The Peranakan Chinese Home. Ronald G. Knapp

      While early shophouses were rudimentary and generally lacked external ornamentation, over time they became increasingly elaborate and ostentatious as the form evolved. John Cameron described the “native part of the town” of Singapore in the middle of the nineteenth century as having “buildings … closely packed together and of uniform height and character. The style is a compromise between English and Chinese. The walls are of brick, plastered over, and the roofs are covered with tiles. The windows are of lattice woodwork, there being no glazing in this part of the world. Under the windows of many houses occupied by the Chinese are very chaste designs of flowers or birds in porcelain. The ridges of the roofs, too, and the eaves, are frequently similarly ornamented, and it is not an unusual thing to see a perfect little garden of flowers and vegetables in boxes and pots exposed on the tops of houses. Underneath run, for the entire length of the streets, the enclosed verandahs of which I spoke before” (1865: 59–60).

      Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the prototypical shophouse structure continued to evolve from its original form, a shop-cum-house. In time, some shophouses came to serve only as residences without any commercial function. British colonial ordinances in the Straits Settlements helped to standardize shophouses by mandating the use of fireproof materials and introducing the continuous veranda-like covered walk-way known as the five-foot way. Interior floor plans changed little over the years, even as widths grew broader and heights increased as reinforced concrete beams came to replace timbers in new construction. As this evolutionary sequence played out, styles changed, but only small numbers of new and larger commercial shophouses incorporating residences within them were built. Older shophouses that had met the needs of earlier generations of immigrants continued to be used, but now were often subdivided into cubicles that provided crowded sleeping space for ever-increasing numbers of poor Chinese immigrant laborers. Thus, instead of a family living behind and above an old shop, the residential space came to be packed with single men, each of whom was hopeful of pursuing the same get-rich optimism of earlier generations of immigrants.

      This demographic transition brought with it the movement of some established Peranakan and non-Peranakan Chinese families from downtown to more salubrious distant areas. Pure Chinese immigrants setting out to fulfill their own dreams often replaced those who moved. Meanwhile, as unsatisfactory and unhealthy overcrowding in Singapore’s Chinatown worsened, the colonial government began to address issues of water supply, refuse collection, and limited fresh air in the ram-shackle commercial core of the city. “An important innovation was the introduction of a backlanes scheme, the idea here being to open up a corridor between the densely packed terraces of back-to-back shophouses, thereby bringing to their occupants ‘the blessings of light and air’” (Davison, 2010: 120). With these improvements, shophouses reached a new level of functionality that substantially enhanced their intrinsic character as an adaptable space for work and living. Today, throughout Southeast Asia, as in China, shophouses continue to be a vital component of the commercial cores of towns and cities. Although few shophouses are today occupied by laboring Peranakan Chinese families, some old shophouses—and terrace houses as discussed below—have been converted into boutique hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, specialty shops, and townhouses that proclaim the vitality of a once-diminishing Peranakan heritage in those areas of towns with tourism potential.

      The doorways from the broad veranda into the residences, which are often left open during the day, are complemented by a perforated metal design above that draws air into and through the Han and Thalib residence, Pasuruan, Indonesia.

      A multiplicity of styles characterizes ventilation ports on the exterior walls of Peranakan and other Southeast Asian homes. From left: Padang, Indonesia; Penang, Malaysia; Emerald Hill, Singapore; Phuket, Thailand; Emerald Hill, Singapore; Syed Alwi Road, Singapore.

      TERRACE HOUSES

      As a truly versatile structural form, the shophouse archetype morphed relatively easily into what can be called a row house or townhouse, serving exclusively as a residence without any commercial purpose. In many areas of Southeast Asia, it is now common to call side-by-side structures whose roots are in the shophouse tradition, but that serve purely residential functions, terrace (or terraced) houses. This nomenclature conforms to long-standing usage in the United Kingdom and is the convention employed here. The fine book by Julian Davison titled Singapore Shophouse (2010) delineates well the elastic nature of the term “shophouse” and the full evolutionary scope of its many manifestations, including “terrace houses.” Curiously, well into the early decades of the twentieth century, the working drawings of architects in Singapore continued to include the generic designation “shophouse” to describe terrace residences even when such buildings no longer incorporated a “shop.” Thus, it is not surprising that many observers even today consider any narrow and long structure aligned along an urban street a “shophouse,” a lingering inexact and anachronistic term, especially when the building is exclusively a residence.

      With heightened immigration from China as the nineteenth century ended, as mentioned above, the core of Singapore’s Chinatown became overcrowded, congested, and unsanitary. Swapping convenience for improved quality of life, some prosperous Peranakan Chinese and pure Chinese merchants and entrepreneurs began to move to newly developing residential neighborhoods along Neil Road and Blair Road to the west, as well as River Valley Road to the north of the core of the original Chinatown. As still can be seen today, many of these terrace house residences have façades with Chinese-style ornamental patterns expressed in applied stucco reliefs and on decorative panels. A fine example of this form is the Wee family home, which was constructed along Neil Road in 1895 as one of a sequence of attached terrace dwellings. After a century’s occupancy over six generations by the Wee family, the residence was acquired and restored with a generous gift from the daughter of Tan Cheng Lock, Agnes Tan, to represent how a Peranakan Chinese family lived in the 1920s. Since opening in 2008 as the Baba House Museum, visitors are able to understand Peranakan home life in a comprehensive fashion that complements well the more formal exhibition of objects displayed in the galleries of the Peranakan Museum.

      Until the late nineteenth century, commercial shophouses had been constructed generally by Chinese craftsmen under the supervision of local Chinese and Indian contractors who replicated existing buildings with the assistance of readily available pattern books. In time, architects who were beginning to design rows of residential terrace houses and some commercial shophouses in Malacca, Penang, and Singapore, began to introduce European-inspired elements. With the addition of classical Grecian columns and pilasters as well as Georgian fanlights, according to Davison, some of the rows of shophouses “would not have looked out of place in either Cheltenham or Bath (two English spa towns celebrated for their fine Georgian architecture)” (2010: 103). While it is not always possible to uncover which of these homes were owned and occupied by Peranakan Chinese families since there were other Chinese and those of other nationalities who also resided in terrace homes, some have remained in Peranakan families for generations and thus have a clear patrimony.

      By the early years of the twentieth century, the once remote Emerald Hill area in Singapore, which had been a nutmeg plantation, was subdivided into building plots. Although most of the developers and builders of fashionable terrace houses in Emerald Hill were Straits-born Chinese whose ancestors came from the Chaozhou area in Guangdong province, wealthy Peranakan Chinese families came in time to outnumber other Straits-born Chinese owners there (Lee Kip Lin, 1984: 5–6). Joo Chiat and Katong in the eastern portions of the island, which until the 1920s and 1930s had been dominated by coconut plantations, also came to prominence as Peranakan Chinese who were seeking pleasant places to live built richly ornamented terrace houses and shop-houses there. Many of the new terrace residences incorporated a private forecourt or yard with gateposts that separated the residence from the roadway rather than having a linked five-foot way. Even as there continued a consistency in the traditional shophouse floor plan, which met the needs of shifting family circumstances, building plots of terrace houses came to vary in depth and width to meet the differing economic circumstances of families. While the earliest structures rarely exceeded two storeys because of the limitations