03/01/2017
Booze is not all that we're obsessed with!
The matriarch of the Ming Ching Club, Emily, has an eye for Oriental furniture. Case in point: this Chinese chest Em bought in KL about 5 years ago with the original maker's stamp still attached!
The maker's stamp says that it is from a shop on Ximen Street, Yangdong, in the Yangjiang prefecture of Guangdong. The shop owner said the chest was made some time between the 1920s and 1950s and belonged to the venerable Chinese "mah jie"s, also from Guangdong. Mah Jie's were ladies who took vows of chastity and spinsterhood after hearing tales from their married friends of unloving marriages and unkind mother-in-laws. These mah jie's were special as they were a select group of women who had a choice in marriage - they were financially independent from men thanks to their silk-making jobs. Just before the Japanese invasion, the silk industry began to decline and many of these silk makers left China and migrated to Malaysia, Hong Kong or Singapore. They were identified by the black and white uniforms they donned while working as domestic servants and keeping their vow of chastity and spinsterhood. Mah Jie's have since become a thing of the past, but their legacy lives on in this chest.
