Baba House; Fort Canning Park

As I mentioned in my earlier post on the Singapore Botanic Gardens, I spent a part of the afternoon there and included it in my “morning” post today. Consequently, this “afternoon” post will be shorter than usual. In the remainder of the afternoon, I visited NUS Baba House and Fort Canning Park.

NUS Baba House

A Chinese Peranakan family lived there from, I think it was 1910 until the 1980s. In 2006 a large donation to the National University of Singapore allowed the university to acquire the house, restore, it and run it as part of its university museum to allow the public to see it as an example of a typical Singapore Peranakan house.

The Baba House is only open a few days a week. Today, Saturday, was one of only a couple of days that I could visit during my time in Singapore. Saturdays are dedicated to self-guided tours. Today is Saturday. On the other days, they run heritage tours through the house.

Oh, a warning. As I entered, I was told that I was allowed to take pictures of the front of Baba House, but not anywhere inside. So you’ll see only one picture of Baba House here.

The first room beyond the door is a small entry hall. In addition to fairly plain chairs and a small table, the room includes some very solid and heavy-looking chairs that are quite beautiful. They are made of intricately carved blackwood, with marble and mother-of-pearl inlays.

In this room, a docent gave a brief history of the house and then set us free to “explore Baba House on our own.”

The next room is the ancestral hall. It’s interesting in that an air wall carves out a large chunk of one side of the room, with no walls or windows between the room and the air well. When it rains, the rain falls directly on the slightly sunken tiled area at the base of the air well. There is a drain in the floor there that carries the water outside.

This room contains more of the chairs that were in the entry hall, along with straight-backed benches made of the same wood, but without decorations. The room also contains a long table made of lighter brown wood and an attractive silver (or maybe just silver-coloured) shrine to the ancestors sitting on a pedestal.

When I said “Set us free to explore on our own” I should say that there was only one other visitor in my timeslot, but another couple arrived later.

Many of the items in the ancestral hall had QR codes on or beside them to provide information about them. As I was trying to scan one of the QR codes, a different docent came up to me and asked if I’d like to hear more. I said yes and she spent quite a bit of time with me talking about the room, its features and functions, and about Peranakan culture in general.

One question I had after leaving the Peranakan Museum the other day was whether someone had to have a blend of all of the ancestral origins that can combine in a Peranakan or if it can be just two. The docent answered that question.

Typically there are just two national origins in a Peranakan. Usually (always?), one is Malay, normally the maternal line, and the other is one of the other origin countries in Asia or the Middle East that define a Peranakan. Consequently, there are different subsets of Peranakans, with Chinese Peranakans being the most common.

Behind the ancestral hall is a kitchen and some stairs to the upper levels. (There are three levels in total.)

Upper Floors of Baba House

On the second level of Baba House, I had to take off my shoes to go into the main rooms, which included a hallway and a couple of bedrooms. The hallway had more of the type of chairs that were downstairs, an old phonograph, and an old manual typewriter.

There was yet another docent there (the docents told me, but I have forgotten all of their names). By then, there were four visitors up there and the docent liked to talk. She gave us a long talk on the family that lived there, where they got their wealth, and the trials and tribulations of buying the house, fixing it up and adding a third floor to what started out as a two-storey house. She spoke for a long time, but it was interesting.

The master bedroom on this floor had two four-poster beds in it, a single and what looked like it was maybe a queen-size bed. One of the other visitors asked about it. The docent explained that Peranakan weddings lasted, I think it is, twelve days. During that time the husband and wife would sleep in the larger bed. But after that, the husband would sleep in the single bed and the wife and a child would sleep in the larger bed. Um, okay.

The third floor of Baba House contains some rooms that the museum used mainly to display artifacts. There was a display of some glass fragments that had been dug up. (They used to bury their garbage. The docent figured that they would break up the glass garbage so it wouldn’t take up as much space. Some carved wood fragments that had been irreparably damaged were also on display.

A table displayed a few pairs of wedding shoes decorated with thousands of tiny glass beads stitched by hand in attractive patterns.

The rooms also offered a couple of videos about the restoration of the house.

With all of that guiding provided, I don’t know why they list Saturdays as self-guided tours. I had someone guide me pretty well every step of the way through Baba House. Maybe more people typically visit on most Saturdays than did today, so they were able to give us more time. I don’t know.

My visit to Baba House made for an interest more than an hour and a half.

Fort Canning Park

You might remember that I said in yesterday afternoon’s post that I planned to visit Fort Canning Park but a deluge changed my mind then. It didn’t rain this afternoon so I went there after visiting Baba House.

My guidebook suggested that Fort Canning Park makes for a refuge from the bustle of Singapore. It’s somewhat right.

It’s on a hill, so visiting the park you quickly have to climb up and away from the bustle of the city. (When I said “climb,” I hope it didn’t sound like mountain climbing. There are some stairs and sloping paved paths.)

The park has a lot of trees, shrubs and flowers. At the top, there’s an area with a large lawn called Raffles Garden. Behind that is a nice-looking building called Raffles House.

Google Maps shows a large reservoir at the top of the hill. I decided to explore, but I didn’t get close to or even see the reservoir. I was confronted with a very stern-looking fence with two large side-by-side signs, that were repeated elsewhere on the fence. One of the signs said that it was a protected area and unauthorized people couldn’t enter. The other sign had a red background with white lettering and a white pictogram that displayed two characters. One had his hands up. The other was pointing a long gun at the stick figure that had its hands raised. I got the message and left Canning Park after that.

As to it being a refuge from the bustle of the city, yes and no. The trees and other vegetation were calming, but you could still hear the city from even the top of the hill. That was particularly true on one side of the hill where, just on the other side of a street from the park, what I think will be a skyscraper was being constructed. The construction noise was quite loud.

Peranakan Dinner

Having caught the Peranakan bug this trip. I decided to go to a Peranakan restaurant for dinner. I ordered a stewed chicken dish. It was very wonderfully seasoned, with a little spice and tang to it. The menu did list it as spicy and, as I said, there was some heat to it, but it was fairly mild. I quite enjoyed it.

When I ordered, the waitress asked me if I wanted rice with it. I said yes. It was rice that looked like no rice I’d ever seen before. About half, or maybe a little more, of the kernels were white, like normal white rice. The others were a very pronounced blue. It tasted like white rice.