In October, Angeline Kong was conducting a tour of the Katong Antique House, a small museum in a local shop house, when she drew attention to three open-toed mules with flowers, animals and geometric patterns worked in colored beads on their wide fabric vamps.
“These are beautiful glass beads,” she said, lifting one shoe off the table. “See how they shimmer in the light.”
Ms. Kong, 57, beads slippers herself, a skill she said took her nearly three decades to master but had made her feel more connected to the women of her family, who wore such footwear.
And the craft also has given her, a sixth-generation Peranakan, some sense of the role of the nyonya, a traditional honorific for Peranakan women. (The Malay term Peranakan generally is used for descendants of Chinese traders who came to the region starting in the 15th century and married local women. The term “means locally born,” Ms. Kong said, but cautioned that there also are many self-identified Peranakans whose ancestors came from elsewhere, mainly countries bordering the Indian Ocean.)
Peter Lee, a cultural historian and the author of the 2015 book “Sarong Kebaya: Peranakan Fashion in an Interconnected World, 1500 to 1950,” said the nyonya role and its trappings were largely sidelined in Singapore’s headlong rush toward modernity after it became independent in 1965. “The golden age for the Peranakans was before the Second World War,” he said. “After, there could be a sense like in Tennessee Williams plays of these fallen Southern families.”
But that sense of decline has lately reversed, according to local observers, with the Peranakan community showing a resurgence of pride — and with beaded slippers and the art of making them also coming back.
An initial boost to the community’s sense of history came from the 2008 hit local mini-series “The Little Nyonya,” which revisited Peranakan life from the 1930s on. Then for the 2018 movie “Crazy Rich Asians,” Nelson Coates, the production designer, decided that the home of the old-money family, the Youngs, should be decorated in high Peranakan style — a mix of Chinese, Malaysian and Indonesian elements. (Of real Peranakans, Ms. Kong said with a laugh, “not all are rich, but the majority are.”)
More recently, several Peranakan restaurants have opened in Singapore, notably Violet Oon’s popular spots at the National Gallery and the Jewel entertainment complex at Changi Airport. The Peranakan Museum, which has featured traditional beadwork several times since its opening in 2008, is now showcasing “Batik Nyonyas,” an exhibition about the batik of three Indonesian Peranakan women (through Aug. 31).
And UNESCO has just decided to add the traditional nyonya outfit — the kebaya, a fitted, often embroidered jacket, and the wraparound sarong skirt — to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The beaded slippers usually are worn with the outfit.
Broken-Down Slippers
For her own wedding in the 1990s, Ms. Kong thought she might like to wear the full nyonya outfit, but she was not able to get the ensemble together in time and her great-aunt’s slippers did not fit. After the wedding, she read a magazine article about a woman who was teaching bead work and decided to call her.
That woman was Bebe Seet, the owner of a Peranakan-accented boutique Rumah Bebe and a fourth-generation Peranakan herself. In the late 1990s, she had learned the craft by spending four months making a pair of slippers, instructed by a friend’s mother who was dying. “By that time, the nyonyas had sort of given up on making them,” said Ms. Seet, now 74. “She was happy I was interested.”
She began going to antique stores to buy broken-down slippers — called kasut manek in Baba Malay, one of the languages used by the Peranakans — and taking them apart to understand how they were made. “I had to unpick scraps of old beadwork on old, ruined shoes, with beautiful beads,” she said.
As for Ms. Kong, she learned basic beading techniques from Ms. Seet and then copied her great-aunt’s slippers, making pair after pair until they began to look like the footwear she had inherited.
Cheah Hwei-Fe’n, a Singapore-born art historian who did her doctoral thesis on Peranakan beadwork and has written several books and monographs on the subject, said that beadwork generally became popular in the early 1800s, and, by the middle of that century, the craft of making beaded slippers was flourishing. Completed pairs, Dr. Cheah said, served as “status items and ceremonial items.”
At that time, beads were sourced from Europe, with metallic ones coming from France and cut glass versions from Bohemia, an area now within the Czech Republic.
When Ms. Seet was learning the skill in the ’90s, she decided that the relatively common Miyuki seed beads from Japan were neither small enough nor pretty enough to use. But she did like the cut glass beads, which are still being made today in the Czech Republic.
The other necessary tools have long been available: a wood embroidery frame to keep the fabric taut; a large sewing needle to position the beads; fine thread, usually silk or cotton; and a small needle to attach the beads to the material, often with a cross stitch.
When it comes to patterns, the maker may select personal sketches, plans handed down from relatives or friends or designs purchased in embroidery supply shops. Ms. Seet is something of a bird specialist, with various slippers she has made featuring a girl feeding a swan, a phoenix rising from the ashes and Singapore’s national bird, the crimson sunbird.
Ms. Kong loves floral motifs, especially the peonies that she said are associated with prosperity in China. She has built up a personal collection of about 70 pairs, mainly ones she has made herself.
An additional pop of color can come from the slippers’ leather soles, which usually are attached by a shoemaker. Popular choices have long included sky blue, parrot green and scarlet.
Beadwork as a Test
Even a simple beaded pattern for a shoe panel can take six weeks to finish, with more complicated ones sometimes requiring four months of concentrated labor, both Ms. Seet and Ms. Kong said.
Ms. Kong said that she had attached as many as 15,000 beads to a pair of shoes. “You have to have a lot of patience and passion to see the whole project through,” she noted.
So painstaking is the work that, from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century, matchmakers and the mothers of young bachelors are said to have assessed young women’s beadwork. “It would be looked at to prove the lady is worthy to be the future wife,” said Kenny Loh, a clothing and shoe designer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who makes beaded slippers. “That and her cooking.”
The scenario actually became a plot point in “The Little Nyonya” series, when a stepsister tried to claim credit for the title character’s lovely beadwork. The mother of the eligible bachelor, however, was not fooled. “This is a common story, the beadwork being used as a test,” said Mr. Lee, the cultural historian. “But often a rich family would pay to have good embroidery and beading done for the daughter.”
Both Mr. Lee and Dr. Cheah, the art historian, dislike the fact that the nyonyas of the past are now sometimes depicted as just decorative domestic goddesses. In researching their books, they said, they came across powerful nyonyas, matriarchs who dominated their extended families and ran large family companies while their trader husbands traveled.
For example, Mr. Lee’s book on typical nyonya fashion included a photograph taken about 1910 of a woman identified as Ho Sock Choo Neo, a shipping heiress who looked formidable but was wearing dainty beaded slippers, flanked by her second husband.
Happy Shoes
The slippers reflect what Mr. Lee called the “hybridity” of Peranakan culture: the beads came from Europe, while the motifs often were derived from China.
“But they were never passive copyists,” Dr. Cheah said of the nyonyas. “In a sense, I think they always translated things, and in translating it, they gave it their own spin.” She compared the culture to a “curry — a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”
Sometimes known as “happy shoes,” the slippers often display some whimsy in their patterns. The beaded versions of animals are often “very cute,” Dr. Cheah said, adding that they are “simplified, slightly cartoonlike; they’re very colorful.”
“So a deer might resemble a deer. You can recognize that it’s a deer, and you may recognize that, OK, it’s taken from a Chinese pattern of a deer, which means longevity, or whatever it is, but they may have shortened its horns.”
Where once the slippers were everyday wear, Ms. Seet said, now they tend to be worn by Peranakans and others mainly on special occasions.
Professionally made slippers with a simple pattern, often rendered in beads from Japan, now may sell for the equivalent of $150 while those with more intricate patterns, usually made of Czech beads, go for more than $1,000. Mr. Loh said his shoes sell for the equivalent of $230 to $625, and another craftsman, Raymond Wong of Singapore, charges $600 to $1,100.
“Compared to the branded shoes, like a Ferragamo,” they cost much the same, Mr. Loh said. “It’s just that they are more handcrafted. So the value is high, the price low.”
Seeking to pass the skills along, Ms. Kong has taught classes at the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School, an independent secondary school, and the Straits Enclave, a building used by the Peranakan community as an event space.
“I’m very happy the younger generation are actually coming in to learn how to do the work,” Ms. Kong said. “I told them, you need not have many pairs. You just have one pair. It’s symbolic of a heritage.”
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