The Kebaya Joins UNESCO’s Heritage List, Nominated by Five Countries

UNESCO added the kebaya to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on 4 December 2024, at the nineteenth session of its intergovernmental committee in Asunción, Paraguay. The element is titled Kebaya: knowledge, skills, traditions and practices. It was nominated jointly by Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, which submitted the file in March 2023. Malaysia’s tourism ministry reported that the evaluation body had described the dossier as an exemplary multinational nomination.

The garment

A kebaya is a woman’s blouse that opens down the front. It is made of a light fabric such as cotton, voile, lace or brocade, often semi-transparent, and is fastened with buttons or with brooches. It is worn over a wrapped skirt, a sarong or a length of batik.

The word is thought to derive from the Arabic qaba, a long loose robe, and to have reached the Malay world through the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century the garment was worn across the archipelago. It was adopted and altered by one community after another, and that shared history is what the five countries put forward.

Many kebayas

There is no single form. The Javanese kebaya is fitted, with a V-shaped neck, and is worn with a batik cloth and a sash. The Balinese version is worn with a sash tied over the blouse, and in white for temple ceremonies. The Malay kebaya labuh is long and loose, reaching the knee.

The best known outside the region is the Nyonya kebaya of the Peranakan Chinese communities of Melaka, Penang and Singapore: a short, fitted blouse of sheer voile, embroidered at the edges with flowers, butterflies and phoenixes. It is closed by a set of three linked brooches called kerongsang, and worn with a hand-drawn batik sarong from the north coast of Java and beaded slippers. A similar dress is worn by the Baba community of Phuket, descended from Hokkien Chinese who migrated from Penang and Melaka, which is why Thailand joined the nomination.

The kebaya is a national dress for women in Indonesia, and a version of it has long been worn as uniform by cabin crew of Singapore Airlines and Garuda Indonesia, which has made it one of the most recognisable garments in Asia.

For travellers

The kebaya is easiest to see, and to buy, in the old Peranakan towns. In George Town and in Melaka, museums in former family mansions display embroidered kebayas with their jewellery and slippers, and a few workshops still embroider them to order. In Singapore, the Peranakan Museum and the shophouse streets of Katong are the places to look. In Java and Bali the kebaya is everyday formal dress, worn at weddings and at temple festivals.

Singapore’s hawker culture, inscribed in 2020, is another living tradition from the region on the same list.