Housing Ancestral Altars
Rumah Abu and Ancestral Shrines in Peranakan Homes Across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia

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The veneration of ancestors lay at the heart of social and spiritual life among the Peranakans of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. While this might seem to suggest a strict continuation of archaic Chinese tradition, the integration of ancestral shrines within domestic architecture in the port cities of island Southeast Asia over this period instigated dynamic adaptations and improvisations of this tradition. These varied responses reveal that Peranakan cultural life was not static and traditional, but in fact modern and global.

Join independent scholar Peter Lee as he explores how ancestral altars and the rumah abu (a hall or house with the family’s ancestral altar), illuminate the ways Peranakan communities adapted inherited traditions to the cosmopolitan world of Southeast Asia’s port cities.


About the speaker


Peter Lee is an independent art and heritage consultant, and the Founding Curator of the NUS Baba House – a historical house museum managed by the National University of Singapore. He has curated exhibitions related to Singapore and Southeast Asian material culture since 1998 at venues in Singapore and Japan. He is the curatorial advisor for Peacock Power: Beauty and Symbolism Across Cultures, now on view at the Peranakan Museum, the host of three seasons of Channel News Asia’s The Mark of Empire and manages a family collection of textiles and 19th-century photography.


About the moderator


Naomi Wang is Tun Tan Cheng Lock Curator of Peranakan Art at the Peranakan Museum and Senior Curator for Southeast Asia at the Asian Civilisations Museum. She developed the jewellery galleries at both museums and co-curated the exhibitions Port Cities: Multicultural Emporiums in Asia (2016), Raffles in Southeast Asia: Revisiting the Scholar and Statesman (2019), and Batik Nyonyas: Three Generations of Art and Entrepreneurship (2024). She holds an MA in Art History and Archaeology from SOAS University of London.


_{Image credit:
Ancestral altar at the Panglima Prang mansion of Tan Kim Seng (1806–1864), 1982, Singapore, photographed by Lee Chee Kheong. National Museum of Singapore, XXXX-15825.}


THIS TALK IS GENEROUSLY SPONSORED BY DALIO PHILANTHROPIES