Strait Talk: Days and Nights in Melaka

A burning sun stood guard over the coastal port. Most, fasting for Ramadan, cooled off in air-conditioned colonial marvels, or the modern apartments between them. The buildings of Bird’s dream still stood: ² A Famosa, the Portuguese fortress, looked over Dutch canals. Gravestones in Latin or Dutch or English leant against the rendered walls of the half-fallen Church of St Paul. Below, by the shore, narrow Chinese-style shophouses lined up carefully on tight winding lanes; further inland, the city relaxed into a low sprawl of Malay village houses.

In 1898, there were no land routes joining the towns on the west coast of Malaysia, save jungle tracks³. Crossing a handful of miles would take days, even with an elephant. But monsoon winds took boats the 150 miles to Singapore in a day. It made Melaka one of many ‘forest islands’: more isolated by the jungle to its east than the sea to its west. Now, of course, there is a bus, in which I had sat, cool and unconcerned, on a trundle south from Kuala Lumpur.

I walked around in the midday sun, lanes emptied of wiser folk. There were few sounds save for water and frying oil. Sweating along streets, I was blissfully half-covered by the verandas of old shophouses. A few were still in the ancient trade, as grocers and suppliers. Others now catered for the new major industry, tourism. In some, airy and open to the streets, Malaysian families sat at wicker tables with huge sluggish fans chopping the air above them, eating fish stews and rice balls, drinking gallons of iced coconut. I was on the hunt for a stamp museum.

Melaka was a place where history impressed itself even on the unwilling.  The ‘Eye of the Sun’⁴, as it was called, was a medieval forerunner to Dubai. By the time Vasco Da Gama’s sailors caught wind of it, it was already the heart of a successful trading sultanate. Sailors from Cairo mixed with Gujarati wheeler-dealers. Traders from China, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Timor, and Java haggled for Arabian perfumes, Chinese porcelain, or Bengali cloth.⁵

Then came the Europeans, bargaining with Venetian glass and incongruous wool, fighting for “the great mart of this part of the world”.⁶ It was said that “whoever is Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice”.⁷ The Portuguese had spent a century inching eastwards, taking outposts along the African and Indian coasts, driven by spice-lust and competition with Spain. By 1511, they had brought enough gunpowder to take the city.

Then, 130 years later, Melaka was buffeted by the newest trend of European adventure capitalism, invaded not by a nation but by a business: the Dutch East India Company. Come 1824, thanks to Napoleonic chaos thousands of miles away, the Dutch handed it over to the British, almost without incident ⁸. But soon, the imperial reshaping of Southeast Asia left Melaka as quiet and peripheral, superseded by Singapore to its south.

Sometimes, Melaka’s buffeted population aligned themselves with the new rulers, as the Chinese babas did with the British, to keep a piece of the trading pie, or just to survive. Other times, their fates turned in a matter of days: in the Sook Ching (Purge through Cleansing) operation in 1942, Chinese Melakans, white-collar and valued by the British, found themselves suddenly at the ends of Japanese bayonets.⁹

Details on the stamp museum had been murky. It was said to be on its last gasp. I found the old Dutch house, white-rendered and orange-roofed, which had been repurposed to hold this fragment of history, a small way of remembering the banality of empire. A young man in a crisp white cekak musang gown beckoned me in.

“It’s the first restaurant in a museum in Malaysia!” he said proudly, as we walked around the house, each little room containing a table or two, with white tablecloths and dinner place settings.

Eventually, with pleasantries passed, I could ask the burning question.

“Where are the stamps?”

“Oh! There are no stamps here – not for five or ten years – but it is still the museum.”

I emerged onto the streets, somewhat unsettled, history evaporating from my hands.

Narrow houses lined the canalside, like a tropical Amsterdam. It was a haven for numismatists. The old town was full of antiques shops, mostly Chinese-run, with exquisite wooden red-painted signs in Malay and Chinese. Some were tiny one-room affairs, just the bottom floor of a two-storey shophouse. Others were warrens. Many sold Chinese cultural objects: statues or carvings, silk paintings, or more tangential things: mugs and busts of Mao, old revolutionary posters, bartered over for capitalist coin.

In the backstreets, a few small shops had racks of coins from Malaysia’s past. I found it unsettling. Melaka was under British control for 130 years, long into the 1950s. This was British imperialism, close and personal. Jun, a tall Chinese Malaysian with a mop of black hair, spoke to me a little about how he felt about those final moments. Britain had re-imposed colonial authority in 1945, only to surrender to the growing independence movement in the middle of a vicious pseudo-civil war, ‘The Emergency’.¹⁰

“Definitely independence is portrayed as a Malaysian push,” he said cheerfully, tilting his head slightly to think, “but as positive, achieved through chitchat. We’re glad of the British laws being passed down, and whatnot. But the British didn’t plan enough, you know?”

By now it was dark, and I stood on a street corner in a Pasar Ramadhan (Ramadan Bazaar). Around me, the city was gorging on iftar treats to break the fast: bags of iced malted Milo drink, okra and aubergine curry, or chewy beef with green beans, and large balls of rice wrapped in brown paper. I held an old coin in my hand. Somehow it made it all more real. A Malay collector took me through a sequence of coins he had spread out on a low table in the street, pointing out when and where they were struck. They were all for use in Malaysia but never produced there.

“This one is from London, this one Birmingham… here, this one is from Bombay,” he then handed me an old note. It was yellowing and small, like Monopoly money, “This 1941 issue was on paper rather than coin. You [the British] were saving metal for the war…”

He delighted in emphasising to me that he had made sure to collect each coin “from every monarch” (Victoria to Elizabeth). One note promised to pay the bearer not in money, but in rubber. Holding them bought a guilty intimacy with what had been done in the name of my nation. I told the collector how amazed I was that these notes, issued just before the Japanese invasion of 1941, could survive so well.

“But any note of age is a miracle,” he said, eyes alight with wonder, as only an enthusiast’s could be, “to have survived fifty years in our humidity.”

Some of my days in Melaka were slow. I was woken early by the adhan (call to prayer) being pumped through loudspeakers in the streets. After 600 years of Islamic predominance over this confused mass of traders, life had become tolerant of infidels. Despite the fast, I could find a little Malaysian breakfast on a paved street: rotis with a little sticky curry or kaya (egg jam), or cups of iced teh tarik (pulled tea), sweetened with condensed milk. Then, it was a matter of lazing around until the sun relented slightly.

Melaka’s self-declared oldest bar, Sin Hiap Hin, was Jun’s recommendation. The auntie (proprietor) there was a half-deaf Chinese woman, around 80. We arrived to find the bar with a metal grill locked shut in front of closed shutters. I hung around a little while trying to see if there were any signs of life, or opening hours, when the proprietress hobbled over.

“What do you want? To drink?” she said kindly, if directly.

“Yes please, if you are open.”

“Of course we are open!” She unlocked the shutters, pulled up the grill, and I sat down at the small wooden bar.

The room was about five yards square, and stifling hot in the 4 p.m. sun. A fan churned the hot air to little effect. Bottles of Malaysian and Chinese rice wine lined the simple shelves. The white paint on all the walls was cracking. Local rice wine was served in ‘pegs’ for about 20 Ringgit (£3) each. I could have bought a whole bottle for that across the border in Indonesia. But it arrived in cut glass, with a small bowl of fast-melting ice (there was no freezer visible – the whole setup came straight from the fin de siècle), and, if we asked nicely, a can of tonic from a hidden domestic fridge. The auntie carried on watching her Chinese soap opera in her room next door, until some other punters joined, and she had to shoo away some more.

“There’s only space for eight.” she said, as she refilled my glass, “My father-in-law set this place up, before the Japanese time [1941-1945].”

The bar had had to adapt to the times. Sin Hiap Hin had not shuttered its doors like the opium dens next door. It stayed open, serving Japanese soldiers, just as it had the British officials that preceded them, and the military government afterwards. The faces changed, but the bar did not.

It was a simple place, none of the in-your-face hagiography of other historic bars in Malaysia: Hong Kong Bar in George Town covered its walls with photos and medals. Here, instead, it was timeless. There was little to suggest a century, let alone a decade. A bar out of time.

Decades and centuries had faded these layers. “The Dutch and Portuguese, that’s just tourism, just Melaka.” said one Malaysian I met. “It’s too far back,” said Jun, “though there is the food culture. Barbecued fish here often relates to the Portuguese…”.  Japan was different, still just within living memory: grandparents’ tales and cerita hantu (ghost stories)¹¹ of stomping boots in old Japanese prisons and schools. “Older generations harbour animosity [towards the Japanese],” said one young man, “but they, sadly, are nearly gone. Boomers onwards are less hung up about it.”

Another day, another attempt at a museum; this time a customs museum, where a soldier inexplicably tried to pick a fight with me. But I was rescued by the quiet charm of the Peranakan (Nyonya) district. Melaka’s Peranakan traced their communities back to the first waves of Chinese settlers to come to the Malay world, five hundred years ago.¹² Several centuries later, the distinctive blend of Chinese and Malay influences had produced a culture of its own: gorgeous historic homes, with gentle internal courtyards of plants and flowing water, overlooked by elaborate airy balconies. Then came tangy and herbal dishes of coconut curries, delicate stewed aubergine, barbecued quails’ eggs. It was the city pulling out the stops after the day’s fast.

On my final evening, I walked over to Melaka Island, just off the coast. I had envisioned it as another of the island entrepots, a mini Penang or Singapore, with a bustling grand old port and moulding colonial housing. Instead, I walked around a dark little isle, alone, with abandoned building projects on all sides, and high metal fences blocking both the buildings and the view of the sea. It was an artificial island from early in the 2000s, planned as a Melakan Manhattan. Its headline billion Ringgit (£170 million) project lay in permanent limbo, whilst two others seemed in various stages of abandonment: bare and windswept, half-finished concrete skeletons of huge buildings. Melaka’s problem was not that history had passed it by, but that it kept arriving in pieces. There were coins without mints, museums without objects, islands without cities. It seemed to survive like that: layers pushing through to the present, then disappearing again.

A torrential storm covered our heads as I left the town. Ahead on the road, cars and buses and motorbikes collided in the muddy water, thankfully without casualties. Behind us, Melaka disappeared into the black rain.

1. Gullick. Adventurous Women in South-East Asia. Oxford University Press, 1995. Pg 211.

2. Bird. The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither. Murray, 1883. Letter IX.

3. Rathborne, Camping and Tramping in Malaya. Sonnenschein, 1898. Pg 66.

4. Crowley, Conquerors. Faber & Faber, 2015. Pg 290.

5. Crowley, Conquerors. Faber & Faber, 2015. Pg 291.

6. Rathborne, Camping and Tramping in Malaya. Sonnenschein, 1898. Pg 22.

7. Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires. Hakluyt, 1944. Pg LXXV.

8. Tarling, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge history of Southeast Asia. Vol. 2 Part 1. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pg 25.

9. Akashi, The Japanese Occupation of Melaka, January 1942-August 1945. In Melaka, Oxford University Press, 1983. Pg 324.

10. See Elkins, Legacy of Violence. Random House, 2022. Chapter 11.

11. Habi and Ekstrom, The ghosts of Japan’s occupation of Malaysia | Lowy Institute, 2024.

12. See Jones, The Straits Chinese between empires. Graduate Institute Publications, 2022. Chapter 2.

Bibliography

Akashi, Yoji. “The Japanese Occupation of Melaka, January 1942-August 1945”. In Melaka: The Transformation of a Malay Capital C. 1400-1978. Oxford University Press, 1983.

Allen, Charles. Tales from the South China Seas: Images of the British in South East Asia in the twentieth century. Andre Deutch and BBC, 1983.

Bird, Isabella L. The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither: With Map and Illustrations. Murray, 1883.

Crowley, Roger. Conquerors. Faber & Faber, 2015.

Elkins, Caroline. Legacy of violence: A history of the British empire. Random House, 2022.

Pires, Tomé. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515. Edited and translated by Armando Cortesão. Hakluyt Society, 1944.

Jones, Christian. The Straits Chinese between empires: Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in colonial Malaya, c. 1890-1920. Graduate Institute Publications, 2022.

Gullick, John Michael. Adventurous Women in South-East Asia: Six Lives. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Rathborne, Ambrose B. Camping and tramping in Malaya: fifteen years' pioneering in the native states of the Malay Peninsula. Sonnenschein, 1898.

Scammell, Geoffrey. The First Imperial Age. Routledge, 1992.

Tarling, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge history of Southeast Asia. Vol. 2 Part 1. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Thomson, John Turnbull. Some glimpses into life in the Far East. Richardson, 1865.