VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
I had plans to visit the Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum a while back, but I realized that without understanding the building’s and the street’s history, I wouldn’t truly appreciate what I was seeing on the inside. So, first, I did a deep dive into Heerenstraat, the street where this museum is located. I wanted to learn about who built these houses originally, how they were designed and engineered, and how they were modified and renovated by the Peranakan Chinese families who eventually bought them.
So, this isn’t just a look at fancy furniture. I was there for the architecture. These long, narrow “tunnel houses” were shaped by Dutch building codes, fire-prevention rules, and a tax system based purely on frontage width. The result? Houses that stretch nearly 60 meters back from the street, with clever open courtyards and air wells to deal with the tropical heat.
I walk the street first, show you the original simple Dutch houses that still survive, then step inside the museum (three properties combined into one) to see how a wealthy Peranakan Chinese family adapted them. I take a close look at the firewalls they had to cut through, the unusual layout forced by the lack of a rear entrance, the servants’ quarters, the wells, and the overall design that makes these buildings work in Melaka’s climate.
If you’ve ever walked Jonker Street or Heeren Street and wondered why the houses look the way they do, this video should help connect the dots.
Entrance was 25 ringgit. No separate local or foreigner price. Touch ’n Go accepted.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning and welcome back to Planet Doug in the historic city of Melaka, Malaysia. And it’s a Monday morning, a bit of a special day in a way because we’re coming up on a bunch of holidays. Tomorrow I believe is the birthday of the prophet Muhammad. And I think that’s a two-day holiday. So like a public holiday. A lot of businesses, everything is going to be closed. And then this weekend, August 31st, is Hari Merdeka, the independence day, national day here in Malaysia, celebrating when the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from the British Empire. So yeah, got a bunch of holidays coming up. We’re probably going to see a whole bunch of Malaysian flags everywhere. That tells you you’re leading up to Hari Merdeka. And I’m hoping the museum that I want to visit this morning is open. And that’s always a little bit of a touchy thing because Mondays museums often close. And now that we’re moving into a bunch of holidays, I don’t know for sure that this museum will be open or not. But that’s where I’m going right now. I’m down by the river, the Melaka River right over here. And where I’m going today is the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum, which is in fact a house that dates back to the 1800s that belonged to a wealthy Peranakan Chinese family. And it has a very interesting history and beautifully decorated on the inside, beautifully renovated. And the family has preserved it and kept it as a museum. Ah there are some of the flags I was talking about. Wherever you are in Malaysia right now, you are going to see hundreds of flags everywhere you go leading up to Hari Merdeka.
I had plans to go to this museum earlier, the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. I had plans to go there, but then I realized that even if I went into this house, saw all this beautiful furniture, and learned the history of the family, I wouldn’t really understand what I was looking at because I didn’t know the history of the street, of all of those houses in particular. So I took a step back and I did a deep dive into the history of the street itself because this museum is located on Heerenstraat which is the residential street downtown historic Melaka. You’ve got Jonker Street, Jonker Street, which is the commercial street set up by the Dutch for all businesses. And then running parallel to it, they set up Heerenstraat. And at one time it was called Millionaires Row when all the houses were bought up by wealthy Peranakan Chinese families who all well not all but a lot of them made their money from tin mining and rubber plantations. There’s a big boom in tin and rubber back in those days. And then the Peranakan Chinese families had all this money to spend and they started buying up the properties on Heerenstraat from the Dutch who were leaving at that time. And then they took these old Dutch houses and converted them into much more elaborate much more decorative Chinese homes. You could even call them mansions, I think. And the Baba and Nyonya Heritage House, this museum is probably yeah, easily the best preserved of these. So if you want to get a look into the lifestyle of the Peranakan Chinese, that’s where you go. And yeah, that’s where I’m heading right now. Right across the river from me there, that is the beginning of Heerenstraat right there.
And as I talked about in my deep dive video in the history of that street, it developed mainly because of I guess two main factors. One is that originally and historically all the buildings here in historic Melaka were made out of wood and thatch. So fire was a constant problem and fire was even a bigger problem because there was so much fighting going on in and around Melaka. People you know the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Acehnese, the Johor Sultanate, you know, the Malay sultanate, everybody was fighting over this city because it was such an important trading center. And with all that fighting and all the wooden houses, everything kept burning down all the time. And then when the Dutch defeated the Portuguese and took over Melaka back in 1641, over the next few decades, they started putting in place building codes. So telling people, don’t build with wood anymore. People had to build using bricks and the roof had to be made of terracotta clay tiles and they had to put firewalls in between each of the buildings and raise the firewall above the roof line. So the Dutch put in place all these building codes saying that they had to build with brick to prevent all of these fires. And that’s why you see all of these elaborate homes up and down Heerenstraat today and Jonker Street and the rest of Melaka.
The second main factor that led to the evolution of the architecture here in Melaka and on Heerenstraat in particular is that the Dutch taxed property based on the frontage. How wide was the property when it entered onto the street. So they measured how wide it was looking at it from the street and then they based their tax rate on that width. It had nothing to do with the square footage with the total area. So what they did, property owners, they would buy a very narrow plot to lower their tax rate, but then they would make the house very long and they created these 60 m long tunnel houses. So a very narrow front, but then as you can see a good example right here, the house would extend a long way to the back. So it would start here on the street. They would be taxed based on how wide the front of the house was, but then they could make the house as big as they wanted to going back back back back all the way to the back. So they ended up with a house that had quite a high square footage, a very big area, but a lower tax rate. So all of these residences up and down Heerenstraat were like what I’ve started calling tunnel houses. Long and narrow tunnel houses.
And because these were such long narrow structures, they had a big problem with heat and air because there were no windows. The houses were all abutted next to each other. So it’d be one house, a firewall, another house, a firewall, and they were long and skinny. So there were no openings along the side of the building where they could build windows. So in order to allow ventilation and heat to escape, they built the houses with a series of open courtyards. So as you follow the roof line, it goes up down and then there would be an opening in the roof, an air well I think you call them, leading down to an open courtyard. Then another section of the house leading to another air well and an open courtyard. And that’s how these buildings were designed for the tropic heat of Malaysia. If they didn’t have these open courtyards and stairwells, yeah, they would be baking basically in a tunnel with no openings. They would just be a sweltering humid cave essentially.
I’ve just arrived at the base of Heerenstraat and I’m talking about the design of the building so much because that’s what I’m mainly interested in when I go into the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. I don’t think I’ll be paying that much attention to the elaborate furniture and the decorations. That isn’t my main interest. Really why I want to visit this museum is so that I can get a look at the inside of one of these buildings. Most of them have been converted into hotels and other like antique shops, things like that. And it’s rare to be able to go inside an actual residence and see all of these architectural details in real life, how they were implemented inside the building. But right here, you can see the things that I’ve been talking about where the front of each one of these buildings is very narrow and yet it has this very narrow front from one wall to the next wall, but then it extends backwards a long long ways. And if you follow the roof line, you can predict where the courtyards are going to be. So the front of the house is going to be like a reception area for honored guests. That would be the reception area at the front. And then the roof line comes down and then you get a flat area. That’s where they have an airwell. So right there there would be an open courtyard in the middle. Then another set of rooms, then a courtyard, rooms and a courtyard until you get all the way to the back.
And one other point I want to mention right now quickly because this factors into the design of the house that we’re going to explore is that when these houses were built, this wasn’t land. This is all newly reclaimed land. So in fact, when you come here to the rear of the houses on Heerenstraat when they were built originally by the Dutch, this would have been water. So this is where the Melaka Strait started right here. So this would be the rear of the house right here. And then what you would have seen would have been water. So this would have been the Melaka Strait. And these houses would have had an opening. This is essentially their backyard. And they would have docks up on stilts and boats all here. So this would be the rear entrance of the house opening up onto the water. So again, here you can see just how narrow that building is when you look at it headon, but it’s actually very very long. So it’s actually surprisingly large on the inside.
Right here, you can start to get an idea of what I was talking about when it comes to the Dutch building codes for fire prevention. So here’s one plot and then between this plot and that one there’s a firewall between them. So of course if a fire starts here, it can’t spread to the next building. It’s blocked by this firewall. And you can see that the roof tiles are clay clay terracotta roof tiles. And the firewall itself extends above the roof line. So even if the timbers of the roof are on fire, it’s not going to carry over to the timbers of the next roof, like underneath the tiles, it’s still going to hit that firewall. So you see another firewall, another one, another one all the way down the street.
Trust me, all of these things that I’m talking about, they actually have significance for when we go into the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. That will help us to understand, hopefully help me understand what I’m looking at on the inside. And something else that’s quite important to understand is that these very large, very elaborate Peranakan Chinese homes, they aren’t the original structures here. The original buildings built by the Dutch were much more modest. And there’s one set here remaining that looks how it was originally as built by the Dutch. So, right across the road from me, that is number eight, Heerenstraat. And when the Dutch built these homes originally back in the 1600s and 1700s, this is what they would have looked like. Very plain, very simple, 1 and a half stories.
So, this is where all of these fancy buildings began. They would have had plots like this with a very simple Dutch structure on them. And you can see the firewall of course and you can see the terracotta roof tiles. But keep this image in mind when we walk down the street and take a look at what these buildings eventually became. I’m now standing right across the street from the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. And before I turn the GoPro around, I want you to picture that Dutch house, the one that I just showed you, have that image in your mind of what the Dutch originally built here and what the original houses would have looked like. And then when I turn the GoPro around, you’ll see what the Chinese Peranakan families turned them into. Are you ready? All right. So, there it is. So, you couldn’t possibly get something more different from that simple plain Dutch structure. Now, a much more much more elaborate, much more decorated, fully two-story structure, but you still see the original bare bones. For example, you can see that when this family built this house, they bought three separate plots. This is 48 Heerenstraat, 50 and 52. So they bought three properties and then combined them into one much larger house.
And if you think about that from the architecture, you realize that instantly poses some problems because they bought three plots to put them together, but every original house was separated by a thick firewall. But they want to combine them. So what they had to do on the interior was take the firewall separating the three different residences and cut holes through them, build archways, but these are all loadbearing walls. So in order to do that, they had to reinforce everything so that they could cut holes through the firewall and combine rooms together but still maintain, you know, the strength of the structure. And I have no idea how they did that. Maybe that’s something that we’re going to see when we go inside.
And there’s one other thing that I want to mention before we actually go inside. And this relates to what I said about how originally these houses behind me, these long tunnel houses, they all had a backyard, a back entrance opening up onto the water. And some of the buildings up and down Heerenstraat, they had a rear entrance opening onto an alleyway. Right. And that dictated how the buildings were designed. So the original Dutch structures and the ones on this side of the road, the front of the house would have the formal reception area for receiving guests basically the living room. And then the next section would be the family living area, the bedrooms and the living room for the family. And then way at the back of the house were the servants quarters, right? Because these were all wealthy families. They all had servants who lived in the house on the property. And the servants quarters were at the back of the house. And that’s where also all of the food and products going in and out of the house were delivered. Right? You have a delivery, go to the back entrance. You don’t go through the front door of a rich person’s house to deliver a sack of rice. No, you go to the rear entrance. That’s just how things work with rich families and their houses. But this property posed a unique problem. And to show you this problem, I’m going to switch over to Google Maps for a second because the problem is this house doesn’t have a rear entrance. It actually just abuts other houses. So, there’s no way into this building from the rear. And I’ll show you what I mean on Google Maps.
Okay. Let’s start here. This is regular Google maps showing the city of Melaka. This is the historic downtown core. And right here, of course, is the dropped pin for the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. And it’s right on Heerenstraat right here. And running parallel to it is Jonker Street right here. So, let’s get rid of the map pin for the museum and switch over to satellite view because that’s what is going to show us some interesting things about this building that the museum is in. So, it is located right here. You can see. Well, let’s get rid of the labels. I figured out recently that that’s something you can do. I did know that in the past, but I can click on this little button here and boom, all the labels are gone. It makes the map a lot easier to navigate as long as you know where you are. So anyway, these three buildings right here where my cursor is, these are the three buildings that were combined to make this one big house. So this is 48 Heerenstraat 50 Heerenstraat and then 52. They all face onto Heerenstraat right here. And then the building being a long tunnel building goes all the way back all the way back all the way back to here. And we can measure that. Measure the distance and from the very front of the house to approximately the back of the house you can see it comes to 56 m. So it is almost 60 m long from the front all the way to the back each one of these houses and then they’re combined together. And these white lines here, those of that that of course is the firewall between the different houses. And here you can see the open courtyards and the air well that I’ve been talking about. So you’ve got one set of rooms, then an open courtyard with an airwell, another set of rooms, and an open courtyard with an airwell. And then here as well, each one of the houses follows the same pattern. And then each one would normally have its own well on the inside as well, so that they can get they have their own supply of water. But the thing I wanted to point out that is unique, not entirely unique, but is special about the buildings that make up the Nyonya Heritage House Museum is that when you get to the back, they run into other buildings. So these buildings over here, they start on Jonker Street. Same thing, basically tunnel buildings. And this tunnel building goes all the way to the back and runs into the back of the buildings that make up this Baba Nyonya Heritage Museum. So essentially there is no rear entrance and I’ll explain why that’s important in a minute. If we move up a little bit to this part here, you can see that there’s an alleyway here. So these houses have a front entrance and then they also have a rear entrance. And if you look at these buildings on the other side of Heerenstraat, this is where I said the water used to be. This used to be the Melaka Strait right here. So, these tunnel houses had a front entrance here facing onto the street, but then the rear entrance opened up onto the water. So, there was another way to get into the building. You could go through the back entrance. So, what that meant is that they put the servants quarters at the back of the house. From the front of the house, the very first part would be the formal reception area for entertaining guests. That would be the formal entertaining part of the house. Then you get the family rooms where all the family members lived. And then at the very back you find the servants quarters, the living quarters for the servants and the kitchen. And because they had a back entrance, that’s where all the deliveries would come. Firewood and food, rice, water, anything being brought into the home, of course, would come in through the rear entrance through the servants quarters. It wouldn’t come in through the front of the house. But when we go to the Baba Nyonya Museum right here, there is no rear entrance. So what did they do about the servants? And that’s what makes this building special. It turns out the way they solved this problem was they bought three properties that are side by side. The first two, number 48 and number 50, these were the living quarters for the family. And the third house, the third residence that they bought, number 52, these made up the servants quarters. So they divided the house into three strips. The first and the second strips is where the family lived. And the third strip was the servants quarters. So this was the kitchen area back here, that open courtyard. And then when they had food deliveries, firewood deliveries, things like that, it had to come through the front of the house because there was no rear entrance. But instead of all of this firewood and things like that coming through the family’s living room, it came through the front door of the servants quarters. So all the deliveries came in through this strip and then would be carried back to the kitchen. So this was a much narrower part of the house. And it’s really quite fascinating because if you think about the family members entertaining guests at the front here, they’re all sitting around in the front ceremonial greeting and reception area. Well, the servants could bring food and drinks from the rear here from the kitchen, walk through the servants quarters hidden from the guests. So, this was all a hidden part of the house. And then when they got to here, there would be an opening and they could go through the opening, a little doorway into the main house, deliver the food and drinks, and then they can disappear back into the servants’s quarters, and then go back to the kitchen. So, that’s what I wanted to point out. And all of this becomes necessary because they don’t have a back entrance. And because they didn’t have a rear entrance for the servants and for deliveries, they had to design their house in such a way that the servants and deliveries could come through the front of the house. So they divided the house into long strips like that.
So, as I assume I just told you in that Google Maps satellite view segment, this house could not put the servants in rear quarters at the back of the house. They didn’t have a rear entrance for the servants for deliveries, things like that. And they solved that problem by dividing the house into thirds. So these two properties over here the wider ones 48 and 50 these are the family quarters and this last third the narrower one that is actually the servants entrance the delivery entrance and the servants residences. So the family lived over here in 2/3 of the house and the servants occupied that third of the house. And it’s really kind of cool when you think about it that the servants have their own sort of long tunnel house that they can go back to the kitchen, back to the street, back to the kitchen, and then as they go in and out of this long tunnel here, they could pop over to these rooms. So, a servant could go back to the kitchen, get the food or drinks for the family, walk up the servants quarters, then turn into these rooms, serve the family or the guests, pop back over to the servants’s quarters, and then go back to the kitchen again. And then all the food deliveries for the kitchen, firewood, anything being delivered would all go through the front of the house through the servants’s entrance. Yet from the front, as you can see, it looks every bit as elaborate as the main family portions.
I just thought of a couple more things I would talk about before I go inside because I don’t know how much I can talk out loud without bothering people. And one is maybe a lot of people are unfamiliar with the word Peranakan. I know it was a real mystery to me for a long time, but when you say Peranakan Chinese, that refers to a particular set of Chinese migrants who came to Malaysia a long time ago and they’ve been here long enough that they intermarried with local people and then Chinese traditions, cooking traditions, things like that kind of mixed and merged with local Malay traditions. And so Peranakan Chinese are distinct from more modern waves of Chinese migration. And Peranakan that word can apply to the Indian people that live here like the Peranakan Indian, the Chitty people. They also have their origins dating all the way back to the Melaka Sultanate. And the Peranakan Indian community also mixed more with the local Malay culture than modern migrants from India. So that’s essentially what Peranakan means. One last thing I wanted to mention before I go inside is that these houses of course were built by the Dutch. The streets, the orientation of them towards north, south, east, west, that was all done by the Dutch originally, not by the Chinese themselves. So when the Chinese Peranakan families purchased these homes and renovated them, they still had to follow principles of feng shui, but it was kind of hard to do because they didn’t build the house from its origins. So they had to adapt principles of feng shui to the house as it already stood. And I don’t know very much about feng shui but it’s like all about energy flow things like that. So for example, you have these doors facing out onto the street and then when you go inside the first thing you see is this screen and that screen prevents the you know chaotic energy from the street flowing into the home. So these screens that separate the room from the outside world is part of the feng shui principles as far as I understand them. And of course, it has a practical effect as well because it provides members of the family with privacy. They can open the front doors to let in air, but then people who are, you know, walking down the busy street, they can’t look right into their living room. Their view is blocked by this screen. So, yeah, last last thing I wanted to talk about. Let’s head inside.
Hello. Just one today. I think it’s 25 and the QR
local. You have received 25 ratings on Touch and Go. No shoes. You come and follow me. All right. Access to see guided tour. Okay. So, you can taking the pictures but not using the flashlight. Okay. So, Baba is me as a man. Nyonya is a ladies. They are already pictures. The father is from the China man. The mother is local Malay. So, the children Baba and Nyonya. Okay. So, now need to use your phone to scan this QR code to get a guide book. Okay. Okay. So this one is the Wi-Fi name and the password is here. The museum on the right there where you see the upstairs the shoes must take off. Then you’re going up. So turn down the same way and you wear your shoes back. The last is a kitchen. Okay. Opposite had a male toilet. But the exit is on the left here. It’s a gift shop. Okay. Okay. Enjoy your time. All right. Thank you very much.
So they have a QR code here. Scan it with your phone.
And they also have a Wi-Fi. I may end up using that cuz maybe inside mobile doesn’t work that well. So, let me switch to Wi-Fi. Okay. So, this takes you to their website. And down here at the bottom, this looks like the audio tour and they give you a brochure as well. From 1861, four generations of the family stayed in this house. In 1986, it was opened as a museum by one of the descendants, Baba Chan Kim. Welcome. My name is Melissa Chan and I am from the fifth generation of the Chan family. Today I’ll be taking you around the house and you will also hear some stories of what it was like when the family stayed in the house. I’m on the inside now and I’ve connected to the Wi-Fi and listen to the audio guide. I don’t know how far the audio guide extends. It was just like two and a half minutes giving you a brief introduction, but I think a lot of the information is about the family and you can get that from the website as well. So yeah, again what I’m interested in is the engineering and the architecture. So here we’re inside property 50, right? From that wall to that wall. A very narrow structure and the original house would have consisted only of this and then a long 60 m tunnel behind us. But then the family, the Chan family bought three properties side by side and combined them. But in order to do that, they had to get through the firewall, right? Because that thick brick firewall separated the houses. And here you can see one way that they did it. They built a square archway. They cut a hole through the firewall and then reinforced it, I assume, in various ways up above to create a strong arch, you know, that can support the rest of the building. So now they took this narrow entrance way here and then combined it with this other area beside it to make much much larger living quarters. Right. And there’s the screen blocking the negative energy from the street from flowing in. But yeah, you can see all of the elaborate furniture and furnishings all imported from China and all around the world in fact. And I’m not much of a furniture guy, so I don’t know the details of all of the, you know, ivory inlays and the artwork and the furniture, things like that. But I mean, you you don’t have to be an expert to appreciate, you know, the elaborate design and interior decor of this building. Look at that. It is amazing.
And interestingly, like I said, 48 and 50, these were combined to make the living quarters for the family. So, they cut holes through the firewall. But if you see that wall over there, that is still part of the property. But they left that firewall intact because on the other side of this wall, those are the servant quarters, all like running the full length of the house that was reserved for the household staff going all the way back to the kitchen. And another element that I was talking about a lot were the courtyards and the air wells. So you can see since this is such a long skinny building, they can’t put a window to the outside world on this side. They can’t put one on that side because all the buildings are touching each other. So you’ve got one room here, another room here. All the rooms can be sealed off with these doors. And then the next section here is the first airwell. And this is how they dealt with ventilation and heat. So it’s open to the outside world as you can see. And the way they were designed from up above is originally the water would be directed inside the building. So if it was raining, the water would come in through the air well and then fall down here into the courtyard. And you can see there’s a sunken area here to hold the rainwater and then it flows into the underground drainage ditches that head out to the street.
Yeah, very elaborate structure. Not just two stories, but two very, very high stories. You know, you can see just how high the roof is. That’s a kind of on the level of a mansion, right? And up there as well. One interesting thing that struck me as I was reading about the family history and the history of this house is I got the impression that the family didn’t actually live here for very long. The original man, you know, the patriarch of the family who built the house, who bought the three properties and then spent all the money to renovate, furnish and decorate the house. He lived here for his lifetime. I think he died at a very young age. He died at the age of 54. And he was a very prominent businessman. He had businesses around Malaysia. He bought property. He was involved in all the local Chinese clan associations and boards of directors of various companies. He was a very involved community man and he had all kinds of visitors to his house. He had one wife and I think three concubines so probably lots and lots of children. So it was a very active dynamic full family home at that time. But then when he passed away, his son inherited the estate. And according to what I read, his son didn’t really like the hustle and bustle of the city and he bought a house on the Melaka Strait like on the shoreline and he didn’t stay in this house and then from that point onward I think the family would return here for special occasions and for holidays. But I don’t know that it was fully occupied by like a big extended family again after the you know the original the man the patriarch who built built the home. But yeah I could be wrong about that but that is my impression. And the other thing that really jumps out at me is these houses, even though they were built by wealthy families, they were of course built at a time before electricity, you know, before modern conveniences. So, it’s electrified now. But you can see that all the wiring has to be it can’t be hidden. It’s all exposed and nailed to the concrete. And then the wires are nailed to the beams, you know, going down to the fans and to the lights. So, they really had to do a lot of alterations over the years to wire it for electricity, probably for plumbing and things like that.
I’ve tried scanning a whole bunch of these QR codes. I think you’re supposed to get a new audio recording with each one, but none of them have worked for me. So, a lot of the furniture like this is the like the workspace for the patriarch and it has a QR code would probably tell you about him, but my phone doesn’t work. It can’t register that QR code. Could be my phone. Could be the internet. I’m not sure. But yeah, here we are back in the air well in the courtyard. So, here, you know, the firewall is still intact. All the way across. And you can see that when they expanded to a second floor and maybe even a third floor, they had to build very elaborate staircases.
So, we’ve already moved quite a long distance from the front reception room to the second room to the first air well. And then you can see just how far back this goes. You might think this would be the end of the house, but in fact there’s a hallway here. And this long property continues so far towards the back. So now you go through this hallway into another airwell. And you can see just how open it is back here. They cut through the firewall here. Again built a reinforced archway and I was hoping to see this. They have wells inside these homes as well so that they have their own water supply. There might be as many as three wells in this property because they combined three properties into one and each of the original properties might have had its own well. This is the first one that I came across. Yeah, still has water down at the bottom.
And there’s another one of the air wells. Yeah, really lets in a lot of light. That’s pretty incredible. Yeah, sunlight is pouring down in here, lighting this area up really nicely. But it also seems to be open towards the back here. The yeah, I guess the kitchen area. The funny thing is I was just talking about how I didn’t think the main family inhabited this residence over the years. It was mainly kept for, you know, big occasions, holidays, celebrations. But out there in the main room, they actually had a big family display of food and offerings. So, it must be some kind of a special day for the family. There seem to be a lot of family members here right now. And they’ve set up quite an elaborate table out front with all the food and offerings and they’re busy moving it to the back here right now.
So even though it is a museum there, it still seem it seems to be kind of a hybrid where the family is still using it or some family members all kind of living here side by side with visitors like me.
So this is the rear of the house and again here I guess this is the very back of it and another firewall between this and the next building and as I said originally there I don’t think there would have been any entrance from the back as you can see it’s a solid wall so this whole area is the servants these quarters. So, this would have been the kitchen back here, kind of the heart of the family home. And then the servants would have been bustling in and out of this kitchen area and then making their way through the the servants quarters all up and down this part of the house on on the right hand side. Kind of like a little tunnel just for the servants. And then they could duck over to serve the family. Kind of, you know, they’re kind of out of the way. Nobody sees them when they’re doing their work. And then they would cut over this way, serve the family, and then cut back over to the servants quarters again.
So, that was the bulk of the main floor that’s open to the public. You can also go upstairs. And to go upstairs, you have to leave your shoes down here at the bottom. So, I will do that now. And take a look upstairs.
Very solid stairwell. I like that. A lot of old houses I’ve noticed, often have like a wooden staircase like this. And as you walk around, you get a lot of creaking and moaning and a lot of noise. But yeah, there’s no no noise at all. Very solidly built.
Feels a little bit more modern up here. You’ve got some carpet, of course. The first thing I want to see is the air well. There we are. Firewall again extending quite high over to the next building and the opening to the outside world.
Yeah, it looks like they have a system of eaves troughs funneling the water to here and then it goes into a pipe there. So, they’ve modernized the system. I think in the original building, the water just would have poured off the roof from all four directions directly down into the open courtyard. And that’s why they have it sunken because they could get a flood of water and they don’t want the water to spread throughout the rest of the house. But they don’t have to do worry about that anymore because they built a system of piping.
Ah, air conditioning. Just stepped into a room that has is really nicely air conditioned. So, I guess this would be one of the family bedrooms up on the top floor.
Yeah, I’m not clear about the rules for shooting video because I do see a sign here like no cameras, no phones, anything like that. But the woman downstairs, she said to me that I can take pictures, video, but no no flash. That that seemed to be the rule that she mentioned, just no flash. So, I think it’s okay to shoot a bit of video. Just kind of nice since I took the time to come here.
But yeah, that’s quite the elaborate bed.
One thing that strikes me about all these mansions, like elaborate wealthy furniture, things like that, it to me personally, it always seems very uncomfortable. Like a room like this, or even like the sitting areas, the ceremonial reception rooms. It’s all hard wooden benches and straight backs and all very formal. And yeah, I’d be much more comfortable if you gave me a choice between I can live in this mansion or I can live in a simple, you know, studio apartment with a nice sofa and a lazy boy chair. Well, I’m picking the the lazy boy on the sofa, right? Yeah. A lot of these yeah, wealthy homes just they never seem very comfortable to me. Just too big and there’s nowhere where you could just settle in and watch a movie and comfort, you know, it’s all too elaborate for me.
And that is almost it for my time at this museum. I’ve gone over all the exhibits three times in total, as I often do. One time to get the lay of the land, another time to shoot some video, talk about what I see, a third time to go over it one more time and take some pictures. And in this case, pretty much all of the information is contained in the QR codes like they’re on display. You see them on the walls, on the tables, on the furniture there. And people will scan those and then you can hear an audio track telling you about what you’re looking at. But mine won’t work. I’ve tried every Wi-Fi signal they have. I can’t scan any of the codes. My mobile internet doesn’t reach in here. So, I haven’t been able to listen to any of those. I took a picture of a lot of them so I can actually listen to them later on. I can scan them when I get back to my hotel, but I haven’t been able to do it here. So, to me, that’s a little bit of a weakness of the museum that you’re just seeing a bunch of stuff and unless you scan the QR code and stand there and listen to the audio, you don’t really know what you’re looking at because there’s no signs anywhere. They I guess that’s kind of a good thing. It makes it look like a lived-in home. It doesn’t look like a museum exhibit because you know like here in the kitchen for example I see the kitchen but there’s nothing on the wall for me to read. There’s no information about the kitchen. So you know I find it interesting because they have you know the fire. It’s a wood fire underneath and then they have quite a large chimney structure going up to the top. But you kind of have to figure all that stuff out for yourself because there’s nothing on the wall for you to read. You have to scan the codes. There’s a little bit here occasionally, but not not very much information.
But yeah, I went over the upstairs, downstairs. It looks like a large part of the servants quarters has been converted into public bathrooms for visitors. And they have a water bottle refilling station. I haven’t tried it. I don’t have a bottle with me. And then the rest of the servants quarters almost ironically has been converted into a gift shop. So this is the exit how you leave and you’re exiting through the gift store I guess but yeah that would be on the other side of this firewall. This would be the servants quarters.
Okay. Yeah. It’s kind of unfortunate for me from a historical point of view that you don’t actually get to see how the servants lived. All of their living spaces, their furniture, their lifestyle is all gone cuz this is where the servants would have lived. This third property number 52, I think. And
it’s all been converted into a fancy gift shop. But again, originally this would have been another house. This would have been number 50, the third property that they bought and combined into one. And it has its own air well up there. But yeah, it’s just a gift shop. I would have preferred it if they kept it so you can actually see how the servants lived, what their bedrooms were like, things like that. But hey, you can’t have everything, right?
And that’s it. That is the end of my tour. There’s the outside, the side of the house facing the street. And as I talked about at the beginning, yes, three three properties that the Chan family patriarch purchased and combined into one family living quarters over there and then the servants area over here and that’s now the gift shop. Yeah, pretty interesting though from my point of view. If you just went there by yourself, just you’re walking down the street as a tourist, you went in to look at the house, you probably wouldn’t come out with very much understanding of what you’re looking at. What’s more interesting to me, of course, like I said, is the history of the building, the engineering, the architecture, the, you know, the history going all the way back to the Melaka Sultanate, then the Portuguese, then what the Dutch built, and then the Peranakan Chinese buying up this property and renovating them, the firewalls, all of that is really fascinating to me. The air wells, but none of that information is in there. You would have to know that in advance in order to appreciate it. So, it’s really more about history of the family than anything else. Seeing the furniture, maybe I would know a lot more, a lot more interesting things about the family and their history, their lives in Melaka if I was able to scan all the QR codes. Though to be honest I don’t know if I’d want to do that because you go to a museum to look at exhibits to look at a living house and when you go in there everybody everybody else seemed to be able to scan them I just I was the only one who couldn’t but you saw everybody just sort of standing there looking at their phone you know and plugged into their phone and listening you know so it’s like I don’t want to do that at a museum basically browse the internet while I’m at the museum if all I’m going to do is browse the internet. Then why did I go to the museum? I want to look around me, not at my phone the whole time. So I would prefer it if there was information posted in nice signs on the wall. Just basic information. So yeah, that is it. Kind of interesting. I wouldn’t list it as one of my must experience things in Melaka, but I guess that’s because I’m coming at it from such such a deep historical perspective perhaps. But I mean if you’re here, yeah, even if you do know about the history of how these streets, how these buildings came to be, it does give you an opportunity to go inside and see it. You know, you can actually see what these tunnel houses look like in the interior with the air wells and the stairways, things like that. But even that one, as I said, I don’t know. It doesn’t really give you a true picture of the history of the house because, as I said, they totally demolished probably the most important part of the house, the servants quarters. That’s the area I would be most interested in seeing. Okay, this is how all the rich people lived. Well, how did their cook live, their servants, the housemaids, the cleaners? Back in those days, I don’t I don’t think they had in, you know, plumbing. So, people had to come to the house every day to pick up what they call their night soil, the sewage, because they used buckets basically. And then the servants would have to carry the buckets out to the streets through the servants quarters. And then men would come up and down here with carts pulled by donkeys or whatever and then, you know, empty the sewage buckets. And that was a daily thing that had to happen. And it was it was the servants that were doing that work, but they turned the servants quarters into a very fancy gift shop. So that makes me mark it down a notch. You know, in my opinion, I’d like to see the bedrooms of the servants in exactly how it was when when the family was living there.
And here I am down by the river, Melaka River, to sum up this video. Yeah, I enjoyed that quite a bit. 25 ringgit, by the way, entrance fee. And there were no special prices for locals, foreigners. It all seemed to be one set fee for everybody. And you can pay with a QR code. You can pay with a Touch ‘n Go. Yeah. So that is it. Shutting down. Hope you enjoyed that look at the Baba Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. And as always, a shout out to the Crunch Club. Everyone who got this far in the video, watch the video all the way to the end. Put CC in the comments to let me know. CCE. If you are a Crunch Club Elite member, you know who you are. And yeah, shout out to everyone supporting Planet Doug Video Productions through Touch ‘n Go, through PayPal, through Buy Me a Coffee, and all the members of the Planet Doug Patreon. So, goodbye from Melaka for now. As you can see, flags everywhere leading up to Hari Merdeka coming up in a few days celebrating Malaysia’s Independence Day. So, who knows, maybe I’ll shoot a video on that day. And if I do, I’ll see you in that video. I’ll see you next time.