Peranakan Museum

Inside a former school on Armenian Street, the galleries trace ten chapters of Peranakan life, the Chinese-Malay culture born when Chinese merchants settled the Malay Archipelago and blended Malay language and batik with Chinese surnames and ancestor rites. The guide lingers at a bridal bed that belonged to Mrs Quah Hong Chiam of Penang, who bore eleven children, and the twelve-day wedding marathon it once presided over, part theatre, part negotiation, part fertility prayer. Listen for what a young boy was asked to do to that bed before the bride ever slept in it.