Looking through the arch of a five-foot way is a glimpse of ceramic tiles on the walls as well as on the pavement. Emerald Hill, Singapore.
Pintu pagar and other doorways vary greatly in terms of wood and ornamentation in Singapore. From left: Blair Road; Emerald Hill; Emerald Hill; River Valley Road; Emerald Hill; Emerald Hill; Emerald Hill; Blair Road; Blair Road; Blair Road; Joo Chiat Road.
Imported cast-iron pieces are found in some Peranakan homes as column capitals and bases as well as ballustrades. From left: Tjong A Fie Mansion, Jalan Kesawan Square, Medan, Indonesia; Han Ancestral Hall, Surabaya, Indonesia; Emerald Hill, Singapore.
While a handful of Chinese-style manors were built in Singapore during the last half of the nineteenth century, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether Peranakan Chinese built many of them. This is because records that discuss descent focus on Chinese fathers to the exclusion of local mothers and rarely reveal the multiethnic character of marriages. Four mansions or Si da cuo were built by entrepreneurial immigrants with roots in the Chaozhou region of China: Tan Seng Poh, Seah Cheo Seah, Wee Ah Hood, and Tan Yeok Nee. Of these four, only Tan Seng Poh is heralded today as a Peranakan personality, but only the stately mansion of Tan Yeok Nee survives. The shipping magnate Goh Sin Koh, an immigrant from Fujian, built a fifth mansion. With its swallowtail ridgelines and red brick structure, Goh’s Fujian-style residence was probably designed and built by Chinese craftsmen, even though professional architects and draftsmen prepared drawings that had to be submitted for municipal approval. Tan Yeok Nee returned to China to live out his days in a mansion he also built there. When he died in 1902 at the age of 75 in China, his sons had all predeceased him, leaving eight grandsons to inherit his estate. It is unfortunate that we have neither photographs nor a surviving structure that would help us understand what Peranakan Tan Seng Poh’s da cuo or “mansion” looked like.
BUNGALOWS AND VILLAS
Bungalows and villas describe dwelling types introduced first to meet the needs of European colonialists in Asia, but in time were also adopted by non-Europeans. Over time, wealthy Peranakan Chinese and others adopted the bungalow form, especially as seaside residences, with a detached kitchen, nearby servants’ quarters, and a separate garage. Isabella Bird, the noted Victorian globe-trotter who visited Malacca in the late 1870s, caught glimpses of the rising prominence of Peranakan Chinese families and reflected on their lives shuttling between in-town terrace houses and their country bungalows, a lifestyle mirrored elsewhere in the Straits Settlements: “And it is not, as elsewhere, that they come, make money, and then return to settle in China, but they come here with their wives and families, buy or build these handsome houses, as well as large bungalows in the neighboring coco-groves, own most of the plantations up the country, and have obtained the finest site on the hill behind the town for their stately tombs. Every afternoon their carriages roll out into the country, conveying them to their substantial bungalows to smoke and gamble. They have fabulous riches in diamonds, pearls, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds. They love Malacca, and take a pride in beautifying it. They have fashioned their dwellings upon the model of those in Canton, but whereas cogent reasons compel the rich Chinaman at home to conceal the evidences of his wealth, he glories in displaying it under the security of British rule. The upper class of the Chinese merchants live in immense houses within walled gardens. The wives of all are secluded, and inhabit the back regions and have no share in the remarkably ‘good time’ which the men seem to have” (1883: 133).
Although the name “bungalow” is used today in Southeast Asia to describe quite elaborate suburban homes, even villas, those constructed in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century were comparatively unpretentious. Early single-storey bungalows were constructed of brick and wood and are noteworthy because of adaptations to the tropical climate, especially to increase ventilation: raising the structure above the ground on substantial piers, adding a projecting veranda, broad eaves overhangs, ventilation grilles in the walls, roller blinds made of reeds for shading, large windows and doors, as well as constructing rooms with lofty ceilings. These features mimic to some degree indigenous Malay building traditions, however with materials that are more substantial. Floor plans were usually symmetrical. Over time, less wood was used in the construction of bungalows as reinforced concrete gained dominance because of lesser costs.
Examples of both Peranakan Chinese bungalows and villas still stand in Malacca, Penang, and Singapore, as well as in Phuket in Thailand and Yangon in Myanmar, although most are gone. These five port towns were linked not only by business interests but also via bonds between temples and personal alliances that facilitated intermarriage between and among Peranakan families. The fact that Chinese carpenters and masons shuttled from port to port also ensured that fashions diffused widely. With their greater populations, larger ports like Singapore and Penang also provided shops that sourced high-quality furniture and porcelains from China, molded iron columns and fences from Scotland, encaustic floor tiles from England and Italy, as well as furniture and decorative objects from sources all around the world. Lee Kip Lin includes a comprehensive gallery of bungalows and villas in Singapore built over a century ago, which were lived in by both Peranakan Chinese and Westerners, that reveal the range of their eclecticism (1988: 143–225).
In some cases in Singapore, Peranakan Chinese merchants such as Seah Song Seah also maintained two residences, a terrace house in the city and a villa in the country, that expressed their multicultural lives. Whether lived in by Westerners or Asians, the floor plan and overall form of bungalows and villas were essentially the same. Peranakan Chinese and wealthy Chinese immigrants, however, marked their homes with distinctive Chinese elements similar to those found on shophouses and terrace houses. On the exterior, they often placed a jiho board with Chinese characters above the front door, hung couplets alongside the door, installed a carved and gilded pair of pintu pagar half-door panels, and sometimes even decorative moldings that evoked Chinese themes. Inside, a prominent space was also found for two altars, one for deities and one for ancestors, and Chinese-style furnishings. Not all Peranakan Chinese residences though had the full range of these Chinese elements. In addition, because many Peranakan Chinese businessmen also interacted with non-Chinese, they also furnished some rooms in a Western, generally Victorian or Edwardian, style that they also came to enjoy. Displaying books in foreign languages and hanging pictures of European scenes expressed their cosmopolitan tastes.
Peranakan Chinese Seah Song Seah, a gambier and pepper merchant, as with other successful businessmen, maintained two homes. On the left is the home he had built in town on River Valley Road, which has housed the Nanyang Sacred Union Temple since the 1930s, and on the right is his country bungalow on Thomson Road, which has been demolished. (Wright and Cartwright, 1908: 636.)
Chinese-style courtyard houses with a single-storey front hall and a parallel two-storey rear hall, which were linked to a pair of perpendicular wing buildings, were built by Chinese immigrants and Peranakan Chinese throughout Southeast Asia. Only rare photographs hint at their scale. Molenvliet Street, Batavia, today’s Jakarta, Indonesia. Photograph courtesy of KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.
Fine examples of early twentieth-century bungalows constructed in the East Coast area of Singapore can still be seen. Some of the finer bungalows that were along the shoreline had an enclosed area for swimming built into the sea as protection against shark attacks (Lee Kip Lee, 1995: 42). In addition, both Europeans and Peranakan Chinese built large detached villas—some veritable mansions based on modest bungalows—but others adapted the styles of villas that were then in vogue