On 20th February 2023, Asst Prof Koh Keng We led students from HH3004 Comparative Business History on a field trip to the Asian Civilisations Museum.
The Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore is a world-renowned institution that showcases the diverse cultural heritage of Asia. The museum boasts an impressive collection of over 2,000 artefacts from China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia, spanning over 5,000 years of history. Visitors to the museum can explore the various galleries and exhibitions, which include themes such as trade, religion, and art, and gain insights into the complex histories and interconnections of the different cultures in Asia. The museum’s emphasis on interactive displays, multimedia installations, and engaging programmes makes it an excellent destination for experiential learning and an opportunity for visitors to deepen their understanding and appreciation of the rich and diverse cultural heritage of Asia.
By giving students the chance to interact on-site and immersively with historical artefacts, a field trip to the museum enhances experiential learning. This makes such artefacts more concrete and relatable to students’ everyday lives, enabling them to engage with history on a deeper level. The wide range of artefacts from ceramics to paintings, furniture, and textiles in these galleries also allows them to interact with different ways of embodying and presenting historical evidence, and train them in different ways of seeing, “reading”, and understanding history through material culture and their contexts. Students are able to analyse and interpret historical artefacts from various perspectives, which can enhance critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Such a visit can also help to spark curiosity and inspire a love of learning about the past, which can lead to further exploration and discovery outside of the classroom.
During this visit, students were also asked to select artefacts to create a gallery trail that tells of business history in the ancient and early modern (meaning 16th-early 19th century) trading and material worlds of maritime Southeast Asia.
Below, students Samantha and Alvan describe the highlights of this field trip.
Through the field trip, I learned to analyse artefacts from various exhibitions from a novel perspective. In particular, the Company and Court exhibition highlights how social activities serve as a driver of demand for commodities catered towards the elites. This can be done via looking at Gameboards and the Writing Box from unique lenses such as material culture.
For instance, the lacquer technique was also a prominent feature of several artefacts with social functional purposes, such as the 16th-century missal stand acquired from a private collection in Portugal, which originally served as support for a Jesuit missal or Mass book. The application of the lacquer technique on commonly used commodities for the Portuguese elites thus highlights how a surge in the popularity of artistic knowledge creates demand, and thus court culture.
– Samantha Lau
From this field trip, I find it fascinating how these artefacts reveal the sensitivity of their producers to the prevailing business environment, which continues to be the case as we observe businesses today. An artefact that perfectly captured this idea is the Gongxian wares, created to imitate the popular Xing wares in 8th-century China. Here, the popularity of Xing wares worldwide led to the emergence of imitation products in other parts of China and abroad. From a business perspective, this reflects the desire of businesses to capture a market share of the booming market of Chinese white wares.
Unlike Xing wares, Gongxian kilns had to apply white slips to achieve the desired white appearance, due to the lower quality clay available locally. This demonstrates businesses’ ability to innovate within constraints, as Gongxian kilns adapted by using slips to overcome their material limitations. The imitation of popular wares to capture market share, and the flexible innovation under constraints, illustrate how modern Asian businesses built upon dominant players’ successes, much as they do today.
– Alvan Lee
