Featured Antique? Chinese? Silver Asian belt. TYIA for any help

I had never even heard of the Peranakan before this

 

Hah!!

Yeah I'm not surprised. Most people haven't, either. Heck, it wasn't a term even in common usage until after WWII.

The Peranakan, or full-term - "Peranakan Cina" ("Per-ahn-akan Chee-Nah"), literally the "Local-Born Chinese", are the descendants of Chinese merchants and sailors who migrated to Southeast Asia from Southern China between the late 1400s/early 1500s, through to the 18th century.

They married local Malay and Indonesian women, and settled in Singapore, the Indonesian Islands, and the Malay Peninsula.

Their children, grandchildren, and all their descendants from then on, became known as the "Peranakan Cina", or historically, the "Straits-Chinese", or "Straits-Born Chinese", since they lived in and around the Straits of Malacca, Strait of Johore, Singapore Strait, Strait of Sunda, etc, etc.

A lot of Peranakan today will identify as either Peranakan OR Straits/Straits-Born Chinese, and will use the terms interchangeably.

Historically, they had about half a dozen different monikers.

Peranakan / Peranakan Cina.
Baba-Nyonya.
Straits/Straits-Born Chinese.
Royal Chinese.
King's Chinese.
British-Chinese.

These last three, were largely because most of the Peranakan lived in the "Straits Settlements", which were part of the British Empire. They saw themselves as British colonial subjects and citizens, and conducted and carried themselves accordingly.

My family on my father's side, are Peranakan Cina from Indonesia, Malacca and Singapore, going back centuries.

Here's a few images from my own collection. I have more stuff, but this is all I have in terms of easily-accessed photos at the moment...



The B/W photograph are my Peranakan-Chinese ancestors. My paternal grandmother is 2nd row, 3rd in on the right...and my dad's sitting on the floor right in front of her



My Peranakan silver bolster-plates (I FINALLY got around to framing these! Whatcha think, guys??)



Here are my Peranakan belts in various styles. Two of these (right down the bottom) are family heirlooms.

 

Very interesting, Shangas! I wasn't familiar with the term Peranakan before I joined Antiquers!

 

The Peranakan thing is why I’d tagged Shangas.

 

Most people have never heard the term before, which is hardly surprising. We're a very obscure subgroup. Even most Chinese will have no idea that we exist.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

 

I learn so much here. I had begun to think I was out of the loop or my education lacking when I first saw the term Peranakan. I am always happy to learn new things (as long as it's not imparted with the superior, arch look my kids give me as they explain something!) and I'm so glad to learn about the people in our far-reaching Antiquers community.

Thank you for enlightening me!

Linda

 

Finding reliable information about the Peranakan is very difficult because there's not much out there, partially because the Peranakan lived in such a small part of the world, mostly Java, Sumatra, Singapore and the Malay-Thai Peninsula.

Ethnically, we're Chinese. The Peranakan all have Chinese surnames - Lim, Chin, Chi, Cheong, Fu, etc etc. But we share very little with actual mainland Chinese.

The food, the clothing, the jewelry, crafts, art, architecture, etc, are all totally different.

There are some similarities, like cultural practices / customs, but that's about it.

Historically, at least, the Peranakan didn't even speak Chinese.

The Peranakan would speak their ancient dialects - Hokkien, or Cantonese (because their ancestors came from southern China where these dialects were born), they would speak English (my grandmother and her siblings were all English-educated), or they spoke a Patois/Creole language known as "Baba-Malay".

My grandmother could all of that and more. She was a freak of nature for having only five years' elementary school education back in the early 1920s. She could speak, read, and write English, Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien, Baba-Malay, and Tamil - fluently. I have no idea how the hell she managed it.

Yes there were similarities, but there were also lots of differences.

For example the Peranakan never did foot-binding.

They never grew-out their hair and braided queues.

They never wore those fancy silk robes. Those are all Mainland Chinese customs which the Peranakan never adopted, because they all left China CENTURIES before that stuff ever started, so it was never part of their upbringing.

Reliable information on Peranakan history, culture, antiques etc, used to be very hard to find - the culture is in SERIOUS danger of dying out completely. It's only been in the last few decades that people have been trying to preserve it. Nowadays there are museums, books, videos on YouTube, there's cultural associations and societies, but there used to be NOTHING, and people started panicking that it would all be lost and forgotten.

Back in 2005, there was even a historical TV drama produced about a wealthy Peranakan family in the 1930s. It's set in Malacca on the west coast of Malaysia. If anybody wants to look it up, it's called "The Little Nyonya".

It's a fascinating look into how Peranakan life was lived back in the early 20th century. It's how my ancestors would've grown up in the 1900s - 1940s. The show was a huge success, except for one thing:

All the actors speak Chinese.

NO Peranakan family in 1935 would speak Chinese. It just wasn't done. They spoke Malay, Hokkien, or Cantonese. Hell, if they had the cast speaking ENGLISH, that would've been more historically accurate than speaking Chinese, because a lot of Peranakan were English-educated by then, and spoke English fluently - remember, they were subjects of the British Empire, so speaking English was kind of important.