The Peranakan Chinese Home. Ronald G. Knapp
techniques, many began to be built to three and even four storeys as cement became the preferred building material. As the illustrations in this chapter reveal, external ornamentation varied considerably as they reflected whatever styles were in vogue at the time.
The second-storey bedroom has bars on the windows and wooden shutters that can be left open or closed according to the weather. Wee family residence, now Baba House Museum, Neil Road, Singapore.
The public face of any terrace house, even a shophouse is, of course, its façade, which can be viewed in isolation or as part of a continuous sequence of rhythmic elevations, incorporating mixed sets of architectural elements. As the twentieth century began, as has been described above, the architectural design elements on the exterior of both shophouses and terrace houses increasingly adopted aspects of European Classicism even as Chinese motifs also had a place. Gretchen Liu describes this trend as “freely plagiarising Western architectural motifs,” while also adopting Malay-style fretwork and floral ornamentation as well as symbolic embellishment derived from traditional Chinese motifs (1984: 21). European-style stucco ornamentation that included draping swags often complemented Peranakan Chinese glazed tile motifs of colorful birds and flowers as well as richly Chinese symbolic motifs, such as deer, dragons, and qilin, which will be discussed in the next chapter. Terrace houses occupied by Peranakan Chinese and other Chinese had an added marker of Chineseness because of the pronounced use of Chinese calligraphy. The ground floor exteriors of many, if not most, terrace houses clearly expressed their Chinese personality with inscribed Chinese characters representing allusive maxims, a horizontal signboard declaring the family’s ancestral hometown in China, as well as pintu pagar half-doors with carved panels, subjects that will be discussed in the next chapter.
With circular ventilation ports above the latticed windows, this view is of a richly ornamented façade with a dentilated cornice, stucco detailing, and generous use of patterned wall tiles. Emerald Hill, Singapore.
The mixing of European aesthetic traditions with Chinese and Malay patterns created an architectural idiom referred to as “Chinese Baroque.” An extravaganza of in-filled exterior ornamentation, this idiom is occasionally an incongruous combining of patterns, materials, and motifs, which is judged by some as more dissonant than aesthetically harmonious. Sometimes compositions on the façade were fanciful and flamboyant, with jostled elements such as Chinese friezes, pintu pagar half-doors, Palladian-style fanlights, arched French windows, ornate Corinthian and austere Doric columns, intricate Malay fretwork and ventilation grilles, egg and dart molding, extravagant cornices, tropical timber louvers, glazed English tiles, and fluted pilasters and columns, among many other elements.
The placement of several registers of colored glazed tiles on the walls below the ground floor windows in Singapore, Penang, and elsewhere was a reworking of a pattern employed by Peranakan Chinese families in Malacca. While in China and early on in Southeast Asia the exterior colors of urban structures were almost universally lime plaster that ages into a mottled white and muted earth tones, more vibrant hues in time began to emerge in the Straits Settlements, first with ochre, green, and indigo. By the 1950s, the full color spectrum of pastel hues and vibrant colors generally associated with Peranakan Chinese dinnerware and textiles became quite popular. Unlike in Singapore, the changes were less dramatic in Penang and Malacca as was also the case in the Dutch East Indies. This profusion of repeating handcrafted and imported details continued until the end of the First World War. After the war, according to Lee Kip Lin, the buildings began to “shed their Chinese elements and decorations” and “assumed a more ‘Western’ appearance” (1988: 127).
The pintu pagar half-door can be employed to provide a modicum of privacy to those inside when the double-leaved door is open. Blair Road, Singapore.
Constructed in the late 1920s, this residence of Johnson Tan has undergone significant restoration. Its wall tiles, pintu pagar, jiho board, and abundant calligraphy are hallmarks of Peranakan homes of the time. River Valley Road, Singapore.
Wherever they appeared, such eclectic design borrowings created a distinct vernacular aesthetic that has worn well over time in spite of having fallen out of fashion for nearly a half-century. In residential as well as commercial buildings in the late 1920s and 1930s, in Singapore especially, interest turned to Art Deco designs, followed by a wave of post-war functionalism. These architectural trends not only affected new construction but also were applied in the “modernization” and general updating of some old terrace houses throughout the island. Others that were abandoned became dilapidated and ripe for later demolition. In the 1970s, within a decade of the establishment of Singapore as a city-state, extensive areas of old buildings were summarily demolished in order to facilitate urban renewal. These comprehensive urban renewal efforts included the construction of high-density public housing estates, which were emerging to meet a critical shortage of adequate domiciles for the country’s population in a country where land is scarce.
Beginning in 1986, the prior overemphasis on urban development was altered in Singapore as planners began to look seriously at conserving the island’s dwindling multicultural built heritage. Successful projects in gazetted conservation areas subsequently included the concentration of Peranakan Chinese terrace houses in Emerald Hill, Joo Chiat/Katong, River Valley Road, and Blair Plain. In these areas, historic terrace houses and shophouse structures were sensitively renovated as residences to meet the needs of discriminating owners who came to value the legacy of Peranakan Chinese even if they themselves were not peranakan. Today, both Joo Chiat and Katong are well known for the large number of surviving terrace houses and shophouses, rows of which are celebrated for their pastel and bold colors as well as rococo-like façades that mesh many styles. In February 2011, Joo Chiat was named Singapore’s first Heritage Town in recognition of its enduring Peranakan Chinese culture.
While neither Malacca, Penang, nor Phuket experienced the same economic vitality that drove many of the stylistic changes in Singapore, each enjoyed a similar evolutionary trajectory in terms of both shophouses and terrace houses, but within a more limited geographic scope. In recent years in the historical and residential areas of these three towns, efforts have been made to arrest the decline of traditional trades in shophouses even as there has been encouragement of those services that will help build the infrastructure necessary for sustainable cultural tourism. This has been accompanied by a celebration of their Peranakan Chinese heritage that is inextricably tied to surviving shophouses and terrace houses, among other cultural markers. The residential and commercial cores of Malacca and Penang, which include many Peranakan Chinese shophouses and terrace houses, were included in the listing of these two historic towns as UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2008. In recent years, community leaders in Phuket, which also has substantial Peranakan Chinese architecture, have debated whether pursuing World Heritage status would be a positive or negative factor in the further development of tourism on the island.
Colorfully ornamented second-storey façades: From left: first two, Emerald Hill, Singapore; second two, Syed Alwi Road, Singapore.
These efforts at the restoration of old shophouses and terrace houses are in striking contrast to an alternative use that is proliferating in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. In towns throughout the coastal areas of these countries, structures that once were elegant terrace homes or serviceable shophouses have been transformed into “barns” or aviaries as breeding sites for dense colonies of swiftlets, small birds whose nests comprise layers of solidified saliva. Edible birds’ nests are a necessary ingredient in making bird’s nest soup, a delicacy appreciated by Chinese for centuries for its reputed therapeutic properties. While bird’s nest soup was once a culinary specialty enjoyed only by the very rich and the imperial family, the demand increased substantially in recent decades as China’s nouveau riche came to enjoy unparalleled