[Talk] A portrait, a name, and a history of Chinese womanhood in Dutch-colonial Java

Readers may be interested in this Zoom talk on Friday by Seng Guo-Quan, hosted by the Asian Civilisations Museum.

When the Peranakan Museum purchased a portrait of a Chinese woman from Indonesia in 2020, little was known about it besides the name of the sitter and the last descendant to hold onto it. But genealogical and historical research, and their dissemination on the internet, quickly revealed her to be a member of colonial Java’s quasi-aristocratic Chinese elite.

Lie Hok Nio (also known as Patoe Nio) was born in 1865 to a three-generation-deep Kapitan’s family. Her father soon rose to the apex of the colonial ethnic status hierarchy when the Dutch appointed him the Chinese Major of Batavia (now Jakarta). Much of the history of Chinese communities in Java revolves around elite men’s business and politics.

In this talk, Seng Guo-Quan explores how womenfolk dominated the inner realm of the Peranakan Chinese household. This domestic space was cordoned off symbolically from the outer world by a reception hall screen, on which ancestral portraits like this one hung. Until nationalism swept traditional adat (custom) and the ancien regime into history, the management of the inner realm was an equally defining feature of what it meant to be Chinese in 19th-century colonial Java.

Source: ACMtalks: Seng Guo-Quan