This photograph showing a Malay man in the traditional attire of sarong and a songkok was taken by Scottish photographer John Thomson. The native man is photographed with a bird on a perch on his left, and with a monkey on his right. The state of his clothes suggest he was probably not financially well-off, as with most of the Malay community in Singapore and Malaya under British colonial rule. Thomson travelled to the Far East in the mid 19th century to document landscapes and daily lives of the locals. Thomson arrived in Malaya in 1862 and was one of the earliest travel photographers who brought photography to Singapore and Malaya following the arrival of the Europeans several decades before. Such photographs were then published in Europe and became one of the earliest forms of photojournalism. Such photographic documentation has also allowed us much insight about life in Singapore under British colonial rule.
