This photograph showing a Peranakan lady dressed in a traditional sarong kebaya was taken by Scottish photographer John Thomson. The Peranakans or Straits born Chinese were the offsprings of Chinese and Malay unions, the result of the disproportionate male-female ratio of Chinese immigrants to Singapore and Malaya in the early 19th century. 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.
