Glossary

This luminous, lace-trimmed kebaya is the version most people now picture, and it's a real garment — just not quite this book's garment. In 1867, Peranakan women in Penang were more likely wearing the baju panjang: a longer, looser jacket in deeper, sober colours over a batik or plaid sarong, cut from cotton rather than voile. The fitted, sheer, European-lace kebaya only became fashionable from around 1900, as Nyonya dress turned toward a more European silhouette.

Part of why the record skews this way: commercial photography barely existed in the Straits Settlements in 1867. Singapore's first studio had already failed for lack of custom more than a decade earlier, and G.R. Lambert & Co — the firm that would photograph the region for the next fifty years — was founded in April 1867 itself. Almost nothing survives to show us exactly what a Penang household was wearing that year. Most of what we now picture as Peranakan dress comes from the 1900s onward, simply because that is when photographs and garments survived to be kept.

We chose to keep the kebaya of the book's imagination rather than the baju panjang of the historical record — it is the more visually vivid of the two, and the one readers already carry in their heads. Consider it a deliberate, acknowledged anachronism, the kind every costume drama makes somewhere. Sarah is a novelist, not a historian, and this is one of the places she knowingly chose story over strict period accuracy.

Unlike the kebaya itself, this one holds up. Fastening a blouse with pinned brooches rather than buttons was a long-standing Peranakan practice that ran across both the older baju panjang and the later kebaya, so it is not tied to the same 1900s fashion shift. The kerongsang is also thought to have been favoured first by the nyonyas of Penang specifically — this book's own setting — before the fashion spread to Malacca and Singapore. Gold-and-diamond jewellery like this was exactly the kind of thing a family kept and handed down for a generation or more, so a household like the Gans' owning one by 1867 needs no disclaimer.

The word is Portuguese — comprador, "buyer" — picked up on the China coast and never given back. The role grew into its full power after 1842, when the abolition of the Canton monopoly left Western firms without the old hong merchants to trade through, and the compradore became the single hinge on which a foreign house's local business turned. Many grew rich enough to trade on their own account.

The book uses the older English spelling, compradore, throughout. It is also precise about the job: it is the Ashworth-Lees' compradore who arranges the first introduction and who carries the settlement figure between the two houses — which is exactly what the role was for, and exactly why Auntie Kim declines to let a marriage be negotiated through one.

A shophouse is narrow, very deep, and shares a party wall with its neighbours on both sides, so windows are only possible at the very front and the very back. The air well solves both problems at once: it drops light into the middle of the plan, and it ventilates by convection — hot air rises out of the opening at the top and pulls cooler air through the house behind it. Most were built fully open to the sky so the floor and walls could dry out between downpours.

The form is not a colonial invention. It came south with the builders themselves, out of the courtyard houses of southern China, where the same narrow, deep plan produces the same narrow, deep light shaft. In George Town it became one of the defining features of the shophouse, and every surviving example has at least one.

A word of caution on the vocabulary: "air well" and "courtyard" are often used interchangeably, including by architectural historians. Strictly, the courtyard is the floor you stand on and the air well is the shaft of open air above it. This book uses both, correctly, and for different things.

The five-foot way is usually credited to Stamford Raffles, whose 1822 Town Plan for Singapore required that houses built of brick or tile present a uniform front, "each having a verandah of a certain depth, open at all times as a continuous and covered passage on each side of the street". Raffles had spent 1811 to 1815 in Batavia and had almost certainly seen the same thing there.

Penang adopted the form rather than legislating it. The Straits-wide Municipal Ordinance came in 1887, and Penang's own building regulation not until 1905 — so the five-foot ways of George Town in 1867 were real, universal, and entirely conventional, built because that was how a shophouse was built, not because any Penang law yet said so.

One consequence matters for the book: a five-foot way is a public right of way running across private property. It belongs to everybody and to the shopkeeper behind it at the same time, which is why it is perpetually half-colonised by goods, hawkers and chairs — and why sweeping your own stretch of it was somebody's daily job.

It travelled a long way to reach this quay. Chop is Hindi chāp, an impression or a stamp, taken up by English speakers in India in the seventeenth century and carried east by merchants and colonial officials. In the Straits it was reinforced by Malay cap, which means the same thing, and by the late nineteenth century it could mean the seal, the impression, a trademark, or a house's reputation, depending on the sentence.

The book uses it in every one of those senses: Kapitan Gan signs under his chop, a sack on the waterfront carries whichever house's chop is stamped on it, and Ah Teck, who does not much care whose chop is on the sack, is making a point about all of them at once.

From Malay and Javanese pikul — literally, the load one man can carry on a shoulder pole. It began as a human measure, and the British turned it into a legal one: Hong Kong's Ordinance No. 22 of 1844 defined the picul as exactly 133⅓ avoirdupois pounds, and that definition carried across the British territories in the region, the Straits Settlements included.

So when a clerk in a godown calls the count and another chalks the figure on the wall, the unit they are working in was originally defined by what a body could lift and carry.