had obtained from the Peranakan revival of the past decade, signalled nowhere as strongly as in the positioning of the community within the state-funded Peranakan Museum. Equally, the actors’ responses brought to the surface the popular view of the Peranakans within Singapore’s social spaces: they are perceived as a quaint minority group remembered for aspects of their cultural heritage such as the kebaya and fusion cuisine. Absent from this public remembering, thanks to the forces that have shaped the historical narrative of the nation since independence, were the powerful Peranakan pioneers, men of high political, economic and symbolic capital, who helped shape colonial Singapore as the “King’s Chinese.” The economic and political dominance the Peranakans possessed at that time is clearly absent from the revival narrative. The new role of the Peranakans, providing Singapore with cultural capital courtesy of their unique material heritage, sits uneasily for some, clouded by a lack of clarity over the unresolved diminution of the Peranakan identity in the postcolonial era – a change of fortune that is still felt and remembered by many living Peranakans.

Introduction This Singapore-based inquiry began with the research question – whether the potential of the state-funded Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) is restricted by the heteronomous nature of the field from which it operates to democratically portray the multiple histories of the Peranakans, first within the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy from 2000 to 2006, and subsequently in the Peranakan Museum since 2008. The study has drawn on Bourdieu’s relational concepts as tools to provide insights into the relationship between the museological practices of the ACM and the wider socio-historical context in which those practices occurred. Specifically, this enquiry has worked with the tools of habitus, capital and field to reveal the complex relationships between the macro-level operations of Singapore’s fields of cultural production and the micro-level curatorial operations of the institution, resulting in the restriction of curatorial practice without the need for overt governmental control.

This research reveals the direct and indirect state-driven logic behind the shaping and reconstruction of the minority group, the Peranakans, first through the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy and subsequently within the Peranakan Museum. Additionally, the original research carried out in this case study establishes new insights into the influence of the

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state on the value of cultural and symbolic capital of the Peranakans as a community, and the economic value of the their antiquarian material culture. In particular, I suggest that the Peranakans’ material culture has effectively been transformed into institutionalised cultural capital, which is then used to reinforce the state’s discourse on national identity and stability, and to provide support for the state’s ongoing economic imperatives.

Analysis Professor Tommy Koh, Chairman of the National Heritage Board (2002–2011), suggested in an interview with the researcher in 2004 that the Peranakans could not be considered an ancestral culture.2 Given that the ACM’s mission is to generate a greater appreciation of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans, one could question why the Peranakans’ material culture is showcased at all. In this chapter, I argue that the process of placing the Peranakans within their own state-funded museum under the auspices of the ACM was non-teleological in nature, and did not result from the macro directives of state policies such as the Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts,3 Singapore: The Next Lap,4 or the Renaissance City Reports.5 Rather, the Peranakan Museum emerged organically, the result of a confluence of influences that began with the gentle resurgence of interest in the Peranakan community in the 1970s and 1980s, and gained momentum so that the community could finally be recognised and claimed officially by the state as Singapore’s homegrown “distinctive content.” The resurgence culminated in the opening of the Peranakan Museum in 2008. This research argues that the uniqueness of the Peranakan collection and its popularity with tourists and local Singaporeans alike generated a compelling case for the ACM to successfully argue that the material culture of the Peranakans was the best fit for its Tao Nan wing. In so doing the ACM ruled out previous official suggestions for the museum precinct, such as a Children’s Museum or a People’s Gallery.6

The case study also reveals a tension between the potential of the Peranakans to represent more than just a new Southeast Asian art form, and the actualisation of the exhibitions.

2 Professor Tommy Koh, Chairman of the National Heritage Board, Ambassador-at-large, interview with author, April 2004. 3 Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, 1989, Executive summary, accessed October 23, 2012, www.acsr.sg/PDF/ACCA_Report.pdf. 4 The Government of Singapore, Singapore: The Next Lap, 13. 5 Ministry of Information and the Arts, Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts, 2000), 4. 6 The 1989 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (ACCA) was chaired by the late former President Mr. Ong Teng Cheong, then Deputy Prime Minister.

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Having been claimed officially as Singapore’s homegrown “distinctive content,” destined to feed the emerging creative industries, such as digital media, television and tourism, the Peranakans have now come to be positioned as representing cosmopolitan Singaporeans themselves.7 This is rationalised by the ACM, given the Peranakans’ broad history of successful adaptation and integration in early Singapore, during uncertain economic circumstances and an influx of Chinese migrants. Those dynamics are mirrored in contemporary Singaporean society, where the nation deals with global economic pressures and the influx of new, mostly Chinese migrant workers. However, history reveals that the Peranakans have been represented as becoming ossified during the colonial period, when they established themselves as a distinct, élite community and lost their capacity to adapt and adjust, culminating in their public refusal to give up their colonial loyalties for fear of losing their privileged position under the Malay Federation. This case study also reveals (from curatorial and other interviews) deep and lingering resentment within the Peranakan community about the state’s treatment of this minority group after independence. This situation is especially significant when one considers that the dominant personality behind Singapore’s development in the past sixty years – Lee Kuan Yew – was once a life member and secretary of the Peranakans’ Singapore Chinese British Association.

The study began by addressing the genesis and specific histories within which Singapore’s contemporary fields of cultural production originated. This was timely in order to understand how the enduring objective structures in those fields emerged, and it provides an understanding of how these objective structures are continually reproduced from Singapore’s early colonial beginnings through to the post-colonial Republic of today. Further, this research considered the dominance of the field of the economy over all other fields, operating as it does within the overarching field of power. The clear homologies among the fields of economics, politics, education and culture have been investigated, providing significant insights into the ACM’s development of The Peranakan Legacy exhibition from 2000 to 2005 and the subsequent establishment of the Peranakan Museum in 2008.

Establishing the Free Port of Singapore This investigation shows how Singapore, from its very inception as a site for a factory under the British East India Company, through to the establishment of the independent Republic of Singapore, has been dominated by the field of the economy. In 1819, Sir

7 Ministry of Information and the Arts, Renaissance City Report, 17.

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Stamford Raffles, as an agent of the British East India Company, “founded” Singapore with the specific objective of establishing a port to break the Dutch monopoly on trade, allowing the British access through the Malacca Straits to rich, emerging Asian markets. Unlike its neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore did not begin colonial life with a large, existing population. Singapore was originally a small fishing community of less than a thousand people. This situation allowed Raffles to plan, from scratch, a spirited and splendid little colony, developed under nineteenth century English notions of governance.

Under colonial rule, orientalist doxologies of race relations were imposed upon the predominantly immigrant peoples of the small island state in order to manage its racially diverse and often transient population. A classic divide-and-rule approach was implemented, whereby migrants from around the region who came to work in Singapore were placed into racial enclaves. Furthermore, racial group differentiations were aligned to social and economic hierarchies, the common doxa being that there were three major racial groups: the hard working entrepreneurial Chinese, the docile Indians, and the lazy Malays – any other racial group was packaged into “Other”. This colonial belief still plays out in Singapore’s current technocratic meritocracy, almost as a pre-reflexive belief system, with the Singapore government dealing with the so-called “Malay problem” as the Malays continue to lag behind in both the fields of education and the economy. British colonial powers dominated all aspects of Singaporean society, and in 1867 Singapore became the seat of government of a newly-established British Crown colony called the Straits Settlements. British supremacy and right to rule was unchallenged, and any alternative unthinkable. At the time, the British controlled the largest Empire in the world, and they appeared invincible to subjects who came to Singapore in search of work and a chance to share in some of the economic benefits that accompanied that dominance.

To provide the new colony with a measure of symbolic capital, the Raffles Library and Museum was built in 1887, a formalised symbol of British colonial dominance of the region that showcased the exotic flora, fauna and ethnographic wonders of the archipelago. Benedict Anderson argues that colonial administrations typically introduced three institutions of power to the colonised: the census, the map and the museum, and Sir Stamford Raffles, in his original imaginings of Singapore, included a museum in the plans, but it was a luxury not viable until the successful establishment of the structures critical within the colonial government’s field of the economy.8 With the introduction of the

8 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 50.

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steamship in the 1860s followed by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Singapore became the main stopover for ships moving between Europe and East Asia, reinforcing Singapore’s dominance as the trade centre in the area. This made the small island port a suitable location to showcase colonial success in the region with the establishment of a museum.

The Peranakans’ Positioning within Colonial Singapore.

In this period of steamships and Empire, the Peranakans were able to carve out a special symbiotic relationship with their colonial masters, operating as middlemen between the authorities and the local workforce. Thanks to their good working relationships with both the local Malay and the sinkehs (the new Chinese migrant workers), the Peranakans were rewarded quickly with political, economic and symbolic capital. As the population grew with ever-increasing waves of Chinese workers, the Peranakans established their own Straits Chinese British Association (SCBA) in 1900, and their exclusive use of English united the élite Peranakans, while affirming their distance from the Chinese coolies.9 With this distancing, the Peranakans were no longer able to represent the interests of the Chinese majority of Singapore. By 1910 they had shifted away from a role as middlemen in the rapidly expanding society, to successfully consolidate a position of social, economic and symbolic dominance amongst the colonial population, thus leveraging their close alliance with and loyalty to British colonial rule.

The Peranakans’ early competence in being able to accommodate the extreme cultural diversity around them was in part responsible for their success in colonial Singapore. They were able to draw on their lived experience in Malacca, and to use their understanding of Malay culture, the ways of colonial rulers, and the customs and behaviours of the new Chinese workers to better navigate the complex social and political waters of the time. These skills allowed the Peranakans to promote their own economic interests alongside, but always secondary to, those of their colonial masters. This early economic capital was steadily converted to symbolic capital, earning them the title of “King’s Chinese,” a clear sign of British support and the formalising of special treatment which allowed further enhancement of economic capital. The result was that, from 1900 to the 1930s, the Peranakans had positioned themselves in the top tier within the Chinese community in Singapore’s colonial public sphere, a time now referred to as their golden age.

9 Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 113.

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During this rise in influence and prestige, just as they had once accommodated the Malay culture that dominated their environment in Malacca, the Peranakans began to increasingly adopt many of the habits, religious beliefs and even leisure pursuits of their colonial masters, as well as their language and education system. This accorded with the belief that the British were the dominant force and would continue to be so in the foreseeable future. The Peranakans’ collective habitus subsumed and embodied colonial dominance and its associated symbolic violence, reproducing and strengthening colonial objective structures through successive generations of adaptation. From 1900 through to the 1930s and the Great Depression, the Peranakans enjoyed their “golden age,” the height of their collectively accumulated economic, political and symbolic capital. The Peranakan Nonyas were able to amass fine objects, produced using the highest quality materials, and commissioned from the best craftsmen and artisans around the region. Like the nouveaux riches of other civilisations and eras, the Peranakans consolidated their economic success symbolically, using their jewellery, silverware and porcelain on occasions such as their very public weddings as an ostentatious parade of wealth. As the Peranakans differentiated themselves from what they considered the less sophisticated coolies or new Chinese, their confident sense of superiority generated resentment. The less well-off, newly arrived mainland cousins of the wealthy Chinese élite came to deride the honorific expression the British had bestowed upon the Peranakans, so that the words “King’s Chinese” became a contemptuous insult.

The Fall of an Empire and its Hysteresis Effect The onset of the Great Depression, followed by the fall of Singapore during the Second World War and its subsequent occupation by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945, spelt the end of the Peranakan dominance in the fields of politics and the economy. During Japanese occupation, any link to British colonialism was not only negative symbolic capital, but also life threatening. Those believed to have been sympathetic to or supportive of British colonial rule were considered enemies of the Japanese Empire. The English language was banned, and use of Japanese was enforced in all schools. Whilst all Chinese were dealt with harshly, the Peranakans, now without the special support of the British colonial government, suffered terribly due to their special alignment to the colonials. In three short years, their earlier steady generational rise to prominence in the colony was completely reversed.

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With Japanese defeat in the Pacific and their subsequent surrender to Allied forces, the British returned to Singapore. They were still notionally in power, but the illusio of their uncontested right to rule Singapore had been completely undermined by their surrender of the island to the Japanese. The inability of the British to defend their subjects in the face of Japanese invaders (subsequently shown to have been a very poor strategic decision) had removed much of the colonial power’s symbolic capital and created bad faith amongst those left behind. The general view was that Singaporeans had suffered dreadfully under Japanese occupation while the British protected their homeland. Singapore, it seemed, had been expendable all along.

With this sentiment, and a broader anti-colonial movement surfacing internationally after the end of World War II, the push for independence in Singapore was irreversible. The emerging élite, led by Lee Kuan Yew, worked to ensure that Singapore would never again rely upon colonial powers. However, the next twenty years – from 1945 to 1965 – proved an unsettling time for Singapore. The aftermath of both the Great Depression and the Japanese occupation had created high unemployment and, with the island experiencing a dramatic population increase, there was a lack of housing and wealth. A rising communist threat resulted in social unrest, racial tension and regular union-driven strikes.

The Peranakans, who had hoped the return of the British would allow them to re- establish themselves in their former position as the élite Chinese of Singapore society, continued to pledge their loyalty as subjects of the British Empire. But as the post-colonial landscape rapidly changed the pre-war dynamics of politics, economics and culture, the Peranakans became increasingly marginalised. In the face of rising nationalism, they refused through Peranakan organisations like the SCBA, to support the move towards independence and the plan to join the Malay Federation. They were seen to be too proud to become Malay citizens and give up the special privileges they had acquired under the colonial administration. Lee Kuan Yew, who had been a life member of the SCBA, broke ties with the Peranakan Association, dismissing their leaders as de-culturated, devitalised and redundant. As Lee’s influence grew, the Peranakans were relegated to the status of an insignificant and outdated minority, best forgotten in an era focused on dealing with the perceived threat of communism, chronic unemployment and economically destabilising social unrest. The Peranakans lost their established position as leaders within the Singapore colonial regime and, as Singapore gradually worked towards independence, their lack of support translated into a loss of their symbolic capital. Being described as the ‘King’s

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Chinese,” previously seen as an honour, now become a derogatory term, signalling further loss of symbolic capital which very quickly translated into a loss of political and economic capital, as they had lost their élite positioning within Singapore. The Peranakans were no longer recognised as a discrete ethnic group and were forced into identifying with the Chinese majority – the Singaporean Chinese. However, a number of key English-educated Peranakans entered the first circle of leadership within Lee Kuan Yew’s party, and were able to adapt to the new environment and identify themselves as Singaporeans.

Expulsion from Malaysia: Establishing a Culture of Fear.

Rejecting colonialism out of hand, Lee established the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore and, in 1959, the PAP was elected in Singapore’s first self-governing Legislative Assembly. While the external affairs of the island remained in British hands, the PAP established an internal Security Council, which had wide-ranging powers. The new laws allowed for the detaining of individuals who threatened national security, and provided the mechanism to allow the PAP to quickly remove serious opposition under the guise of ridding Singapore of communist threats.

There was an absolute belief amongst the PAP that, for a small island with no natural resources to achieve independence from Britain, it would have to operate within a Malay Federation and, after much lobbying, the newly appointed Singapore government “merged” with Malaysia in 1963. However, just two and a half years later the relationship proved unworkable, and Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation. This decision brought Lee to tears publicly and propelled Singapore unwillingly into independence in 1965, a development bringing with it an enduring doxology of economic survivalism.10

In establishing the new State Republic of Singapore, Lee and the PAP focused on making the dramatic changes required by Winsemius’s economic plan, which had been drawn up in 1961. Lee established a college for the civil service to ensure that public servants grasped their role as supporters and implementers of PAP policies. Following recommendations by the United Nations, the government set up the Economic Development Board (EDB) as a statutory authority to attract foreign investment. Building the economy became the route to Singapore’s survival because the country was no longer able to rely on the support of Malaysia, which had been viewed as Singapore’s post-colonial

10 Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma, 30.

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motherland. To support the structural and economic changes, Lee and the PAP set about carefully constructing an enduring discourse of fear and anxiety for Singapore’s population, with “survival” the key word in a state-run discourse that coalesced around an Asian style, non-liberal communitarian democracy.11 Singapore’s survival, it was argued, was wholly dependent on attracting foreign investment and economic success, which in turn was dependent on political stability, which only the PAP could provide. Simplified, the story was that the PAP equalled Singapore’s survival. Within living memory of the golden age of British colonial rule, the PAP, under Lee’s leadership, had reproduced the illusio of colonial power with all its attendant real and symbolic violence, exchanging Britain’s right to rule for that of the PAP.

Singapore’s Economic Rationalism and Nation-Building.

In the following years, the Singapore government focused its resources on implementing its plan to create a bulletproof economy. Given the fractious state of Singapore in the early 1960s, the PAP felt that this required draconian methods, and the Internal Security Act was frequently invoked to ensure political stability. The Winsemius Plan that was driving economic change involved establishing the powerful Economic Development Board, attracting major foreign firms to Singapore to build a manufacturing industry that would solve the unemployment problem, bring in foreign currency, and create economic growth.12 To support the development of the manufacturing sector, the Singapore government set about regimenting its citizens: it introduced mandatory national service, and completely reformed the education and housing system, with the aim of producing an efficient, compliant and loyal workforce. The Housing Development Board swept away traditional kampongs and other established dwellings, building in their place high-density apartment blocks and compensating citizens at a state-determined rather than market-driven rate.13 Most dialect-based schools were centralised under the Ministry of Education, and whilst Malay remained notionally the official national language, English was promoted aggressively as the language of education, because it was recognised to be the international language of business.

The longer-term plan for Singapore’s economic survival involved refashioning the education system from the ground up. Schools were established on a three-tiered, streamed

11 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 187. 12 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 54. 13 Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, 129.

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system with students tested at a very early age and placed in an education environment designed to produce either workers/labourers, middle managers, or those destined for élite English-speaking leadership roles. Under the watchful gaze of the government, the best and brightest Singaporean students were selected and educated at the top stream so they could operate in a global market, just as was required during colonial governance. Yet this new system privileged those with the financial means to allow their children tutoring in English or those already well versed with the language, like many of the children of the Peranakans. Once again this strategy inevitably reproduced colonial structures, creating a gulf between the powerful and wealthy Singaporean élite and “heart-landers” (as the Singaporean HDB urban dwelling workers are often referred to in Singapore).

The level of control imposed on citizens during this period cannot be overestimated, the government famously regulating minutiae such as the length of hair, the practice of spitting, and the chewing of gum. From this starting point at the level of the individual body, control extended upwards and outwards to curb criticism and freedom of expression in the name of social cohesion, and the government frequently detained those critical of the PAP and its policies. With a government focused on generating a hegemony of national survival, dissent was simply not permissible, with the result that Singaporeans lived in a culture of fear. The message was clear: the tiny island was surrounded by threats, and oppression and the denial of freedom of expression was a small price to pay for stability and economic prosperity.14

The PAP were also successful in establishing grassroots community associations, creating networks throughout the small island that could be used for constant surveillance of its citizens. The artist Salleh Japar describes an acquaintance he knew who was forcibly removed from his home at 3:00 a.m. and held for questioning for having read out a humorous poem which he wrote about Singapore’s systems of fines. Although the poet in question had read his work to a small group of friends during a picnic in the Singapore Botanical Gardens, the network of surveillance and reporting had picked up the anti- government signal.15 Such stories are commonplace, and demonstrate why, with the threat of real and symbolic violence, within one generation of implementation of the new structures that shaped civil behaviour, Singaporeans came to be known as a compliant, law- abiding people who looked to the government for direction before acting on any decision – large or small.

14 Barr, Lee Kuan Yew, 149. 15 Salleh Japar, Art Lecturer Lasalle•SIA, interview with author, 1999

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PAP Economic Management Success

With the government carefully controlling all aspects of society to ensure economic success, within thirty years from independence Singapore moved from Third World status, with a per capita GDP of $500US, to being on the verge of First World prosperity (with a per capita GDP of $15,000US). Edgar Schein, an economic advisor brought into the country by the Singapore government to review the EDB in 1996, pointed out that this economic achievement could only have been implemented because the government was able to focus on the economy alone, without ever being distracted by having to win elections. Schein also described how the PAP managed Singapore like a multinational corporation, with the EDB initially branding itself as “Singapore Inc.” and later “Singapore Unlimited,” and most recently “Future Ready” in its successful attempts to attract foreign investment. 16 The EDB became a critical driver in Singapore’s growth, initially improving existing markets and then identifying potential areas of growth. The PAP maintained unbroken rule since gaining power in 1959 and was able to inculcate the civil service to actively support its policies, creating strong homologies between the field of the economy and all other fields. Schein suggested that the PAP’s style of economic management was a genuine East-West hybrid and that, as a powerful arm of the government, the EDB had the power to influence other ministries and initiate unpopular initiatives such as the Housing Development Scheme and the removal of traditional kampongs without any fear of reprisals for the government at the ballot box. The EDB also introduced a corporate style of management into state organisations, such as those initiated within the Ministry of Education, schools and – closer to this case study – the field of cultural production and state museums. The EDB also identifies and generates “EDB babies” – like-minded organisations – nurturing them to maturity under a watchful eye.17 This strategy resulted in the push to establish Singapore’s creative industries, with museums assigned to support this initiative by working more closely with the commercially-minded Singapore Tourism Board.

The Return of the Mother Tongue

As a result of Singapore’s successful economic development, a prosperous new middle- class was established in Singapore. However, Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP detected an

16 Economic Development Board “Future Ready Singapore”, accessed November 1, 2012, http/www.edb.gov.sg. 17 Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, 168.

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undesirable outcome that had emerged with the promotion of English in the education system. It appeared to them that the “next generation” of Singaporean workers were losing touch with their origins and developing Western, individualist values that might have a negative impact on national productivity. To counter this situation, the Singapore government implemented the Mother Tongue Language policy in all national schools, requiring students to study their respective official mother tongue: Mandarin, Malay or Tamil. For those considered Chinese, this meant that no matter what dialect a family spoke at home (for example, Cantonese or Hokkien) children were required to learn Mandarin as their mother tongue at school. There was no room for the “P” of Peranakan in this CMIO division of race, and the Peranakans were subsumed under the Chinese category. This meant that, despite the fact that they preferred to speak Malay, they were compelled to learn Mandarin as their “mother tongue” at school. As a result, this further diluted the use and value of their own Baba Malay patois, which was not recognised as an official language.18 By contrast, Indian children who did not speak Tamil at home were able to select a non-Tamil Indian Language such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu.

These discriminatory procedures ensured that, within a generation, Peranakan grandparents were no longer able to communicate with their grandchildren, as many of the older generation could speak neither Mandarin nor English. The result was the further diminishing of cultural transmission and the dilution of the Peranakan identity. The situation was exacerbated by the introduction, in 1979, of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, launched by Lee Kuan Yew in 1979, primarily designed to create better communication among Singaporean Chinese with different dialects, and to ensure that Singaporeans had an increased capacity to trade and undertake business with China.

The Field of Cultural Production: Creating Ballast against Western Values

Whilst the government focused its energy on the economy, there was no time for matters of culture and the arts. Indeed Lee Kuan Yew suggested that the arts were a luxury the small nation could not afford. It was not until the 1970s that the cultural field began to catch the eye of those in power. Lee Kuan Yew re-evaluated his position on the importance of heritage (along with the introduction of “mother tongue” languages), deciding that, in order to be good citizens, Singaporeans needed to retain their distinctive identities and cultural moorings. As the concern to instill good “Asian Values” took hold, the yet unexplored symbolic value of Singapore’s cultural fields came to be seen as a critical

18 PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalism, 2000.

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part of the solution. The government focused its attention on harnessing culture in order to further control the development of Singapore’s society in the direction it felt was best for continued prosperity. Singapore had managed to control its own social environment primarily using economic and political tools. These could not be extended beyond its borders in a globally networked and deregulated world, but the field of culture could provide the support the government needed, reinforcing good Asian values and supporting non-liberal communitarian style democracy.19

The process of harnessing Singapore’s cultural capital began in earnest after the 1985 economic recession. The Economic Development Board (EDB) was tasked with establishing a plan to invigorate the economy. In 1991, the resulting Strategic Economic Plan recognised the fields of culture and the arts as a potential growth area. The EDB identified this area as one of seventeen service sectors that could be further harnessed to assist with economic development. Concurrently, the state undertook an in-depth study of Singapore’s fields of art and culture. This study culminated in 1988 in the Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, also known as the Ong Teng Cheong Report (named after the Council chairman and then Deputy Prime Minister). This report was significant in that it acknowledged the importance of the arts and culture in Singapore and provided a blueprint for developing a new infrastructure to generate growth in this area.

Second Generation Leadership and Harnessing Singapore’s Cultural Capital In November 1990, Lee Kuan Yew passed on leadership to the carefully groomed and tested Goh Chok Tong. The new Prime Minister presented an opportunity both to connect with the new generation of Singaporeans and to represent a more liberal and approachable government concerned not just with the economy but also with developing the “Singapore Heartbeat.”20 In 1999, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s office produced a manifesto Singapore: The Next Lap designed to provide a blueprint for developing Singapore into a “Global City” with total business capabilities. In keeping with the aim of Singapore: The Next Lap to create a more vibrant Singapore, the government implemented the recommendations of the Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts.21 Backed by the EDB’s plan to invigorate the economy through art and culture, the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC) was established in 1991, followed by the National Heritage Board (NHB) in 1993. These statutory boards were placed under a newly formed Ministry of

19 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 60. 20 Ministry of Information and the Arts, Renaissance City Report, 38. 21 Singapore Government, Singapore: The Next Lap, 13.

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Information, Technology and the Arts (MITA), established in 1990 to provide the necessary centralised infrastructure to promote and develop Singapore’s artistic, cultural and historical heritage.

The mission statements of MITA and the NHB illustrate the joint and complementary roles the two organisations play within the hierarchy of the Singapore government, promoting Singapore’s economy and its ancestral heritage. The objective of MITA is to: “To develop Singapore as a Global City for Information, Communications and the Arts, so as to build a Creative Economy and a Connected Society with a Singaporean Identity rooted in our Multicultural Heritage.”22 The NHB reinforces the building of this identity with its mission: “To explore and present the heritage and nationhood of the people of Singapore in the context of their ancestral cultures, their links with Southeast Asia, Asia and the world through the collection, preservation, interpretation and display of objects and records.”23 These mission statements clearly interconnect, both referencing globalisation and the importance of recognising Singaporeans’ multicultural heritage within a shared set of Asian values.

In keeping with the 1989 Ong Teng Cheong Report, the NHB, with the help of the Preservation of Public Monuments Board, set about building a museum precinct and transforming key heritage sites into museums. The NHB brought together the already established National Archives, Oral History Department and the National Museum. The Minister for the newly formed Ministry of Information and the Arts, Brigadier-General Yeo, made a decision in 1991 to restructure the National Heritage Museum into three separate institutions: The Singapore History Museum (SHM), The Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and The Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM). As reflected by Benedict Anderson, these museums were put to use in recreating the role of the old colonial museum – better supporting the state in its official “imaginings” of an independent Singapore.24

The original National Museum was renovated and reopened as the Singapore History Museum with a specific task: “To explore, discover and enhance the national identity of Singapore by preserving and interpreting the nation’s history and material culture in the context of its multicultural origins.” This allowed the government a clear focus to present

22 Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, http//www.mita.gov.sg. 23 Annual Report 2000/2001. (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2002), 3, accessed 2001. 24 George Yeo, “Speech at the opening of the Gems of Chinese Art exhibition,” January 30, 1992, Singapore Government Press Release, National Archives Library Release No: 34/Jan 03- 1/92/01/30. 24 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 50.

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Singapore’s social history though carefully constructed nation-building narratives. In 1987, the St Joseph’s Institution was repurposed into the Singapore Art Museum, opening in 1996. Its mission was to: “preserve and present the art histories and contemporary art practices of Singapore and the Southeast Asia region so as to facilitate visual art education, exchange, research and development.” 25 SAM aimed to help Singapore become a more gracious and cultured society, which the then Prime Minister, Goh Chock Tong, spelt out as necessary in his major policy directive Singapore: The Next Lap.26

As a direct result of Brigadier-General Yeo’s decision, in 1997 the first wing of the newly established Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) was opened in the old Tao Nan building, previously a Chinese dialect school. ACM was tasked to present the cultures and civilisations of Asia, to promote awareness and appreciation of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans.27 ACM’s second and much larger flagship wing was opened in 2003 at Empress Place, an old colonial building historically housing government offices.28 The ACM’s mission was established with the belief that for a multi-ethnic society like Singapore to thrive, citizens needed to be more strongly connected to their own origins and cultures, as well as having greater awareness of the origins and cultures of the other ethnic groups.29 The three museums form a triumvirate addressing different but complementary aspects of Singapore heritage. They work together to present Singapore’s cultural capital in a manner that has great resonance with the work of anthropologist Dr Flora E. S. Kaplan – recognising that, in the developing world, collections and displays are intended to unite a populace, to reduce conflict and to ensure political stability and continuity.30 SHM seeks to reinforce national identity through the heroic accounts of the PAP and nation-building. ACM further attempts to develop national identity by establishing clear links between government supported “Asian values” through awareness and appreciation of Singaporeans’ ancestral cultures. SAM positions Singapore as the hub of Southeast Asian art and a credible and sophisticated player in the global network of art and culture.

In an interview, the Chairman of the National Heritage Board and Singapore’s Cultural Ambassador-At-Large, Professor Tommy Koh, expressed a desire to take advantage of the universal benefits of culture, understanding that it can contribute to enriching the quality of

25 Singapore: National Heritage Board, Annual Report 2000/2001, 2002, 22-24 26 Singapore Government, Singapore: The Next Lap. 27 Annual Report 2000/2001 (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2002), 26. 28 The Asian Civilisations Museum’s website, http://www.acm.org.sg/themuseum/historybldg.asp. 29 Vasil, Asianising Singapore, 62. 30 Kaplan, Museums and the Making of "Ourselves", 2.

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Singaporeans’ lives, while openly acknowledging, without irony, the primacy of the economy. In the same interview, Tommy Koh suggested that in the Singapore context “being good at your job” must come before “being culture loving.” One of the reasons identified for the speedy development of Singapore’s economy, aside from political stability, was interconnectedness or homology between different government agencies.31 As the EDB looked for new and creative ways to improve the economy, it acknowledged that creating cultural vibrancy was important in order to attract foreign talent, boost the tourism sector, prevent a brain drain by enhancing “home” for Singaporeans, and most importantly, building an environment that was conducive to creativity – especially useful for building a workforce to support Singapore’s new emerging “Knowledge Based Economy.”32 Singapore’s fields of cultural production were now officially recognised as having the potential to support the ongoing growth of the nation’s economy. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, in his Singapore Day speech in 2001, made clear that a culturally vibrant city is needed to attract global creative talent. The government now made it unabashedly clear that cultural development was to become concomitant with economic development. Singapore’s leadership planned and managed the growth and development of its fields of cultural production in order to meet economic and national objectives. Indeed, they, like their counterparts in the business world, saw how “culture” could be used to help achieve economic goals and to create a sense of national cohesion. The state recognised that it needed to create a “home-grown” culture to mitigate the wholesale importation of foreign influences, and it needed to find “distinctive content” to inspire its creative industries. This opened the door for the Peranakan revival.33

Peranakan Cultural Revival

As the state was attempting to attract foreign capital, business leaders and the world’s best universities, the Peranakan culture began to resurface organically in Singapore, enjoying a revival of interest through its fashion, food, and festivals in the 1980s. Peranakan material objects became recognised as highly valued collectables, with prices soaring at Christies Auction house. A number of Peranakan theatre productions, such as Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill which is often played, addressed Peranakan culture and

31 Tommy Koh, interview with author, 2004. 32 “The Strategic Economic Plan: Towards a Developed Nation”, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Research Room, 1991, http://www.mti.gov.sg/ResearchRoom/Pages/The%20Strategic%20Economic%20Plan%20- %20Towards%20a%20Developed%20Nation%20(1991).aspx. 33 National Heritage Board, Renaissance City Plan III (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2008), 46.

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history and proved to be popular, not only with non-Peranakan Singaporeans, but with international audiences. This rising tide of interest in Peranakan culture was harnessed by the government in two ways. The first, a commercial approach, took place through the development of “,” set in Singapore’s busy and élite shopping district along . An old terrace house was restored and turned into a private museum, sporting a restaurant offering authentic Peranakan food and a shop selling Peranakan fashion. Young (mostly non-Peranakan) guides, dressed in appropriate costumes, played host to paying visitors. Additionally, the Singapore Tourist Board took an interest in Peranakan culture, both as a point of interest for visiting tourists and also as an identity for Singapore Airlines’ stewardesses or “Singapore Girls” whose famous uniform was adapted from the kebaya and sarong.34

The second government approach to Peranakan culture was through its museums. Responding to the fear that modern Singapore was not attractive to tourists because of its cultural depletion, the government “repackaged” the Peranakans within its museum precinct. As the sociologist John Clammer has noted, the Singapore government manages everything in such a close way that when it sees something develop organically it halts its development and subsumes it into a government directive. As a result of this tendency, grassroots culture disappears from the Singapore scene and is replaced almost entirely by either crass commercialism or an officially sponsored variety of governmentally condoned iterations of “high culture.” This is the typical Singaporean paradox: the more that is done to “officially” shore up minority cultures, the less they are likely to survive, as they are unable to grow and develop freely.35

Repackaging Peranakan Culture and the ACM

The ACM opened its first wing at Tao Nan in April 1997. In keeping with the ACM mission to address the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans, the building originally focused on collections from China – the Chinese being Singapore’s largest “official” racial grouping – with temporary exhibitions addressing the other major cultural groups within Singapore: the heritage of India, Southeast Asian and West Asia. However, when the “main” collection, including the Chinese material, moved to the much larger flagship building in the heart of Singapore’s business and tourist district at Empress Place, Tao Nan was

34 Patricia Ann Hardwick, “Neither Fish nor Fowl: Constructing Peranakan Identity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Singapore,” Folklore Forum 38, no. 1 (2008): 37. 35 Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965-1990, 263.

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positioned as a small boutique museum, focusing on the material culture of the Peranakans, a decision that was not without controversy. The Peranakans were not identified as an ancestral culture and there was no mention of them in any of the state’s policy directives or reports addressing the development of the museum sector. Not surprisingly, a small number of ACM Board members initially questioned the idea, concerned that, as the Peranakans were a minority group, it might be perceived that they were being privileged over other groups, significant given their pre-colonial political past.36 Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the ACM, argued that the Tao Nan had to focus on something that complemented, but did not replicate, the collections addressed within ACM’s flagship museum at Empress Place. Dr Kwok pointed out that significant Peranakan material already existed in the National Heritage Board’s collection and that there were opportunities to take advantage of other major private collections available for borrowing in the region. He also maintained that the hybrid Peranakan material culture was something “truly unique” and provided the ACM with a collection that had international currency and therefore could be “traded” with other museums for loans or travelling exhibitions.37

Kwok acknowledged that the Peranakans also had what he called a “subtext” in that they provided Singaporeans with an historical example of an ethnic and social interaction that created a fully integrated and eclectic culture. However, Kwok qualified this opinion as his personal view only, establishing early on a tension between an idealised narrative, an official narrative and reality. Many Singaporeans still remembered that the Peranakans were loyal to the colonial powers, and Singapore history recalls their reluctance to support the independence movement. Further, as they became an established élite during the colonial period, many Peranakans closed entry into their community: Peranakan girls married into Peranakan families, and only the “true blues” with a long family lineage could call themselves Peranakan. According to Assistant Curator D, they firmly believed they were a better class of Chinese than those from the mainland.38 However, despite reservations it was pragmatically advantageous to showcase the Peranakan collection. The distinctive material culture itself provided such an undeniable case and in the end it was enough to justify the decision to showcase it in its own dedicated museum and to overlook the Peranakans’ unfortunate history during independence. Ultimately, exhibiting Peranakan culture in the Tao Nan wing of the Asian Civilisations Museum became the “common

36 Assistant Curator A, interview with author, 2003. 37 Dr Kenson Kwok, interview with author, 2003. 38 Assistant Curator D, interview by author, 2009.

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sense” choice. Summing up the compelling case for the Peranakan collection to be presented at the ACM, Tommy Koh, Chairman of the National Heritage Board in 2004, stated during an interview: “I hope Singapore will have a dedicated Peranakan museum because it’s a living culture, it is something unique in this part of the world and as I say, it can bring many peoples together.”39 Koh made the point that as the Chairman of the National Heritage Board it was ultimately his decision to support Dr Kwok’s initiative, while he could have stopped the Peranakan Museum if he did not think it was a good idea – instead he thought it was a unique opportunity for Singapore’s museum sector.

The Peranakan Legacy: 2000 to 2005

On December 7, 2000, the ACM opened The Peranakan Legacy. It occupied the second floor of the Tao Nan building and focused on the material culture of the Peranakan Chinese from the region. The ACM publicity stated: “on display are fine collections of Peranakan silver, porcelain and jewellery, and a re-creation of a monumental altar from the mansion of one of the wealthiest Peranakan families in Singapore.”40 The exhibition was divided into themed sections with a clear focus on the distinct forms of Peranakan material culture from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries - the Peranakans’ “golden age.” As discussed in detail in Chapter 6, The Peranakan Legacy began with an introductory gallery and, whilst this gallery explored the history and multiple theories behind the origins of the Peranakans, the real purpose was two-fold: firstly, to amplify the hybrid nature of the Peranakans and secondly, to position their vibrant material culture within a new canon of Southeast Asian art. Two portraits were used to support the notion that the Peranakans were the result of intermarriage between the Malay locals and Chinese traders. In addition, the traditional Pintu Pagar (outer gates) helped to symbolise the fusion of Malay, Chinese and European culture. Such symbolism was intended to demonstrate the potential of Peranakan material culture to act as a galvanising bridge, bringing together Singapore’s clearly differentiated racial groups and asserting their historical links to the region and the world.

The introductory gallery contained a small photograph of a Chitty Peranakan and a text panel underneath acknowledged that there were other Peranakans besides the Chinese. However, the text panel also made it clear that the exhibition would focus on Chinese Peranakan material culture from the region, the rationale being that, whilst the Peranakan

39 Tommy Koh, interview with author, 2004. 40 National Heritage Board, http://www.nhb.gov.sg/ACM/AboutACM/Overview.

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community encompassed a variety of sub-groups, it was the Chinese Peranakans who left the richest material legacy due to their wealth. The exhibition positioned the Peranakans as having a truly unique culture, something Singapore could claim as its own, unlike the Chinese, Indian and Islamic material cultures (Singapore’s “official” ancestral cultures) which originated from the “motherlands.”

The Museum’s curatorial team laid out the gallery as a series of themed displays addressing sireh sets, textiles, batiks, beaded goods, wedding furniture and attire, jewellery, an ancestral altar, silverware, and porcelain. Assistant Curator A explained that this was the first time that the museum had attempted to undertake a complete survey of the Peranakan material culture across the Straits Settlements. Assistant Curator A, who had been in charge of developing the Peranakan collection, had actively cultivated collectors who could provide material as loans to the museum. He made it clear that the rationale behind the thematic display was to elevate and establish the Peranakans within the canon of Southeast Asian art, and felt strongly that the art that emerged from the Peranakan community, with its technique and sophistication, was amongst the finest in the region.

The Peranakan Legacy presented a traditional connoisseur’s curatorial approach: a de- contextualised, object rich exhibition, beautifully presented in delicately lit display cases. Kwok, himself a connoisseur, described the approach to the exhibition as in keeping with ACM’s role as operating somewhere between an art gallery, an ethnographic institution and a history museum. The extensive text panels throughout all the galleries uniformly deconstructed the objects, clearly identifying the Chinese, Malay, Indian or European influences. The projected rationale behind this set of influences was that the Peranakans were wealthy enough to commission objects to their specific taste, and that their taste changed with the influences around them.41

Tony Bennett argues that, unlike modern history museums where objects are displayed with the aim of making their history present and visible, an aesthetic response renders the object’s past history invisible – including the people who made the object and their nationality, region or social group.42 Such an argument relates to The Peranakan Legacy. While opening with the promotional line “The Peranakan Legacy comes to life at the Asian Civilisations Museum,” the extensive text panels clearly suggested that this exhibition was

41 For example, just before the end of the Peranakan golden age in the 1930s, a high degree of colonial British influence was evident across all their material culture. 42 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 166.

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presenting a quaint culture from a bygone era. Additionally, there was no attempt to position the Peranakans in a contemporary light.43

As the discussion in chapter 6 indicates, a number of influences had a major impact on the aesthetics of The Peranakan Legacy as an exhibition: the pre-existing Peranakan exhibition at the SHM, the make-up of the curatorial team, the desire to showcase donor collections, and the short timeframe for research and scholarship prior to opening. The exhibition, Rumah Baba – Life in a Peranakan House, at the SHM – which featured a recreation of a house of the Babas, was mandated to address modern Singapore history when the National Museum of Singapore was split into three complementary but distinct institutions.44 The SHM had established a common practice of producing highly contextual displays addressing the social history of different groups within Singapore, and the ACM strove for a distinctly different approach for the installation of its new Peranakan exhibition. The curatorial team that created The Peranakan Legacy were all Chinese Singaporeans with the exception of one Eurasian and, whilst the team drew on Peranakan advisors, there was no Peranakan representation on staff. From interviews with the team, it became clear that this led to an easy uniformity in their approach, and there appears to have been a shared understanding of the positioning of the Peranakans within the exhibition. The desire to showcase as much of the donors’ collections as possible in The Peranakan Legacy was motivated by the wish to receive them as gifts for the future Peranakan Museum. This “showcasing” approach helped rationalise the need to organise objects into beautifully lit cabinets, where many objects could be easily viewed within a very limited space.

The lack of time available to access research and scholarship also led the curators to take an object-centric approach to the exhibition. Assistant Curator A described how the Peranakan collection had to be speedily placed into galleries left empty by the removal of the Chinese collection, which was being readied for the new museum at Empress Place. Additionally, Assistant Curator C pointed out that the exhibition was always going to be a precursor to a much larger display of Peranakan culture given that the whole of the Tao Nan building was eventually to be converted into the Peranakan Museum, so they knew it was only a temporary exhibition.

43 Asian Civilisations Museum, “Press Release: The Peranakan Legacy Comes to life at the Asian Civilisations Museum,” accessed April 3, 2000. http://www.museum.org.sg/ACM/pdf/press_archives/Press/20Releases%202000/Peranakan. 44 Singapore History Museum, Rumah Baba – Life in a Peranakan House, accessed February 2007, http://ecal.nhb.gov.sg/SHM/Exhibitions/PastExhibits/RumahBaba.htm.

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Other influences on the curatorial decision-making process included a limited budget (the exhibition designer was required to recycle cabinets in creative ways), and a squeamishness around the positioning of the Peranakans in Singapore’s history (the Senior Curator found their exclusivity and snobbishness offensive, and considered their material culture loud, unrefined and in keeping with a nouveau riche desire to display their wealth).

The net effect of these diverse factors culminated with The Peranakan Legacy focused on showcasing the material culture of the Peranakans as a new canon of Southeast Asian decorative arts, and perpetuated the doxa that the Peranakans were an élite antiquated community from Singapore’s past. That they were renowned exclusively for their unique material culture from the colonial period, firmly depoliticised their identity. In doing this, the ACM’s representation of Peranakans effectively obliterated the significant role the Peranakans played in Singapore’s colonial history as pioneers, and minimised any potential role they might play in the future of Singapore. The Peranakans, who had once had significant roles in the fields of politics and the economy, were placed firmly and safely in the field of culture with the clear aim of providing Singapore with its own unique cultural capital in the form of a newly established canon of Southeast Asian Art.

Despite initial concerns by a few Board members at the time, exit surveys indicated that The Peranakan Legacy had been a resounding success with no overt protest about the privileging of one minority group over others. Exit surveys made it clear that the Peranakan exhibition was a favourite with both tourists and locals, reinforcing the establishment of a Peranakan Museum. The Tao Nan building was closed in 2005 with a three-year period to develop the entire building into a dedicated Peranakan boutique museum.

Third Generation Leadership

In its on-going campaign to continually evolve into a stronger and more competitive global economy, Singapore changes at a fast rate. In August 2004, Singapore’s third generation of leadership came into power – Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the son of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Minister Mentor and first Prime Minister. Like Goh Chok Tong before him, he represented a change in direction for Singapore. Now was the time for Singapore to loosen up. Lee Hsien Loong signalled the new mood, encouraging the people in his inaugural address to: “feel free to express diverse views, pursue unconventional ideas, or simply to be different.” However, the old doxa did not suddenly disappear. The new Prime Minister also reminded Singaporeans that they needed to deepen

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their sense of common purpose and identity. Echoing his father’s many speeches in the troubled times of the 1960s, he warned Singaporeans that the new war on terrorism could strain racial and religious harmony both locally and in the region.45

Ironically, the idea that Singaporeans needed to “loosen up” came from the same central discourse within which all government initiatives originated. With their gaze firmly fixed on Singapore’s economic success, the nation’s leaders realised that making its citizens more competitive in the global market, greater flexibility and openness was crucial. External experts advised the government that a high achieving workforce had to feel free to operate creatively. Creativity was now seen as the key to unlocking Singapore’s full economic potential and it was finally acknowledged that creativity had been suppressed by societal restrictions. The language of government changed dramatically with this new emphasis, and employees were told they had to “dare to innovate.” 46 This meant that eight years after the ACM’s The Peranakan Legacy, the country was entering a new phase, led of course by economic imperatives, which would allow the Peranakan identity to be fully re-imagined. Now part of an official development plan – the Renaissance City Report III – the Peranakans were identified as “home grown… distinctive content,” and a collection of their material culture was housed in a dedicated state-funded museum.47

The Peranakan Museum: 2008 Visitors to the new museum were asked to “enter the world of the Peranakans”48 and discover that the Peranakan are a vibrant living culture. This repositioned the Peranakans significantly: eight years earlier the call had been to discover “who were the Peranakans … a unique culture forged between the Chinese, Malay and European worlds over 200 years ago.”49

As detailed in the previous chapter, the Peranakan Museum is made up of ten galleries, addressing the themes: Origins, Wedding, Nonya, Religion, Public Life, Food and Feasting and Conversations. Additionally the museum’s temporary exhibition galleries featured Junk to Jewels: The things the Peranakan valued, curated for the opening by Peranakan guest curator Peter Lee.

45 Lee Hsien Loong, inaugural speech, 2004. 46 Renaissance City Plan III, 21. 47 Ministry of Information, Trade and Industry, Singapore, imagi. accessed February 12, 2010. 48 Asian Civilisations Museum, The Peranakan Museum: Visitor Guide, (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2008). 49 Asian Civilisations Museum, The Peranakan Legacy, brochure, (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2000).

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The Origins gallery introduces the Peranakans as a community inclusive of Indians, Malay Chinese and Eurasians. The entire second floor of the Peranakan Museum features four semi-contextual galleries addressing the Chinese Peranakans. Whilst the museum states it wishes to present the Peranakans as a living culture, this display features material from the Peranakans’ golden age, firmly positioning them in the early twentieth century. The Religion gallery features a contemporary painting addressing the complexity of Peranakan belief systems, a genuine attempt by Assistant Curator E to pull the exhibition into the twenty-first century. The Food and Feasting galleries, like the Wedding gallery, is a highly contextual display, again situated in the early twentieth century, featuring the finest Peranakan Chinese material culture from that period. The narrative of these galleries speaks of the high level of economic capital the Peranakans amassed during their golden age. The final Public Life gallery is one of the smallest galleries, and addresses the lives and contributions of Peranakan individuals who were (and in some cases still are) significant in the nation-building of Singapore. It includes Kwa Geok Choo, the wife of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and mother to current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, as well as historical pioneers like Tun Tan Cheng Lock, President of the Malaya Chinese Association and Wee Kim Wee former President of Singapore, and social reformers such as Song Ong Siang and Lim Boon Keng. However, this gallery is possibly the least resolved, with objects and photos in some cases clumsily put together and text panels oddly placed around and in display cases.

The Conversations (exit) gallery brings the visitor back to the ideas addressed in the Origins introduction gallery, and takes another look at the identity of the contemporary Peranakans, and what it means to be Peranakan. Some of the Peranakans represented take an uncritical position, such as the Chitty Melaka Tanya Nair who states: “Are you Peranakan? You belong to us. Are you Singaporean? You belong to us!” At the other extreme Dr Suryadinata (Jawi Peranakan) states that the Peranakans are dying out “because we don’t all practice.” Some conversations are more philosophical, such as the comment from Dr Farish Nour (Malaysian Peranakan) “What race are you? There is only one race, the human race.” The Conversations gallery, like the Origins gallery, is inclusive of all Peranakans and brings the discourse on the Peranakans into a current framework. The dichotomy between the style, content and delivery of the Origins and Conversations, the Public Life gallery and the central displays sandwiched between them which focus on the Peranakans’ material culture from the height of Singapore’s colonial period, reflects the

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unresolved tensions still at play in positioning the Peranakan community within its own state-funded musuem.

Conclusion In keeping with Bourdieu’s position that case-based research has to begin with an understanding of the genesis of the object of study, this research has considered the context and historical establishment of Singapore as a nation and of its first public museum, built in 1887. This study argues that the role of state-funded museums in Singapore has been generatively reproduced from the nation’s colonial beginnings and put into the service of the state as required by Singapore’s changing circumstances over time. This research argues that the ACM, as part of a wider field of cultural production,50 has been encouraged to shape and use its cultural capital, in order to reinforce the state’s authoritarian, non-reflexive discourse on national identity and stability, and to support the state’s economic imperatives.51 This case study demonstrates how this doxic attitude, generated through the collective Singaporean habitus, has impacted Singapore’s field of cultural production through the ACM’s self-censored museological practices as manifested in the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy (which opened in 2000 and closed in 2005), followed by the exhibition within the current Peranakan Museum.52 By examining and analysing the representation of the Peranakans, this research has added to the body of knowledge by addressing the role national collections play in supporting state-sanctioned ideologies as they occur in a post-colonial context in Singapore. The following pages detail the main findings of this case-study.

Identity Both The Peranakan Legacy’s introductory gallery and the Peranakan Museum’s Origins gallery make clear that the exhibitions they preface will only feature Peranakan Chinese material, rather than a balanced investigation of the various other Peranakan communities from the Straits Settlements. Text panels in the Peranakan Museum acknowledge this bias

50 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (London: Polity Press, 1993), 37–39. Bourdieu refers to fields of cultural production as the contexts of discourses, institutions, values, rules and regulations that interrelate to produce and transform attitudes and practices. 51 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. R. Nice (London: Sage, 1990), 71. Bourdieu refers to cultural capital as including material things as well as culturally significant capital such as prestige, status and authority. 52 Bourdieu, Outline of Theory of Practice, 3. For Bourdieu, the doxic attitude is a specific community’s adoption of values and principles, generating a field that the community view as being innately sound and true.

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by asserting that the museum’s longer-term goal is to continue its research and build the collection with the curatorial aim of demonstrating the breadth of the label “Peranakan.” The Peranakan Museum attempts to provide the Peranakans with a more inclusive identity than that of The Peranakan Legacy by including contemporary portraits via large photos and video footage with as many ethnic configurations of Peranakans as possible.

The Deputy Director suggested, in an interview, that the Origins gallery was designed to encourage visitors to consider the constructed nature of personal identity. However, she excluded the political from this discussion, stating: “First of all, being Peranakan is not a political identity. It’s a social identity, and as you know, all of us negotiate our identities. We all play different roles!”53 So the transition from The Peranakan Legacy to the Peranakan Museum demonstrates the repositioning of the Peranakans from simply a quaint antiquated community that developed a valuable aesthetic culture, to a bi-cultural or multicultural cultural community that continues to operate effectively in the region. The Deputy Director acknowledged that the Peranakan Museum is gradually shifting the focus on the Chinese Peranakans, presenting a community that is comfortable in several worlds: firstly at home in a Malay world, but also able to identify as Chinese when needed. Well educated, they were also English-speaking and had the ability to become influential brokers in the British colonial regime.

The Aesthetic Approach The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum are both aesthetically orientated. The Peranakan Legacy safely positioned the Peranakans’ material culture within the canon of Southeast Asian decorative arts. The collection on display was themed by material such as sireh-sets, batiks, furniture, silverware, jewellery, beadwork and porcelain, and the exhibition design was influenced by the desire to clearly distinguish the way the Peranakan material culture was presented from the Singapore History Museum’s highly contextual Rumah Baba display, and the need to showcase as much of the donors’ collections as possible. Later, with the closure of the Rumah Baba exhibition, the Peranakan Museum adopted a more contextual, ethnographic approach but its focus is still on the material culture of the Peranakans, with four of its eight themed galleries addressing the opulence of a traditional twelve-day wedding, with the remaining four galleries looking at Nonyas, Religion, Food and Feasting. The Peranakan Museum discards individual stories in favour of an object orientation, framed with the use of highly decorative contemporary graphic

53 Deputy Director, interview by author, 2009.

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design work (such as pink walls festooned with butterflies and swirls of beads on partition walls), creating a decorative and playful environment. Some of this decoration (like the caricature cartoons of Nonyas and Bibiks) was an extension of promotional materials developed by the marketing department in an effort to help promote the museum and make it seem more inviting.

Figure 27: The marketing department generated cartoons such as this mobile-wielding Nonya as part of the Peranakan Museum’s branding. Note the patterned wall.

The Director mandated that, in keeping with Singapore’s push to be a culturally vibrant city, the Peranakan Museum planned to reflect the Peranakans as an exciting, living culture, and it was this aim that prompted the exhibition designers to adopt a distinctive decorative style. The vibrant, patterned walls not only suggested that the Peranakan culture was dynamic and alive, but modeled how to appropriate the traditional icons to create something innovative and fashionable, exactly as had been proposed in the state’s Renaissance City Plan III policy in identifying the Peranakans as “distinctive content.”

The Social Politics of Exchanging Material Culture for Social Prestige Interviews that curators conducted with members of the Peranakan community suggest that the Peranakan community were delighted with the presentation of their material culture in the consecrated space of a state museum. Peter Lee, Peter Wee and Assistant Curator D, all acting as expert advisors at the ACM, were acutely aware of the dynamic exchange that occurred with the display of their antiquated cultural capital in a state-funded museum. All three were collectors and recognised that lenders specifically, and the Peranakan community more generally, were receiving both symbolic and economic capital in return for providing access to their material culture. This symbolic capital was very

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rapidly exchanged for economic capital as the price of Peranakan collectables jumped dramatically as a result of being showcased in the Peranakan Museum. However, the dynamic nature of the shifting value of Peranakan material ended in controversy when, in 2010, the National Heritage Board valued a donation of three hundred pieces of silverware and porcelain at S$15 million (providing the donor with a substantial tax deduction). On appeal, the items were subsequently re-valued at S$2 million and the donation withdrawn.54

Despite this controversy, the general increase in social capital was welcomed, and whilst many Peranakans acknowledged their loss of economic and political influence after independence, they felt that being identified as a Peranakan was no longer something to be ashamed of. The sad aftermath of the Peranakans’ failure to support Singapore’s struggle for independence was now fading, and in its place came the pride and prestige associated with being Peranakan. Both The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum strongly affirmed the wealth and, by association, the power the Peranakans once held. The curatorial team working on The Peranakan Legacy placed this power and wealth within Singapore’s colonial past, while the Peranakan Museum’s curatorial team attempts to perpetuate the Peranakan influence in Singapore’s future. However, the material culture on display within the Peranakan Museum speaks for itself, and its provenance dates back to the Peranakans’ “golden age” from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. As a result, while Kwok drew on contemporary media to present the Peranakans as a living culture, the evidence of their material culture, aside from a few token paintings, places them at the height of Singapore’s colonial period.

Curatorial Difference and Dissonance in the Peranakan Museum There is a distinctly dissonant note between the Peranakan Museum’s entry and exit points signalled respectively by the Origins and Conversations galleries and the contextual display of early twentieth century Peranakan material culture sandwiched between them. These different exhibition narratives come from the markedly different approaches and agendas within the curatorial team. With the introduction of a Peranakan curator on staff, the team working on the exhibition was no longer homogenous. Assistant Curator D brought with him a disposition affected by the bitterness and lack of resolution that had come with the downfall and dismissal of the Peranakans during independence. This curator had his community firmly in mind and resisted the curatorial team’s broader aim to

54 Deepika Shetty, “NHB’s evaluation process questioned,” April 16, 2010, accessed July 7, 2012, http://www.straitstimes.com/Singapore/Story/STIStory_515137.htm.

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position the Peranakans as a true mix of Southeast Asian cultures, bridging the distinctly differentiated races as presented within the ACM’s flagship at Empress Place. Rather Assistant Curator D worked towards re-positioning the Peranakans as the wealthy élite community powerful during the colonial period. As a “true blue” Peranakan, Assistant Curator D was able to dominate the presentation of Peranakan culture within the museum, as he was deemed to have the greatest personal cultural capital. The rest of the team worked hard to generate an inclusive narrative, which meant the Peranakan Museum was full of mixed messages with the entry and exit galleries including Peranakans of all racial and cultural types while the central exhibition displayed the opulence of Peranakan weddings and the exoticism of the rituals set firmly within the Peranakan golden age.

In addition, whilst the Origins and Conversations galleries highlight the inclusive hybrid nature of Peranakan-ness, the contextual displays do not deconstruct objects to reveal their various ethnic influences, as was the case with The Peranakan Legacy, but rather position the material as the Peranakans’ own regionally produced heritage. This reflects the influence of Assistant Curator D, whose aim was to authentically portray his community from a Peranakan perspective. He suggested that while other curators saw Malay, Chinese, Indian or European influence, he saw “Peranakan-ness.” He made it clear, in interviews, this was his community’s culture and that he placed the community first in interpreting their material in the museum.

Assistant Curator D embodies the lived experience of growing up as a Peranakan in Singapore when those who were labelled Peranakan were sometimes treated with contempt. For example, he experienced the frustration of having to learn Mandarin instead of his own Baba Malay, and was warned by his mother never to speak Baba Malay in public for fear of ridicule. Today Assistant Curator D represents one of approximately three hundred people in Singapore who still live in a traditional Peranakan home, having grown up in an extended family with a matriarchal grandmother who insisted on the family acknowledging the now outdated rituals and practices of the Peranakans. Even though he was aware of the outcomes desired by the Director and Deputy Director for the museum, Assistant Curator D expressed in a 2008 interview that he had a strong desire to focus on the golden days of the Peranakans and present “his community” with the most accurate contextual display possible, in order to make them proud.55 What can be concluded here is that Assistant Curator D brought into the curatorial process, via his habitus, the embodied

55 Assistant Curator D, interview with author, 2009.

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manifestation of the Peranakan community’s lack of closure regarding the treatment dealt out to them during and after independence.

The universalising effect of the highly patterned exhibition design and anonymous authoritarian text panels rendered the curatorial team’s discordant voices or “speech acts” neutral.56 Only the dramatic shift in content signals the different interpretations and underlying narratives. Ironically, the cause of the dissonance that emerges from Assistant Curator D’s approach is revealed in some of the quotations linked with the Peranakan portraits and in some of the video interviews, which make clear that they have not yet resolved the loss of economic, political and social identity suffered in the post-war era. Largely gone are identities built on high economic and political capital, replaced with a new and yet to be fully determined identity based on a re-emerging symbolic cultural capital, or on the prestige associated with being Peranakan. With the Singapore government acknowledging the need to assert and display its own distinctive culture in a globalised, tourist driven economy, the Peranakans find themselves once again valued.

This lack of resolution about the representation of the Peranakan identity is also played out in the temporary exhibition Junk to Jewels on show at the opening of the Peranakan Museum. Peranakan guest curator, Peter Lee, mentioned that many items were not made available because of the deep sense of loss and resentment that their Peranakan owners still felt over the treatment of their community at the hands of the state. Additionally Lee, as guest curator and active member of the Peranakan Association, hoped to address what he saw as an imbalance in the Peranakan Museum’s focus on the community’s high value material culture by using everyday objects and ephemera, such as diaries and letters, which were only of importance to individual Peranakans.

Lee also raised the issue of what makes an object Peranakan, questioning whether, simply because a Peranakan commissioned or bought an object in the 1920s, it should be deemed Peranakan. He argued that this logic could have been extended to motor vehicles. He noted that the Peranakans liked to buy European cars in their heyday, but these were never seen as being Peranakan. This is a much debated but still unresolved issue. Reflecting the community’s lack of homogeneity, Lee was not impressed with Assistant Curator D’s interpretation of the community, suggesting that he had once again reinforced the stereotypical cultural markers attributed to the Peranakans, through an elaborate show of wealth and exotic rituals in the contextual displays. Lee felt that this reflected Assistant

56 Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 181.

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Curators D’s cultural transmission from his matriarchal grandmother and he commented that the Peranakan community represented more than sets of porcelain bowls and antiquated rituals.57

Peter Lee also curated the contextual exhibition Rumah Baba that was displayed within the Singapore History Museum (1996 to 2003). At the time he curated Junk to Jewellery for the Peranakan Museum, Lee also took a lead curatorial role with Singapore’s new Baba House (2008), a fully restored Peranakan house museum, gifted to the National University of Singapore to promote research into Peranakan culture and history.58 Lee was a recognised historian of Peranakan culture within the field and brought to the ACM a high level of validated scholarly cultural capital, in contrast to Assistant Curator D whose cultural capital lay firmly within his lived experience as a “true blue Peranakan.” This dichotomy created tensions as the two Peranakans struggled within the field of the ACM to claim the stakes on offer – in this case the cultural authority to speak on behalf of the Peranakan community.

Assistant Curator D was well aware of creating tension among the curatorial team. He suggested that the ambition of the team to include the material culture of other Peranakan communities within the displays was “the white elephant in the room,” and stood by his belief that this would make the other Peranakan communities look like “poor cousins.”59

A Museum about a Community, not a Community Museum The Museum’s Director, Kenson Kwok, made it clear that the Peranakan Museum was a museum about a community rather than a community museum, showing that the intent was not to single out the Peranakan community and celebrate their glory days but to present to Singaporeans and the world a unique cultural heritage that exemplifies what a cosmopolitan contemporary Asian community might look like. According to Kwok, whilst the Peranakans were remembered by a display of objects representing a bygone lifestyle focusing on food and exotic rituals, it was their ability to communicate and to adapt to both Asian and colonial trading worlds that defined them. For example, Lee Kuan Yew and a number of his key officers (Deputy Minister Dr Toh Chin Chye, Minister for Defence Dr Goh Keng Swee, and Minister of Finance Lim Kim San) used their Peranakan values and characteristics to succeed as Singapore’s new powerful élite whilst rejecting the ossified

57 Peter Lee, interview with author, 2009. 58 Baba House opened in September 2008, six months after the opening of the Peranakan Museum. 59 Assistant Curator D, interview with author, 2009.

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Peranakan associations. Lee embraced his Chineseness during the early days of his political campaign, learning dialects and concealing the English-speaking Baba “Harry Lee” of his childhood upbringing. However, Lee Kuan Yew still privileged a certain kind of “Chineseness: “one that was able to broach many worlds to create a rich network of influences, and one with an openness to create a multicultural world where English language combined with Chinese drive becomes a powerful asset for economic and political success in a globalised world.”60 It was this fusion of talents that was being symbolically harnessed under the newly emerging label of Peranakan.

Academics have long understood and debated the potential role of museums as spaces for new forms of governmental control. The issue of censorship is identified by Carol Duncan in her work Civilizing Rituals: “What we see and do not see in museums, and on what terms and by whose authority we do or do not see it, is closely linked to larger questions about who constitutes the community and who defines its identity.”61 The leaders who lived and governed through the racial and political riots of the 1950s and 1960s – men like Lee Kuan Yew – dominated the political scene in Singapore. Whilst Singapore, in the current climate of economic prosperity, appears to be a sophisticated cosmopolitan city- state, it takes nothing for granted, maintaining tight control over all its institutions. The government is concerned that ignorance, and the lack of a holistic sense of community within different racial and religious groups, could lead to civil unrest, resentment and a repeat of the riots that occurred during Singapore’s struggle towards independence. Lee Kuan Yew stated in 1996, that “it will be a grave mistake to believe that these dangerous primeval forces, driven by religious and racial feelings, cannot erupt again. If we ever forget this, we put our future at peril.”62

Self-Censorship It may come as a surprise to those residing outside of Singapore that the Singapore government does not need to directly intervene in curatorial decision-making at the ACM and the Peranakan Museum. Singapore’s long entrenched real and symbolic violence has created a civil service culture dominated by non-reflective self-censoring behaviour, and such behaviour prevails at the ACM and the Peranakan Museum, as elsewhere in Singapore. For over three generations the Singapore government, has successfully

60 Chew, The Peranakan Role in Singapore Education History, 114–115. 61 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 133-134. 62 Yew, Senior Minister, “Speech to the National University Students, ‘Our Past has Shaped our Present’”, (Singapore: Singapore Government, 1996).

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repackaged colonial structures to develop a collective Singaporean habitus which is acquiescent and instinctively stays within the boundaries of acceptable practice, while understanding of the commonsense logic of “the way things are,” and content to receive the bounty of Singapore’s continuing economic success. This is clearly reflected in the curatorial practice of Singapore’s national museums. Even the most vocal Assistant Curator D stayed well away from any controversy or from openly challenging displays. Where he disagreed with certain state-driven narratives, his resistance was passive, carefully avoiding the disclosure of the multiple racial influences within the Peranakan material culture that would send a state sanctioned message of exclusivity, and preferring to stay within his family’s élitist paradigm.

Explaining, in part, the lack of direct state intervention, the Chairman of the NHB, Tommy Koh, stated that museums in Singapore were not important enough to be thought of directly by the government, implying that the ACM has significant autonomy and that curatorial practice was free from direct interference.63 Confirming this, both the Director of ACM, Dr Kwok, and the Senior Curator of The Peranakan Legacy exhibition have clearly stated that they have never experienced any direct government intervention. However, where rewards are clearly related to political conformity and dissent strongly discouraged by the dominant political field operating in Singapore’s social spaces, it is in any individual’s interests to “to toe the party line” as Assistant Curator B suggested.64 As a new member of the team, and just back from the UK, Assistant Curator C believed that while working on The Peranakan Legacy exhibitions no one had time to reflect on “woolly” issues such as national identity. As she expressed the situation: “We simply came up with the most effective story line given the collection being addressed.”65 Clammer suggested that in Singapore “the present state of things and scale of values is taken for granted as ‘natural’ and it is terribly difficult for most people to conceive of a society that might be (and indeed could be) organized on very different principles.”66 With censorship reinforced by both real and symbolic violence, and fear of state reprisal a genuine issue within Singapore society, museologically the curatorial teams avoid narratives that showcase a range of potentially conflicting perspectives for fear of creating real debate or controversy. The national logic, developed through government rhetoric, is that this could lead to social unrest and to a

63 Professor Tommy Koh, Chairman of the National Heritage Board, interview with author, January 28, 2004. 64 Assistant Curator B, interview with author, 2003. 65 Assistant Curator C, interview with author, 2003. 66 Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965-1990, 263.

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repeat of racial riots, resulting in economic ruin. The government, operating as an overarching field of power, dominates all the fields within Singapore’s landscape. Agents within the cultural fields of Singapore, such as curators, struggle for the resources at stake within that field. The government controls Singapore’s social spaces and attempts to organise the parameters of its citizens’ imagined realities. This means that not only does the Peranakan Museum become a conduit for the Singapore government’s attempts at developing “national identity,” but the museum also adopts an apolitical way of presenting the material culture of the Peranakans as a new Southeast Asian art form rather than presenting them as a once powerful minority group that acted as successful mediators for the colonial regime.

As Carol Duncan suggests: “To control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths.”67 Through heavy-handed tactics deployed under the guise of “national security,” and by creating a very real fear about liberty, the Singapore government tightly controls the everyday reality of agents’ lives. It is this symbolic violence that has enabled the government to create a doxa of “the way things are,” a significant achievement when one considers this has happened within fifty years. The successful inculcation of state-generated values renders certain behaviour and action as unthinkable. The Peranakan Legacy exhibition and the subsequent Peranakan Museum present an apolitical, safe and aesthetic experience, highlighting the richness of the Peranakan material culture to the delight of locals and tourist alike. Irrespective of whether the state wants its citizens to “loosen up,” Singapore has successfully created an environment where agents clearly understand the boundaries of acceptable practice.

The state-controlled media constantly remind citizens of the economic imperatives of stable government, and the National Security Act generates genuine fear for those who cross the clearly established boundaries. The banning of artists from exhibiting and performing their work without the required license and the crippling fines imposed on potential political opponents have created a pervasive culture of socialised fear and an unconscious day-to-day self-censorship. In terms of The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum in particular, this results in single perspective, safe exhibitions that support the government’s agenda on national identity and shared Asian values. Curators, rooted within the Singaporean habitus and employed as servants of the government, are

67 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 8.

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inculcated institutionally to be mindful of the importance of social cohesion and racial sensitivities.

The Shifting Position of the Museum in the Field Peranakan culture has been identified as part of Singapore’s unique cultural capital, and the museum, as an agency within MITA, has been instructed via the state policy to work with the Singapore Tourism Board “to unleash the economic potential of the arts and cultural sector.”68 The following diagrams demonstrate the position of The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum within Singapore’s social spaces, illustrating the position the two occupy as a sub-field within the ACM, dominated as it is within a hierarchy within the more dominant fields. In keeping with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools, each field contains its own logic and capital at stake. Through homologies between fields, this capital is put to use by the more dominant fields at play. The overarching field of power, which in Singapore’s case is consistent with the state, has the capacity to ultimately control the exchange rate of capital in each field. The Peranakans, now placed within a state-funded museum, have received symbolic capital from the state, which is put to use in supporting both state- sanctioned ideologies on Asian values and in assisting the achievement of economic imperatives. The clearest of these homologies is the pressure for the museum sector to work more closely with the more dominant and commercialised Singapore Tourism Board, where the Peranakan material culture provides much needed unique content to “sell” Singapore and to support Singapore’s “brand” overseas.

68 Economic Review Committee Singapore Government, “Singapore – A Global City for Arts and Culture Renaissance City 2.0”, in Creative Industries Development Strategy: Propelling Singapore's Creative Economy (Singapore: Economic Review Committee Singapore Government, 2002), 10–11.

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Figure 28: The Peranakan Legacy exhibition within the hierarchy of Singapore’s power structures.

Figure 29: The Peranakan Museum within the hierarchy of Singapore’s power structures.

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The finding of this thesis demonstrates that Singapore’s museums are part of a “dominant dominated” cultural field. Although the newly independent government gave the original Raffles Library and Museum a new name, it was a neglected national museum, and quickly became dusty, idle and struggled for funds and survival. However, once culture was identified as having a significant role to play in nation-building, museums began to help fulfil a range of state ambitions. As part of a larger cultural field, they now act as a voice for the state doxa and reflect the values of its leaders, being used, from the 1960s and 1970s, as a tool for nation-building. In the 1980s the cultural fields were seen as a means of creating ballast against undesirable Western influences and, from the 1990s, they were harnessed to Singapore’s all-embracing push to be a leader in the world economy. As a dominated institution, the Peranakan Museum is susceptible to the influences of more dominant fields such as those of the economy and politics. The ACM and the Peranakan Museum are “dominant” in the sense that they are official institutions with resources that enable them to speak with authority, yet they are “dominated” in that what is said and done by the ACM and the Peranakan Museum is framed from the predetermined “natural” objective structures provided by those more dominant fields.

Bourdieu makes it clear that the logic and related structures of a field are historically constituted and rendered invisible over time. The following diagram clarifies the way a consideration of the genesis of the broader historical context of the field allows the researcher to make connections and draw insights that might otherwise not be apparent by narrowly considering only the curatorial input and the artefacts of the exhibition. The following diagram summarises the collective history, unrecognised as such, that consciously and unconsciously impacts on and informs the day-to-day decisions made within the ACM, and which renders certain positions as natural, normal and commonsense.

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Figure 30: The Socio-Historical Genesis of the Asian Civilisations Museum

Theoretical Framework Bourdieu’s theoretical framework has provided the tools to allow for an effective non- teleological, relational mode of analysing this case study. Habitus, capital and field have worked as valuable relational analytical tools to explore the macro-level influences.69 Together with in-depth interviews, they expose the critical links between the micro day-to- day realities of the struggle at play within the field of the ACM and the macro level historical context of Singapore’s social spaces.

In keeping with a non-teleological approach, the Peranakan Museum did not originate from a state directive, but evolved through the organic resurgence of Peranakan culture culminating in the efforts of the National Museum of Singapore, the National University of Singapore and the ACM to showcase the Peranakans’ material culture. The ACM’s Director, Dr Kenson Kwok, was able to present the most compelling case to the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts to establish a Peranakan Museum and to begin with The Peranakan Legacy exhibition. As demonstrated within the Renaissance City Plan

69 Emirbayer and Johnson, “Bourdieu and organisational analysis,” 2008, retrieved from Springer Science + Business Media, December 6, 2012, http://www.springer.com.

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III report, once recognised and approved, the Peranakan material culture was subsumed into state imperatives such as providing original cultural content for the creative industries to work with.70

An analysis of The Peranakan Legacy demonstrated that without a Peranakan Curator on staff the curatorial team were able to establish a coherent, themed approach led by Assistant Curator A. He had the required cultural capital to support the establishment of the Peranakan collection within the ACM having worked closely with donors. This allowed him to lead and direct the curatorial team even though he had no official institutional power. The Assistant Curator, working within the logic of the ACM in the face of great time pressure to deliver the second and major wing of the ACM, was able to establish a themed aesthetic approach positioning the Peranakan material culture as a minor decorative art form within its own Southeast Asian canon. This pleased the donors and the Peranakan community, as it delivered a safe apolitical exhibition, by-passing the Peranakans’ problematic colonial history, and placing the community firmly in the past.

The Peranakan Museum, established only eight years later, was developed because the state now recognised the potential of the Peranakans to provide home-grown content for its creative industries – primarily the economically motivated Tourism Board. Reflecting the altered homologies of more dominant fields, the Peranakans were now repositioned within the museum as a dynamic living culture.

Active Fields in Play If the Peranakan community is considered a field in itself – with different agents trying to establish authority over what legitimates membership of this community and who can speak on its behalf – the differences between the Guest Curator Peter Lee and Assistant Curator D illustrate the core of the struggle between two different Peranakan outlooks. Assistant Curator D focuses on the cultural achievement of the Peranakans’ golden age, whilst Peter Lee assumes a more progressive outlook, wanting to reinstate the Peranakan pioneers within Singapore’s history while actively seeking out their current contribution and engagement with contemporary Singapore. The complex dialectic relationship within the ACM involved the museum’s agents, each with an individual habitus and diverse forms of capital, in combination with the influence of individuals representing other institutions, agencies and fields. All of these agents are involved in the struggle to control, through

70 National Heritage Board, Renaissance City Plan III, 46.

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curatorial practice, the legitimate representation of the ACM’s Peranakan collection – the key cultural capital at stake within this case study. Most significant in a Bourdieusian game, is the context within which the curatorial struggle occurs, operating within Singapore’s wider social spaces, which carry its own Singaporean collective social ethos, social spirit and social norms.71 The following diagram seeks to visualise this logic embedded within the Bourdieusian framework, linking the impacts of colonial history and other historical contextual effects to practices in the museum.

Figure 31: Bourdieu’s theoretical framework drawing on the relational tools habitus, capital and field

By considering the ACM as a “field,” this case study makes clear that it is animated by the relationships of the players and their investment or belief in the game at play within the field. The players bring to the game all the generative structures of their lived histories, which in turn, have a generative effect on the field in which they play. Thus the players link the macro structures, embedded within Singapore’s history with the micro level day-to-day

71 S. Ramesh, “Enormous problems if Singaporeans don’t procreate: Lee Kuan Yew,” Singapore News on line, August 11, 2012, accessed December 6, 2012.

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decision making, shaped by the particular field and the capital at play – in this case the ACM and the Peranakan collection.

Analysis of The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum as sub-fields of the ACM, demonstrate how greatly the field conditions can change within a brief period. Whilst the ACM field was formed as a direct result of careful planning by the state to address specific national issues (such as developing greater racial tolerance and respect through a deeper knowledge of Singapore’s ancestral cultures), The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum did not originate from state policies. Rather it was the power and vibrancy of the legacy of the Peranakans’ distinctive material culture that generated the compelling case to showcase objects first as an exhibition and then within a dedicated museum.

The curatorial teams for both The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum developed a logic of their own. Each player within the team brought his or her own habitus or schemes of perception, thought and action, which both affect and are affected by the game at play. The members of the curatorial team are both the products of their early durable disposition and the embodied history of other roles and positions they have previously played, which they bring to their role within the ACM. This means they hold various types of capital, which consist of technical knowledge, economic advantage, social networks or cultural knowledge. Some players were a “natural fit” (like Assistant Curator A within The Peranakan Legacy) and were highly successful, reaping all the rewards the field has to offer. (Assistant Curator A is now the Director of one of Singapore’s major cultural institutions.) Others struggled and clashed with the formal and informal rules of the game, such as the Peranakan Assistant Curator D, who left the ACM a few years after the Peranakan Museum opened.72

The repositioning of the Peranakans over the eight years from The Peranakan Legacy to the Peranakan Museum demonstrates how the various forms of capital at play in the ACM field work as a dynamic currency. The more dominant players, not necessarily those with the highest rank or official designated authority, and the more dominant fields that influence the ACM (such as the fields of the economy and politics), have the power to determine the “exchange rate” of the forms of capital of individuals and institutions.73 The value of any type of capital is never stable, but is in continual flux as the context within which it operates changes over time, and as players come and go and social spaces shift and

72 Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 127. 73 Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 264–5.

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evolve. This shifting value is also apparent for Peranakan material culture: the Peranakan collection shifted from being positioned as a minor hybrid Southeast Asian decorative art form, safely positioned within Singapore’s colonial past, to being represented as a dynamic living culture.

Under the auspices of the ACM, the Peranakan Museum’s potential to democratically portray the multiple histories of the Peranakan minority group has been, and continues to be, restricted by the social spaces from which it operates. As a state–funded museum, the ACM is encouraged to shape and use its cultural capital in order to reinforce the state’s authoritarian discourse on national identity and stability and to support the state’s economic imperatives. At the level of museum practice, this occurs through self-censorship and the inability to see alternative modes of representation, which are simply considered out of the question. It is for this reason that the Peranakans continued to be viewed primarily as an exotic wealthy community, remembered for their unique cultural artefacts positioned as a new form of Southeast Asian art.

Yet the Peranakans have proved to be significant players within Singapore. Today, although not officially recognised as a racial group, the Peranakans, like the museum that keeps the artefacts of their culture, have increasing cultural significance as the nation seeks to define itself in terms broader than the merely economic. Perhaps their present condition is evidence that, as Rudolph proposed, the Peranakans have always been good at adapting and that they are in the evolutionary process of redefining their culture into a new form. After all, Singapore’s current Prime Minister has declared himself Peranakan. As the Origins Gallery with its contemporary portraits suggests, the Peranakans have never disappeared or died out: they continue to adapt and operate, but now as Singaporeans.

The Peranakans have been re-imagined in the Peranakan Museum as it supports an ongoing nation-building exercise. As the Peranakan Museum encompasses elements of a history, an art and an ethnographic museum, it is free to interpret the Peranakan material collection in a myriad of ways, and now tentatively frames the Peranakans as an example of what a successful Singaporean multiracial citizens would be like. The Peranakans of the past could speak fluent Malay, could pass as Chinese, were English-educated, and were able to operate at many different levels within the Singapore community and the community of the region, adapting and changing as needed. Such adaptability is now what the state wishes for Singaporeans of the future. This means that, unlike the thinking behind the ACM’s general collection, which effectively reproduces the colonial doxa or orientalist

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understanding of race relations with its separate galleries presenting the Chinese, Malay and Indian ancestral cultures, the approach behind the Peranakan Museum is that the Peranakans have the potential to provide Singaporeans with a model for a multicultural Singaporean future, a bridge between the racial groups. As the banner at the Peranakan Museum first birthday celebrations stated: “We are one!”

In 2010, the international search for a new director for the ACM resulted in the appointment of Dr Alan Chong, a Yale graduate with a doctorate in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Chong grew up in Hawaii with its rich, mixed Chinese-Hawaiian community. As such he represents what is only hinted at in the representation of the Peranakans within the ACM: an individual of Chinese heritage who is truly cosmopolitan, comfortable living and working within many worlds at once, one who is educated and successful on the global stage. All that is required in Singapore to fit the Peranakans into this idealised framework is to suppress recollections of the perception of their transgression of loyalty during Singapore’s independence – a forgetting that is underway. Divorced from this historical mishap of collective behaviour, the Peranakans represent a community whose success comes from their ability to adapt and bridge different worlds. They are an English-speaking, trans-national, multicultural and globalised people born of Confucian values. And they are now a people once again seen as being ahead of their time, a community from whom Singaporeans can learn. After all, even Lee Kuan Yew’s wife, Kwa Geok Choo, said that it was “OK now” to connect Lee himself to the Peranakan label.

Choo’s endorsement symbolises the unspoken nature of decision-making in Singapore, a process by which, in the museum, curators combine second-guessing and self-censorship in an anxious dance to “get things right” for those in higher authority and more dominant in the social framework. A subtle and powerful element of Confucianism, this entrenched culture of the need for the constant upwards glance, was validated by the words of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s most powerful leader, in the 1988 National Day Rally, when he stated that “even from my sick bed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up.”74 Over the past sixty years Singaporeans have come to understand, accept and regenerate the implicit threats embedded in Lee’s words. The complicit behaviour with its upward glance has become so deeply entrenched in the Singaporean psyche that it is normalised in daily practice to make decisions with a view to

74 Peter H. Lim, ed., Chronicles of Singapore, 1959-2009: Fifty years of headline news, National Day Rally Sunday 14 August 1988, 219.

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making sure nothing “is going wrong” for those in power. For those working at the ACM over the period of the development of the representation of the Peranakan community, it has meant the overarching framework for curatorial decision-making has been an institutionalised avoidance of controversy and a deeply embedded unconscious self- censorship. The result is a museum bounded by the state’s imperatives, and the representation of a people that carefully avoid narratives that strays too close to the realms of power and politics.

The incremental changes that have occurred with the representation of the Peranakans over the past ten years, and the inevitable end of the Lee Kuan Yew era, open up the possibility for the Peranakans to come full circle in their social status. With Singapore’s leaders embracing the call to loosen up, the Peranakan Museum may yet realise its potential to take a lead in the region and address both the full spectrum of Peranakan narratives (from the Chitty to the Jawi Peranakans) and to embrace the Chinese Peranakans as a community with a significant social, political and cultural heritage – one that illuminates a path beyond the great colonially-constructed divide of racial doxology in Singapore.

This thesis has provided the first in-depth case study and critical examination of the positioning of the Peranakan community and their material culture, initially within the ACM’s exhibition The Peranakan Legacy from 2000 to 2006, and then within Singapore’s Peranakan Museum in 2008. What emerges is the evidence that – due to the constraints of the wider socio-cultural environment from which the ACM and its Peranakan curatorial teams operate – the ACM has been effectively prevented from realising its potential to democratically portray the multiple stories and contradictory perspectives that emerge from a genuine understanding of the Peranakan community and their material culture. As is made evident here, with the tension arising from the inclusion of a “true blue” Peranakan on the ACM’s curatorial team, The Peranakan Legacy and the Peranakan Museum were neither about the Peranakans nor indeed about how they might view themselves. Rather, these exhibitions reflect the state’s invisibly constructed and sanitised positioning of the Peranakans to meet the nation’s ever evolving need for political stability and economic security.

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Appendix

List of Interviews

Salleh Japar, Art Lecturer Lasalle-SIA, 1999, 45 minutes. Lim How Seng, Director of the Singapore History Museum, 2001, 35 minutes. Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, 2003, 75 minutes. Assistant Curator A, Southeast Asian Collection, Asian Civilisations Museum, 2003, 90 minutes. Senior Curator, Head of Southeast Asian Collection, 2003, 56 minutes. Assistant Curator B, Southeast Asian Collection, Asian Civilisations Museum, 2003, 56 minutes. Assistant Curator C, Southeast Asian Collection, Asian Civilisations Museum, 2003, 45 minutes. Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, 2004, 55 minutes. Professor Tommy Koh, Chairman of the National Heritage Board, Ambassador-at-large, 2004, 55 minutes. Dr. James Khoo, Chairman of the Asian Civilisations Museum Board, Member of the National Heritage Board, Neurosurgeon, 2004, 63 minutes. Peter Wee, Advisor to the Asian Civilisations Museum, Peranakan Antique Collector, 2004, 55 minutes. Assistant Curator E, Asian Civilisations Museum, April 2008. Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, 2008, 45 minutes. Dr Kenson Kwok, Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, 2009, 65 minutes. Deputy Director, Asian Civilisations Museum, 2009, 95 minutes. Assistant Curator D, Asian Civilisations Museum, 2009, 40 minutes. Peter Lee, Peranakan Guest Curator, Junk to Jewels, June 11, 2009. Mok Wei Wei, Peranakan Museum, Exhibition Layout, Managing Director W Architects Pte Ltd, interview by author, the Asian Civilisations Museum, June 10, 2009. Jean Wee, Peranakan, Education Officer, Singapore Art Museum, 100 minutes, 2004. Dr John Miksic, Member of the Asian Civilisations Museum Board, Academic, 2009, 55 minutes. Dr Farish Nour, Participant in the Conversations Gallery within the Peranakan Museum, Academic, 2009, 65 minutes. Patrick Gan, Peranakan Museum, Exhibition Design, Managing Director of Black Design, 2009, 50 min.

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Sample of Interview Questions

Given ACM’s mission statement “to explore and present the cultures of Asia, and to interpret the civilisations that created them, so as to promote awareness of the ancestral cultures of Singaporeans…”– what do you see as ACM’s core objectives as an educational institution?

NHB’s vision is “to make heritage an enriching part of everyone’s life” - what broad educational strategies do you think are necessary to achieve this aim in making ACM accessible to all Singaporeans? Is it really possible to please everyone all of the time? What do you think the Singaporean “heart-lander” really thinks about national museums?

How significant is ACM in helping to forge and reinforce Singapore’s national identity?

Do you think the NHB museums as a group have a join mission in reinforcing and helping to construct a governmentally condoned Singaporean notational identity – if so how?

How important are exhibitions featuring the Peranakan in promoting Singaporeans’ ancestral cultures? The Peranakan exhibition at Tao Nan really does highlight the material wealth of this cultural group – why was this curatorial approach taken? Why has this small cultural group received such a high profile in both Asian Civilisations Museum and Singapore History Museum?

Quoting from the article in Arts Asia, why did Minster Yeo believe ‘that for a multi- ethnic society like Singapore’s to thrive, citizens need to be more strongly connected to their own origins and culture, as well as have greater awareness of the origins and cultures of the other ethnic groups’?

What degree of autonomy do you have in deciding how to present the contents/storyline of the exhibitions and, consequently, how much autonomy to the curators have.

Are curators briefed on the museums principle aims in relation to the production of both permanent and temporary exhibitions or are they left to make the connections between ACM mission statements and their own museological practices and outcomes themselves?

Is there ever a discrepancy between the said aims of the museum and the curator’s own personal agendas and outlook? Are most curators self-regulating /censoring or do they need significant guidance in the form of external parties such as the board/ advisors etc…?

Does this drive to reinforce national identity affect the role of ACM as an educational institute – does it influence the way objects are presented? The text panels that a written and presented?

Within MITA and the NHB on what criteria are government funding distributed/shared between institutions?

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