Behind the Scenes of the National Heritage Board (NHB)
This interview features Mr. Brian Lee, who is part of the National Heritage Board and the Peranakan Museum. With his expertise in the Peranakan Museum's Public Programs and Workshops Department, Mr. Lee reveals the organization’s efforts to preserve and raise awareness of Peranakan culture, as well as a broader view of heritage preservation.
About This Interview
Mr. Brian Lee provides insight into Singapore's culture and heritage preservation as a member of the National Heritage Board. In light of Professor Ho—a NUS professor and a previous interviewee of VVP—emphasizing the importance of both bottom-up and top-down efforts in heritage protection, Mr. Lee’s perspective is emblematic of the government’s lens.
Today’s interview builds on interview #5 with Ms. Afra Alatas, delving deeper into Peranakan culture and the institutional efforts to preserve this communal tradition.
Interview Details
Guest: Mr. Brian Lee
Interviewer: Christine Oh
Date Recorded: April 17th, 2026
Location: Orchard, Singapore
Language: English
Format: Transcript
Interview Questions
Below are highlights from our conversation with Mr. Brian Lee, a member of the National Heritage Board and the Peranakan Museum. This excerpt captures his expert viewpoint on the importance of preserving intangible culture.
What efforts has NHB made to preserve Peranakan heritage in Singapore?
Mr. Lee: NHB actually oversees different museums and heritage institutions across Singapore, and also manages other matters relating to preserving Singaporean heritage, culture, and so forth. On a larger scale, I would say that the National Heritage Board has an initiative to promote intangible cultural heritage. So, they have an award they give out annually. It's called the “Stewards of Intangible Cultural Heritage”. Through this award, they recognize practitioners from different cultures who work with intangible cultural heritage. So, as part of this, we do have a few Peranakan practitioners who have been recognized under this scheme. They are actually given some funding to aid the work they are currently doing, and it also helps promote and provide wider publicity (e.g., through Peranakan theatre, or wayang peranakan). We do have Mr. GT Lye, who is Peranakan, and he is also a practitioner of dondang sayang, which is a Peranakan musical set to poetry. So, he is one of the earliest recipients of the award, which started in 2020, and he's the first to be recognized for promoting Peranakan culture. We also have other practitioners who work in craft, like Raymond Wong, who specializes in Peranakan beadwork and embroidery.
So, we do have many of our Peranakan practitioners who have received this award. I think this is a way the National Heritage Board tries to preserve culture through intangible cultural heritage, such as knowledge practices that do not exist as tangible objects we can keep in museums. Much of this funding goes toward documentation for some of the initiatives these practitioners can use to further promote their craft to a wider audience.
Why is it still important to preserve the tangible culture (e.g., historical sites) alongside intangible culture?
Mr. Lee: Specifically talking about heritage sites, there are different sorts of categories that we are looking at. We do have national monuments that are overseen by the Preservation of Sites and Monuments, one of the divisions under the National Heritage Board. But if you're talking about Peranakan-specific sort of buildings, they don't usually fall under this category, because a lot of them are actually neighborhoods, precincts, and also certain houses that were actually owned or built by Peranakan families. It usually falls under the purview of the URA (Urban Redevelopment Authority), which looks to preserve some of these precincts. So, a lot of terrace houses that we know, shophouses that are in these Peranakan enclaves, they are usually preserved under the URA. But what the National Heritage Board does is help draw attention to some of these precincts. We have what we call our heritage notes, which are a ground-up initiative in which the National Heritage Board works with the community. For example, in Joo Chiat, we have worked with many of the communities, the shops, the craft practitioners, to help revive and promote culture in these areas. These are very ground-up activities that are managed by the community.
What are the Peranakan historical sites at risk due to urbanization?
Mr. Lee: I would say all of them are at risk. We do have some areas that are already sort of marked by the URA for preservation, like the Katong-Joo Chiat area. We also have the area near where NUS has a sort of house museum. That's one area; the Emerald Hill area also has a strong Peranakan community. These are some areas that have already been marked for preservation. So I would say that, aside from that, most other major Peranakan sites have already been preserved. The rest would be, you know, mainly private homes of renowned Peranakan families. A lot of those might already have been lost from what the [Peranakan] Museum does; we do try to, and we do actually, collect some of the objects from some of these very well-known houses that you can see in the museum. We have furniture pieces in the museum and also in the national collection. But you know, a lot of the houses have already been demolished because of what was happening in Singapore in the 70s and 80s, where a lot of urban redevelopment was going on at that point in time—a lot of cultural and heritage sites were being preserved, but the main priority then was the national monuments. Private homes were not seen as a priority then, so we did lose quite a bit of those. But with preservation efforts in the 90s, we had to preserve the Emerald Hill area, so that is actually under the URA's purview.
What type of heritage preservation needs more development?
Mr. Lee: Much of what we are doing now involves documenting what we call intangible cultural heritage. So, we collect cultural practices, festivals, food, crafts, and objects associated with the culture. We also collect fashion items, clothing, kitchen- and culinary-related items, ceramics, and furniture. If you come to the museum, for example, we have videos on recipes from the different Peranakan communities.
From the museum's point of view, there are two areas of collection or gathering. One is documenting cultural practices; the other is obtaining and collecting objects. Other things the museum does include engaging with different communities because the Peranakan community is quite diverse. It's not just the Chinese Peranakans that we are very familiar with. We also have Indian Peranakans, Arab Peranakans, the Chauvinacans, and so forth. So we do have a quarterly program at the museum called Community Voices. We run the program on a quarterly basis to highlight different communities, or we might have a certain theme that we rotate around, and then we get representatives from the different associations to share ideas on how they can promote the culture. If you go to our website under Programs, you can see what was offered during the past programs. Sometimes we also have workshops. A lot of the ideas for preserving culture come from workshops that raise awareness and teach people how things are traditionally done. But the different associations themselves, they also have their own outreach programs. They have different ways of preserving their own culture. There's the Peranakan Association Singapore, and there's the Peranakan Indian (Chitty Melaka) Association Singapore (PICMAS) for Indian Peranakan communities. There is the Arab Network that deals with the Arab Peranakan community. So these are some of the ways that we work with the communities to help preserve Peranakan culture and to also bring more awareness of the diversity of the community as well as the different cultural aspects to a wider audience.
How can international students like me get involved in preserving Singapore's heritage?
Mr. Brian Lee: I think firstly, to educate yourself by visiting a museum and participating in some of the programs that are offered by the museum, which helps in creating more awareness about the different cultures. Think of being involved in the community by participating in events or mingling a bit more with local Singaporeans, rather than being in a community of just expats. And those kinds of interactions do help broaden your perspective on Singaporean culture and the cultures of different communities.
Second, volunteering. We don't have many volunteer options at the museum right now, but we do have opportunities from time to time. I think, coming from an international school background, we do have many of our volunteer docents who actually work on weekdays. They are actually also from the expat community. A lot of docents that we have in the museums are actually expats! So I think that's one way you can actually learn more about Singapore's culture: volunteering as a docent.
Finally, I think being on site in some of the cultural areas and interacting with practitioners in heritage businesses is one way to really find out more and understand the culture of the different precincts and communities. So that firsthand experience of being in those precincts and interacting with people who work there, who have heritage businesses, I think that is very valuable.
