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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Shangas, post: 11337464, member: 360&quot;]You&#039;re welcome. Some antiques are more distinctly Peranakan than others. For example, jewelry, porcelain, silverware, etc, can usually be identified as Peranakan from the style of decoration, or where and when it was made. Other pieces are less obvious.</p><p><br /></p><p>As a friend of mine once said: Sometimes it&#039;s not about whether a piece is &quot;Peranakan&quot; in the sense of whether it was manufactured by the Peranakan, or not, but rather, whether it was something known to be used by the Peranakan in daily life. </p><p><br /></p><p>Because a lot of the time, items used by the Peranakan were not manufactured by them - they were just the target market, and the main purchasers/users of such items. </p><p><br /></p><p>Pieces like porcelain and furniture, for example, were usually not made by the Peranakan, but were simply styles or types that were favoured by them, and used in their homes.</p><p><br /></p><p>Usually these styles are Chinese in influence (since, as I said, the vast majority of Peranakan are Chinese), taken from the south of China - the homeland of their ancestors.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is where the &quot;difficulty&quot; that I mentioned earlier, pops up:</p><p><br /></p><p>Not all &quot;Chinese&quot; things were used by the Peranakan. But at the same time, not all Peranakan used Chinese things (remember, there are other types of Peranakans!!). This is what makes identifying Peranakan stuff so challenging. Really it&#039;s a balance of probability.</p><p><br /></p><p>For example - Peranakan porcelain (a type known as &quot;nyonyaware&quot;) is very very distinctive, and you can usually spot it a mile away. It was a style used almost entirely by the Peranakan, and nobody else. It was manufactured cheaply in China, and shipped in-bulk to Malacca, Penang, and Singapore, and purchased literally by the crateful.</p><p><br /></p><p>But that&#039;s not to say that the Peranakan didn&#039;t use OTHER types of porcelain as well -- of course they did. BUT -- are these also to be classified as Peranakan? That&#039;s up to you to decide. A lot of people would probably say &#039;no&#039;, but I&#039;ve also known plenty of people who say &#039;yes&#039;, simply because it was used by the Peranakan, even if it wasn&#039;t of their known style.</p><p><br /></p><p>You can see how confusing it gets, can&#039;t you?</p><p><br /></p><p>Items of JEWELRY (silverware, goldware, accessories, etc -- like the belts) are more easily identified as Peranakan because these were almost always manufactured by the Peranakan themselves, to suit their own tastes. Again, these varied by region. A Siamese Peranakan belt will be different from a Singaporean, which will be different from a Javanese or Sumatran style belt. A belt made in Malacca in the 1900s will be different from one made in Jakarta in the 1930s, and so-on...[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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