It evokes a scene from a far-off time, like those depicted in courtly annals when the lands and the seas of the Malay World were controlled by the sultanates, before the Europeans came with their cultural imperialism and everything changed forever. It was all lost, this royal way of life, those feudal kingdoms - or so we were led to believe.
But the event described is not of some long ago time. It is of the here and now. The prince is Tengku Ismail bin Tengku Su, Tengku Ismail for short. The old wooden palace is his home, “Pura Tanjung Sabtu” upriver from the old trading port of Kuala Terengganu. The foreigner is me, the author, while the nobleman is my husband, this book’s photographer, whose royal roots go back to Jambi in Sumatra. His family is part of the Malay diaspora that resulted from the colonial invasions, but that is another story.
Auguste Nicholas Vaillant’s view of Melaka’s Town Square with its 18th-century Dutch-built Christ Church and 17th-century Stadthuys.
By contrast, Tengku Ismail was fortunate to experience an upbringing in the traditional royal style, pampered by black slaves, family retainers and household poets who lulled him to sleep in the royal compound. Needless to say, this unique childhood affected his later passions, reviving Terengganu’s hand-woven silks and restoring old wooden palaces.
History is all around him as every painting and photograph on the walls has a story to tell. There is his great uncle, Sultan Muhammad II, who had 36 wives. There is the princess whose recent untimely death was rumoured to be due to an enemy’s spell, and there is the prince who was murdered by his son who had joined a fanatical religious cult.
Malaysia’s history is like Tengku Ismail’s walls, a glorious melange of past and present, of royal courts, of vanished kingdoms, of famous battles won and lost, of shamans and spirits, of religions waxing and waning like the tides. Over the centuries, the layers build up, while others erode away, until the present takes form like an old lime-washed wall, exposed to the elements, where the different hues of past owners are revealed like an abstract of the past.
Climate invariably affects history. Its affect in Malaysia is particularly profound, often annihilating the past. The equatorial combination of heat, humidity and torrential rains has not only weathered walls but has, in most cases, wiped out all traces of ancient settlements. Not everywhere though. Away from the ravages of the elements, inside limestone caves, archaeologists have been assembling the jigsaw of Malaysia’s earliest days. It is an exercise that is fraught with physical difficulties as well as being a theoretical minefield. Old theories are dismissed in the light of new evidence, as are established dates, with new dating techniques turning the clock back even further into prehistory.
Habitation was once believed to have begun in Borneo with the unearthing of a 40,000-year-old skull in Sarawak’s Niah Caves. Now that date is uncertain. Peninsular Malaysia was once thought to be inhabited later, but that theory has been overturned with the discovery of the Kota Tampan stone tool workshop in Perak. Its Pompeii-like demise was linked to the eruption of Sumatra’s Lake Toba, said to be 34,000 years ago, but radiocarbon dating may now shift that date back to 100,000 years ago. Strangely, but rather in character with Malaysia’s dual persona, the past becomes older the more we move into the future.
James Wathen’s 1811 view of Porta de Santiago, the last remaining gate of Melaka’s Portuguese fortress, A Famosa.
The residence of Dato Klana, the Malay chieftain of Sungai Ujong, near Seremban, in the 1870s.
In inland areas, elephants were the major means of transport in Perak until the early 20th century.
Despite climatic drawbacks, Malaysia pioneered regional archaeology. It all began around 160 years ago when Colonel James Low, on one of his numerous jungle excursions, suddenly discovered “undoubted relics of a Hindoo Colony, with ruins of temples”. Little did he know then that he had stumbled upon Malaysia’s richest archaeological region, now known as the Bujang Valley, and that his discovery would pave the way for later archaeologists to solve one of Southeast Asia’s most intriguing historical puzzles - the location of the legendary kingdom of Kedah that flourished from the 5th to the 14th century.
Low’s theory of a Hindu colony has long been relegated to the dustbins of history. Kedah was more likely a long-standing Malay trading kingdom which had incorporated Indian cultural elements into its lifestyle, beginning with Buddhist and then later Hindu influences. But the religion that would have the greatest effect on Malaysia, and provide the impetus for its greatest kingdom — Melaka — was Islam.
Melaka is to Malaysia what Athens is to Greece. Even though its fame was brief, lasting a little over a century before the Portuguese conquered it in 1511, its effect on the psyche of Malaysia, its culture, attitudes, fashions, royal houses, language and literature are still being felt over six centuries later.
In Melaka, and in the sultanates it spawned, rulers enjoyed absolute power. The concept of daulat, a type of mystical kingly power, placed the sultan above society and criticism. However, tales abound of rulers who failed because they did not heed their ministers’ advice. The feudal days are long gone, but the sultanates remain, although their powers were curtailed by colonial laws and eroded further in recent times.
Like the rings of a tree, history is layered. Throughout Malaysia, these tiers are visible in some places more than others, especially in Melaka. Here, the incursions of Malays, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and the Malays again, are interspersed with influxes of Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Javanese, Bugis, and scores more. A glance at a map can show why Melaka was such a successful trading kingdom. The southeast trade winds blew dhows and caravels across the Indian Ocean, the northeast monsoon delivered the junks and praus from the South China Sea and the Malay Archipelago, and all of them were funnelled through the channel that came to be known as the Strait of Melaka.
The Peninsula’s strategic location was also its undoing. Although the Portuguese and the Dutch only ever held Melaka, the next interlopers, the English, were stunningly successful. Penang their first base, was acquired by trickery in 1786 from the Sultan of Kedah. Singapore was then established, in 1819. Melaka was a “gift” from the Dutch when the British and the Hollanders carved up the Malay World into their own spheres in 1824, and from these Straits Settlements they gradually planted British Residents in the Peninsular states. Even Borneo was not spared. In 1848, James Brooke became Rajah of Sarawak by quelling a rebellion against the Brunei court, while Sabah ultimately came under the “ownership” of British merchants. But it was not all smooth going. Malay rebellions had to be quelled in Perak, Pahang, Negeri Sembilan and Sabah, and under the guise of anti-piracy campaigns Brooke emasculated Sarawak’s Iban and other tribes. Johor held out longer than the other western states, and there was anger when Siam ceded Kelantan, Terengganu and Kedah to the British. By 1919, however, the Union Jack fluttered over all: British Malaya was complete.
These noblewomen from the royal court of Perak, photographed in the early 20th century, are wearing the typical Malay costume of the time: a long, loose blouse fastened down the front with jewelled pins, a handwoven checked sarong, and a sumptuous silk songket shawl.
Kuching’s High Court, built in 1874, is one of Malaysia’s finest surviving Georgian-style buildings.
Established by the second White Rajah of Sarawak, Charles