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 GOVERNMENT OP INDIA

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MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

HUTCHINSON'S UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

BRITISH EMPIRE HISTORT

editor:
SIR REGINALD CO UP LAND
K.O.ll.O., M.A., D.UTT.

Brit Profusor of tfu History of tht British Emftin

/r in thi University of Ostford
Works by the same author:

A Malay Grammar

Colloquial Malay

A Simple Malay Reader

Dictionary op Colloquial Malay

Malay-English and English-Malay
Enolish-Malay Dictionary

Britain and Malaya

Malay Proverbs

The Malays. A Cultural History

The Malay Maoician—In the Press

•W
MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

by

SIR RICHARD WINSTEDT

K.D.B., C.M.O., D-LITT. (oXON.JTuIa.

KOHMKKLY OF TUB MALAYAN OlVIL

IRRVlOt AND Rf.ADKR IN MALAY,
UNI VRRIITY OF LONDON

35260

Stand Edition, Un it'd

Wr*

95*
HUTCHINSON’S UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Hutchinson House, London, W.i
New York Melbourne Sydney Cape Town
 Fir* Publish* . . 1948
Ftzistd Edition ... . '55*

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CONTENTS

Chapter l Malaya, the Land Page 7

11 The Peoples 13
in The Hindu Millennium 24
iv Malacca's Century of Malay Rule 32
v A Famosa 40

r* vi The Dutch at Malacca

Vil The Straits Settlements
47
S3
1
Vlil Britain and the Malay States 62
ix British Administration 78
x The Reign of Law 96
Vi
\ xi Trade, monopolized and free ;
and Finance 103
xil Industries, past and present 112
xm Labour; Health; Edhodfion 124
xiv Japan’s Houtof Triumph 135
xv The Malayan Union and Singapore 140
xvi The Future 148
Bibliography 151

Index *57
 CHAPTER I /

MALAYA —THE LAND

Seven times the Malay Peninsula has played a notable part on

the world’s stage. About 6000 B.C. it was a bridge down which
the ancestors of the Australian aborigine and of the Papuan
made their way to the narrow waters they crossed one after
another to their present homes. About 2000 b.c. the ancestors
of the Malays descended its rivers on their trek from Yunnan
to Sumatra and Java and beyond. Then, when India and China
had built ships for the high seas, a Malay Buddhist empire,
Sri Vijaya, maintained a footing in the north of the peninsula
to command the Straits of Malacca, as it maintained a footing
in Palcmbang to command the Sunda Straits. For five centuries
the fleets of its Maharaja intercepted ships faring between India
and China to levy tribute and toll, as afterwards the fleets of
Portuguese and Dutch monopolists were to do. In the fourteenth
century Sri Vijaya and its colonics fell before the attacks of
Majapahit, Java’s last Hindu empire, and one of its fugitive
i rinces founded about 1403 the port kingdom of Malacca to be
or a hundred years a Malay world market. In addition (a
happening even more momentous) Malacca became a centre
from which Indian and Arab missionaries carried the religion
of Muhammad to the islands of the archipelago.
Then came the European. In 1511 d'Albuqucrquc captured
Malacca to be Portugal’s base for trade with the Spice Islands
and the Far East. From Portugal it was wrested in 1641 by the
Dutch, who, having settled at Batavia to command the Sunda
Straits, wanted, like Sri Vijaya, to dominate the Straits of
Malacca also, the more effectively to hold the East and West in
fee. Under Dutch rule Malacca, after nearly two and a half
centuries of greatness, was eclipsed by Batavia, and when in
the nineteenth century it was transferred to Great Britain, the
7
8 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

increased draught of East Indiamen had already made It a less

convenient port of call than Raffles’ "political child” Singapore,
where the introduction of free trade furnished modem Asia
with a new pattern of commerce and government. A century
later the demand of the motor industry for tin and rubber
lifted Singapore into one of the world’s ten greatest porta. In
1941 the capture of that key to the Pacific by the Japanese saw
the defence of Netherlands India collapse like a house of cards,
and exposed India and Australia to menace.
So much we know of Malaya’s past and more, although
Muslim fanaticism destroyed nearly all the vestiges of its
Hindu period and British engineers blasted the fourteenth-
century monument to Majapahit’s conquest of Singapore,
blew up Malacca’s mediaeval Portuguese fortress and used
the bricks of a Dutch fort in Lower Perak to make
roads.
Wave after wave of early migrants visited the Malay
peninsula and aborigines stayed behind on its mountains,
although it was not till the Christian era that states emerged
into history, already called after rivers with Malay names or
bearing Sanskrit names introduced by sparse Indian colonists.
For the whole peninsula there was until the nineteenth century
no common label, rivers giving their separate names to those
sections of the limitless forest into which they cut the only
openings. By Malays it came to be termed "Malay land”
(tanah Melayu), though parts of Sumatra and Borneo are also
"Malay land”. The continent of Europe still calls tho country
the Peninsula of Malacca. But it was the British whose roads
first pierced the great forest and joined river states, and it was
left for the British to invent a suitable name for tho whole
peninsula. When and by whom that name, Malaya, was in¬
vented? It occurs in Mendez Pinto (U39), in Leyden’s Dirge
of the Departed Year, written in 1806, and again in Captain
Sherard Osborn’s pleasant book on Quedah, which was published
in London in 1857 but written as a diary when he was a mid¬
shipman in Malayan waters.
It was, however, not till the present century that the name
became popular. British Malaya it is sometimes amplified, to
distinguish between British and Siamese Malaya. But as their
 MALAYA—THE LAND 9
states are protectorates and not colonies, the Malays resent the
adjective, bitterly since a Union was mooted. And apart from
the euphonious Malaya, the peninsula has been singularly
unfortunate in names of British invention: Prince of Wales’
Island for a settlement never called by any name but Penang;
Straits Settlements, an unromantic description for the Colony,
with a penal nuance; Malayan Union, a term reminiscent of
poor-houses and primers on political science. “Malaya” the
peninsula is called by all races, and, whatever its official desig¬
nation may be, Malaya it will remain. Malaya fits the new
country of tin and rubber with its upstart federal arms with
metal on metal, a solecism anathema to the College of Heralds,
but it fits also the country of Swettenham’s Real Malay and
Hugh Clifford’s Brovm Humanity and George Maxwell's In
Malay Forests, the country of palm and mangrove and tawny
rivers.

tf

That part of Malaya which falls within the British sphere

is a little larger than England without Wales. Hardly a quarter
of the area has been hacked out of the sea of forest. The species
of trees exceed in number all those of India and Burma, and
flowering plants and ferns amount to more than 9000.
There arc three kinds of forest. Above 2000 feet is one of
low trees, lichens, mosses, ferns, liverworts and orchids. Below
that height is another type with the vegetation most charac¬
teristic of the country, ranging from trees 150 to 200 feet tall
down to a dense undergrowth of palms, tree-ferns and her¬
baceous plants. Along the coast the forest changes again.
Wherever there are sandy spits or rocky soil, the graceful
casuarina flourishes, and wherever there are mud-flats, mile
upon mile of mangrove trees straddle the ooze.
Mountains and rivers are big for the size of the country.
The highest mountain, Gunong Tahan, which lies on the
northern frontier of Pahang, rises to 7184 feet, and the next
highest (7160 feet) is one of the granite peaks of the main range,
named by the Indonesian Sakai Korbu, meaning “Mountain”
 10 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

—though modern Malays and map-makors have corrupted it

• into Kerbau—“Buffalo”. For, excepting a large area of fresh¬
water swamps, each type of soil covered by the different kinds
of forest has supported different races. Like their kinsmen the
Igorots of Luzon and the Bataks of Sumatra, the Sakai have
felled clearings on mountain slopes, and the higher the sites,
the healthier and more intelligent the tribe. On the levol land
the Malaya are to be found: attracted by the rice-plains of the
north, and, since commerce visited their shores, by the iungle
produce, resin, guttapercha, rattans, and by tin and gold, they
used for their highways the rivers, the Kelantan, the Trcng-
K i, the Pahang, the Johore, the Selangor, the Perak, tne
ah, all of which have given their names to Malay states.
Finally, along the coastal belt and at the estuaries settled the
Malay sea-gipsies, fishermen and, with the coming of Indian
commerce, pirates, whose ancestors, for example, formed an
element in the population of Sri Vijaya and of mediaeval
Malacca.
But country broken into small valleys afforded little promise
of livelihood for an agricultural people in days beforo inter¬
national commerce opened markets for metals and iungle
produce. When they descended from the continent of Asia,
Malays had already learnt to irrigate rice-fields; so at the wide
plains of northern Malaya, Pcrlis, Kedah and Kelantan, a wave
of Malay agriculturists halted. There in the north a large Malay
population collected, leaving the more southerly part of the
peninsula to nomad aborigines and Malay sea-gipsies until in
mediaeval times it, too, was developed by the aforesaid sea-
tribes, by Minangkabaus who colonized Negri Sembilan and
by Bugis who colonized Selangor.
’w Xike every tropical country, Malaya is always green and
always beautiful, though not perhaps as beautiful as Ceylon or
Java or as varied in its landscape as Indo-China. But, except in
valleys where rice-fields have been cut out of the jungle, as, for
S ple, in Kedah, Perl is and Kelantan, in Malacca and Negri
tilan, it is only from some mountain height that the visitor
can g$t free of the. enclosing forest and rubber estates and
confront landscape in perspective.
Few nowadays get the chance to travel by Malayan rivers,
 MALAYA—THE LAND II

past avenues of trees of all shades, hung with veils of smoky-

grey or orange-flowered creepers, past clumps of feathery
bamboo and white-leaved bushes and plants with crimson
tassels or rosemadder fringes. Fewer still know the fairy beauty
of the islands off the east coast or of the Langkawis that from
the Peak at Penang can be descried far off in a setting of cloud-
chased peacock sea. Across the harbour of Penang towers
Kedah Peak, purple at sunrise above the willow-green shoots
or golden grain of rice-fields. Penang, beyond dispute, is one
of the world’s fairest spots.
Seldom in a sea of forest does the wayfarer light on elephant
or tiger or rhinoceros or the wild bison or deer or many of the
650 species of birds. In the jungle of Pahang and Johore is a
huge bearded pig, but even hunters have encountered them so
seldom that it was a moot point whether they had not been
imported in the last 50 years, until at last their skeletal remains
were unearthed among the prehistoric litter of a Kelantan cave.
Crocodiles one may see in every river, nor are iguanas or
monkeys shy. Once in a lifetime, if the fates are kind, the
traveller may catch a glimpse of a pack of the red fox-like wild
dogs in hot chase across a clearing, or surprise a baby tapir at
his bath. There are over 130 varieties of snakes, and some 800
butterflies and 200 dragon-flies. The fauna of the mountains
is closely related to that of the Himalayan ranges, but, curiously
enough, there are affinities between the birds and insects of
Malaya and West Africa.
It is a pity that Malaya was a terra incognita to the Victorian
lady who wrote to a friend in 1841, "When I say romantic, I
mean damp.” On 27 December, 1926, there fell at Kemaman
in Trengganu 15^ inches of rain, and Trengganu’s total rainfall
for the month was 76.54 inches. In the same month the-Perak
River rose 38J feet at Kuala Kangsar and the Pahang River
over 60 feet at Temerloh. That year was abnormal. Ordinarily
the annual rainfall varies between 50 inches in the driest
locality and 259 inches in the mountains. During December
and January the east coast of Malaya is swept by the north-east
monsoon blowing across the China Sea. From May to October,
tempered by Sumatra’s mountains, the south-west monsoon
prevails. To get an idea of the temperature it is only necessary
12 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

to visit the palm-house at Kew. In the hottest spot on the plains

the mean daily maximum is about 9S°F. in the shade;
on the highest mountains night has seen it fall to less than
half that. The early mornings arc delightful and the nights
tolerable.
 CHAPTER II

THE PEOPLES

Aborigines

The most primitive race extant in south-east Asia and the

Malay archipelago is that of the dwarf Negritos, called Semang
in Kedah and Perak, and Pangan in Kclantan. These little black
woolly-headed nomads are related to the Actas of the Philip¬
pines and the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands. In Malaya
there are only 3000 of them, living on jungle fruits, roots and
wild game. Their weapon is the bow and arrow, but they have
borrowed the blow-pipe of the Sakai, with whom they have
intermarried. They build neither houses nor boats, but sleep
round a forest fire on a floor of sticks under a wall-less leaf
shelter propped on a stick. Innocent of the crimes that spring
from greed and passion, they live in family groups with no
ruling class or tribal organization. They fear thunder and
lightning and draw blood from their shins to appease the
unseen powers that cause them.
Far higher in the scale of civilization are the taller, fair,
wavy-haired Sakai or Scnoi of the mountains and foot-hills.
Thoy are cinnamon-coloured people of Indonesian stock,
which is one of the components of the Malay race, but their
language is mainly Mon-Annam. They arc akin to hill-
tribes in Yunnan, Indo-China and die Malay archipelago, but
those of the lower hills have not only intermarried with the
Negrito in the north and the Jakun or proto-Malay in the south
but exhibit an Australo-Melanesoid strain; that is, traces
of the blood of the remote ancestors of the Papuans and
of .Australia's aborigines. There are some 24,000 Sakai,
divided into tribes and families under patriarchal chiefs. Their
houses, like those of the Malays, are built on piles, and they
plant rice, sugar, millet, plantain and tobacco, moving to fresh
clearings as the soil becomes exhausted. Like the primitive
Malay, they are animists, fearing innumerable spirits of sick¬
ness. Like the Malay and the Mongol, they believe in the
'3
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY
H
shaman, giving him as the Malay once did tree-burial, to let the
tiger familiar rend his body and release his spirit.
In the southern half of British Malaya are found primitive
tribes, whose proto-Malay ancestors trekked down from
Yunnan and overran Indo-China. Whether of the land or
sea these 7000 Jakun, as they call themselves, have the
Indonesian and Mongoloid strains that, along with foreign
blood acquired in historical times, make up the modem civilized
Malay. But some of them also exhibit the very early Australo-
Melanesoid blood and one may see a Johore Jakun as big, black
and bearded os a Papuan. The jungle tribes live on fruits and
wild game and the Orang Laut (Kipling's “Orange Lord”) or
Sea-Folk by fishing, their families with them in their boats or
ashore in huts. These sea-tribes would transfix fish with wooden
spears, and in modern times they dive for coins in Singapore
dock. Tomd Pircs, the Portuguese writer (1515), was the first to
term them “Ccllatcs”, which may mean People of the Selat or
Straits. He describes them as pirates who haunted the Carimon
(Kerimun) islands, showed the port of Malacca to ita founder
and took part with their blow-pipes in its defence against
d’Albuquerque. He adds that the founder of Malacca rewarded
these aboriginal followers by bestowing on them titles and
offices such as that of Bendahara or Prime Minister and Laksa-
mana or Admiral, which would make them the ancestors Of
leading Malay families. In the eighteenth century they were
still loyal followers of the sultans of Johore, who condescend¬
ingly bestowed on them grandiloquent titles. Their religion is
animism, the belief that stocks and stones are animated by
living spirits, but from their civilized neighbours they learnt
also to invoke Hindu deities. Their language is Malay, free
from foreign loan-words.
More and more Malaya's aborigines are ceasing to be nomadic.

1 The Civilized Malay

The migration of the Malays from Yunnan down to the

Malay peninsula took place between 2500 and 1500 b.c. Their
quadrangular adze culture, accompanied by unglazed cord-
 THB PE0PLB8
>5
marked pottery of great variety, has been traced from China
southward, and "the highly specialized pick-adzes of Java and
Sumatra from a simple adze type with quadrangular cross-
section and semi-circular edge found in Laos through an inter¬
mediate type frequent in Malaya indicates the direction and
way of their migration1'—namely, down the Malay peninsula.
Some may have travelled by land, others across the Gulf of
Siam In craft developed from bamboo outriggers still in use on
rivers in Burma and Indo-China. Among the earliest waves may
have been the Jakun, But the most important movement
brought the ancestors of the Malays of Kedah, Kelantan and
Patani to become the civilized hinduized subjects of Langka-
euka and Sri Vijaya. The people of Kelantan, who have been
compared to the Polynesians, arc bigger than the Malays of
the south, perhaps because they represent a different strain,
perhaps on account of a better climate or the better food of an
ancient rice area.
For the culture of primitive Malays, language and pre-
hiJtorio discoveries provide the only evidence. And while
earlier peoples, apparently with an Australo-Mclancsoid strain,
lived in caves or left gigantic shell-heaps, the debris of
antediluvian meals, to bear witness to their location, the more
highly civilized Indonesian and primitive Malay inhabited
villages that arc revealed only by some accident like the great
flood of 1926, which unearthed one at Tembeling in Pahang.
Yet there is ample evidence that, before these neolithic people
left the continent of Asia, they made pottery and built mega¬
liths. They were hunters—not only of game but of human heads
for the sake of their soul-substance. They were fishermen
acquainted with traps of bamboo and wood, though not,
apparently, with the cast-net or other nets of cord. They lived,
as villagers still live, in houses built on piles and lashed with
rattan, with bamboo flooring and walls. In their gardens they
cultivated sugarcane, bananas, the gourd and the coconut. Their
field-crops were millet (still a Sakai crop) and rice, both of
which provided them with food and fermented drink. They had
domesticated the pig and the buffalo and perhaps cattle. Their
clothes were of bark. Their numerals went up to a thousand
and they possessed some knowledge of the stars.
 l6 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

It must have been long before the Christian era that Malay
names were given to many parts of Malaya like Kelantan,
Muar and Tumasik (which Hindus changed to Singapore).
The meaning of Naning, for example, is forgotten today, but
we know from the Malay element in the Khasi of Assam that
it means “Upriver’-. Possibly no generic name was adopted by
the scattered tribes until Jambi or Melayu succeeded Sri
Vijaya in the thirteenth century, after which they called them¬
selves Malays.
When Jambi fell, Minangkabau dominated Sumatra. And
when Malacca was founded with a population largely made up
of Malay sea-gipsies, its commerce attracted many Malays from
the opposite coast of Sumatra, more especially Hindu Minang-
kabaus, who sought the gold districts of Pahang and the valleys
of what in the eighteenth century became Negri Serabilan.
Bugis, too, from Celebes, in 1700 founded modern Selangor
and in 1722 became Underkings of the Johore empire. Most of
the Bugis immigrants, at any rate, were men of birth who inter¬
married with peninsular royalties and dominated their local
Malay subjects. And to infer from the legends of the Malay
Annals that most of the Malays of the peninsula crossed from
Sumatra in mediaeval times is to ignore the evidence of pre¬
history and place-names. The Malays have at least as much
right to be regarded as the aboriginal people of Malaya as the
English have to be called the aborigines of England.
The Malay of today, a broad-headed individual with olive
skin,, fine eyes, a neat well-proportioned body, lank black hair
and almost hairless chin, is the primitive Malay plus many
foreign strains derived from marriage with Chinese from Chou
times down to the advent of Islam, with Hindus of the Deccan
and Bengal, with Muslim Indians, Siamese and Arabs. They
have changed little since Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte
Barbosa, described them from his experience in the East
between 1500 and 1517: “They are well-set-up men and go
bare from the waist up but are clad in cotton garments below.
They, the most distinguished among them, wear short coats
which come half-way down their thighs, of silk cloth—in grain
or brocade~and over this they wear girdles; at their waists
they carry daggers in damascene-work which they call creeses.
 THE PEOPLES l7
Their women are tawny-coloured, clad in very fine silk garments
and short skirts decorated with gold and jewels. They are very
comely, always well-attired and have very fine hair. . . . They
live in large houses outside the city with many orchards,
gardens and tanks, where they lead a pleasant life. They are
polished and well-bred, fond of music and given to love,”
To bring the picture up to date: all but the peasant at work
in his fields wear coats nowadays, creeses are worn only at
court ceremonies, and many Malays have adopted European
dress for working hours. Some years ago when a Resident
issued a circular in praise of Malay costume and in favour of its
retention, the Malay chiefs at the next meeting of the State
Council asked him the reason: was he concerned lest they should
contract dhobi^itch?
It is a pity that modern life and the Malay’s own admiration
for European ways have conspired to make the white man for¬
get what Miss Isabella Bird, author of The Golden Cher some,
knew in 1879: “The Malays undoubtedly must be numbered
among civilized peoples. . . . They have possessed for centuries
systems of government and codes of land and maritime law,
which in theory at least show a considerable degree of
enlightenment.”
, The Malay has great pride of race—due, perhaps, as much
to his Muhammadan religion as to a past he has forgotten. He
has, as Sir Frank Swettenham once wrote, "as good a courage
as most men”, and a better sense of the values of what life
offers than is generally gained from book philosophies. Even
the aborigines of Malaya have attractive manners, and the Malay
has not only undergone the discipline of Hindu etiquette but
has been affected by his Muslim teaching much as an English
boy has been affected by the public school, acquiring poise and
confidence. Because he is an independent farmer with no need
to work for hire, the Malay has got an undeserved reputation
for idleness, which hia Asiatic competitors take care to foater.
In affairs he is not only diplomatic but intelligent and states¬
manlike, with a natural ability to weigh both sides of a question.
His domestic life is happy- He marries young, but in spite of the
latitude o'f Islamic practice the peasant has seldom been a
1 Hindustani for “iaundrymao’’.
l8 MALAYA AND IT8 HISTORY

polygamist, though the immemorial need for sons to work hia

fields makes him prone to repudiate a childless wife.
At the 1947 census, out of 2,398,186 Malays in the
Federation, 275,700 were comparatively ncw-comers from
Sumatra and java, men of the Malay's own racial stock and
religion, who alone of the country’s immigrants rapidly become
absorbed into the Malay community. In the Federation,
Malays and aborigines formed 49*47 per ceht of the total popu¬
lation and the Chinese 38*6 per cent. But in Kelantan, for
example, the population iB almost wholly Malay.

Chinese

Chinese may have visited Malaya in pre-hietoric times. The

first historical record, the Chinese History of th$Le<wg($Q2-$<(>)t
mentions Lnngkasuka (or Kedah), a Buddhist state in the north of
Malaya whose rulers sent embassies to China at least four times
during the sixth century a.d. ty'hat part the Chinese played in
the peninsular half of Sri Vijaya is unknown. But when at the
end of the fourteenth century that empire fell, the Chinese
established at Palembang In Sri Vijaya’s Sumatran centre
"stood up for themselves and a man from Namhoi in Canton,
culled Liang Tan-ming, who had lived there a long time and
roamed the sea, followed by several thousand men from
Fukien and Canton, was taken by them as their chief". For
nearly 200 years Palembang remained in tho hands of Chinese,
who were, many of them, pirates. ; .
The first Malay mention of Chinese in the peninsula is found
in the Malay Annals of fifteenth-century Malacca. Mixing folk¬
lore and history, they relate how the Emperor sent Sultan
Mansur Shah (ca, 1456) a junk full of needles as many as the
people of China, and how the Malay king sent back envoys with
a cargo of sago, every bead rolled by one of his subjects. The
Malays entered the seven gates of the imperial palace to the
clash of gongs and saw the Emperor in a glass palanquin
carried in the mouth of a dragon. They brought back for the
Sultan a "royal" bride, Hang Liu, whose escort of 500 gentry
settled in Malacca and gave Bukit China its name.
 THB PBOPLBS
t9
:Tom6 Plres, the Portuguese who lived in Malacca .from
1512 to 1515, is less romantic. “The Chinese to be seen in
Malacca are not very truthful and steal. That is the common
people.” But Tome Pires says that Islam had not yet got a
strong enough hold over the Malays to prevent intermarriage
with the Chinese. “Heathens marry with Moorish” (that is,
Muslim) “women and a Moor with a heathen woman with
their own proper ceremonies.” Afterwards, when Malays
became strict Muhammadans, the Chinese immigrants for¬
bidden to bring their wives from China had to turn to Balinese
and Batak slaves to be the mothers of a Baba race, which by
intermarriage among its own kith and kin retained Chinese
dress and Chinese customs though it lost Chinese speech.
Under the Dutch there .were about 2000 Babas in eighteenth-
century Malacca, some employed as soldiers. A Perak history,
written in the same century, relates how Chinese boxers and
snake-charmers took part in royal festivities there with Chinese
music that sounded "like the noise of frogs in a .swamp after
rain”.
The Chinese words in the Babas’ pidgin Malay support the
claim of the Hokkiens from Amoy that they were the earliest
immigrants and they are still more numerous than other
Chinese in the former Straits Settlements and Johore, But
it was Western trade after the Napoleonic wars and then tin
and finally rubber that attracted an endless flow of Chinese
from Kwangtung (Canton) as well as from Fukien to Penang,
Singapore and the Malay States as they came under British rule.
The stream has also included IChehs (or Hakkas), Teochus,
many of vvhom are fishermen, and the so-called Hailams from
the island of Hainan who are excellent and well-bred domestic’
servants and shop-keepers and small planters.
Nearly all the commerce of Malaya is in Chinese hands.
There are Chinese planters, miners, bankers, doctors, lawyers,
accountants, civil servants, schoolmasters, contractors, rubber..
manufacturers, timber merchants, booksellers, hotel-keepers,
pig-rcarers, poultry-farmers, market-gardeners, carpenters and
fishermen. Without the Chinese, Malaya, having no surplus
population of unemployed Malays, could never have developed.
But Chinese national virtues are colonial vices. Against a
20 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

people so industrious, intelligent and clannish, no other race

can stand up. Endowed with the laughter and manners of an
ancient civilization, they mix with other races with innate good
nature and are delighted to welcome them to their entertain¬
ments,' but never into their businesses. No trespasser may ever
enter their commercial preserves. In colonial politics they have
been even less interested than in Chinese politics, a trait that has
made their invasion Into local commerce less patent. Never till
the British period did they attempt to take part in the adminis¬
tration of Malaya.
Two-thirds of the Chinese in Malaya were bom in their own
country and have remitted their savings to their native districts,
thereby draining Malaya of a great portion of its wealth. Now
that more and more Chinese women are coming to Malaya, this
drain on the country’s wealth will lessen, but racial competition
will be aggravated. In 1947 there were 1,884,534 Chinese in
the Federation and 730,133 in Singapore.

Indians

For more than a thousand years the Malays owed their

civilization to Hindus, though the Indian immigrants, whether
fyim the Deccan or Bengal, were never enough to introduce
their own colloquial languages and had to be content to intro¬
duce Indian alphabets, the last the Perso-Arabic Muslim
alphabet that has been known to the Malays for 600 years. The
coming of Islam to India stimulated Indian migration to the
C sula. According to Tom6 Pires, when Diogo Lopes de
lira readied Malacca there were a thousand Gujerati
merchants there, or, along with Parsis, Bengalis and Arabs,
more than 4000 foreigners. “There were also great Kling
merchants with trade on a great scale and many junks. This is
the nation that brings most honour to Malacca.” By local usage
all southern Indians, Tamils, Telugus and Malayalis are called
Klings after the mediaeval kingdom of Kalinga that covered
the northern Circars or territory north of the Coromandel
coast, but though the use of the terra is a tribute to the great¬
ness of his past, the southern Indian now regards it as deroga-
 THE PEOPLES 21

tory. The Malay, for his part, has borrowedthe word “Lebai” as •
a term of respect for a pious Malay elder from the Labbai
Muslims of the Madras coast. Tamil merchants occasionally
won place and honour in old Malacca and in eighteenth-century
Perak,.where the Sultan gave one a title for going to India and
returning with a trader who bought elephants. Half-ca9te
Indians, like Munshi 'Abdullah, who was half Tamil and half
Arab, have played a great part in writing the Malay’s literature
of translation, introducing him to Indian folk-lore, romance
and mysticism. Today the great majority of Indians in Malaya
are Tamil labourers from the Madras Presidency, who work
on rubber estates, on the railway and in the Public Works
Department and return home on an average after three years.
Most Tamils of the second generation are clerks, overseers and
schoolmasters. Malaya also has Indian doctors, lawyers and
merchants.
Northern Indians are fewer, but include men of many
races: Punjabis^ Bengalis, Afghans, Pathans and Mahrattas.
Many Punjabi Sikhs and a few Pathans are policemen. From
Ceylon come not only Tamil clerks but a few thousand
Singhalese jewellers, carpenters, barbers and labourers. In
1947 there were just under 600,000 Indians and Ceylonese
in Malaya. . .

Other Races

The northern states, having been subject to Siam until 1909,

have a large sprinkling of Siamese residents.
Arabs, though only a few thousand in number, have great
influence from their religious status and their wealth. In Singa¬
pore, nearly all the Arabs are of pure Arab descent, most of
them immigrants from the Hadramaut, where they have built
palatial houses with fittings imported from Singapore. The
war, it may be noted, greatly impoverished the Fladramaut by
depriving its people of the usual remittances from Malaya and
Netherlands India. As early as the seventeenth century Sayids
(or descendants of the Prophet) of the great Hadramaut house
of Ahmad Isa al-Mohajir had won State offices in Perak. One
 22 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

became the father of a Perak Sultan. From another are

descended the rulers of Siak in Sumatra. The older settlers
have intermarried with Malay women. But a Sharifah, the
female equivalent of a Sayid, may marry no one but a Sayid or a
Malay of raja rank.
There are about a thousand Jews, some of them the wealthy
owners of large properties in Singapore.
Filipinos; Boyancse, Bataks, Tibetans, Annamese, Negro
boxers, Turks and many local races add to Malaya’s human
miscellany. But the only two races numerous enough to require
mention arc Eurasians and Europeans, who in 1947 numbered
respectively 19,171 and 18,958, almost equally distributed
between Singapore and the Federation.
Malaya’s Eurasians of oldest descent are those with
Portuguese blood in their veins and a patois founded on
mediaeval Portuguese. All of them came originally from
Malacca, where the poorest are fishermen and the well-to-do
planters, clerks and schoolmasters. All Portuguese Eurasians
are Catholics. But there arc also several well-known Eurasian
families in Malaya who are of Dutch descent and again derive
from Malacca. The prosperity of Penang and Singapore later
attracted Eurasians from British India, some descendants of
writers and captains in the East India Company. A son of
Captain Light, the founder of Penang, by a Portuguese
Eurasian was an officer on Wellington’s staff and laid out
Adelaide. The Eurasians of Malaya refused to follow the
example of Eurasians in India, who term themselves Anglo-
Indians. They have to their credit such a record of respect¬
ability and public service that it would have been a pity for
them to disguise their identity.
Lastly there ate the Europeans of whom in 1947 there were
in the Federation only 9986. They numbered representatives
of most European countries and of the United States of America.
All the British are employed in government service, business,
planting or mining, or else they are private doctors, lawyers,
accountants or journalists. While there are no localities con¬
fined to Europeans, in the larger towns they have their own clubs,
just as Chinese, Malays, Indians and Eurasians have theirs.
Superficial observers believe the Asiatic is eager to enter
 THE PBOPLBS 21

European clubs. But he would be no happier if all clubs were

mixed than the European would be. Generally he prefers to
associate wjth his own race. And had the Eurasians or the
British, for example, admitted Chinese to membership of
their clubs, they would have been entirely swamped by the
more numerous community. But there are more and more
clubs with an international membership, one of the most
successful of them founded by the present Sultan of Johorc.
All races meet on the football field and the well-to-do at coif,
tennis and cricket. Two Malays were once playing the gravc-
dmgera in Hamlet. Said the first grave-digger; ‘Tm giving up
thiB job. Ever since Dr. -— has been stationed here, there is
no one to bury. Roars of Malay applause grocted this compli¬
ment to a popular British footballer. For the liking between
Europeans and Malays and between Europeans and Straits-
bom Chinese is spontaneous and sincere. And even if other
races may not find quite so much in common, hitherto tolera¬
tion and good-fellowship have marked the intercourse of all the
peoples of Malaya, mainly because they had the traditional
manners of ancient civilizations—and were too prosperous for
jealousies.
 CHAPTER III

THE HINDU MILLENNIUM

Geography laid the Malay world open to the influence of

China, but down the ages that influence has been negligible. It
is true that the rulers of mediaeval Malacca used to send envoys
thore, as nine centuries earlier Malaya’s first recorded kingdom
Langkosuka had done. But fortunately relations between China
and the South Seas were generally confined to trade. For while
Indian penetration was peaceful and ingratiating, China, where
she attempted to penetrate, conquered and annexed, appointed
governors and compelled her subjects to adopt the Chinese way
of life. Rarely did she seek intimacy on other terms. For
foreigners the Chinese language and calligraphy are equally
difficult, but the Chinese have displayed no missionary leanings
that might have disposed them to study the language of peoples
they despise as barbarian. Chinese monks studied Sanskrit, but
that waft a sacred language. Modern Chinese, though nearly as
clannish as their forefathers, study English, but English is tho
Open Scsamd to material success. It was not China but India
that so influenced the spiritual as well as the material life of
the Malays that till the nineteenth century they owed nearly
everything to her: alphabets, religion, a political system,
law, astrology and mediaeval medicine, litorature, sculpture
in atone, metalwork and tho weaving of silk.
The Indiana, who built the oldest temples and chiselled
Buddhist inscriptions in Sanskrit as early as tho fourth
century a.d. in Kedah, must have been preceded by traders,
who sailed to and fro long before Brahmins and monks
and literate adventurers brought the Hindu religion and
Buddhism and Sivaite ideas of royalty, and carved Sanskrit
inscriptions to which India itself had not long been accustomed.
Immigration in larger numbers and permanent settlement began
in the first centuries of the Christian era, with commerce as the
driving force.
«4
 THE HINDU MILLENNIUM . 25

“The contact established between the Mediterranean

world and the East after Alexander’s campaign, the founda¬
tion in India of the empire of Asoka and the later empire of
Kanishka, the birth in the West of the Seleucid empire and
of the Roman empire gave commerce in luxury commodi¬
ties a scope deplored by the Latin moralists of the first
century. Gold, spices, sandalwood, eaglewood, camphor and
benzoin were reckoned among the products of lands and
islands beyond the Ganges."

So Professor Coed is in his book Histoire Ancienne des

Etats Hxndouisfc d'Extrime-Orient. And he notes how place-
names like Suvarna-bhumi (“Land of Gold") and Suvama-
dvipa (“Islands of Gold") for south-east Asia and the Malay
archipelago suggest the probability that above all it was
the mi sacra fames—“the metal that God chose", as Tomd
Pires calls it—-which attracted Indians, particularly because
migrations in central Asia just before the time of Christ cut
the route used by caravans to bring them Siberian gold. Two
other accidents stimulated India’s overseas commerce: firstly,
Buddhism, with its abolition of caste barriers and of the preju¬
dice against crossing the sea and being polluted by barbarian
contacts, and secondly the increased size of Indian ships and
Chinese junks, built on Persian models, together with the
discovery of the Arabs’ secret knowledge of the monsoon winds
that took those Muslim traders not only to India but, as early
as the fourth century, to China.
Yet in spite of having ships that could carry 600 passengers
or more, Indians did not reach Malay shores in numbers
sufficient to introduce Prakrit, the colloquial form of Sanskrit,
or to affect the physical appearance of the local people as Muslim
Tamils m the nineteenth century affected the Malay?, of
Penang. Chinese voyagers described the inhabitants of the new
settlements not as Indians but as hinduized natives of the
Malay world, an account corroborated by the fact that in modern
Bali only seven per cent of its Hindu population claim to
belong to an Aryan caste. Even so, it took only a Brahminieal
rite to admit Indonesian chiefs to the second or warrior caste
of the Aryan Hindu. To that caste the new' kings belonged,
 26 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

whether Indians or half-bloods or Indonesian converts tutored

by Brahmin chaplains in the ritual necessary to turn patriarchal
chiefs into incarnations of Hindu gods. As most of the colonists
came from the south of India, not all of those Brahmins can
have been any more Aryan than the Dravidian Brahmins of the
Deccan. But they fixed firmly in the Malay mind a respect for
their caste that even now survives unguessed. The Muslim
? sultans Of the Malay peninsula no longer, like the kings of
- Siam and Cambodia, maintain Brahmins to guard their regalia
t and conduct court ritual. But ip Perak no one outside the royal
house may handle the regalia except a hereditary court func¬
tionary, the Sri Nara-diraja, whose family may not eat beef
and boasts descent from the vomit of Siva's bull, Nandi; At a
Perak enthronement it is still this Sri Nara-diraja who proclaims
the royal title, and as a Brahmin whispers into the car of his
pupil the name of the god who is to be the child’s special
protector through life, so this representative of past Brahmins
whispers to the new ruler the Hindu name of the founder of
his dynasty. At the enthronement of a Yang di-pertuan of Negri
8embilan the name of the chosen ruler is still proclaimed by a
court herald in Brahminical attitude; that is, by a herald
standing on one leg with the sole of the right .foot resting on his
left kn ee, his right hand shading his eyes and the tip of the
, fingers of his left hand pressed against his left check.
For the Malay enthronement ceremony, though covered
’ today with a decent Muslim veneer, still retains all the elements
of the Hindu ritual. The first rite was lustration. The second
was anointing at oach quarter of the compass. But wherever
^Buddhism Substituted water for oil, in Burma, Siam and
Malaya, there the two rites have been merged. And while in
wSlam the king turns to every quarter of the globe to be
anointed, in Negri Sembilan this has lapsed into a fourfold
anointing without change of position; After these rites pious
Muslims chant prayers as once Brahmins chanted stanzas of
benediction. Next, as so often in Brahmin ceremony, there is
circiimarabulation, the ruler being taken in procession round
the royal demesne. After that he exhibits himself to lii$ people,
wearing in Perak the ornaments of a Hindu god. In the heath-
dress of a Perak ruler is thrust a mediaevalseal, whose handle

l \ft
 THE HINDU MILLENNIUM •' . 27

is made of “thunder” wood; it is called, the “lightning” seal,

and has taken the place of a symbol of the thunderbolt which
Indra always holds as a threat to the wicked. On the Sultan’s
shoulder is a sword, which in spite of its shape boars the name
Of the heavy sacrificial dagger “from the heaven-bom Ganges”,
that, inlaid with the figures of Siva and Mahadcvi, was used by
a famous fourteenth-century ruler of Minangkabao aa member
of a demon Bbairava sect professing a Tabtric doctrine that
connected the worship of Siva with the religion of Buddha.
While a Perak ruler sits thus enthroned, the Sri Nara-diraja
reads an address in corrupt Sanskrit, lauding his Raja’s victory
over evil, his luck, bis justice and his power of healing. Similar
addresses are common in India and one is used in Siam. In
Negri Sembilan a translation of this formula is read, not by a
Muslim dignitary but by one of the court functionaries who
must represent the Brahmins of old: it invokes five angels of
the sky in place of the Hindu guardians of its five regions who
were invoked in Vedic times. A Malay ruler has to sit immobile
as possible on his throne, rigidity being evidence in Hindu
ritual of incipient godhead.
It was as an incarnation of Siva that Aditiavarman, ruler of
Minangkabau in’ Sumatra, is depicted on his sacrificial dagger,
and the founder of Majapahit, last Hindu empire of Java, is
sculptured as Vishnu. But it was generally of Indra, controller
of weather and lord of Mount Meru the Hindu Olympus, that
the rulers of Malay agricultural communities became the
receptacle. In Hindu times the capital of Pahang was called
Indrapura, city of Indra, and behind the palace at Sri Menanti
(in Negri Sembilan) a hill is dedicated to Sri Indra. The rulers
of Malacca, Perak and Negri Sembilan claimed descent from
the emperors of Sri Vijaya, who at Palembang had a Mount
Meru, famous in Malay folldorc. The kings of Sumatra, Java,
Cambodia, Burma and Siam all had at their capitals a Meru,
namely a hill or shrine or temple or palace tower .that symbol¬
ized die Hindu Olympus. And this symbol was probably
developed from the earth-mound that in the time of Confucius
stood on the confines of a Chinese town to represent the whole
district. The idea of this mound in turn may well have come
from Babylon or the Middle East, and have given the Sumatran
 a8 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

the idea of a pyramid grave, and the Javanese the idea of a

pyramid temple like the Chandi Sukuh, erected when
nationalism had revived and triumphed over Indian influence.
The court was the centre of Brahmin influence among
communities almost entirely Malay. But even the humblest
villager could not remain unaffected by an influence that lasted
a thousand years. Everywhere, for example, twelve purificatory
rites that cleanse a Brahmin of original sin have left their mark
in the marriage and birth ceremonies of the Malay, on the
introduction of an infant to mother earth and father water, on
the ceremonies at the beginning and end of his religious studies.
Still in remote places the village medicine-man, Muhammadan
though he is, calls upon Siva to restrain malicious spirits from
plaguing the sick, from molesting those who woula plant rice
or build a new house or have killed a deer. But next to the rite
of enthronement, the most elaborate Hindu rite is the sacrifice
preluding the performance of the Ramayana on the screen of the
&hadow-play, when, wearing a yollow scarf, the master of the
show claims to be an incarnation of Vishnu and makes offerings
to Siva the Supreme Teacher and King of Actors and to all the
demigods of the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
It is in Kelantan that this rite and plays out of the Ramayana
arc common, and it is not surprising chat the remoteness of this
state from foreign influences has favoured the survival of Hindu
practices inherited from the oldest centres of Hinduism in the
peninsula.
For the first state in Malaya of Indian type was Langkasuka,
which, with a capital in what is now Kedah, probably straddled
from sea to sea, controlling one of India’s early land-routes to
Indo-China. A Chinese account written in the sixth century says
it was then more than 400 years old and had brick walls. Both
sexes wore their hair long and wore sleeveless coats made of a
cotton (fripei) materia^ (kan-man), while king and nobles wore
pink shawls over their shoulders, gold belts and gold car-
rings. The women had fine scarves adorned with gems. The king
went abroad on an elephant, seated under a white howdah and
escorted by drums and banners and fierce-looking soldiers.
That there was early Buddhist influence in the north of Malaya
is proved by the discover)' in Kedah and Province Wellesley of
 THE HINDU MILLENNIUM 29

Hinayana and Mahayana inscriptions in Sanskrit that date from

the fourth century a.d., and by the discovery at Pengkalan and
Tanjong Rambutan in Perak’s tin district, Kinta, 'of two
Hinayana (two-armed) Buddhist bronzes of Gupta style that
may be assigned to the-fifth century. (Alas! the upper portion
of the Pengkalan Buddha was lost during the Japanese occu¬
pation.) Buddhists evidently were pioneers in colonizing
Malaya. But an ornament with Vishnu on his Garuda and a
cornelian ring inscribed Vishnu-varman in characters ante¬
dating the sixth century have been found at a neolithic shore
site at Kuala Selinsing in Perak, and before the end of the fifth
century the Sailarajas, or Kings of the Mountain, who ruled
Fou-nan, the empire that stretched from Annam to Maiaya,
had adopted the worship of Siva, who was supposed to descend
on the holy mountain from which the dynasty and empire took
their names. This was the beginning of the period when Pallavas
from the Coromandel coast built little Sivaite temples along the
River Bujang (? ga) in Kedah. Then in the seventh century,
after 500 years of domination, Fou-nan fell, leaving it to a
Mahayana Buddhist empire, Sri Vijaya, to take swift advantage
of the growing commerce from India and Arabia. A Sanskrit
inscription setting forth doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism in
Pallavan script said to be of the sixth century has been un¬
earthed on the same River Bujang (?-f- ga) in Kedah. An
inscription of a.d. 684(inthesamescriptbuttheMalaylanguage)
has come down to us from Sri Vijaya’s Palembang territory and-/
contains the first dated reference to the existence of this
Mahayana Buddhism, or syncretism of Buddhism and Hin¬
duism. According to the monk I-tsing, Melayu (later called
Jambi) became part of this, the earliest Sumatran Sri Vijaya,
between 689 and 692.
The expansion of Sri Vijaya came not with its early un- . -
known dynasty but through the marriage of one of its’prin¬
cesses into a family of Sailendras or Kings of the Mountain
who in the eighth century arrogated to themselves the style of
Maharaja and ruled first in central Java, where they built
Borobudur and other famous monuments. Before a reaction
towards Saivism drove them from-Java they had already a
footing in Malaya, where in 775 a Sailendra Maharaja left’an
 3<> MALAYA AND ITS HI8T0RY

inscription in Ligor. And now they created an empire called

by the Arabs Zabag or Javaka that embraced not only Kedah
and the north of Malaya but the Sumatran colonies of the earlier
Sri Vijaya. Apparently the Chinese talk sometimes of Palem-
bang, sometimes of the whole empire, as Sri Vijaya. The roving
Malay seamen that were now the subjects of the Snilendraa
were not of the type to build religious monuments to astound
posterity, but their far-flung empire, the Chi-H-fo-che and
San-fo-ts’i of the Chinese, greatly impressed Axftb voyagers
from Oman, who left Abbaside coins dated a.d. 848 at yet
another site on the Bujang (? 4- ga). Arabs tell how the empire
of the Maharaja controlled the Sundn Straits from Palembang
and the Malacca Straits from Acheh and Kedah. And a copper¬
plate from India records how in 1006 Rajendrachola I of Tan-
jorc granted a charter for a village to support a shrine started
at Negapatam by a king of Sri Vijaya and finished by hifi son
Mara-vijayottungavarman--“ray-garlandcd sun in the lotus
groves of the wise, king of Sri Vijaya and Kedah”.
An empire thus strategically placed to control the commerce
between India and the Far East was doomed.to excite jealous
rivalry. In 992 it was attacked by Java and apparently retaliated
in 1006. Then in 1025, after a preliminary raid eight years earlier,
Rajendrachola I overwhelmed Sri Vijaya and its subject terri¬
tories, including Melayu (or Jambi) and Lamuri (or Acheh) in
Sumatra, along with Kedah and Langkasuka and other places
in Malaya. But though the Maharajas had for a time to
"worship their conquerors’ ankletted feet”, Malayan countries
were too far beyond “the sounding seas” for the Cholaa to
hold, and the Arabs again extolled the greatness of an
empire that still, in the twelfth century, included Palera-
bang, Acheh, Ligor, Langkasuka, Pahang and Trengganu
among its dependencies. But already at the end of the previous
century Melayu (or Jambi) appears as a separate kingdom. And
soon Java began to encroach on Sumatra and the Thai on the
north of the Malay peninsula, and Buddhist power was
threatened by Muslim missionaries. By 1281 Jambi was sending
to China merchant envoys with the Muslim names Sulaiman
and Shamsu'd-din, and in 1292 Marco Polo describes Langka-
suka as of no account and talks of eight separate kingdoms In
 THE HINDU MILLENNIUM

Sumatra, one of them, Perlak, being Muslim. But the final

blow to Jambi, inheritor of the empire of Sri VijayS, came
from Java. As early as 1275 Java claimed Pahang as one of he*
dependencies, and then at some time between 133S and 1365
her last Hindu empire Majapahit conquered Sumatra and the
Malay peninsula, leaving to this day Javanese words in the
Kedah dialect, a Javanese type of creese in Patani and the
Majapahit shadow-play in Kelantan. Java dealt the death¬
blow to the old empire of the Maharajas, and Ialam deprived
Siva and Buddha of their spiritual ascendancy in the Malay
world. One most evil legacy from Sri Vijaya was left to the
new age. Rich from international commerce, she had attracted
merchants, scholars and adventurers to her ports, but as early
as the twelfth century it was said of Palembang: '‘if a merchant
ship passes by without entering, her boats go forth to make
a combined attack and all are ready to die (In battle). That is
the reason why the country is a great shipping centre.” The
decline, of Palembang into a den of Chinese pirates was a local
disaster, but the pattern of sea-power supported by piracy
and monopoly that Sri Vijaya bequeathed to Malacca, Portugal
and Holland was a cause of war and misery for many lands and
countless people.
 CHAPTER TV

MALACCA’S CENTURY OF MALAY

RULE

By 1365 Majapahit claimed as a dependency Turaasik, “the

Sea Town”, or, to use its more famous Indian name, Singapore,
“city of the Singhs or lions”; but in a few years that mediaeval
haunt of pirates, along with the Malay peninsula, fell under the
domination of Siam. It was the murder of Siam's governor of
Singapore that drove its Malay king, the Palembang consort of
a Majapahit princess, to flee upcountry, where about 1403 he
founded Malacca. The legend goes that the site was shown to
him by Malay sea-gipsies whose ancestors had served his own
as fishermen and pirates in Palembang waters, but it looks as if
the Parameswara, or Prince Consort, as the founder of Malacca
termed himself in deference to his high-born wife, deliberately
chose Malacca as being far enough south not to be overwhelmed
by Siam and yet so situated that the port might hope to attract
from India, from the east, and from the archipelago the trade
that had formerly been enjoyed by Kedah when a part of Sri
Vijaya. Kedah, Tomd Pires records, still claimed Malacca,
Perak, Manjong, Selangor and Bemam, all of them prized for
their tin. Yet Kedah was not only subject to Siam, but appar¬
ently part of the little Muslim port-kingdom of Pasai (in modern
Acheh), whose missionaries carried Islam inland as far as
Trongganu/ to judge from a stone there, inscribed in 1326 or
1386 with the first known specimen of Malayo-Arabic script.
There is a Megat Kedah mentioned in the chronicles of Pasai,
and there is a Pasai grave-stone of 1380 which has been
deciphered to refer to a princess of a family that ruled Pasai
and Kedah. And the fact that Pasai had a footing in northern
Malaya may have influenced Malacca's first ruler to marry a
Pasai princess. Whether or not the Pasai house had by inter¬
marriage the blood of the SailendraS who ruled Palembang and
Kedah and Acheh is unknown. As early as 1406, according to
the Chinese, the Parameswara of Malacca had already claimed
 Malacca’s century op Malay rulb 33

the throne of Palerabang, and folk-lore has always associated

the origin of the Malacca dynasty with Palembang. The second
ruler of Malacca assumed the Sailendras’ ancient title of
Maharaja, and it is to this ruler that the constitution of
Malacca is ascribed. That constitution, so far from being based
on any Muslim pattern, embodies the ancient Hindu con¬
ception of a kingdom as an image of the heavenly world of stars
and gods, a conception current in Fou-nan (p. 29) and
borrowed probably from Fou-nan by Sri Vijaya. In the ninth
century Java was divided into 28 provinces corresponding
in number to the houses of the moon, with four chief
ministers corresponding to the four cardinal points, and a
king, all together making up the number of the 33 gods 00
Mount Meru, the Hindu Olympus over which Indra presided.
Pegu, in the fourteenth century, had 32 governors and a king,
Malacca, even as a Muslim Sultanate, had, in addition to the
ruler, four great, eight lesser, 16 small and 32 inferior chiefs.
From Malacca, Perak and some other modem states have
inherited the same constitution.
Sri Vijaya was now to be revenged on the two powers
that destroyed its empire. For Malacca proceeded to stem
Siamese influence in Malaya and to weaken Java’s last Hindu
empire Majapahit, both materially by incursions into her
trade and politically by encouraging Muslim missionaries to
proselytize in Javanese ports.
“Dead we lie wrapped by earth; alive we arc wrapped by
custom.” So runs a Malay saying, and the policy of every Malay
state was based on tradition and precedent. As early as the
sixth century a.d. Langkasuka (Kedah), forerunner of Sri
Vijaya and later the centre of its peninsular empire, had four
times sent embassies to China within a hundred years. So now,
from Parameswara, founder of Malacca, down to her last
Sultan, Mahmud Shah, all tire rulers of the new port kingdom
sent envoys with tribute to China’s new Ming emperors, every
one of tnese Malay potentates seeking recognition of his
accession and some of them occasionally asking for protection
against Siam.
In r4.11 the famous Admiral Cheng Ho, or Ong Sam Po,
whom the Malacca Chinese today worship as a minor deity,
c
 34 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

called at .Malacca with a fleet of great junks and took the

Paramcswara, his consort and followers, 450 people in all, to
China, where the Malay prince was entertained by the Emperor
in person and given magnificent presents, so mindful must
China have been of past trade with the Malay peninsula.
'The visits of Malacca’s rulers to China promoted trade,
and the size of China’s touring fleets gave Malacca a sense of
* security.
But closer than Malacca’s tics with China were those with
India. When its first ruler married in old age the Pasai
f rincess he became a convert to Islam, newly imported from
ndia, and assumed the title of Iskandar Shah, a name illustrious
from Islamic legends of Alexander (al-Iskandar) the Great. On
his death, as we have seen, there was a reversion to Sri Vijaya’s
old Hindu title of Maharaja. Then soon after 1445 l^cre was 8
coup d'itat at Malacca by Muslim Tamil merchants, who killed
an infant rulei of Malay blood royal and elevated to the throne
his younger brother by a Tamil mother. This usurper,
Muzaffar Shah, was the first ruler to assume the title of Sultan,
borne then, Pires says, only by the kings of Pasai and of Bengal.
His elevation to the throne gave Tamils a footing in the govern¬
ment of the kingdom which their half-caste descendants lost
only on the arrival of d'Albuquerque. There is no doubt that
this promoted trade with India, though the Tamil element led
to corruption and intrigue.
Malacca, however, emulated not only the commerce but the
imperialism of Sri Vijaya and Majapahit. The reigns of Muzaffar
and his son Mansur saw the conquest of the whole peninsula
south of Kedah and Patani, and across the straits the subju-
jjgatiQnof Roknn, Kampar, Indragiri and Sink on the opposite
coast of Sumntra. Mahmud, Malacca’s last Sultan, conquered
Kedah and Patani too, and he ceased to send tribute to Siam
and elephants to Java, acknowledging only the suzerainty of

Sometimes a conquered ruler fell in battle or was carried a

captive to Malacca and his throne given to a Malacca prince.
Sometimes he was converted to Islam by the offer of a Malacca
^princess.- As in trade and imperialism, so in diplomacy and
administration Malacca followed traditional lines. Her founder
 MALACCA’S CENTDRY OF MALAY RULE 35

had been a Palembang raja married to a princess of Majapahit,

which had subjected his country. And just as Siam, for example,
had exacted an annual tribute of gold from Malacca, and as
Majapahit expected elephants and China pearls and tin, so
Malacca required tribute from all her dependencies in
return for which they got the protection of her fleets and

These governors were given the Sanskrit style of Mandulikas,

as Sri Vijaya must have termed them, seeing that a fourteenth-
century Trengganu inscription speaks of a Mandulika still in
office up the remote Trengganu River. Not till Malacca fell and
her governors were supplanted, or as in Negri Sembilan arro¬
gated to themselves independence, did the title of Mandulika
die out, surviving only in Jelebu, where today it is a meaningless
honorific.
The king of Pahang paid Malacca annual tribute of 5! lb.
of gold, Indragiri and Kampar i J lb. each. Other dependencies
in Malaya paid tribute in tin. Sumatran states, Rokan, Rupat,
Siak and Tungkal paid no tribute but had to supply fighting
men at their own cost in time of war. The Cclatcs, or sea-.;
gipsies, of Bintang were requued to serve as rowers for certain >
months of the year.
More important tlian tribute were the imports that came to
Malacca from the countries she subjected, imports that
attracted wholesale merchants from Gujerat and Coromandel
and Java and China to open warehouses in the port, and
brought with the south-west monsoon trading ships from India
and with the north-east junks from China. Duarte Barbosa,
like all his countrymen, grows almost lyrical over the commerce
at Malacca. He tells how there came to the mediaeval port very
fine four-masted junks with cargoes of sugar, great store of fine
raw silk, porcelain, damasks, brocades and satins, musk and
rhubarb, silver and pearls, gilded coffers, fans and other
baubles. In exchange for those cargoes the Chinese took away
X, incense, saffron, coral shaped and unshaped, vermilion,
36 ;V; MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

European type, built of very thick timber, so that when the

hulls were no longer seaworthy, new planking could be fitted to
the old. The Javanese brought for sale finely wrought daggers
and spears, gold and the foodstuffs of which, throughout her
history, Malacca has always stood in need. In return they
carried home cloths from Pulicat and Cambay, opium, rose¬
water, vermilion, vegetable dyes, silk, saltpetre, iron and drugs.
From Malacca ships sailed to the Moluccas for cloves, to Timor
for sandalwood, to Bandan for nutmegs and mace. All over the
archipelago Malacca distributed Indian cloths, Chinese
porcelain, iron knives and drugs. From Sumatra came gold and
camphor. Gold, indeed, was so abundant, says Tomd Pirea,
that the leading merchants kept their accounts in bars of gold,
and the richest merchant could discharge three or four ships
and reload them from his own stock.
Although they are dated 200 years later, the oldest Malay
port regulations extant, coming from Kedah, show that the
Malays administered their international ports on lines practised
in India from the time of Chandra Gupta to the time of the
Great Moguls. .They had rules fixing port fees and the duty
payable on exports like tin and elephants and on imports like
cloth and slaves. They prescribed standard weights and
measures, and laid down rules for ships’ manifests and the
collection by the port officers of money due to trading captains,
TomC Pires records that at Malacca there were four port officers,
or Shahbandars, of different nationalities: one for the Gujerati9,
the most important of all; one for the Klings, Bengalis, Peguans
and Pasai; one for vessels from the Malay archipelago, and one
for vessels from China and Indo-China. They presented ships’
Captains to the Prime Minister, allotted them warehouses, gave
them lodgings if they had documents and ordered elephants
for them. All shipping from the west, Arabia, India, Ceylon
and Pegu, paid fixed dues with presents to the Sultan, the
Bendahara, the Temenggong and the Shahbandar for the
nation in question. No shipping from the east or the Malay
archipelago paid dues; it only gave presents. The value of all
S Des was determined by the Shahbandars, who were “sym-
etic to the merchants and of the same nations as the
merchants”. Or the dues payable on a large cargo might be
 MALACCA’S CENTURY OF MALAY RULE 37

assessed by a board of ten merchants in the presence of the

Temenggong. “The law and the taxes in Malacca were well-
known.” And though there was some corruption, Malay
administration must have been competent and just to foreigners
to have attracted so much commerce to the port.
What a change from Parameswara’s little village of primitive
Malay fishermen, who lived partly at sea and partly ashore
among gardens newly planted with bananas, jack-fruit, sugar¬
cane and vegetables! In less than a century Malacca had grown
into a crowded port and the capital of an emperor, whose court
was thronged with Indian bravoes, bibulous mahouts with
Hindu titles, Tamil merchants anxious to buy their way to
royal favour, missionaries of Islam eager to preach the most
recent of India’s faiths. Decadent that court was now under a
weak, clever, half-caste libertine, who would go humbly and on
foot to his Arab teacher to seek in mysticism a peace that did
not belong to his temporal world, that world where fear made
him order the murder of his uncle and of his eldest son, and
where he could not save his panders from vengeance or his
country from the infidel invader. Yet for a while Mahmud saw
Malacca at the height of its achievement and prosperity.
According to Duarte Barbosa the Portuguese found it “the
richest sea-port with the greatest number of wholesale
merchants and abundance of shipping that can be met in the
whole world”. Neither d’Albuquerquc nor Barbosa could ever
have realized that already before their time Malacca under its
Malay Sultans had played its most important r6le in the history
of the Far East, and that role not as a great commercial port but
as tho place from which Muslim missionaries were to spread
over the Malay archipelago and change the lives and ideals of
millions of Asiatics for centuries after the commerce of Malacca
had become quite insignificant.
For the conversion of Indians to Islam brought to the
people of Malacca new intellectual interests on the top of old.
The children in its mediaeval streets still knew by heart the
Hindu epic of the Ramayana, which Islam failed to banish from
the shadow-play that was the cinema of those days. But the
educated about the court read or listened to the recital of
Muslim historical romances like the tales of Amir Hamzah and
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

Muhammad Hanafiah, and above all to the story of Alexander

the Great, claimed as a hero of the Kuran. The valley of ants,
the giraffe-riders, the cave-dwellers with one foot and one eye;
the place where angels told their beads above the sun and the
noise of that luminary made Alexander faint; the great flies
that stoned his troops and were driven away only when one of
their number was caught, saddled and mounted by a puppet
rider; the angels, who pierced with lances the devils that dwelt
in Coptic idols; the bird-worshipping Circassians in tiger-skin
tunics; die nude gymnosophists who marvelled that a mortal
should bother to subdue a worltl; Gog and Magog; the diamond
mines of Ophir and the copper walls of Jabalqa; the riding on
mares into the land of darkness and the visit to the spring of
life—these legends of Alexander were more effective propa¬
ganda for Islam among an impressionable people, as yet mostly
ignorant of the new alphabet, than lessons in difficult Arabic
grammar.
Yet, again, the Malay stuck by tradition, turning naturally
to the study of Islamic mysticism from the esoteric magical
knowledge of the Hindu. So keen was interest in theological
speculation that Sultan Mansur Shah sent the Pasai court a
present of yellow and purple brocade, a red lory and a brown
cockatoo, with a letter offering p lb. of gold-dust and
two slave-girls to any theologian who could say if those in
heaven and those in hell remain in their respective places for
ever. Pasai’s leading theologian told his Sultan in durbar that
they did, but one of his students went to him afterwards and
suggested that Malacca would not have propounded a question
that was no conundrum at all. He added that his teacher could
easily explain that the esoteric answer was not to be blurted out
to all and sundry, and he suggested what that esoteric answer
Was. It must have been the answer given in The Perfect Man, a
Work by al-Jili, a Baghdad mystic who died in 1417, leaving a
body of doctrine that spread to the Malays. al-Jili said that the
power of endurance in the damned, being a divine gift,
^rainguished the fire of hell or else their torment changed to
pleasure. Muhammadan romance, Muhammadan mysticism
d Muhammadan law, all coming from India and tinged with
 MALACCA’S CENTURY OF MALAY RULE 39

to the Moluccas, southern Sumatra, Java, Celebes and Borneo,

There is ample evidence that the Malays of Malacca in its brief
heyday were neither without the education of the period nor
without intellectual interests. Its court was the scene of great '
literary activity stimulated by many contacts with Java, India
and Arabia. M »

•1

'»• 1 k

r
l

1
 CHAPTER V

A FAMOSA

Portugal’s expansion overseas began as a riposte to the

Moorish invasion of Iberia. Her armadas were built not to
challenge the trade or the galleys of Genoa and Venice but
as a sailing fleet to challenge the Atlantic. Year by year they
ventured farther down the coast of Africa. In 1488 Bartolomeu
Dias doubled the Cape. In 1498 Vasco da Gama landed at
Calicut, pioneer of the route to India. By the capture of Goa
on 25 November, 1510, Affonso d’Albuquerquc secured a base
from which Portuguese carracks could sail farther cast to dis¬
pute with paynim kings the produce of the Spice Islands and
the trade with the Great Khan.
With that objective the first European ships to reach
Malayan waters sailed into the Malacca roads on 1 August,
1509. Their admiral, Diogo Lopez dc Scqueira, asked per¬
mission to land one of his officers with presents and a letter
from King Manuel. The crowd on the beach, never having
seen Europeans, took the bearded envoys to be white Bengalis.
One of them, a captain, wanting to present the Primo Minister
with a gold chain, flung it over his head, a gravo insult according
to Malay ideas, though the Bcndahara passed the incident off,
remarking: "Take no notice. These fellows have no manners."
Meanwhile, all the Indian merchants urged a Holy War against
infidels, of whose interference with Indian trade they had heard
alarming reports. A plot was hatched to seize the Portuguese
fleet while do Sequcira and his men wore being entertained on
shore. But a Javanese strumpet revealed the Malay design to
her Portuguese lover, and the Malays could only kidnap some
20 Portuguese who were ashore buying cloves. Unable to effect
their release, dc Scqueira burnt two of his ships for want of
crews and sailed away. His errand had served its purpose and
provided a casus belli.
On 2 May, 1511, d’Albuquerque left Cochin for Malacca
with 16 ships (of which one was wrecked on the voyage) and a
40
 A FAMOSA 4*
force of 800 Portuguese and 300 Malabari fighting men. With
the same fanfare of trumpets and crash of artillery that later
were to affront Canton his beflagged fleet sailed into Malacca
harbour on an evening early in July. There was a pretence of
parley, d’Albuquerque demanded the return of the surviving
Portuguese prisoners. Sultan Mahmud requested him to with¬
draw his fleet from inshore, d’Albuquerque withdrew hia ?1
smaller vessels only, waited six days and then burnt som? ►
houses on the foreshore and all the shipping in the harbour
except Hindu and Chinese junks. At last the Sultan returned
the prisoners, and agreed to pay for all de Sequeira had lost
and to grant a site for a fortress. Communications from the
shore then ceased and the Malays decked their stockades with
flags. The Chinese of the five junks that had been spared said
that beside the Malays Malacca held 20,000 foreign warriors,
20 war-elephants, plenty of artillery, arms and provisions. The
Chinese doubted if it would fall except from starvation.
T Neither the size of the port nor the fears of the Chineso
deterred d’Albuquerquc. Two hours before dawn, on 25 July,
1511, being St. James’s Day, a trumpet sounded on his flag¬
ship for the Portuguese captains and men to assemble for con¬
fession and absolution before they risked their lives for pride of
arms and greed for trade and, what atoned for all, the spreading
of the true faith. The key to their prize was the bridge over the
Malacca River. That bridge gained, the Sultan’s stockades and
forces would be divided. Twenty thousand men divided against
Iiool But the Portuguese soldiers were disciplined and
fanatical, and their artillery outranged the Malay guns. The
first day of the assault saw a great part of the city burnt and
the mosque and a bridge-head captured, but, his enemy’s forma¬
tion intact, d'Albuquerque dared not risk a night ashore, and
retreated to his ships with 70 wounded. The Malay AnnaU
relate how, as his enemy retired, the Sultan’s son sat on his
elephant indifferent to file, while an Arab, his religious teacher,
clung to the howdah and begged his young patron to remove
from a bridge that was no place to ponder the unity of God.
The Malays now repaired the stockades on the bridge and
doubled their artillery; they even gave their Javanese mer¬
cenaries arrears of pay and three months’ pay in advance.
42 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

d’Albuquerque, for hia part, equipped a tall armoured junk to

overtop the bridge he had to take, but the junk at« once ran
aground and for nine days stuck on a sandbank. Even his grim
captains began to be doubtful of success, but before the in¬
vincible mind of their Viceroy there was always the vision of
Cairo and Mecca deprived of trade and ruined, and of a
luxurious Venice that would dine without spices unless she
bought from Portugal at Portugal’s own price. So on Friday,
8 August, the tall junk was floated and grappled to the bridge.
The Portuguese fire overcame the defence. d’Albuquerque
landed, and his men being worried by the fire of bombards
from the house-tops, he cleared the streets with orders not to
£ are man, woman or child. The rich port was won. Three
Dusand pieces of artillery were captured, though the only
deaths among the invaders were due to poisoned arrows.
Six bronze lions from some Malay royal grave
d’Albuqucrquc chose for his own tomb. Jewellery and brocaded
howdahs and gold-plated palanquins he would have presented
to his King Manuel and Queen Maria, along with women
embroiderers and many young girls and youths of noble family;
but lions and palanquins and embroiderers, all were lost in the
wreck of the Flor de la Mar off Sumatra.
However, before he embarked on the Flor de la Mar,
d’Albuquerque took over the Sultan’s 1500 slaves and scoured
the countryside for fugitive Malays to be put in chain-gangs
and set to break up the graves of their bygone kings and, with
stone from them and from mosques, to build a great fortress,
A Famosa, on the sea-shore. He prepared a commemorative
slab with the name of his principal officers, but a9 they fell out
over the order of precedence he turned its graven face inwards
bver a gateway and on the outer face caused to be carved
Lapidem quern reprobaverunt edificantes—“The stone which the
builders rejected.” Having completed A Famosa, issued a new
currency in gold, silver and tin, and executed a Javanese head¬
man for seizing the slaves and properties of the Malay chiefs
and for trying to corner imported rice, at the end of the year
d'Albuquerque left for Goa, lucky to escape with his life from
the shipwreck that lost him his lions and palanquins and
embroiderers. Communications in those days were so sJow
 .A PAMOSA
r - ’ 43
that it was 6 June, 1513, before the puissant and invincible
King Manuel reported to His Holiness Pope Leo X that
Malacca had been captured and was left by d'Albuquerque in
charge of 600 of the best soldiers and a well-armed fleet off¬
shore. I
Those forces were needed. For here, in hostile seas, the
Portuguese stood alone, hated for their cruelty and greed,
fighters whose victories never led to friendly alliances, adminis¬
trators who divided mankind into Catholics, heretics, heathens
and Moors, officials deprived of home influences, young,'
arrogant, dissolute and grasping.
The conquest of Malacca made enemies of the fugitive
Sultan Mahmud and his heirs and of their relatives in Perak
and Pahang. Frequently, by his fleets or by his influence over
Sumatran ruleis, Mahmud cut off the food supplies of his
former capital. Portuguese ships were captured by Malay war-
boats, and when some Portuguese landed in Pahang they were
given the choice of embracing Islam or being blown from guns.
In 1534 Malay warriors killed even a brother of Malacca's
Portuguese Captain on the Muar River. In 1586 the Sultan of
Johorc, one of Mahmud's family, invested Malacca by land and
sea, summoning to his aid his house’s ancient fiefs, the
Minangkabaus of Naning and Rcmbau, so that the Portuguese
Viceroy had to call for loans from Goa Hussein and Chaul in
order to equip a force to raise the siege. Punitive expeditions
up the Johorc River gave only temporary relief. In the end
Johore helped the Dutch to capture A Famosa.
Portuguese insistence on monopolies also made her many
enemies at Malacca and elsewhere. The first trouble came from
the Javanese, who found this new rule irksome after a Malay
administration on lines they understood and appreciated for its
tact and compromise. When a revolt in the Javanese quarter of
the port had been quelled, an attack by 10,000 Javanese from
over the sea had to be beaten off. Then came a grave menace
from a new power, Acheh. The fall of Malacca and the Portu¬
guese intolerance of all Muslims, as well as their arrogation of
<olies, had attracted to a port that lay outside the range of
alacca patrol merchants from India, Ceylon and even
, who congregated there in quest of pepper and tin. If
 MALAYA AND ITS HI8T0RY
44
Acheh could oust the European intruder from Malacca, it
might hope to step into the place of Sri Vijaya and the Malacca
that was.
In 1537, therefore, some 3000 Achincsc attempted to
surprise A Famosa, only to be driven back from torch-lit
ramparts. The worst fright Acheh gave the fort was in 1547,
when an Achinesc fleet sailed by night into the harbour, caught
seven fishermen and, cutting off their noses, cars and feet, sent
the Portuguese a challenge written in their blood. "The City
was in an Uproar . . . Simao dc Mello was as sensible of the
King of Acheh’s cowardice, as if it had been an outrage; so
sacred were the walls of that Fortress, as if to march towards
them had been an insolence, to look on them a Crime." But for
want of forces Simao de Mello refused the challenge, where¬
upon St. Francis Xavier, prophesying the timely arrival of two
galliots, persuaded some merchants to lit out a fleet. The galliots
arrived, and with the improvised fleet set out in search of the
Achinesc marauders. Meanwhile, the royal cousins of Johorc,
Perak and Pahang sailed into Muar estuary and stayed there for
three days, to the terror of the Portuguese. But on Sunday
morning, while preaching, St. Francis Xavier fell into a trance
and saw the little improvised fleet from Malacca drubbing the
20 great vessels of the Achinesc away on the Perlis River, In
1551 the mere rumour that a Portuguese fleet had left to harry
the harbours of Johorc, Perak and Pahang caused the Malaya
to leave their Javanese allies in the lurch after thoy had
besieged A Famosa for three months. In 1568 even the priests
were impressed to help withstand another siege by an Achinesc
armada. It seemed there could be no end to the triangular duel
between Malacca, Acheh and the Malays, when the exclusion
of their ships from Portuguese harbours brought the Dutch to
Malayan seas.
Even Acheh and Johore had caused Malacca such trouble
as its Malay Sultans had never seen. Under Malay rule no
enemy had landed at Malacca, and, their arms always victori¬
ous, the Sultans by placating the defeated enlarged their trade
abroad and encouraged settlers at home. In return for tribute
their fleets protected the countries that acknowledged their
sway. Under the Portuguese, Malacca enjoyed few years of
 A PAMOSA
... 45
peace, and its people often had to flee within the walls of the
fort for safety. And Portugal gave no return to Asiatics for the
taxes wrung from them. Only the Catholic Church cared for
the welfare of any Orientals, and then only for the welfare of
converts and potential converts. For those converts there was
the diversion of watching the pageantry of religious processions
as splendid in their way as the pageantry of the former Malay
court, with its processions of elephants, bands and umbrellas.
In 1551, when good news came from St. Francis Xavier in
China, the Captain of the Fort, with mcn-at-arms, clergy and
magistrates, proceeded through decorated streets to Our Lady
of the Mount. Four Japanese, brought to see the opulence of
nations that worship Christ, were publicly baptized. And the
night was devoted to dancing, fireworks and the ringing; of
bells. In 1567 the whole city turned out to welcome the skull of
one of the Eleven Thousand Virgins martyred with St. Ursula.
In 1588, when Don Paulo da Lima had destroyed the capital of
Johor© in revenge for Johore’s siege of Malacca, he and his men
were greeted on their return by the Bishop and all the clergy,
and in the middle of the bridge the victor was crowned with a
chaplet of flowers as he knelt in front of a crucifix. Or again, in
1622, when the people were dying of pestilence and famine,
there was an efficacious procession of penance to the Church of
St. Stephen, where a statue of Nossa Senhora dos Remedios
had wept for more than a week.
It was due to Catholic missionaries that in one respect
Portugal was in advance of any European rule in Malaya down
to the time of Stamford Raffles. It felt and exhibited concern
for the spiritual welfare of Asiatics, and in 1548 there was
opened a school for the teaching of Portuguese and Latin.
Within a few days there were 180 pupils, and the school
survived to modern times, to be promoted the College of St.
Paul and enter candidates for the Cambridge examinations. Its
original pupils must have been only the children of Portuguese,
Catholic Eurasians and Catholic converts. But when a Viceroy
charged the religious orders with trespassing on the govern¬
ment revenue by continual begging, the clergy could reply that
at any rate they did not spend the money on themselves, and
that it was official corruption which emptied the public coffers.
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

Malacca was the scene of St. Francis Xavier’s most famous

miracles, but when he left it he shook the dust off his feet and
ordered the members of the Society of Jesus to abandon a place
so wicked.

“When you confess Captain, Factors, or any othec

officials of die King,” wrote St. Francis Xavier, “get complete
information of the way diey get their living. Ask if diey pay
taxe9, if they make monopolies, if they help themselves with
the King’s money for their own business and so on. They
will answer you that they owe nothing to anybody. . .
Really they are under obligation to restore much to many."

As early as 1514 Tom6 Pircs wrote that "Malacca should

be provided with excellent officiate, expert traders, lovers of
peace, not arrogant, quick-tempered, undisciplined, dissolute,
but sober and elderly, for Malacca has no white-haired official.”
The system of government was rapacious and heartless, and
it passed on those vices to its officiate. Tom6 Pircs talks of a
Malay Bendahara owning 640 lb. of gold, but it ia doubtful if any
Malay chief made the £20,000 a year taken by the Portuguese
Chief Justice from fines and fees, much less the £50,000 and
more got by the Captain yearly from perquisites and illegal
trade. Spices could be sold only to the Captain’s merchants,
and a Captain put his merchandise on the King's ships or
other vessels without paying freight. Even when customs
duties were fixed, the Captains demanded from every ship a
hu^c present, though this was forbidden on pain of excommuni¬
cation.
But apart from rapacity and corruption, Portugal’s emoire
fell for two cogent reasons. Her population was far too small for
empire in any shape. And her hatred of Muslims, which had
preserved her in Europe, ruined her trade with Indian and
Malay Muslims and added fuel to her perpetual warfare.
 CHAPTER VI

THE DUTCH AT MALACCA

In fhe seven years after 1595 no fewer than 65 Dutch ships

visited Eastern waters. Then in 1602 the Netherlands, com¬
pelling the amalgamation of several smaller companies, gave a
monopoly to its famous East India Company, with permission
to make settlements and conclude treaties in the name of the
government. When a Governor-General was appointed, he
lived first in the Moluccas, the spice islands, until in 1619 Jan
rieterszoon Coen, conquering Jakatra in Java, chose Batavia
for the Company’s capital.
From early days the Dutch company had two objects: to
destroy the trade of her competitor, Portugal, on sea, and to
capture Malacca, the rival of Batavia for the commerce of the
Malay archipelago and the Far East.
As early as 1603 Goa, seat of Portugal’s Viceroy, was com¬
plaining that the Dutch had seized one of its ships voyaging
from San Tom<$ to Malacca, three or four more ships taking
money to Bengal, and off Johore the Santa Catharina, richest
carrack that had ever left China. The cargo of the Santa
Cathanna was sold at Amsterdam for more than 3,500,000
guilders, and today the Dutch still term the thinnest and finest*
china carrack porcelain” after this prize. Early in 1605
another carrack was captured off Patani, the St. Anthony, with
a cargo of 120 tons of sugar, 268 tons of tin, 223 fardels of
Chinese camphor, 90 fardels of agilawood, 18 leaden boxes of
musk balls, n boxes of vermilion, 22 boxes of Chinese fans,
209 fardels of raw silk and 75 of yellow silk, 6000 pieces of
patterned porcelain, 10 casks of porcelain coarse and fine, some
gilded couches, benzoin, velvet, woven silk, damask, taffeta and
boxes of gold wire. By 1635 the Dutch were intercepting all
Portugal’s ships, and the trade of Malacca was ruined.
For the capture of Malacca as well as for trade the Dutch,
tolerant of Islam and indifferent to all but commerce, tried to
keep on good terms with Johore and Acheh. In the very first
 48 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

year of the Company’s existence Jacob van Heemskerck was

sent to Johore to represent the Dutch as allies against the hated
Portuguese. After the capture of the Santa Catharina, Johore
accepted a Dutch factor and sent two Malay envoys to Holland.
In 1606 Admiral Matelief made a treaty promising to help
Johore capture Malacca in return for the right of the Dutch to
keep the town itself, and to trade with Johore free of duty, and
to the exclusion of all other Europeans. The treaty was followed
by the first Dutch siege of Malacca, which the threat of a strong
Portuguese fleet from Goa caused Matelief to abandon, In
revenge, Portugal attacked the capital of Johore. In the next
attack on Malacca Johore took no part. The following years
saw Johore, Perak, Pahang and Kedah overrun by Acheh,
which, carrying on the traditional imperialism of Sri Vijaya,
Majapahit and Malacca for the enlargement of her commerce,
punished any Malay rapprochement with Portugal, the hated
enemy and rival in trade of all Moors. From 1637 onwards
Johore remained the constant ally of the Dutch. The Dutch
controlled the Straits of Malacca, and in 1639 their captains
were drinking to the man who should be the first Dutch
governor of Malacca that year, a toast still premature.
But on 19 May, 1640, at the castle of Batavia, Antonio van
Diemen, Governor-General, the Council of India and the
Directors of the East India Company announced that from time
z to time they had considered the capture of Malacca, not only
for the expansion of trade but to strengthen influence and
prestige over neighbouring monarchs and princes, and now the
moment was opportune as there was intelligence that the
garrison was weak, the leaders at variance and supplies scarce;
also the assistance of Acheh and Johore was expected. As
Captain Major to conduct the siege, the Company appointed
Adriaen Antonisz, ex-Ficld-Marshal of their Ceylon campaign.
It was recognized that only a strong European army stood any
^chance of capturing A Famosa, with its walls 32 feet high and
24 feet thick, and its garrison of 260 Portuguese and two or
three thousand half-castes and Asiatics. The Dutch blockaded
of the port started at the beginning of June 1640, but it was
not fill 3 August that a landing was effected. At first the Captain
Major was urged to press the attack vigorously so as to save his
 THE DUTCH AT MALACCA 49

troops from the epidemics common during the autumn of

fruits and obnoxious smells. But soon it was seen that Malacca
was "not a cat to be handled without gloves”. The Directors
chose a successor to Adriaen Antoniaz in case anything should
happen to him, reminding him that "all of us are mortal and
those nearest the fire get burnt first”.
* The precaution was not without reason. Both Antoniaz and
hJa successor died of sickness. On 5 September the Dutch f,
forces numbered 2283 men on land and sea; by 4 December
malaria, plague and dysentery had reduced that total to 1707.
Of the 2000 to 2500 Malays of Johorc, Naning and Rembau
S ) fell sick, but the healthy did much damage to rice-crops,
its and vegetables, as well as helping in the blockade by sea.
So, in addition to sickness, the besieged came to suffer the
agony of famine, being driven to eat dogs, cats, rats and the
hides of animals. It was estimated that 7000 died. The Dutch
sent priests with a white flag to invite surrender. They wore
drivdn away from the walls. Letters were then tied to rockets and
fired into the city, but to no purpose. At 2 a.m. on 14 January,
164k, a Dutch force of 650 men set out to carry the fort and city
by assault. By 10 a.m. that morning A Famosa had fallen. The
siege had lasted five months and twelve days and cost the Dutch
1000 men killed in the fighting or carried off by sickness.
• The Dutch ascribed the length of the siege to the defection
of the Sultan of Achoh owing to a grudge against Johore, to
the failure to effect a complcto blockade, to epidemics and to
the excellent valour of the Portuguese Governor, Manuel da
Sousa Coutinho, whom they buried with military pomp two
days after the fortress had fallen.
The bastions of A Famosa were given new names: St.
Domingo became Victoria, Madre Deoa was changed to Emilia,
. the Eleven Thousand Virgins gave place to Hcnriette Louise,
St. Jago to Wilhclmus, and Courassa, a spacious sea-washed
bastion, became Fredrick Hendrick. The bastions no longer
bdre witness to the glory of God, but to the glory of the
sponsors of unmitigated trade, and the walls of A Famosa,
ceasing to breathe the enchantment of Rome and the Middle
AgeSjSecame a stronghold for ledgers.
V AS , soon as they had captured the port the Dutch con-
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

sidered it their legal right to continue the “tolls, licences and

the cruising in the Straits instituted by the Portuguese for the
maintenance of the rights of Malacca and now devolved on us
by right of conquest”.
Import duties were imposed with discrimination of nations
and varied from time to time. In some years a higher duty was
charged on Portuguese goods than on the cargoes of other
nations, but much as Portuguese trade was resented, it was
K nerally esteemed more profitable to let their ships enter
utch harbours, pay dues and attract customers by their wares,
than to drive them to foreign ports. Moors perpetually damaged
the Company’s trade, so that in 1698 the duty payable by them
and other private traders was raised to 20 per cent. In 1699 the
import duty on European imports was similarly raised, ana later
such imports were for a while forbidden. A veiy important
dutiable article was cloth. Rice and other foodstuffs, buffaloes
and slaves, if first offered to the Company, were free of duty
owing to Malacca’s constant need of them.
No ships, unless of a nation specially exempted, could sail
in the Straits of Malacca without calling at Malacca and taking
out a pass, on penalty of confiscation. At times no passes were
S anted to Indian ships bound for Acheh and Perak, ao that
ay should have no chance to violate the Dutch monopolies of
tin and pepper.
For, another Portuguese right the Netherlands East India
Company attempted to exercise was the exclusive purchase at
its own price of spices, sandalwood, cloth and tin. But without
intermission its tin monopoly was challenged by Achineso,
Javanese, Moors and Bengalis, though Dutch cruisers
blockaded the coasts of Kedah, Perak and Linggi, and the
SuBuhunan of Mataram was made to order public floggings for
Javanese who tried to run the Perak blockade. Twice the
Dutch in a lodge on the Perak River were murdered by
Malays who refused to be hectored into selling tin at the
Company’s low price. Then the decay of Acheh increased the
amount of tin sold to the Dutch by Perak, until in 1786 the
foundin of the free port of Penang killed the Dutch monopoly.
But Kedah, another country that exported tin, was further
north and, lying just across the Bay of Bengal, found it easy to
 THE DUTCH AT MALACCA 51
evade Dutch restrictions. In 1641 the “modest unpretentious”
Sultan promised to refuse Moors entry to his State without
passes from Malacca, and to sell half Kedah’s output of tin to
the Company. Kedah, however, was too close to India and too
favoured by the monsoons not to prosecute its trade in tin and
elephants with the Muslim and European merchants of India,
So the “modest unpretentious” Sultan continued to deal ip
tin, elephants and calico with ships from Bengal, Coromandel
and Java, and to let Moorish cloth be sent overland to Patani,
Ligor and Pahang. The Dutch attempt at a blockade was inter¬
minable, but the cheapness of the Moorish cloths in Kedah
attracted a large Malay and Javanese traffic, and the Dutch
consoled themselves by the reflection that if the Moors had not
got the trade, it would still have been taken from them by the
English, the Portuguese, the French and the Danes.
< Like the Portuguese, the Dutch had not yet learnt the need
of empire to exclude European rivals from trade and to crush
local opposition to monopolies. They wanted no territory other
than the port of Malacca, but they had inherited Naning, and
its Minangkabau inhabitants had helped them to evict the
Portuguese. So at first they demanded nothing from them but
a tithe of their rice-crops, which was a foolish and irritating
tax in view of Malacca’s interminable need of foodstuffs. The
Minangkabaus proved so recalcitrant that several Dutch
expeditions were sent to exterminate them. But before the
Japanese invasion only the Portuguese knew where to fight and
whore to stop fighting in Malaya. Once 3700 Mman^kabaus
ravaged Malacca's countryside. At last in place of tithe the
Dutch company had to be content with the annual tribute of
400 quart measures of rice, a concession its British successor
overlooked to its great cost and shame.
The eternal greed of the Company overreached itself.
Holland was drained of men and money, not only by wars in
Europe, but by fighting in the East provoked by blockades and
piratical methods of enforcing monopolies and diverting trade
to her ports. In the middle of the eighteenth century the
Co/hpany employed, besides 3500 sailors, 18,000 slaves and
soldiers, and the army pay-roll amounted to 5,500,000 guilders
plus expenditure on forts and factories.

1 d .
V
1^ /{&* T
’
V p\
35260
I X,
 52 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

Being more efficient, Dutch exploitation was even more

flagitious than the Portuguese. The'system was wholly bad, as
Raffies recognized so clearly and so indignantly, and it corrupted
its agents, whose dishonesty further helped to bankrupt the
Company. Officials engaged in private trade, sometimes under
fictitious names, and even resigned to sell their experience for
high wages under foreign competitors. A young Dutch port-
officer at Malacca has described his life there in 1786. “I lead
the life of a prince. I live in the finest house in the town and
have a nice country-place which I occupy when shipping is
alack. I further have a splendid property at Tanjong tiling on
which four villages arc situated. I cannot tell you the exact
number of my slaves but it is over sixty. I have my conch and
gig, three sets of horses and two saddle-horses. I have a large
office staff. The most arduous part of my task is to receive
money and sign my name.”
In 1798 the Batavian Republic took over the remaining
possessions of a bankrupt Company that with the grossest
faults had yet created for Holland a colonial empire.
Malacca, under the Dutch, sank to be the province of a
governor, as a capital for the Company’s operations had already
. been opened at Batavia. When it fell into Dutch hands, out of a
population of 20,000 only 3000 remained. A quarter of a century
later there were 4884 persons living in 137 brick and 583 palm-
leaf houses. That total was made up of 145 Dutch burghers,
1469 Portuguese Eurasians and “blacks”, 426 Chinese, 547
Moors and Hindus, 588 Malays, 102 Bugis and 1607 slaves.
 CHAPTER VII

THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS

Penang »'

In 1592 the first British ship ever to reach the Straits of Malacca
anchored off the island of Penang (Betel-Nut Island), where
nearly 200 years later the British were to create the first of their
Straits Settlements. The ship was the Edward Bonaventure, -
commanded by Edward Lancaster, and she was wrecked and
never got home with the pepper, silk, taffetas and Venetian
glass that her sick crew pirated from Portuguese vessels bound
for Malacca down the halcyon “Ladies’ Sea”.
A few years later the East India Company had a dozen
factories in the Malay archipelago and one at Patani in Siamese
Malaya, but unable to withstand competition backed by the
Dutch government, or alternatively to share the cost of Dutch
forts, troops and fleets, it decided in 1623 to abandon Malayan
spices for the calicoes of India. Individual Englishmen, how¬
ever, continued to drive a large private trade, especially with
Kedah, so temptingly close across the Bay of Bengal.
Then in 1782 war with France, Holland and Haider Ali
discovered the need of a station on the east of that bay, where
a squadron could be stationed and disabled ships could be
revictualled and careened for repairs during the south-west ’
monsoon. A port of call, too, was wanted for East Indiamen
bound to and from China. Penang’s suitability for these pur¬
ls well as for local trade had been urged already for years
)ung Suffolk trading captain, Francis Light. And in 1785
got from the Sultan of Kedah a document leasing the -,
it uninhabited island to the East India Company with the
ion that the Company would help him with men,
and the loan of money against the attack of any
the interior. The Company guaranteed that the
Id Suffer no financial loss, and, evidently convinced
 54 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

that money was the real key to possession, appointed Light

superintendent of Penang and allowed him to hoist the British
flag over it on 17 July, 1786. But in compliance with Pitt's Act
of 1784 the Company had to refer to die British Government
any agreement that might lead to war, because (after its loss of
the American colonics) “schemes of conquest and extensions
of dominions” were “measures repugnant to tire wish, the
honour and policy of the nation”. Light had to explain this to
the Sultan, but a few months after he had occupied the island
he informed Bengal that Kedah feared Siam and that he had
told the Sultan the British would assist himl Not till January
1788 did he get the Government’s decision vetoing any treaty
that might involve military operations against any Eastern
prince. Mr. Light "might employ the countenance or influence
of the Company for the security of the King of Kedah . . .
strictly guarding against any Acts or Declaration that may
involve the honour, credit or troops of the Company”.
Kedah was to fall a victim to Britain’s good intentions. But
the Sultan of Kedah did not understand and tried to retake
his island by force. Light defeated his quondam friend, and in
1791 a treaty was signed guaranteeing the Sultan $6000 a year
, for the island, a sum raised to $10,000 a year when, in 1800,
Kedah ceded a strip on the opposite mainland (since called
Province Wellesley) in order that the British might have
complete control of the harbour and a local source of food-
supplies.
But Kedah's fear of Siam was not exaggerated. In 1816 she
was ordered to conquer Perak for Siam. With commercial
impartiality the East India Company sold muskets and gun*
powder to Kedah and tried to persuade Perak to send tribute
and come to terms with Bangkok. Kedah’s conquest of Perak
did not placate Siam. In 1821 the state was invaded by the
Siamese under the Chau Phya of Ligor, who had recently sent
tin to the Governor of Penang and asked for a gun, two or three
C pg.“caffre” girls and a pair of handsome spectacles suitable
a man fifty or sixty years old. Malays captured during the
invasion were hewn asunder or thrown to crocodiles. Twenty
thousand of them fled into Britain’s new territory, which the
Sultan also reached, scattering rupees from his elephant to

A
 THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS 55

delay his pursuers. For the next 20 years His Highness

plotted to recover his State with the help of neighbouring Malay
rulers and Burma. The Company was not a little anxious about
Siam’s recognition of its title to Penang, but whenever possible
Penang interceded on behalf of the Sultan. Captain Burney,
sent as an envoy to Bangkok in 1826, retorted to critics in
Penang that no one could negotiate with Siam without means for
employing intimidation, that a Siamese viceroy had wanted
him hanged for making representations about Kedah beyond
his instructions, and that British territory would lose 10,000
Malays if the Sultan were restored. In 1827 the Penang govern¬
ment asked the Recorder if the order of the Governor-General
was legal justification for the use of arms to remove to Malacca
a Sultan whose plotting had long embarrassed its neutrality.
Sir John CJaridge, the Recorder, in a minute “altogether
unprecedented and unbecoming”, gave his opinion that whether
warranted or not, such a proceeding would disgrace the British
and he would not have his name mixed up with it. Several times
the Sultan’s adherents attacked the Siamese in Kedah in vain.
But the Chau Phya of Ligor died and Siam grew tired of
unprofitable guerilla wars. In 1842 Sultan Ahmad Taju’d-din’s
persistence was rewarded and he was allowed to return to
Kedah as its ruler. But the government of Kedah remained
mediaeval, until in 1905, Kedah being on the verge of bank¬
ruptcy, Siam appointed a British adviser, who induced the
Sultan to appoint a State Council. In 1909 Siam transferred
its suzerainty over Kedah to Great Britain.
As for Penang, apart from these foreign relations, its early
history is the sorry record of its administration.

Malacca
j ij

1Meanwhile European politics had given Great Britain a

hold over Malacca 30 years before it became British territory.
Foe after the French Revolution an alliance between France
$md a Batavian Republic made every Dutch fort in the East
Indies, a potential base for French warships, so that to safe-
guard-her own possessions and conserve those of her ally, the
 56 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

exiled Stadtholder, Great Britain took over Malacca and later

seized Java by force of arms. The Dutch Governor of Malacca
entertained the British officers to dinner after their arrival, and
when he left, “the council deemed indispensable for legal
administration was retained against its will”. But expecting to
have to hand Malacca back to the Dutch, the East India
Company spent two years and thousands of pounds on demolish¬
ing that perfect specimen of a mediaeval fort, A Faraosa, in case
Britain might ever have to attack the settlement! The Directors
even talked of removing the 15,000 inhabitants to Penang, so
that never again might Malacca be the rival of that northern ’
port. Fortunately, in 1808 Thomas Stamford Raffles, later the
founder of Singapore, went on a holiday from Penang to a place
in which Malay research had interested him, and he dissuaded
the Directors by a report on Malacca’s valuable buildings, its
cultivated fields and its constant revenue, and by a plea that the
people considered British faith pledged for their protection.
After the downfall of Napoleon, the Convention of London in
1814 returned Malacca (and Java) to Holland, but it was not
till 1818 that the Dutch took Malacca back, and then in 1824
the Treaty of London ceded it finally to Great Britain, His
Netherlands Majesty engaging never to form any establishment
gjffjfljjiiya. ;' '
" The history of British Malacca is the history of its adminis¬
tration and of war with Naning (p. 79), the little Minang-
kabau state on its boundary. Though in 1801 the English had
made a treaty (voidable, if the Dutch returned) with Naning as; ■ '
at least a semi-independent tributary State, an industrious
Superintendent of Lands, Mr. Lewis, wrongly told Governor
Fullerton that Naning was part of Malacca territory and that
revenue was being lost by the remission of a tithe of its large
rice-crop. Perhaps Dutch merchants in Malacca spread
rumours disturbing to Naning, in the hope of reaping the
profits of a war. Anyhow, the fears of the Penghu!u (or chief) of
Naning were aroused, and he ended by claiming absolute
independence. So in July 1831 150 sepoys with two six-
pounders dragged by bullocks were despatched to Naning, but
were bogged and had their retreat stopped by the felling of
trees in their rear, until with guns and baggage lost the red-
 THE ST BAITS SETTLEMENTS 57

coats had to retire “expeditiously” to Malacca, where “fear

whispered that every bush concealed a Malay and converted
every stick into a musket barrel”. The safe retreat of the sepoys
was in fact due to the adroitness of a Malay leader, who having
saved his State considered it absurd not to accept $500 to let
the enemy get back to Malacca as soon as possible. Jubilant,.
Penghulu ‘Abdu’l-Sayid of Naning now complained that the
sepoys had shot a warrior sent to escort the Assistant Resident^
and he sacrificed on the warrior’s grave six out of seven Malaccan,
convicts captured during the "war”, keeping the seventh to
read the Kuran to him. He also wrote to the King of England a
letter of protest.
Too late the officials at Malacca discovered that Naning
was within its rights in objecting to any tithe, the Dutch
having commuted it into nominal tribute since 1765. But now
jungle warfare, with its uncertainties, was inevitable. To keep
open a way of retreat, a road 600 feet wide was cut at the rate of
three or four miles a month over the 22 miles to Naning. Even
so, the British Colonel was nervous, complaining of "troops
knocked up” and acting on the defensive against enemies wno
never numbered more than 100 men. The Penghulu of Naning
swore to hamstring all the buffaloes of anyone who supplied
the British with transport. In the end, a force of friendly Malays
from Rembau surprised the Penghulu at his dinner and broke
the Naning defence. Promised a pardon, Penghulu 'Abdu’l
Sayid was given a pension and a house in Malacca, generosity
that impressed the Malays more than our tactics in an unjust
and petty campaign.

W SlNOAPORB

Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore

(formerly the most important of the Straits Settlements and
now a separate colony), wa9 born at sea off Jamaica on 6 July,
nj| the son of a sea-captain of such narrow means that his
u*'-r Once complained of the boy’s extravagance in burning a
. >yer bis books. At the age of fourteen Raffles entered
India House as an extra clerk. Ten years later his talents won
58 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

’him the appointment of Assistant Secretary to the Presidency

of Penang at £1500 a year. Unlike most of his colleagues, he
took the pains to study Malay, and by temperament he was
interested in the abolition of slavery and in Britain's responsi¬
bility for the welfare of her Asiatic subjects. In 1808 he urged
on the Directors our moral obligations towards the people of
Malacca. He added that from their territory Great Britain
might render the Rulers of the Malay States “not only sub¬
servient but, if necessary, tributary". In 1810 he was posted to
Malacca as Agent for the Governor-General to prepare for
the British expedition against Java. Until it was returned to
Holland in 1814 he was Lieutenant-Governor of that island.
After that he went on leave to England, when at a levee the
Prince Regent praised Raffles’ book on Java for 20 minutes
and knighted him. His next office was that of Lieutenant-
Governor of Bengkulcn, a derelict spot but the one British
possession in the Malay archipelago. It was, as he remarked, an
Elba on which he was not secure, though he failed to get
support for his scheme to extend British territory in Sumatra.
In October 1813 he visited Lord Hastings at Calcutta and £0t
permission to look for a spot for a British station at Riau
(Rhio) or in Johore. “There is some reason to think," his
instructions continued, “that the Dutch will claim authority
over the State of Johore by virtue of some old engagements,
and though it is possible the pretension might be successfully
combated, it will not be consistent with the policy or present
view's of the Governor-General in Council to raise a question
of this sort with the Netherlandish authorities." The Dutch
had anticipated Raffles at Riau, and the Carimon (Kirimun)
Islands a marine survey condemned as unsuitable.
So on 28 January, 1819, he landed at Singapore, where the
local hereditary chief, the Temenggong (direct ancestor of the
present Sultan of Johore), told him that there were no Dutch
and that the British could buy land for a factory there or in
Johore. But the Temenggong was a subject of. his cousin, the
Sultan of Riau, Lingga, Johore, Singapore and Pahang. That
Sultan, ‘Abdu’f-Rahman, was under Dutch surveillance and
would certainly be forbidden to ratify any cession to the British.
‘Abdu’r-Rahman, however, was a younger son, enthroned by
 THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS

Bugis influence immediately after his father’s sudden death in

1812, while Husain, the elder son, prot£g6 of the two greatest
Malay chiefs, the Temenggong of Johore and the Bendahara
of Pahang, was away in the Malay peninsula marrying the
Bendahara’s daughter. Raffles himself in 1813 had recognized
‘Abdu’r-Rahman, but now to secure a good title to Singapore
he decided to install Husain as Sultan of Johore. On 30 January,
1819, the Temenggong in his own name and that of Sultan
Husain agreed to let the East India Company select land for a
faotory at Singapore or in Johore in return for an annual grant
of $3000. Fetched from Rinu, Husain was installed Sultan of
Johore at Singapore on 6 February and confirmed the
Temenggong’s preliminary agreement, the annual grant being
raised to $5000 for the Sultan and $3000 for the Temenggong,
and "factories” substituted for "factory”.
The Malay chiefs had been eager to make money out of an
almost uninhabited mangrove swamp and they had probably
heard of Raffles' fair dealings with Asiatics, but as the Dutch
had returned to power, and as the British had given way bofore
them for two centuries, it was clearly an occasion for diplomacy,
especially as rumour said that Batavia was sending troops for
Timmerman Thysscn, the Dutch governor of Malacca, to
attack the English at Singapore. They wrote to Riau and
Malacca that Husain had been forcibly installed. Timmerman
Thysscn, though he did not attack, protested to Banncrman,
Governor of Penang, that the Temenggong on behalf of Sultan
'Abdu’r-Rahman had signed an agreement with the Dutch on
26 November, 1818, by which Riau and Lingga were to be free
ports, but all other harbours in the Sultan’s kingdom were to
do £feS only to Dutch and local vessels. That treaty in Raffles'
eyes was invalid, because when quitting Malacca in 1795 the1
Dutch for their own ends had declared that Riau, Lingga,
#ohorc and Pahang were not its dependencies, so that no prior
fight now justified them in spuming the agreement Riau had
signed with the British on 19 10 August, 1818, promising not
to renew any treaty that might obstruct British trade at any
port in those countries. But Banncrman, the Governor of
Penang, was too jealous of Raffles and a rival settlement,
and too apprehensive of Dutch power not to admit Holland’s
 60 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

pretensions. He refused to risk adding “violence to injustice”

by sending troops to Singapore and he wrote to Lord Hastings
/ advocating withdrawal. To the Dutch Lord Hastings wrote a
diplomatic letter expressing unfeigned regret at the occupation
of the port, explaining how too late he had tried to prevent
Raffles from forming any British establishment, but concluding
that abandonment now would imply “subscribing to rights
which you claim and of which we are not satisfied, thereby
awkwardly forestalling the judgment which was to have taken
place at home”.
Bahnerman received a stern rebuke. Jealousy of “the new
post, should misfortune occur and be traceable to neglect
originating in such a feeling, will find no tolerance with this
Government, who must be satisfied (which is not now the case)
that perseverance in maintaining the post would be an infraction
of equity before they can consent to abandon it”. So Banner-
man had to send 200 troops to Singapore.
On 14 August, 1819, the Company’s inner cabinet decided
that Raffles had contravened the spirit of his instructions and,
should the Dutch expel the British garrison from Singapore,
England must either submit or hazard a war that might involve
all Europe. But the Directors took no other action and awaited
an explanation from Lord Hastings, who, primed by Raffles,
became more impressed with the value of the new port and
with Holland’s “injurious policy” of monopolies than by the
validity of her claim to Singapore. Controversy raged until the
Anglo-Dutch treaty was signed at London on 17 March, 1824,
though long before then the amazing growth of Raffles'
political child had convinced India House not only of the
commercial value of the island but of a moral obligation
to hold it
By June 1819 the influx of Chinese, Bugis and Malacca
Malays had raised the population of Singapore to 5000, and a
year later that figure had doubled. The exports and imports by
Asiatic crafts alone exceeded $4,000,000 for the first year. But
this was only a beginning. The history of Singapore is written
mainly in statistics, and to them the student of its develop¬
ment turns for comparative figures of its trade, which are
Startling: >*'■ . Ir-r-yVp::'
 THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS
61
Singapore Penang Malacca Total

1825 2,610,440 1,114,614 318,426

v r 4,043.480
- £ m
1850 5,637,287 1,644,931
439,175 7,721,393
I3»252» 175 4.496,205 821,698 18,570,078

Raffles himself saw Singapore only as a mangrove swamp

when he first negotiated for a site there, and once more when
he stayed there from October 1822 until 6 June, 1823, to draw
up plans for its future with “trade open to ships and vessels of
even- nation free of duty, equally and alike to all”. It was after
he had left the East for ever that on 2 August, 1824, the whole
island was ceded to Great Britain. The lamentable vagueness of
the arrangement with Kedah over the leasing of Penang was
not forgotten. It was definitely laid down that neither Great
Britain nor Johore should be bound to interfere in the internal
concerns of the other’s government or in any political dis¬
sensions or wars within their respective territories or to support
each other by force of arms against any third party. Fortunately
Holland gave no cause for us to test the validity of these
professions.
Singapore from its foundation down to the time of the
Japanese invasion was a scene of peaceful commercial develop¬
ment, disturbed only for a few years by pirates who molested
its sea-traffic and by pitched battles among Chinese Secret
Societies, which in 1854 resulted in the killing of 4000 Chinese
m ten days. This private piracy of the nineteenth century was
no more than a relic in the tradition of the national piracies
which for centuries had enforced monopolies that deprived the
Asiatic of a proper price for his produce. And before judgment
is passed on the method of its acquisition, it must be remem¬
bered that to Raffles the creation of the free port of Singapore
was far more than a bid for the extension of British commerce.
In the present century free trade is only an economic doctrine:
to Raffles it was a battle-cry for the rights of the Asiatic man.
 CHAPTER VIII

BRITAIN AND THE MALAY STATES

Down the centuries the Malay States of the peninsula were

fated not to coalesce or for long to co-operate. First, Majapabtt
and Siam broke the power of the Malay Buddhist empire of
Sri Vyaya which from Kedah held the northern states together
for five centuries. Malacca, succeeding Sri Vijaya, conquered
and controlled the peninsula for less than a century. Then the
Portuguese conquest cut off the north of Malacca's newly won
empire from the south, leaving Kedah, Kclantan and Trcng-
ganu to become distant tributaries of Siam, and Perak (a State
founded by the eldest son of Malacca’s last Sultan) to be con¬
quered by Achch. Also, though apart from its quarrel with
Islam Portugal took no interest in Malayan politics, its con¬
quest of Malacca was to lead to the rise of two races destined to
hew two pieces out of the Johorc empire that was the relic of
Malacca’s empire. For, hating Muhammadans, the Portuguese
encouraged the then Hindu Minangkabaus of Sumatra to
Immigrate into the valleys that the eighteenth century saw
turned into an independent Negri Scmbilan under a Minang-
kabau prince. And driving trade away from the Malacca
Straits by their patrols, the Dutch rivals of the Portuguese
brought wealth and enterprise to the Bugis of Macassar, who
at the end of the seventeenth century founded the kingdom of
Selangor. Even when they had conquered the Portuguese, the
Dutch still had no imperialist leanings, but in the absence of
their economic patrols the Bugis from Selangor might have
become the suzerains of all the Malay States instead of having
to be content with the virtual control of the Johore empire from
Riau and with winning high offices in Kedah and Perak by
force of arms. In the end the Dutch quashed Bugis ambitions
■* and destroyed the Bugis chance of dominating the Malay
States. ■;; <v ; :.. ■._ ./■-;. •>:
Then, in 1824, the Treaty of London allotted to Great
 BRITAIN AND THE MALAY STATES 63

Britain the Malay peninsula and to Holland all the islands

lying to starboard of East Indiaxnen voyaging to China, an
accident of alien politics that split the remnants of the Johore
empire for ever. To the Johore Sultanate was left only the Riau
archipelago, while the two greatest Malay chiefs of the broken
empire were cut off at Pahang and Johore from their overlord
in the Riau area, and soon made themselves independent.
Sultans. The ties between the Bugis rulers of Selangor and the
Bugis Underkings at Riau were also severed. Lack of communi¬
cations and sequestering forests had always made for
separatism with narrow local loyalties, and now that there was
no suzerain to arbitrate or command, fratricidal quarrels broke
out in Perak, Negri Sembilan and Pahang, and there was
anarchy in Selangor. In the '30s of the last century Negri
Sembilan saw five claimants to its throne. In 1857 Wan Ahmad,
afterwards first Bendahara Sultan of Pahang, started a six
years’ war against his brother for possession of that country.
The general anarchy infected the growing Chinese population,
At Lukut Chinese miners rose and murdered the heir to the
Selangor throne, thrusting his wife and children back into
their burning house. In a struggle between Selangor chiefs
a Straits-born Malacca Chinese, Baba Tek Cheng, supplied the
sinews of war, requiring only interest on his outlay until victory
should put his man in a position to grant limitless concessions
of land.
, The many quarrels, intricate and petty but disastrous to
welfare, have no interest today. But in the midst of the anarchy,
foe Singapore Chamber of Commerce was informed on 2r
August, 1872, that "it is the policy of Pier Majesty's Govern¬
ment hot to interfere in the affairs of foe Malay States unless
Where it becomes necessary for the suppression of piracy or the
punishment of aggression on our people or territories; and that
if traders, prompted by the prospect of laige gains, chooso to
^r'jthe risk of placing their persons and properties in the
ardy Which they are aware attends them in these countries
ar present circumstances, it is impossible for Government
^answerable for their protection or that of their property”’.
Things got worse. In the fighting at Kuala Lumpor between
.lajft Mahdi and the Sultan’s progressive Kedah son-in-law,
jg MALAYA AND_ IT8 HISTORY

Chinese partisans paid so much a head for the corpses of

adherents to the side they did not favour, and an Arab
mercenary captured 80 sepoys with two European officers, of
whom one was killed in the fighting and the other had his
throat cut as Muslims slaughter buffaloes. Pahang joined in
the fray.
In the State of Perak, faction fights had started among
40,000 Chinese miners in Larut, whose Malay chief grudged
wasting any of his annual revenue of $200,000 on such a novelty
as regular police. When he did recruit a small force, it was man¬
handled by some professional Chinese fighting-men he had hired
to deal with the miners. Chinese throats were cut to dye the
banners of the victorious side. Hundreds perished in the fight¬
ing. In vain the Malay chief, the Mantri, trimmed to be on the
side of the faction for the moment victorious. There was piracy
along the Perak coast and there were clan-fights in the streets of
Penang.
Meanwhile on the Perak River a Sultan's body lay unburied
for a month until the chiefs settled the claims of two rival Perak
Rajas for the throne by electing a foreign Raja, Isma'il, con¬
nected with the ruling house by marriage only.
Once again the leading Chinese merchants of the Colony
sent a petition to the Governor contrasting the peacefulness of
Johore and the order in the northern States under Siamese
suzerainty with the lawlessness and turbulence in the other
Malay States. For the British not to intervene in "the half-
civilized States of the Malay Peninsula (whose inhabitants are
as ignorant as children), is to assume an amount of knowledge
of the world and an appreciation of the elements of law and
justice, which will not exist among those Governments until
your petitioners and their descendants of several generations
have passed away”. A little arrogant and condescending, but
thon the Malay of those days thought no more than a tiger
thinks of killing a Chinese. To the Chinese the Malay was a
barbarian without culture; to the Malay the Chinese was a
pagan without rights.
It was the complaints of the Chinese and not any grasping
imperialism that now led the Secretary of State for the Colonies
to execute a complete volte-face, as Downing Street has so often
 BRITAIN AND THE MALAY STATES 65

done in its Malayan policy. A despatch dated 20 September,

1873, informed the Governor of the Straits Settlements
th^tr

“Her Majesty’s Government have, it need hardly be said, ,

no desire to interfere in the internal affairs of the Malay
States; but, looking to the long and intimate connection
between them and the British Government . . . Eftf™. ^
Majesty’s Government find it incumbent to employ such
influence as they possess with the native princes to rescue, If 4
possible, these fertile and productive countries from the ruin
which must befall them if the present disorders continue \ ■
unchecked. ' '
“I have to request that you will carefully ascertain, as «
far as you arc able, the actual condition of affairs in each
State and that you will report to me whether there are, in
your opinion, any steps which can properly be taken by
the Colonial Government to promote the restoration of •
peace and order and to secure protection to trade and
commerce with the native territories. I should wish you, -
especially, to consider whether it would be advisable to
appoint a British officer to reside in any of the States. Such
an appointment could, of course, only be made with the full
consent of the native Government.”

j ,• A new governor, Sir Andrew Clarke, arrived in Singapore

within three months of this change of policy, and in less than a
year he had got Perak, Selangor and Sungai Ujong to accept
V British advisers.
,*ffhe instrument employed to needle the way into Perak was
dkaja Muda ‘Abdullah, the legitimist heir to the throne,
the chiefs had passed over for the foreigner Isma'il.
illah was ready to sign any document if he could be made
and it was easy for him to persuade chiefs favourable
use to come to Pangkor and sign too. The treaty,
on 20 January, 1874, was not by any means the
lose concerned liked to think it. The deposed Isma'il,
a title and a pension of $1000 a month, was not
66 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

amused. The cession of the Dindings to Great Britain at the

instance of one of ‘Abdullah’s Chinese creditors was suspected
to be the prelude to the total annexation of Perak. The Mantri
of Larut, who considered that ‘Abdullah had some time ago
made him an independent ruler with the subsequent approval
of the British, was chagrined at becoming his subject and
having to foot the Colony’s bill for disturbances in Larut
which 'Abdullah had fanned. He paid a lawyer $12,000 to place
his case before Parliament, but dropped the matter on the order
of ‘Abdullah, who feared for his new throne. •
The sequel to this unpropitious beginning was lamentable;
the entry of the British into the Malay States being as ill-
starred as the acquisition of the first of the Straits Settlements.
James Wheeler Woodford Birch, whose career had been mainly
in Ceylon, was ignorant of the Malay saying, "When you enter
a byre, low; when you enter a pen, bleat," and he dashed into
Perak like a Victorian rationalist schoolmaster, confident that
decision and firmness would soon remedy abuses. Chiefs who
had depended for their livelihood on the collection of taxes in
hereditary areas were termed blackmailers and threatened with
legal proceedings instead of being paid or promised compen¬
sation for the loss of those rights. Complacently Mr. Birch
wrote to the Governor at Singapore, "It concerns us little
what were the old customs of the country, nor do I think they
are worthy of any consideration.” One of those old customs
was slavery, but, without awaiting legislation or offering
compensation, Mr. Birch, acting from a generous heart rather
than a diplomatic head, abetted the escape of fugitives regarded
by their owners as legitimate and valuable property.
Before the end of 1874 'Abdullah sent a secret message to
the deposed Sultan Isma'il: "If Mr. Birch asks you for the
regalia or desires to install me, do not consent. Should you
consent to my installation as Sultan, Perak will be given ovfer
to the English; for my words have caused me to be much
indebted to them. Should I myself ask for the regalia in the
presence of Mr. Birch, do not consent to give them up." Mr.
Birch explained his programme for future taxation to a gathering
of chiefs. In the words of one of the Sultan's retainers, the
Malays concluded that "he had nothing to fill his belly and came
 BRITAIN AND THE MALAY STATES 67
to Perak to collect the revenue of others”. ‘Abdullah sent a
deputation to the Governor at Singapore. There were grievances
over minor matters such as the Resident's arbitrary fixing of a
district boundary against the weight of local evidence. But the
chiefs decided to confine their complaint to important issues.
They wanted Sir Andrew Clarke to forbid Mr. Birch to interfere
with religion and custom and to counsel him to consult Sultaji
and chiefs, and not to deprive them of feudal dues, at present
their only source of income, or to assist the escape of slaves,
their property by custom 3000 or more years old. Sir Andrew
was retiring and handing over to his successor. Nettled by the
Sultan’s action, he told the deputation never to bring the
Governor letters that had not been seen by the Resident, and
he wrote to ‘Abdullah to obey the Governor, describing himself
as one "who lifted you out of your misery and sorrow, giving
you position and honour” and Mr. Birch 1
There was now a meeting of chiefs who talked of poisoning
the Resident but finally accepted an offer of the Maharaja Lela
to j»tab him. The Sultan, however, consulted a lawyer as to
legal means for his removal and tried to borrow $5000 from the
Lieutenant-Governor of Penang in order to buy a diamond
star for the Governor’s impending visit. Having failed to get
the loan, His Highness approached Mr. Birch, who seized the
occasion to arrest one of the Sultan’9 boatmen for past
rowdyism in a native theatre. This affront was the last straw.
The Saltan sent for the state wizard to call up the guardian
genics of Perak and enquire if they would wreck Mr. Birch’s
steamer on the river-bar and destroy him. The Sultan was one
of the mediums, and stabbing a flour mannikin repeatedly
declared the Resident would be dead within a month. Anothor
medium was paid $100 to produce Mr. Birch’s spirit of life in
thd form of a butterfly, which was killed with a knife.
. . The new Governor seems to have had a better idea than the
Resident of how to handle people three centuries behind the
times, although unfortunately he was even less inclined to move
cautiously than his predecessor. He visited Perak and received
‘t&fe^Sfdtan (complete with Star), surrendering to him two
fugitive slaves with a lecture on debt-slaver}’ and a proposal
that the'Perak chiefs should receive allowances and hand over
68 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

government to the British. Two rajas, Yusuf and Idris (both

destined to be Sultans) accepted this offer. So did ‘Abdullah
later. Elated by this victory, Mr. Birch drafted a far more
stringent agreement than the Governor had proposed, and told
the Sultan that if he did not sign it the throne was to bo given
to Raja Yusuf. ‘Abdullah yielded, but Raja Yusuf advised that j
troops should be summoned before the proclamations as to the
new system of taxation were posted. ‘Abdullah sent a hand¬
some creese to the Maharaja Lela at his village Pasir Salak, a - j
symbolic acceptance of his offer to stab the Resident. Three ■ I
days after his assassins had been appointed, Mr. Birch, with a
sprained ankle, sat in his house-boat at Pasir Salak and ordered I
his clerk to post the proclamation abolishing the collection of
taxes by any authority but the British. The Malays tore down
die notices, stabbed the clerk and speared Mr. Birch through
the flimsy palm-leaf walls of a bath-house. The date was ]
2 November, 1874. ’ j
More than a thousand troops were despatched from India to /;
hunt down the murderers and their abettors. Three chiefs were ■
hanged, and ‘Abdullah with two others was banished to the
Seychelles. When, more than twenty years later, thecx-Sultan
had returned and I met him, an elderly dandy in European . ■
clothes, he helped out my still halting Malay with excellent
English, and pointing to the Sultan’s fine palace and motor- fl
cars, ejaculated, “Had I but foreseen!”
The Executive Council of the Straits Settlements was fj
instructed to hold an enquiry into the Perak tragedy. It found . j
that, in spite of admirable qualities, Mr. Birch had sometimes
acted injudiciously without respect for Malay customs and in
an overbearing manner. Especially it deprecated his inter¬
ference with feudal taxation before allowances had been fixed
to compensate chiefs for their loss.
But it took several years before Perak settled down. The
Maharaja Lela did not surrender until July 1876, and was not
hanged until 20 January, 1877. As late as June 1876 Mr.
Davidson, the local lawyer appointed as the successor of Mr.
Birch, had to be informed by the Governor that his proposal
to settle in a stockade with 50 or 60 troops would be an undigni¬
fied confession of failure. Perak was bankrupt and the Malays
 BRITAIN AND THE MALAY ST AT B 9 69

sullenly hostile. The troops could not stay indefinitely. It was

decided to replace them with 800 police, mostly Malays,
but no one knew how they were to be paid. Mr. Davidson
resigned.
The next Resident, Mr.—afterwards Sir—Hugh Low, had
been a botanist, and was now to provide the model for the
administration of all the protected Malay States. How much of
his policy was original, how much due to the Governor and how1
much to Downing Street has not yet been explored. It was now
recognized that to govern a people by intimidation is an
expensive and unsatisfactory course. The cost of a police force
was reduced by giving police duties to headmen and abolishing
many village police-stations. To compensate them for loss of
feudal taxes the chiefs were given administrative posts and a
substantial percentage of the government revenue collected in
their districts. Land rents took the place of forced labour. A< '
State Council was started on the model of Indian Councils
created by an Act of 1861, after the Indian mutiny had taught
US the need of bodies competent to interpret the wishes of the
people. All revenues wcic collected, all appointments filled and
all land alienated in the name of the Sultan. The Sultan was
also President of the Council, on which sat the British Resident,
the major Malay chiefs, and Chinese business men. Under the
strict Muslim constitution of former days the Chinese had had
no rights at all, not even the right to possess land. Now they
Were not shy to express their views even on the merits of
candidates for the throne of Perak. They objected strongly to
the appointment of Sultan Yusuf, until Sir Hugh Low declared
that it would be embarrassing to tell Queen Victoria her
nominee was rejected. “Oh I” said the Chinese. “Why did you
\tell us before that Queen Victoria wants him? If Her
;sty recommends him, he must be suitable.”
?ho Malays of those days were not yet qualified for official
ft but their views were consulted and their local knowledge
Of inestimable value. In six years the Perak debt of
was paid off, and in 1883 slavery was abolished. The
iph roughly estimated in 1879 at 81,084 souk waa
•51891 to be 214,254.
'rp After getting ‘ “
the Perak
Per chiefs to sign the Pangkor treaty,
 70 1/ MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

the Governor at once turned to Selangor, where civil war and

piracy had long been rife, though the immediate excuse for his
interference was the murder of eight British subjects from
Malacca at Kuala Langat by pirates disguised as fishermen.
The pirates were the followers of the Sultan’s third son. The
Sultan, a rather careless philosopher, whose interests were
- •>, gardening and hoarding tin, readily agreed to the trial of the
offenders, explaining that piracy was not his affair but the
affair of his boys, and sending a creese for the execution of
.4 those found guilty.
‘' «&,' A liking for the English as rivals of the Dutch was a Sel-
■>, : angor tradition, and now Selangor chiefs, whether out of
•’ ‘fyoliteness or conviction or owing to the presence of a British
naval squadron, expressed the desire to have a Resident. Sir
Andrew Clarke, however, was content to leave a young civilian,
i Frank Swettenham, to give the Sultan informal advice. The
Sultan soon reported to the Govcmoi that the young man
knew the customs of the country and was clever at winning
hearts with soft words, so that all men icjoiccd in him as in the
perfume of an opened flower. His Highness wanted to pay
Mr. Swettcnham’s salary and expenses. The Governor now
appointed a Resident, Mr. J. G. Davidson, a writer to the signet,
who afterwards succeeded Mr. Birch in Perak. Mr. Swetten¬
ham, energetic, tactful and of great promise, remained with the
Sultan at Langat as Assistant Resident. One item in Selangor’s
earliest budget was $300,000 owed by the Sultan’s son-in-law
to a Chinese in Malacca for munitions for the civil war that had
rent the country. In extending our protection over Selangor
there was no trouble, evidently owing to the tact of a young
' civilian who was to retire in 1903 as Governor of the Straits
Settlements, and to die in London in 1946 at the age of ninety-
J six, combatting in the very last weeks of his life a Malayan.
. Union which he regarded as a stupid betrayal of the race he
4 j had served so well.
extenc* protection over Negri Sembilan, the Nine
i W^Counties, by one treaty was impossible, as each of the larger
_J L- • J_J_* T .. A_M O- .1 .1 «

mm
 BRITAIN AND THE MALAY STATES 71

$50,000 not to infringe the peace with arms given them in

order to clear the Linggi River from the evil-disposed persons
who built stockades and hindered traffic by unlawful exactions.
They also promised not to harbour enemies of the British
Government or of its friends. In return “the moral and material
guarantee and protection" of Great Britain was to be accorded
them "to secure the independence, peace and prosperity of
Sungai Ujong". This cryptic document was followed by the
hoisting of the Union Jack at the Klana’s house. But an old
chief of Sungai Ujong, the Dato' (Shah) Bandar, threatened
trouble, ostensibly because the Klana had not consulted him.
Next, when the Dato' Bandar had surrendered, the Yamtuan
Antah of Sri Mcnanti and other chiefs attacked the Dato'
IClana. A British force of 150 infantry and a detachment of
artillery dealt with this disturbance, a British officer, Captain
Channer, winning a V.C. for leaping over a stockade on Friday
(the Malay day of rest) and driving a few Malays away from
their cooking-pots.
By January 1876 military forces were withdrawn from
everywhere except Sungai Ujong. All the chiefs supporting the
Yam-tuan Antah went with him to Government House and
promised to refer any disputes for the arbitration of Maharaja
(later Sultan) Abubakar of Johorc. For the British Government
was unwilling to appoint any more Residents after what had
happened in Perak until it had "had further experience of thoso
already established”. So with the approval of Singapore, the
ambitious Maharaja of Johorc sent a representative "as a sort of
Resident” to Sri Menanti, the scat of Yam-tuan Antah. But
Johorc failed from its ignorance of the matriarchal organization,
Squabbles among chiefs continued in Rembau and Jelebu. But
when Jelebu applied for a British Resident to arbitrate, the
Governor decided it was inexpedient.
So disturbances continued and mile after mile of home¬
steads and rice-fields were deserted. Then in June 1885 the
first British Collector was appointed to Jelebu, and in Sep¬
tember 1886 the territorial and tribal chiefs signed a treaty
surrendering administration to the British officer of whose
continued assistance they asked to be assured. In 1887 another
of the Nine Counties, Rembau, applied for a British officer with
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY
7*
the stipulation that one-third of the revenue should be paid to
, the chiefs; the huge increase of revenue due to rubber led a
quarter of a century later to a modification of that stipulation,
' , the chiefs agreeing that they should draw fixed allowances, and
the balance of the third be devoted to Malay welfare.
' f In 1889 the rulers of Rembau and Tampin joined a
number of little Counties adjacent to Sri Menanti to form a
Negri ■ Sembilan, Gemencheh, hitherto unknown to fame,
-ife&eing added to make up the number. There was now one
--^British Resident for the Nine Counties and another for
'\-y Sungai Ujong and Jelcbu. In 1895 th® whole of what is now
i i" Negri Sembilan elected Tengku Antah Yang di-pertuan of the
entire country and accepted one Resident. Perhaps the example
of more than two centuries of peace under the Dutch and
: English at Malacca and direct dealings with the English there
made the Malays of Selangor and Negri Sembilan readier than
Perak to welcome British protection—in spite of the Naning
war, But the tact of early officials must not be underrated.
■ l As for Pahang, the first British official to visit it was Frank
Swettenham, who had done so well in Selangor. In 1885 he
was sent there to try to settle a boundary dispute and a quarrel
between the ruler and his brother. This he did, and at the same
time warned the Sultan of the financial improvidence of grant¬
ing large concessions of land. In the light of his own experience
in Selangor he recommended the appointment of an Agent of
the Straits Settlements to live at Pckan, watch the interests of
British subjects and make himself acceptable to the Malays.
- * (Sir) Hugh Clifford was sent to try to arrange for a treaty,
which, with the help of the very able Dato’ Mantri of Johore,
•<'< he contrived to do. The important point was Pahang’s accept-
',-^flnce of a British Agent with functions similar to those of a '4
’wjGonsular Officer. The Agent found himself in an environment
mediaeval and chaotic. The revenue system was organized
merely to put money into the coffers of the ruler and his chiefs, X
Even onions and curry-stuffs were taxed exorbitantly, and the
Jultan granted monopolies for the sale of household arfioles
id farmed out the collection of import duties on nearly every
unmodity. Gold ore had to be sold to His Highness’ agents at'1
jut half its market price. Huge concessions of laird were

1
 BRITAIN AND THB MALAY STATES 73

made to Europeans and Chinese who had greased the palms of

royal favourites, the Sultan not caring if the land belonged to
his chiefs or was already being mined by Chinese or Malays.
As soon as it was rumoured that the British would protect
the State, the hunt for concessions became keener than ever,
concessions bound to retard development and narrow sources
of revenue. The Sultan’s favourites imposed heavy fines for
mediaeval offences, carrying off wives and daughters in default
of payment and killing any who resisted. When the Agent,
Hugh Clifford, tried to tackle this maladministration of justice,
to draft laws and define jurisdiction, the Sultan added a clause
to the draft providing penalties for the harbouring of fugitive
slaves, and the chiefs interfered with the new judges. A Malay
was convicted of abetting the breach of a monopoly and fined
$32 or six months’ cash earnings, because his wife made oil for
her own use out of four coconuts.
When Clifford went on a visit to Singapore, two Women
were tortured and two Sakai boys ducked and beaten (so
severely that one died) on suspicion of stealing the gold ring
of a creese. Then in February 1888 a British Chinese subject,
Go Hin, was stabbed in the precincts of the palace, where none
would dare to lift a hand without royal orders. Rumour said
the Sultan coveted the victim’s wife. The Malay Chief Justice
offered a reward for information as to the incident, whether
the stabbing was due to man, djinn or devil. The Chinese died.
The Governor came up from Singapore and required the
Sultan to accept a British Resident Advised by the Sultan of
Johore to comply, the Sultan of Pahang did so, hoping that no
more would be said about the murder of Go Hin and that Her
Majesty Queen Victoria would be satisfied with his expression
of regret.
The problems that faced the first Resident were the aboli¬
tion of slavery, the regulation of forced labour, the fixing of
allowances for the Sultan and chiefs in place of feudal dues,
and the framing of laws for the tenure of land. The fixing of
allowances, however careful, was bound to cause discontent.
Actually the list was drawn up by an untrustworthy Malay Who
inserted the names of his friends and omitted those of his
enemies; it was passed by the Regent, the Sultan’s heir, because
 MAtAYA AND ITS HISTORY
74
he thought that the Resident had approved it, and though it
was criticized by the Sultan, His Highness forgot to revise it.
At a meeting of the State Council the Resident accepted some
alterations, but pointed out that the allowances amounted to
two-thirds of the State revenue. A chief, with aboriginal blood
and a reputation as a fighter, the Orang Kaya Pahlawan of
Semantan, had his seal of office withdrawn by the Sultan for
refusing to obey the orders of government, as in days before
British protection he had once refused to obey the orders of the
Sultan not to collect taxes. He incited his people to disobey all
government regulations until he should get the allowance of a
major chief. When he thought the government planned to
arrest him, he ambushed a Collector's boot and captured a
S lice-station, after which his followers rose from a hundred to
o men. The Sultan took the field against the rebel, and
much impressed the Resident by his transport and commis¬
sariat arrangements as well as by his skill in guerilla warfare.
But the rebels vanished into the jungle, thence from time to
time raiding unprotected stations. Some of the chiefs urged the
Sultan to expel the British, and the Dato' Maharaja Purba of
Jelai got ready to attack Kuala Lipis. Some accounts relate
that the Sultan connived at the proposals; if so, His Highnoss
soon changed his mind. The Sultan increased his forces to
1000 men, and there were now 240 Sikh troops. But To’ Gajah,
another chief, joined forces with the Semantan rebel, and
together they fled into Kclantan. The Sultan and the Maharaja
Purba visited the Governor at Singapore, where the latter
voiced his grievances, inadequate allowances for himself and his
headmen, the threat to his mining land by a grant given to a
British company, and his people’s dislike of the new regulations
for forced labour, even though they were to be paid as they
never had been before. An amnesty was proclaimed for all
rebels except the two leaders, who were, however, promised
their lives if they surrendered. But a holy fanatic of Trengganu
foretold their invulnerability and victory. They collected a
hundred men and raided Kuala Tembeling. The Dato’ Maha¬
raja Purba and Sikhs from Perak and Selangor and the Colony
put the rebels to flight. Hugh Clifford pursued the rebels and
their few followers into Kelantan and Trengganu, which were
 BRITAIN AND THE MALAY STATES 75

still under Siam. Siamese commissioners accompanied him.

But with the connivance of the Sultan of Trengganu the rebels
escaped. In November 1895 the Orang Kaya Pahlawan and
five followers surrendered to the Siamese. To’ Gajah was
reported to have died in Trengganu. This last of Malay risings
had dragged on four years from December 1891. Few lives
were lost in the fighting, although many of the rebels’ followers *•"
must have died of privation in the jungle.
No other Malay States came under the British until I909>
when by a treaty signed at Bangkok Siam transferred to Great
Britain “all rights of suzerainty, protection, administration and
control” over Kedah, Pcrlis, Kclantan and Trengganu, in /'
return for a modification of British extraterritorial jurisdiction
in Siam, and for a loan to build a railway connecting Bangkok
with the Malayan system. Kedah paid a Penang lawyer to
protest against the disposal of states as if they were merchan¬
dise, and a relic of this token objection survived in a clause in
the treaty made between Kedah and Great Britain stipulating
that Kedah should never be joined to the Straits Settlements or /
to any other Malay State without the approval of the Sultan-in-
Council.
Kedah and Perlis were too near Penang not to have felt
some at least of the influences of the present century. But as
Rupert Emerson, an American critic of British ways, has
remarked, there should linger “no romantic notion”, that “in
Kelantan and Trengganu the British or even the Siamese inter¬
vention disrupted a somewhat primitive but idyllic govern¬
ment”. In Trengganu, when the British entered, “all manner
Of crime was rampant, the peasantry was mercilessly down-
,trodden, but the land was full of holy men, and the cries of the
miserable were drowned in the noise of ostentatious prayer’!.
In Kelantan, when Siam appointed a British Adviser in 1903,
the Raja and his uncles had the monopoly of a mint that
’dJJiffttMLtin into the most trumpery coin in any part of the
world* What revenue there was, was paid to clerks in the
palace to be borne off on elephants to a cache in the hills that
served as a royal bank. Salaries were paid only when the clerks
happeoed.to have cash in hand. This mediaeval mess it was
not very difffcplt to dear up. The legacy of misrule that

•4, > ssfWJ4i

 76 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

retarded the progress of Kelantan for 30 years was a con¬

cession to a police inspector, Duff, who had accompanied
Clifford into Kelantan in pursuit of the Pahang rebels. In
return for payment to the Raja of £2000 and 2000 shares,
Duff had been given 3000 square miles, or one-third of Kelantan,
together with wide seignorial powers and other privileges. The
purchase of these rights by Kelantan led to prolonged costly
and notorious litigation and a claim by the Duff Company for
£1,091,269. It is too long a story for these pages, but the
concession saddled Kelantan with debt for years.
The last Malay state to seek British protection wa9 Johore, •
with whose rulers the British Government had had intimate and
cordial relations since ancestors of the present Sultan sold it
the island of Singapore. Johore in some respects was highly
civilized. In 1882 Maharaja Abu-Bakar, father of the present
Ruler, entertained Prince Albert Victor and Prince (afterwards
' King) George. The princes described "the huge drawing-room
of the palace like one of the state-rooms at Windsor and
furnished from London”. In the afternoon the Maharaja drove i
a four-in-hand to Singapore races, with Prince George beside
him on the box. In 1885 a treaty was signed by which Great
Britain promised Johore protection against external attack, and
) formally recognized the Ruler’s change of style from Maharaja
. to Sultan. Johore, on its part, was not to enter into any engage-
ment with any foreign state or to make any grant or concession
7 to other than British subjects or persons of the Chinese, Malay vf-
or other Oriental race. Johore also agreed to accept a British
Consular Agent if ever it were desired to appoint one. But by
1914 the development of the rubber industry had turned
Johore into an important state beyond the experience and
ability of its Malay administration to manage; the Sultan,
therefore, signed a treaty accepting a General Adviser "whose
advice must be asked for and acted upon on all matters affecting
the general administration of the country and on all questions
other than those touching Malay religion and custom”.
Except for Patani all the Malay States of the peninsula had
accepted British protection and advice. To ensure that pro¬
tection force such as in civilized territory would have peen
. exercised by the police had with the co-operation of the more :
 BRITAIN AND THE MALAY STATES ft'

enligh tened Malay chiefs been employed in Negri Sembilan

and Pahang.
P: Only in Perak the tactless eagerness of the first
Resident had led to events that called for military intervention,
with which even the more friendly chiefs could hardly show i
sympathy.

r\
*

4
I ‘
 CHAPTER IX

BRITISH ADMINISTRATION

i. In thb Straits Settlements

When in 1786 the East India Company rented the island of

Penang from the Sultan of Kedah, there were few inhabitants
and no local Malay administration for it to supplant or reform.
This was fortunate, because being interested only in commerce
die Directors so handled matters that its administration became
a notorious failure. Within three years the total value of Penang’s
imports and exports rose to $853,592, within eight years to
double that sum. Yet the Settlement never paid its way. Its
founder and first Superintendent, Francis Light, was instructed
not to levy taxes and was given no staff to do so. Until 1800 the
revenue was derived from lump sums paid by Chinese for
spirit, opium and gambling farms, the only course possible in
the absence of customs officials. But in one year Penang was
paid only $72,000 for farms out of which the Chinese bidder
made a profit of $186,000, while in the same year Singapore
with less than a quarter of Penang’s population got $75,000
for its farms. Light had no training in administration. To
attract a population, he let Asiatics occupy what land they could
clear under promise of a title in the future. Europeans, including
servants of the Company, were given large areas, and Light and
his business partner, a second cousin of Sir Walter Scott,
appropriated the best sites. When death and migration brought
valuable lands on the market, the government bad no funds
for their purchase, and they were bought by Scott’s firm, which J
also engaged in usury and acquired land by foreclosing on
mortgages and buying from impoverished debtors or the
representatives of absent or dead owners. Grants had been
promised with no condition that failure to cultivate would,
after a term of years, involve resumption. There was no.land 1
revenue and no prospect of getting it. The Company even had
to rent land from Scott as a site for Government House, In
78
 BRITISH ADMINISTRATION 79

1805 Penang still had “few roads and public buildings, no 4

medical service, no department for the collection of revenue, the
scantiest provision for the maintenance of law and order, and
Strangely enough no law”. In that year the Directors attempted
reform. Henceforth no servant of the Company was to engage in
trade. No land was to be alienated to Europeans without the
Directors' approval, and in all titles there was to be a clause for
increasing quit-rent with increase in cultivation. Usury was to
be stopped. But though Light had been given only one assistant
and there were now fifty officials from India drawing £42,700 a
year, they were too ignorant of local conditions to stand up
against Scott & Co. This first volte-face in policy, out of the
many the British were to make over Malaya, proved futile. In
1832 the seat of government was transferred to Singapore,
when that island had been a British possession for only eight
years.
1824, the year that saw Singapore ceded to Great Britain by
the Malays, saw also the cession of Malacca by Holland. But the
British had held Malacca from 1795 till 1818, and its adminis¬
tration was in the obsolescent tradition of Penang rather than
on the progressive lines of Raffles’ Singapore. The East India
Company was faced with two problems at Malacca, namely
land and Naning, and its civilians mishandled both. Large
areas were in the hands of Dutch landlords who had the right to
let their property in return for a tithe of its produce payable to
themselves or their nominees. These nominees were Chinese,
who bought the right of collecting rents and squeezed the
Malay tenants, whom they regarded as barbarians. Under this
mediaeval Malay system the government still owned the soil,
but there was no stipulation that land would be resumed if it
were not cultivated, and no machinery for a just assessment of
tithes. The rapacity of the Chinese middleman discouraged
agriculture. So, commerce having passed to Penang, the
government bought out the landlords' rights for annual
pensions that came to less than £2000, in the hope of deriving
revenue from improvement in agriculture. But while retaining
the old mediaeval system of tenure for land that was cultivated,
it decided that after 1830 titles should be issued for other land
in accordance with English law. There were no surveyors,- and
 8o MALATA AND ITS HISTORY

hopeless confusion arose a9 to what land was held under the

old system and what under the new. The Recorder pronounced
the new land rules illegal. The Malays demurred to paying cash
in lieu of the tithe. The Land Office failed to defray its expenses
plus the landlords' pensions. The problem was not settled till
the '80s, when a Governor from New Zealand, Sir Frederick
Weld, introduced a system under which all dealings with land
have to be registered in a government office.
The Naning war falls within the province of general history
rather than the province of administration. But it is worthy of
‘ I note that the civilians of the East India Company discovered
in thoir archives the actual relations between the Dutch
at Malacca and Naning only after they had stirred up an
unjust war that cost £100,000 and resulted in subduing a
district whose revenue in 1833 was $762! Naturally It was
years before the British ventured on extension of territory in
% Mjalaya.
.'Singapore, too, narrowly escaped administration on the bad
old) lines. Farquhar, its first Resident, held the traditional views
about raising revenue from gambling and cock-fighting, and,
worse still, he owned slaves. As for Raffles, he did not hesitate
/to avail himself of the Company’s permission to hold land, and
he instructed Farquhar to reserve half the lots on the sea-front
at Singapore for himself, his relatives and friends. Moreover, like
all other of the Company’s servants, Raffles was a jack-of-all-
tradcs. To a friend he wrote: “I have had every tiling to new-
mould from first to last; to introduce a system of energy, purity
and encouragement.” That was his forte, but he had the more
concrete tasks of making laws for his new city. He drafted
regulations for a land registry, port rules, police regulations,
laws forbidding gaming, cock-fighting and the slave trade. “All
this work,” as he wrote home, is “a pleasant duty enough in
England where you have books, hard heads and lawyers to refer
to, but here by no means easy, where all must depend on my
own judgment and foresight.” At law Raffles was an amateur,
and legal chaos continued to prevail. Raffles’ greatest financial
measure was to declare Singapore a port whose "trade was
open to ships and vessels of every nation free of duty, equally
and alike to all”. But this measure was very much more than
 - B RITIV{*"'$ 99'
financial. It was ethical reform in the interests of the Asiatic, so
long cabined -and confined by monopolies. On that score it
stands beside Raffles’ abolition of slavery. Even then Raffles was
not Satisfied. He wanted not only to free the Asiatic ari^i
trade but'fe do something for his advancement. With this
established an “Institution, having for its obj
iOn of the languages of China, Siam and the .
50, and the improvement of the moral and int
s of the inhabitants of those countries’'. In edi
iw, Raffles was an amateur, and he failed to recognize
Ion must work upwards from the elementary schdbl*
the pioneer of the idea that a colonial government must ^
the welfare of the people. ‘ vKtfr
po swallow does not make a spring, and men with the
jsiasm and ideals of Raffles were rare in the Malaya offtjy!
lys. No Bengal civilian studied Malay or Chinese or
to be transferred to Settlements made up of three ports ,£
j .field for promotion. With empire thrust upon it, the fy
ny had littlo experience of the art of government and had ,
Jpalizc the need for lawyers and engineers in distant 1
I parts of the world or the need for its own good to study local >'
interests. In an effort to make the Straits Settlements pay their
■\ Way, tho Company from time to time threatened the free trade r
i that,was the life-blood of the Malayan ports. For after 1833 TO1
*. Government of India lost its monopoly of trade with China, and
. .the Indian Treasury had every year to meet a heavy deficit in
the Straits budget. The Company did its best for three distant
ports without prospects, witn hinterland unopened and with
Dutoh competition all around them. Often it lacked information
and It lacked imagination. When it passed an act to force the
5 rupee on a dollar country, the people of the Straits Settlements
for a transfer to the Crown. ^ ,
The year after the Indian Mutiny the East India Company '
$ was abolished as an anachronism and for nine uneventful yeafs 4 "
the Straits Settlements were under the control of the India
Office, until in 1867 Great Britain bowed to local demand ’*&
put them under the Colonial Office. Not yet had Indian
> patriots arisen*to talk of Greater India and include ancient
j Singapura in the arr^it of their thoughts.

1 . *

- h
M&m MALAYA AND ITS HI8T0RY

Under the East India Company and the India Office there
had been no local representation. As a Crown Colony, the
Settlements came to have unofficial members not only on their
Legislative Council but on the Executive Council. The pre¬
ponderance of Chinese in the population led to a preponderance
of Chinese members, who rapked next to the British members in'
number. But Eurasians and Malaya and Indiana were also
' -' ’ Except for two British members of the Legislative
loosen by the Chambers of Commerce, loll these
unoffioials were nominated by the Governor. In a
largely foreign popular election was impracticable. H
munity so composite, an official mnjority, though hare
I; was the ultimate means for holding the balance t J
Hig interests. Before they were sundered in 1945 II
_ apore was left a solitary Colony by itself, the Straits I
Settlements, outliving piracy and Chinese riots, reached a
height of prosperity beyond the dreams even of Raffles. jj A

cJcw,
•H ii. In the Malay States
M7.

When Malay States first accepted British protection, i

jtyj. bureaucracy was superimposed in Negri Sembilan on-'a
democracy that gave votes to women and protected the rights
of the humblest. The change would have been a matter, for |
t except that this matriarchal democracy of Minanjjkabau
iats suffered from one flaw, which it never contrived to
f:. It insisted that the election of all its representatives, from fif
Uler down to the humblest tribal elder, must be unanimous. ,
\vas the result? In the i83o’s there wore five, claimants J
and in 1874, when the British intervened, two claimants to the J
throne, with the four territorial chiefs, the electors;®^ J
asserting the paramount claim of his own favourito and main¬
taining his view by force of spear and crccsc. The office of
Ruler! oE Yang di-pertuan, or, as it is abbreviated, 'Yam-tuan,
was in fact a foreign and Hindu excrescence, which the Minang-
kabau tribal system never absorbed or before the days of
British .tutelage tried to absorb. For though the Yam-tuan had,
like other Malay rulers, the divine right of■ one whpsew ancestors

t v<_'
I
 BRITISH ADMINISTRATION 83

had been the incarnation of Hindu gods, and who himself was
the shadow of Allah upon earth, yet compared .with the rulers
of the patriarchal Malay States he had no authority. He could
levy no taxes except fees for cock-fights. For his maintenance
he lived on land inherited from the tribal wife of the founder of
his house and he was given traditional petty presents at his
installation and on the occasion of marriages and other feasts.
He was supreme arbiter and judge, if the territorial chiofs chose
to invite him to adjudicate, which they never did. He was
Caliph or head of the Muslim theocracy in any territory where
the local chief did not arrogate the title for himself—and he
always did. The Yam-tuan should have been first in a State
Council, as other rulers were, but no council ever met. For,
like the Ruler, the four territorial chiefs or Undang were, in a
Minangkabau polity, excrescences inherited from the patri¬
archal overlordship of the fifteenth-century Sultans of Malacca:
older excrescences than the Yam-tuan and more powerful, as
they had got absorbed by accepting uterine descent and con¬
forming to matriarchal custom. Since the days when d’Albu-
querque took Malacca, the Undang had been leaderless, or
rather their overlords the Sultans of Johore, who represented the
Malacca line, had been fugitives, far away and powerless, so
that the tyndang regarded themselves as petty kings and never
collaborated except when the threat of Bugis domination led
them to create the first Yam-tuan in the eighteenth century.
Below the Undang are the Lembagas, the real chiefs of the
matrilineal Minangkabau tribes. They also had to be elected
unanimously, and in old days there were often indecent delays
over their obsequies and fights at the graveside, a new chief
having to be appointed before his predecessor was buried. If the
electors failed to reach unanimity, the choice came to be made
by the territorial chief in council with the other tribal chiefs
within his borders. But even that council sometimes failed to
agree. And it was left for the British to arrange final appeal to.
a State Council of the four Undang under the chairmanship of
the Yam-tuan. Once appointed, the Lembaga was, and is, an
invaluable official..Under Malay rule he marked the boundaries
of tribal land?, settled the transmission of property on death
or divorce, had jurisdiction in cases of lesser crime, torts and
 84 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

debts, kept an eye open for the misdeeds of territorial chiefs and
had an official to spy on the conduct of his subordinates, the
ciders, as his Undang also had one to spy on his. While legal
powers have passed now into the hands of British and Malay
magistrates and land officers, the Lembaga has remained their
tnisted expert adviser on all matters of tribal land.
The Lembaga’s subordinates are elders (buapa) elected by
members of sub-tribes. In old-world sayings the Lembaga is
described as a hawk, but the elder irreverently as a chattering
mynah, whose province is not tribal land but the disputatious
. tribal folk male and female. He is the witness for all formal
payments made to or by a member of his sub-tribe, and for the
declaration of a husband’s private property at marriage and at its
return on divorce. Before the advent of the British he also had
minimal jurisdiction.
On the whole the Minangkabau democracy of Negri
Sembilan has accepted accretions whether Malay or British
with equanimity, confident in its power to bring even the
British official under its “sceptre of fascination". But its matri-
lincal democrats never really sought to remedy the two funda¬
mental .weaknesses of their constitution. They were so intent on
the principle of unanimity that they never realized the advantage
of accenting a majority vote, so that before the British period
minorities were always creating civil strife. They were so sus¬
picious of tyranny that they never gave the Yam-tuan the power
required .to federalize their territory. The Undang or four
territorial chiefs never met in council under the Yam-tuan, as
each of them met in council with his own tribal chiefs. The
British creation of a Council with the Yam-tuan as chairman,
the four Undang as members and a majority vote ccmentod the
warring elements of the little State of Negri .Sembilan for the
first time in history.
Theorists will point out how the study of his law and
constitution has made the Malay of Negri Sembilan perhaps the
most intelligent in the peninsula, and will complain that
bureaucracy has overlaid a healthy indigenous polity. But
•Openly arid covertly that democracy has contrived to function.
There are still all the old Malay offices, their holders elected still
in the old fashion. One evidence of their power is the almost
 BRITISH ADMINISTRATION 85

total absence of Malay litigants from courts constituted by the

British with British and Malay magistrates. Only when the white
man's law demands attendance at a government office, as for
example when dealings in land have to be registered, do the
female democrats, in whose names ancestral holdings are held,
flock with their tribal chief before the collector and expound and
demand their tribal rights with dominant persistence.
If some explanation of the benefits of British administration
in Negri Sembi lan is required, civil wars, barbarous punish¬
ments and exorbitant taxation afford indisputable excuse for our
belated interference in the other states.
At the head of every one of these patriarchal states is a
ruler, Yang di-pertuan—“He who is made lord”, to employ the
Malay style, the Raja in the parlance of his Hindu ancestors,
or Sultan to use the term preferred by his latest faith. Like
the Chinese of the Chou period 3000 years ago, the prlmitiye
Malay had credited his chiefs with magic powers under the
influence perhaps of Babylonian ideas. Even as late as 1874 a
Perak audience saw nothing fantastic in their Sultan acting as
a medium at a shaman’s stance and prophesying the death of the
first British Resident—whose murder he intended to compass.
With the advent of the Hindu period the Malay ruler had
become an incarnation of a god, most often of Indra, controller
of weather and lord of Mount Meru, the Hindu Olympus, with
its 33 gods. The myth has a measure of practical interest still
because the astrological notions centring round the Hindu Meru
have affected and left their impress on the political structure of
the Malay States. Like Burma, Siam and Cambodia, mediaeval
Malacca and most of the modern states have constitutions
founded on the astrological numbers 4, 8, 16 and 32. In all those
countries there were 4 chief ministers and 4 chief consorts for
the king. In most Malay countries there are not only 4 chief
ministers, but 8 major chiefs and 16 minor chiefs, and, bdow
the last, mediaeval Malacca and modern Perak have had also 32
petty chiefs. Thirty-two chiefs plus a king made up the number
of gods in Indra’s heaven, and a Malay kingdom was con¬
ceived as “an image of the heavenly world of stars and gods”.
Its rot soldi was associated with all that was bright. Only the
king could fly a white flag or wear yellow garments. As the king
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

any white elephants. so'A“

•as his perquisites albino
laaE ,h -y ' / . , / \\
Coming down to earth, a Malay ruler had certain recognized
ftz powers as well as many prerogatives. Only he could pardon a
gj|J traitor, (4 murderer and the abductor of a married woman. In v
at least he was a constitutional monarch. Tom4 Plrea
i how in old Malacca death sentences were reviewed by
f)te Sultan, the prime minister, the admiral and the chief of
Jj® police; and treaties between the Sultan of Perak and the Dutch,
mf example, were signed by the Ruler and major chiefs.
In mediaeval Malacca all the chiefs except the 32 boro the
title of Mantri; and every Mantri had judicial powers and the
duty of collecting tribute, which was paid by adjacent subject
states in tin or gold. The Bcndahara or Prime Minister had
S <jrs of life and death not only in his own domain but any- '
re in the state in the absence of the Sultan. The Tcmenggong,
chief of police, had everywhere the same duties, namely to
arrest criminals, build prisons and carry out execution®J-.he
superintended forts and moats and supervised markets and
weights and measures. A Sultan had a chamberlain, secretary
treasurer, styled Pcnghulu Bcndahari, who kept a roster of
royal slaves and collected the Ruler’s personal revenuo; The
Jjj Shahbandars or port officers and collectors of customs dues are
f ^Ssfltd by.Pirea to have been of several nationalities. There were u
. '.^governors of tributary districts with the title of Mandulikfl. rlJ/.T*
fete prime task of chiefs in mediaeval Malacca was to
prosecute an imperialist policy for the glory of the royal house
and for the advancement of trade that brought wealth to rajas J
and'chiefs. As for domestic policy, except Johore and Kedah injv
”j»M8eht century, no independent Malay states expended
' $fh, roads, medicine, education or any of the scientific
38 of a civilized government. Instead of a standing army
$5 there.were mercenaries and swashbucklers attached to the court
$3$ or to chiefs’ households. The only civil servants were tax-*/.
co*jcc^or3 and police, who were also the myrmidons'.of the v

The obligations of any power concerned with the protection

ffSjof Malaya’sMt|^ling and - lawless states were clear. Great

K; -V
 ,8 * tM * 5jr
Britain had to ensure peace and order and to build up com¬
munications that would consolidate isolated districts into
homogeneous states. It had to contrive that rulers in theory
constitutional should be so in practice. It had to enlarge the
ent to represent the rights and interests of immigrants g!
>rding to Muslim mediaeval theory had as pagans no Sfrf
at all. It had to arrange for public revenues to be spent |*
for public welfare. It had to transfer administration from the jg
hands of interested amateurs to the hands of disinterested
specialists and to increase the branches of government to
‘ Include such modern subjects as medicine and agriculture and
engineering.
As soon as the Malay chiefs had been allotted compensation 9-/
for tim loss of hereditary privileges in the shape of fixed allow-'
^ ifi it did not take long to win their co-operation, and the olc|fiA,
quickly gave way to the new. The change was greatM%'«
ted by the two main principles of Malay rule: the\cbn-
, of their chiefs by the rulers and the virtual conduct of
' it by the Bendahara or Prime Minister. Just as a Sultan
i had delegated authority to his Bendahara, so .now
jultans were content to entrust administration to* the.
Residents. For the kernel of the treaty with every state was j
that, while all revenue should be collected and all appointments
made in the name of the Ruler, he should accept a British •,
Resident whose advice had to be invited and followed upon all
; matters other than those touching Malay religion and custom*'
But how were these British Residents to discover the wishes
of the Malays and to explain to them the objects of British
policj%The Indian Mutiny had revealed the folly of legislating /
for Asiatics without means of ascertaining whether laws of
foreign origin were objectionable to them or not. So, following
the model of the Indian Councils Act of 1861 and mindful of
jthe Sultans’ time-honoured councils, the British instituted
State Councils with executive and legislative powers. The
President of every Council was the Ruler, and leading chiefs
were members, but there was the radical innovation that the
British Resident and Chinese merchants (and later other British
officials and unofficials and Indians) were also members. Taxa-'
tion, land laws, the review of death sentences, the enforced
 88 MALAYA AND IT8 HISTORY

carrying of torches by night to reduce robberies, the firing on a

crowd of Chinese rioters', the construction of a railway, com¬
pulsory vaccination, trespass by buffaloes, the preservation of
wild guttapercha trees, an application for permission to trap
elephants, the efficacy of a rat-poison for ricc-fields, the abo¬
lition of slavery—the topics broached at early meetings of these
State Councils were a strange mixture. So, too, was the per¬
sonnel of the new civil service in those days. A few officials
- from the neighbouring colony were available like (Sir) William
Maxwell and (Sir) Frank Swettenham, who did yeoman work
and made for themselves distinguished careers. But the most
able and tactful of the Residents, Sir Hugh Low, had been a
botanist. One upcountry district officer had been a midship¬
man and won great popularity among the Malays by holding
cock-fights to settle disputes, the owner of the winning bird
having the suit given in his favour. Another was an Italian who
kept a Malay smith and was elated when he got a hawker to
# palm off one of his smith’s creeses on the Resident as a genuine
antique. But already by the late ’90’s of the last century cadets
were recruited for the Malay States and soon there was formed
a united Malayan Civil Service, its members liable to be.
stationed in the Straits Settlements or the Malay States,
honours men from British Universities, who sat for the com¬
petitive examinations prescribed for the Home and Indian
Civil Services. The same type is recruited today, though
theoretically they are members of a service common to all the
Colonies, and they are appointed no longer after competitive
examination but by nomination.
Although the Residents were responsible to the Governor of
the Straits Settlements, lack of communications and of any
federal link led to tiresome differences in the taxation and
legislation of the four protected states. Each passed its own
laws and its own annual budget and each had its own state
officers. So in 1895 Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan and
Pahang were federalized under a Resident-General. From the
time when Francis Light negotiated the acquisition of Penang
down to the MacMichael treaties of 1945 there has been a
tendency for the British Government to assume that when the
attainment of a good end is in question the end justifies the
 BRITISH ADMINISTRATION 89

means, and though pains had been taken to institute State

Councils, the signature of the Rulers was accepted on this
treaty of federation without their prior consultation with those
bodies:—even in Malay times the most arbitrary Sultan had
at least made a pretence of consulting his chiefs, and since 1889
laws had been enacted by the Ruler in Council. Nothing in
the newr treaty was to curtail the powers of rulers in their
several states, though they were now set the acrobatic task of
following the advice of a Resident, of a Resident-General and
occasionally of the Governor also. Under it the wealthier
states were to be persuaded to take the unprecedented
but admirable step of promising to give the poorer such
assistance in money and officials as the Resident-General might
advise. A durbar of the Rulers was constituted, a sort of federal
council in embryo, though it was without legislative or financial
powers. And there was nothing in the nature of an executive
council to limit the authority of the Resident-General. '
Rubber coming on the top of tin gave an impetus to the
development of the federal constitution. For when Sultaii Idris
W89 led by the Resident of Perak to issue a circular exhorting his
subjects to take up the easy job of squatting in the shade and
tapping rubber-trees, Malays accepted this reflection on their
Industry in good part, but having often been bitten over novel
crops waited to see the result of European and Chinese planting.
But the tin mines and rubber plantations that those foreigners
opened in every state rapidly grew into great industries, which
for financial confidence demanded representation; so in 1909
the first High Commissioner got approval for a Federal Council
that eviscerated the four State Councils, leaving only petty and
local matters on their agenda. On the new Federal Council the
Rulers became ordinary members with no power of veto and
with the disadvantage that their rank prevented them from
joining in debate; besides, they were in the anomalous “position
of advising themselves and that only as individual members of
a majority or a minority as the case might be". The President
of the Federal Council was the High Commissioner (who was
also Governor of the adjacent Colony), and other members were
the Resident-General, the four Residents and four unofficials,
of whom-three were British and one Chinese. In 1913 the Legal
 r 1 * t* m
Adviser and another unofficial were added, and in 1920 the
Treasurer and yet another official. Before the reform of the
Council by Sir Lawrence Guillemard in 1927 the unofficials
had been raised to eight, of whom five were Europeans, two
Chinese and one a Malay chief.
In 1927 the Rulers signed an agreement for the reconatitu-
•$ tion of the Federal Council, with thirteen officials and eleven
igS unoffici{il8. The new officials were heads of large departments,
St appointed so that they could explain policy and answer criti-
- *v’ asms. Of the unofficials four were to be Malays, taking the place
,‘jl of the Rulers, who to their great satisfaction now gave up their
rj§’ seats. Although consulted outside the federal chamber, Their
Highnesses had for years sat and listened in silence to what
everyone regarded as the allocation of state revenue by the
'.^federal executive authority and unofficials interested in tin and
* ^'jubbor. But there was so ,much money that the Rulers felt no
Inclination to criticize. Nor were they disposed to challenge
’•'.‘Emergency legislation passed without prior reference to them
’!)tv iduring.the First World War. Then two events opened their eves
®jo t{»e realization that their states were in theory federated, but
amalgamated. _
The first event that made Malays eye federation Critically
•; 3\vas the refusal of the five states, Johorc, Kedah, Kelont&n,
ffifSTrengganu and Perlis, tliat came under British protection in
,$8909, to enter it on any terms. The treaty with Kedah went so
far as to stipulate that it should never be joined to the Colony or
to any other Malay state without the consent of its State
'^Council. The treaties with Johorc and Kedah stipulated that
SfflMalay and European officials should be on a footing of equality.
5$ Johore had voluntarily asked for protection as the modem
government of a growing population was outside its experience, /'
an: had reason to expect consideration. But evert "the
. right ^0 administer the four northern States which. Great
Britain possessed” on taking over suzerainty from Siam
exchanged by her for the right to advise, and she thus
internal independence which is an ii *
ii power”. The newly protected states enj<
dreams of the federated, notabb
.And the people of the Federated Malay State* were aware that
 it was their revenues that had financed the loan to Siam, which r,'
had bought the British suzerainty over the four northern states.
The Rulers of the Federated Malay States felt that they had
had a square deal.
e second event was the depression after the war of, 1914,
»led to charges against the federal authorities of eXtrava-
rat the expense of the constituent states. The expenditure
‘lions of dollars on unprofitable sections of the railway
1 the futile construction of a railway dock in the drifting
silt of Prai excited general criticism. Why had no one (except
the Sultan of Johore) foreseen the imminent competition of the
motor-car and the motor lorry? Critics shut their eyes to the
many public works and services that were due to federation. Sx -
, In spite of all, even Malays had become conscious that Eft
federation had widened the horizon of the state with benefit to
the peasant, who for centuries had lived (as Malaya say) like a ft ‘
frog under a coconut shell. But now Downing Street perfori06djj5'
characteristic of its Malayan policy and approved of
ization. After 1909 the Resident-General had been W;
Chief Secretary, to emphasize his subordination #> the
igh Commissioner, but his powers had remained unchanged,;^
now his place was to bo taken by a Federal Secretary, too
junior in rank to the Residents to be an autocrat. Laws were
no longer to be passed by the Federal Council, but by the four
SUie' Councils again. History is likely to smile oyer this
ostrioh-like gesture. But decentralization appeared no laughing-
matter,to the heads of such departments as dealt with agricufc '
turc, ^education, medicine and public works, who since 1,937
had been members of the Federal Council and whose unchal- ''
lenged fiat had run throughout the Colony and the Federation.-^.
Now they saw their departments disintegrating and their fiatsK
challenged by state heads of departments, their own subordin¬
ates. Their fears were exaggerated, but they looked with cxiVy -"f-
at the unified departments that were left intact, the police, the
L the survey and the labour departments and military^’'
, Responsibility for the public debt remained withflho'.V
^Council: without its sanction no State could-ifcjse a
broom of impetuous reform halted at the threshold

-ry 7.<V .
 92 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

With its great revenues Malaya had been able to afford the
service of such competent specialists that no constitutional
change was likely to put back the clock of progress. Malaya’s
forests were threaded by a thousand miles of railway and five
thousand miles of metalled roads.-The fifth of the country that
was cultivated had been surveyed from trigonometrical data.
There was scientific conservation of the small supply of
hard timber in Malaya’s boundless forests. Agriculturists had
increased the rice crops and done much to improve copra and
the quality of pineapples and the fruits. Only the Fisheries
Department remained inadequately staffed and equipped until
after the Japanese war.
< But the weak spot under any scheme for decentralization was
the State Councils. In Johore and Kedah these were efficient
bodies with Malays accustomed to the ways of Singapore and
Penang and having a good notion of modern government. But
under the shadow of the Federal Council no State Council in
the four oldest protected states had grown to maturity. The
members were the Sultans, the Resident, some Malay chiefs,
occasionally one or two British officials and unofficials and one
or two Chinese; Proceedings were in Malay and the views of the
Sultan were practically always those of the Resident and the
views of the chiefs those of the Sultan. It was the old Eastern
story: “What are legions and motor-cars thundering by? What
spikenard? What bezoar compared to the twinkle of a royal
eye-lash ?” To qualify these effete councils to deal with larger
issues European and Indian unofficials were now made members,
as also were younger Malays with a modem education and modem
minds. All unofficial members of the Federal Council were to
have served first on these State Councils. And to ensure federal
uniformity without obtrusiveness the two federal officers
responsible for finance and legislation were appointed members
of all the State Councils! Nine sets of individual laws were now
enacted by nine legislative bodies in a country the size of England.
It was farcical make-believe and it failed in its object; the five
States outside the Federation still showed no inclination to come
in. Why should they? Without cost to themselves they enjoyed
a pattern for their laws in federal legislation and borrowed
officials who had been trained in administration, tropical
 BRITISH ADMINISTRATION 93

medicine, agriculture and so on at the expense of the Colony and

the Federated Malay States. Not that the Unfederated States
were now averse from paying their quota. They grudged no
expense to preserve their autonomy. For, as a former High
Commissioner, Sir Lawrence Guillemard, wrote when he started
a policy of decentralization in the Federation, in the other States
"the British Advisers had to deal with a different type of ruler
from the type of the ’yo’s and they set about their task in a
different way. They have never attempted to be anything
excopt Advisers”, and guided the Unfedcratcd States *“along
lines in no wise bureaucratic and for the benefit primarily of
the Malays". Though wealth was in the hands of Chinese and
Europeans, there was no doubt as to which was the favoured
race in an Unfcderated State before the Japanese invasion.
The difference between the Malay States that came first
undor our protection and a state like Johore in 1914 is well.
illustrated by the written constitution that was drafted by
English lawyers for Johorc’s first Sultan, Abubakar, in 1895.
That constitution with one amendment made in 1912 has
remained in force and has been taken as a pattern by nil Malays
of what they would choose for the constitution of all protected
states. Under the original constitution there were to' be a
'Council of Ministers and a Council of State. The ministers,
who were the assistants and advisers of the Ruler, had to be
Malays professing the Muhammadan faith. Before the treaty
of 1914 the members of the Council of State had to be Johore
subjects, though not necessarily Malays or Muslims, but after
191^ membership was thrown open, as in all the states, to
British officials and others not required to be Johore subjects or
to take an oath of allegiance to the Sultan. The Council of
Ministers had neither executive nor legislative powers; the
main function of the Council of State is legislative. By an
amendment to the constitution in 1912 a third or Executive
Council was created on the model of similar councils in British
colonies, its ^province including routine matters of adminis¬
tration, the initiation of legislation, advice to the Ruler on death
sentences, applications for all but small holdings of agricultural
land and for all mining rights, all contracts and tenders for
public works. To every General Adviser the session of this
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

T Kr )»■»]! ^ 1.. - ^ ' iff

;i "• ) t 1 ilj

Ki rW.T« J

I{ 'ii'T* I •i'M
 BRITISH ADMINISTRATION 95

After the defeat of Japan, Malaya was divided into two

divisions only:

(a) the Colony of Singapore

(£) a Union of all the Malay States plus the Settlements

of Penang (along with Province Wellesley) and of Malacca
(along with Naning).

In 1948 the Union was changed into a Federation of

Malaya.
 CHAPTBft X

THE REIGN OF LAW >

In NO sphere has British influence been more beneficent than

in the sphere of law. But British was not the first European
influence experienced in one Malay port: Malacca had been
under the reign of both Portuguese and Dutch law. The
Portuguese appointed leading citizens as magistrates with civil
and criminal jurisdiction, and from their decision appeal lay to
a Chief Justice; but there was no divorce between the judiciary
and the executive, because in criminal cases triable in his
court the Chief Justice had to apply for the advice and con¬
firmation of the Governor. To adjudicate in the disputes
of the Minangkabaus of Naning and to punish their mis¬
deeds, a Portuguese was appointed bailiff for life, but he too
had administrative functions. The Bcndahara appointed by
the Portuguese to have jurisdiction over foreign Asiatics in
Malacca derived part of his income from fines. Portuguese
justice, indeed, was no less corrupt than Portuguese adminis¬
tration, nnd it was the Portuguese from whom words for “rack”,
“torture” and* “dungeon” crept into the Malay language. Then,,
when in 1641 Malacca was wrested from Portugal by the Dutch,
the Malays came under a people with a profound respect for
law, but it was still law that adjudged the ferocious punishments
of the age. When the crew of a Dutch patrol ship butchered the
crew and passengers of a Moorish ship off Kedah in revolting
circumstances, the Netherlands East India Company with
oven-handed justice sentenced the offenders to lose their right
hands and be broken on a cross before execution. Kccl-hauling
was regarded as a mild punishment for the Company’s servants.
And slaves were liable to inhuman floggings. Such had been the
law of the conqueror before the British period, and it was a
happy accident of history that by the time the British came to
impose a uniform system of criminal law throughout tho Malay
peninsula, law, or, as Hobbes called it, "the public conscience'*,
was coloured with the humane ideas that had followed the French
96
 THE REIGN OF LAW
97
Revolution. When Lord Minto burnt the stocks and the racks
and released the debtors from the Dutch prison at Malacca, it
was no idle gesture but the symbol of a new era.
Yet when the British had rented the island of Penang for «
their first settlement, a trading company was very slow to
introduce a proper legal system. Although within three years
the population of that island had risen to 10,000, Francis Light,*
its nrst Superintendent, was told vaguely to preserve order by
inflicting imprisonment or other common punishments. By
1792 he had to arrange for the Asiatic headmen to exercise >
jurisdiction in the case of offences committed by persons of their r
own race; for it was not till near Light’s death of malaria in 1794
that a regular magistrate was appointed to meet the needs of an *
expanding population. Cases of murder by other than British
subjects were tried by courts-martial, consisting of not less
than five members chosen from officers of the army and from ‘'
respectable citizens. For the trial of British subjects there was
no provision at all. When in 1800 instructions for the adminis¬
tration of justice were at last issued, they prescribed that tho
law for Penang was to be "the law of the different peoples and
tribes of which the inhabitants consist, tempered by such parts
of the British law as arc of universal application”. It is hardly
surprising that when the first Judge arrived, he concluded there
was no law except the law of nature. In two cases where ho
applied the Statute of Frauds, he was overruled by the Lieu¬
tenant-Governor. It was not until 1807, or twenty years after its
foundation, that Penang got a proper legal system.
, In Singapore Raffles took the line that "the old and irrational
in the societies with which he dealt must be rooted out that
they might be replaced by the universal and natural law of
nature, the outstanding embodiment of which was undoubtedly
the British Common Law”. To the Government of India he
reported that "we cannot do better than apply the general
B riples of British law to all, equally and alike, without
action of tribe or nation, under such modifications only as '
local circumstances and peculiarities and a due consideration
for the weakness and prejudices of the native part of the popu¬
lation, may from time to time suggest. . . . Something like a
code, Which shall explain in a few words what is considered a
98 MALAYA AND ITS HI8T0RY

crime and what is the punishment attached to it, seems in¬

dispensable.” But until 1826 legal chaos prevailed, the Resident
administering Chinese and Malay law, and having no power
over Europeans.
The introduction of a satisfactory legal system into the
Straits Settlements took time. It was not till after 1867, when the
Settlements came under the Colonial Office that a Supreme
Court was established and the executive ceased to have judicial
functions. The Indian Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes
were adopted with few alterations. There was also a Civil Proce¬
dure Code. And a Civil Law Ordinance “introduced the English
law relating to partnership, corporations, banks and banking,
principal and agents, carriers by land and sea, marine insurance,
life and fire insurance and mercantile law generally”. Not only
was a Court of Appeal instituted, but appeals could be made in
appropriate cases to the Privy Council. Magistrates in the
Colony before the Japanese war might be British, Malay,
Chinese or Eurasian.
Except that there could be only British and Malay magis¬
trates and that two assessors took the place of juries, the
judicial system of the Straits Settlements was the model for that
of the Malay States. And to assess the value of this importation
of British law into those states, some knowledge of the Malay
systems is necessary. '
Universal validity, impartiality and comparative humanity
distinguish British justice, and only one Malay system of law
can challenge any comparison. That is the primitive Indonesian
system of which Hindu and Muslim law had left only relics in
the patriarchal States, but which was in full force in Negri
Sembilan seventy years ago and is still the civil law of Minang-
fcabau colonists. Put its customary provisions alongside the
despotic rule and brutal hybrid law of the patriarchal Malay
States and at once it is apparent why this matriarchal law
commands the passionate regard of the Minangkabau9 as a
Magna Charta, or, as they express it, “a couch for the sleeper, a
shelter for the wayfarer, a ship for the navigator, a heritage for
the farmer”. No Raja ever dared to tamper with its validity and
no Muslim Kathi to challenge its unorthodox principles. It was
safe in the keeping of a democracy of inland agriculturists

4
 THE REIGN OF LAW
99
impervious to foreign influences.’ Every peasant can quote the
sayings that embody it and the clever We compiled innumer¬
able digests with the impossible aim of identifying the la\V of
exogamous clans with the Muslim canon.
Life in a clan is communal, and the Hindu sword of exe¬
cution, the Hindu tortures and prison cage, and the Hindu, and >
Muslim lopping off of thieving hands would have involved the
loss of workers on tribal fields. So except for heinous and
incorrigible offenders tribal penalties always took the form of
restitution, a fowl or goat for pssnult, a man from the slayer’s
tribe in the event of homicide. With a rigidity unavoidable in
law designed foi a large population British law sentences
murderers to death and cares nothing for tribal loss or for
compensation in the shape of fowls, goats and sisters’ sons.
It refuses to accept the Minangkabau view that arson, robbery,
swindling and marriage with a woman of one’s own tribe are
capital offences. When accident is proved, it will not convict of
homicide, and what the Minangkabau custom condemns as
criminal cheating it often relegates to a civil court. In all these
points the Indian Penal Code introduced by the British is an
advance on Indonesian criminal law.
But with Minangkabau civil law neither Muslim nor
British law has interfered. The law of property remains matri¬
archal. In theory ancestral property still belongs to the tribe and
in practice descends to daughters and granddaughters or
Sisters and nieces and so on. This tribal law had two great
advantages in former days. To prevent the loss of a pair of
hands a tribe would defray n tribesman’s debt rather than let
him be lost to it as the debt-slave of a creditor. Secondly, it safe¬
guarded—and still safeguards—the proprietary rights of wives,
divorcees and widows, giving a divorcee, for example, a half
Share of all property acquired jointly during married life. In
modern times this tribal law has had another beneficial result. It
has kept land from passing into the hands of foreign money-'
lenders for the liquidation of individual debts.
A. primitive fairness to women was the one redeeming
feature in the law of the patriarchal Malay States. Villagers
on the Perak River, for example, still insist that on divorce
half the land acquired during wedlock shall be given to
, xoo MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

an unfaithful wife, if she has helped to cultivate it, and one-third

if she has not. A proposal by the Perak State Council to apply
the general principle of Muhammadan law which gives a man
A a share double that of a woman has found no acceptance. For
K " Malay headmen were allowed to give evidence explaining
anomalies of local customary law. Then in 1927 the
'^British Supreme Court ruled that this oral evidence on the law
' 3,tof a state was inadmissible. But how then was any court or
land office to discover what was the Malay law ? An enactment
' was passed enabling points to be stated for the decision of the
Ruler-in-Council, a decision that unfortunately is likely to
follow Muslim jurisprudence rather than earlier custom.
Another danger now threatens the customary rights of Malay
women, and that is the possibility of the construction of Malay
law within the new Federation following the strict Muslim law
of Penang and Malacca. The Muslims of those two Settlements
would be shocked not only at the customary rights of women,
but at the customary evasion of the Muslim ban on the taking of
interest. A Malay creditor will accept a charge on land, allowing
him to enjoy the profits or part of the profits of the crop, such
profits not to be placed against the money owed but to be in
lieu of interest, until the debt is repaid in full. Here the peasant
has preferred the practice of old Hindu days to compliance
' with the commandments of his latest faith.
\ Criminal law in the patriarchal states was a tissue of
, barbarities, inconsistencies and class favouritism, three of the
most damning flaws in the administration of justice. Evolved for
/ the mixed population of mediaeval ports like Malacca, Kedah
■,* and Pahang, it was introduced mainly by Indians, at first Hindu
'and later Muslim. And our knowledge of it is due to five digests,
-1 a Malacca digest of a.d. 1523, a Pahang digest of 1596, a Kedah
.digest of port laws dated 1650, an eighteenth-century digest
■ entitled the Ninety-nine Laws of Perak, and a Johore digest of
T789 which is largely based on that of Malacca. Tomi Pires tells -
. Us that in mediaeval Malacca a man might be impaled or burnt
alrv6 or beaten on the chest to death according to the nature of
his crime. The Pahang digest prescribes for a traitor three
^ hundred and sixty tortures, to be followed by quartering. People
f are still living who have seen a Pahang youth guilty of Uu-
t
 THE REIGN OP LAW IOI

majesti by some palace intrigue with his scalp down over his
eyes and his body tied to a stake to be drowned by the rising
tide. His accomplice would be the victim of obscene tortures or
of execution by drowning. Alternative to the death penalty in
Malacca of the fifteenth century were such punishments as
scalping or cutting out the tongue of a betrayer of royal
commands. The last Sultan of Malacca is alleged to havo had
his Lord High Admiral castrated for bringing false charges that
led to the execution of a Prime Minister, The veracity of a
witness was tested in those days by the Indo-Chinese methods
of ordeal by diving or by plunging a hand into boiling
water or molten tin, to extract a potsherd that as a concession
to Islam bore an inscription calling on Allah and the Four
Archangels to reveal which party spoke the truth. The Hindu
generalization in the Malacca digest as to the death sentence for
ten offences mirrors the contemporary disregard for human life.
Even a slave who had been struck a blow could lawfully kill his
assailant within three days, and if he killed him later was merely
fined, though, ns the compiler of the digest remarks, Muslim
law would hold him guilty of murder. But the Malacca and the
Pahang digests exhibit inconsistencies tluit may have been
purposely inserted to leave a Sultan scope to apply customary
Hindu or Muslim law as prejudice or policy dictated. Yet
a Sultan ruled by the consent of his subjects, apathetic and
superstitious though they might be, and the adoption of Hindu
law with its condonation of murder or payment of blood-money
made no insurmountable break with the Malay custom of
substituting a fine for the death sentence, a custom obviously
wolcoracd for the sake of their purse by Perak’s Sayid justiciars
of the eighteenth century; Perak’s Ninety-nine laws let a
murderer pay a fine and provide a buffalo or white goat for
the funeral feast. Whereas the usual penalty for theft was the
loss of a hand on the first and second occasion and the loss of a
foot for die diird or fourdi offences, these Perak Sayids allowed
a thief to compound for a first offence, to lose a finger for a
second and to be banished for a third. In fact, so discrepant are
the provisions of the several digests that there was little meaning
in a statement made in the Perak State Council in 1878 that
Malay law was for the most part “unwritten though generally

/'*•;• • wv / ui.? 'tf.v■;• . ■ ■, r.

102 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

understood and appearing to differ little from the codes of law

formerly in force in Malay States”. Even the law of torts
dealing mainly with damage by buffaloes to crops was not
uniform throughout the peninsula.
When the British started to administer the Malay States,
the outmoded cruelty of Muslim criminal law and the imprac¬
ticability of the Muslim law of evidence, along with its contra¬
diction of the Malay acceptance of circumstantial evidence, made
the Malay rulers glad to follow in the footsteps of Turkey and
Egypt and to adopt the Indian Penal Code and a law of evidence
that was a compromise between two systems they could not
reconcile. In this matter the Malays saw the desirability of
interference with their religion and custom.
 CHAPTER XI

TRADE, MONOPOLIZED AND FREE,

AND FINANCE

Statements by early Chinese voyagers have been taken to

imply that Indian traders visited the Malay world in neolithic
times before the Aryan invasion of India. Certainly they must
have needled the way there for the coming of Hindu priests and
Buddhist monks and for the Hindu adventurers who founded
little port kingdoms on Malaya’s estuaries. As we have seen,
desire for the gold and spices of the lands beyond the Ganges
greatly increased the amount of Indian shipping at the opening
of the Christian era. Buddhism had lessened Hindu prejudice
against crossing the sea and mixing with barbarians. Larger
Indian ships were being built and the monsoon winds were
understood. But in spite of bigger ships, or rather because of
them,’Indian traders naturally shunned the calms of the Malacca
Straits by crossing on foot the narrow Malay peninsula on their
way to Indo-China. Others were content to go no farther than
the west coast of Malaya. And the beads dug up at Kuala
Sfllinsing in the north of Perak and the Indian and Roman beads
from Kota Tinggi on the Johore River suggest that inter¬
national trade started with neolithic Indonesians as primitive as
the naked Sakai or the Dayak, who both deck their persons with
those omamonts. Among primitive Malays it must have been
the practice for chiefs to take the lead in commercial trans¬
actions as the Sakai headman and the Batak raja still do. The
practice was not only natural but inevitable in commuhities
where property belonged not to the individual but to the tribe.
And when Indian adventurers married the daughters of Malay
headmen, the practice was fortified by the growth of families
not only bilingual but possessed of the quicker intelligence
desirable for transacting business with the foreign customer.
Under such conditions it was easy enough for the Hindus to
 IO4 ^ MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

introduce the Indian system of royal trading. I-tsing, the

Buddhist monk who travelled at the end of the seventh century,
tells how the king of Sri Vijaya possessed ships that sailed with
• cargoes to and from India. So it is in a literal sense that Arabs
trading in the ninth century with Kedah declare that the
V Maharaja of Sri Vijaya was made as rich as any king in the
Indies by trade in cloves, sandalwood and nutmegs, m ivory,
t ebony and gold, in camphor from Sumatra and tin from Malaya.
To this royal commerce the coming of Islam made no difference.
Tom4 Pires records how at Malacca Muzaffar Shah "bought
and built junks and sent them out with merchants" and how the
ruler of Malacca waxed rich by "putting his share in every
junk that goes out". He also relates how by ships from the
Malay archipelago and the Far East "dues arc not paid on
merchandise, but only presents to the king and his ministers".
Even on the visits of the early rulers of Malacca to China there
is a caustic but illuminating remark made by a Chinese chron¬
icler, that the barbarians brought tribute not from any sense of
. duty but in quest of the advantages of trade.
To mediaeval Malacca resorted mcrclumts from Cairo,
Arabia, Turkey, Armenia, Byzantium, Persia, India, Burma,
Siam, Cambodia, Champa, China and the Malay archipelogo
as far away as Celebes. The merchandise exchanged at this
entrepot half-way between India and China was such Malayan
produce as tin, cloves, nutmegs, mace, pepper, musk, camphor,
benzoin, sandalwood, honey, wax and slaves; gold from Pahang,
Sumatra, Java, Brunei and Cochin China; tapestries, incense
' and seeds for dyeing from Arabia; cloths from Pulicat and
Cambay; Chinese silks and brocades and porcelain; silver from
' Burma, Siam and China; rosewater, opium, pearls, quicksilver,

f
,5 saltpetre, copperware and ironware; gilded coffers from Canton
l birds of paradise to set in Turkish and Arabian turbans,
s to be noted that it is precisely the most valuable of this
rchandise—gold, silks, ivory and sandalwood—that were the
; perquisites of Malaya's merchant kings down to the British
period. In mediaeval Malacca chiefs as well as Sultan9 traded.
' JThe Malay Annals say that the Bendahara or Prime Minister
£,to Malacca’s last Sultan never failed in his ventures and was
vwWp than richest Tamil in the port. Pires talks of the
 TRADE, MONOPOLIZED AND FRBB lO$

Bendahara’s great jewels and his five quintals of gold, but Pires
also records that Sultan Mansur Shah died possessed of 120
quintals of gold besides quantities of precious stones.
In the seventeenth century, as Dutch records show, the
Sultans of Kedah traded with India, taking cargoes of tip and
elephants to Bengal and Coromandel in their own royal vessels/ .
It was with the rulers of Kedah and Johore that the
monopolists made so many ineffectual agreements for the.
purchase of all the tin from their countries, and there is frequent
mention of vessels belonging to the Sultans and their chiefs.''
Early in the eighteenth century there was a Sultan’s brother at
Riau who nearly caused a rebellion by "engrossing all trade in
his own hands, buying and selling at his own prices”. And
Bugis traders, for whose merchant vessels the last Sultan of
Malacca had special laws drawn up, soon blossomed into chiefs
who not only married into the Malay ruling families but usurped
their commerce. As late as the nineteenth century the old ‘
E rogatives were asserted. For in the middle of that century
Singapore Chamber of Commerce was complaining that the
Temenggong of Johore monopolized trade in Malaya’s indi¬
genous gutta-percha, his armed followers intercepting cargoes
tor Singapore and securing nearly all a crop in which there was
then a boom: "it was inferred that extreme influence of some
kind was used, or some part of it would have found its way to
parties who offered much higher prices”.
This Malay tradition of royal trading brought two most
evil consequences. In the first place, protected by sumptuary
laws, the royal merchants prevented the emergence of a
commercial middle class. In the second place, when the arrival
of the Portuguese and Dutch monopolists put an end to inter¬
course between Indian merchant princes and Malay ruling
families, the one chance for Malays to get to understand the
uses of capital was extinguished, the royal families becoming
more and more Malay with no fresh Indian blood to keep alive
commercial instincts. Not, of course, that it was Malay rulers
who were to blame for the decline of Malay trade. For, while
the Sultans of mediaeval Malacca could spend money on the
building of merchant ships, the European monopolists now
hampered Malay enterprise and ruined Malay commerce,
 Io6 N MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

driving Sultans and chiefs to spend their lessened takings not on

profitable overseas commerce but on jewellery and finery that
brought no return. When at last the British introduced free,
trade and British advice limited the enforcement of sumptuary
laws to the mere observance of etiquette within court precincts,
it>as too late to remedy Malay economic decay. Apart from
Bugia vessels that till the advent of steamships sailed from and
to Celebes with the monsoons, Malay shipping had had no
chance to develop under the surveillance of the patrol boats of
Dutch monopolists. Malay commercial ties with Java and
Sumatra and Coromandel and Bengal had been severed by the
Portuguese and the Dutch. The Malay peasant, it is true,
became richer in the British period and soon learnt to spend,
but no one taught him how to invest, and his religion frowned
on the taking of interest. So he stood naked to the winds of
commerce that blew from China, India and Europe. Chinese
and Indians not only had shipping of their own, while the
Malay, a better sailor, had practically none, but Chinese and
Indians had commercial connections between their countries of

rubber hooded their eyes. Neither Chinese nor Indian will

admit the Malay into their firms, and now that the Malay is
perturbed and anxious to enter commerce, ho finds that the
Chinese and Indian have preceded him even in British firms and
have taken care to keep alive the tradition that the Malay is
*, JflZy. A Malay once tried to start dealing in rice in a state
predominantly Malav, but as the only motor transport was
owned by Chinese, they gave their own race preferential rates
i, for lorries in the hope of squeezing out the interloper. A Malay
'' co-operative society arranged to sell its rubber direct to a
British firm in Singapore, but as this was a blow at the Chinese
middleman the firm’s large Chinese clientele threatened to
withdraw their custom unless the arrangement was cancelled.
In his own country the Malay is boycotted as a trader by im¬
placable foreigners. Examples arc innumerable. The trade of
^Jwajaya >9 in the clutch especially of the Chinese, to whom
compromise over business is unthinkable. In Burma the
 TRADE, MONOPOLIZED AND FREE 107

government has discriminated against firms that have neglected

to employ Burmese.
It was free trade and peace that attracted the Chinese and
Indians, who have created a Malayan problem. Free trade was
introduced with the founding of Penang in 1786. Free trade
and the eclipse of the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars led
to the rapid progress of commerce at the new port, though
Penang never fulfilled its early promise. Chosen as a place for
the refitting of ships, it proved unsuitable for docks, as the
opposito coast was to prove in the present century. Lying at
the extreme periphery of the Malay archipelago, Penang was
central only for trade with Burma and Siamese Malaya and with
northern Sumatra, which as late as 1824 produced—a legacy
from Acheh's greater days—almost 60 per cent of the world's
pepper. Not only was Penang at the edge of the Malayan map,
but pirates made the long sail up the calm Straits of Malacca so
hazardous a venture that Riau remained the chief port of resort
for the Bugis, and local boats still preferred the nearer port of

Not that the ancient harbour of Malacca could fulfil modem

needs. Policy and geography had directed much of its trade to
Penang. Its harbour was too shallow for the increasing draught
of shipping. The anarchic condition of the Malay States ham¬
pered even Malacca’s local trade. And finally the founding of
Singapore reduced it to a depot for its last and greatest rival.
The commerce of the two lesser ports had its ups and downs,
By 1865 (long before the days of rubber) the trade of Malacca
was six times as big as in 1829. The trade of Penang in those
days dopended largely on the price of Sumatran pepper, though
it also had important Chinese customers interested in its sea-
slugs, birds’ nests and sharks’ fins. But before the days of
rubber the ratio between the trade of the three Settlements
was fairly constant, Singapore enjoying about three-quarters
of it. And though there have long been no pirates to deter
shipping from Penang, Singapore will always be pre-eminent
by reason of its central position and its great landlocked
harbour.
< .Singapore, however, did not come to be numbered among
the ten greatest ports in the world without rivalry and setbacks.
 I08 MALAYA AND ITS HI8T0RY

The Brirish occupation of Hongkong in 1842 deprived it of

much traffic. The French conquest of Indo-China made
Saigon and Haiphong its competitors. The establishment of
Dutch shipping lines between Holland and Netherlands India
and between the islands of the archipelago took away a con¬
siderable part of local commerce. The Malay States opened
Port Swettenham for direct transport of tin and rubber and of
the commodities needed for those two great industries. Finally,
in 1933, in order to halt the menace of cheap Japanese tcxtilos
and other wares, Netherlands India had to impose preferential
tariffs on foreign imports. But for all these losses the demand of
the world's motor industry for tin and rubber and the economic
advance of Siam more than compensated. In 1830 the total trade
of the Straits Settlements was just under £5 million; in 1890
Malaya’s trade was over £32 million; by 1900 that total had more
than doubled; by 1910 it was £80 million odd and by i<)20 it
was over ,£237$ million. In 1926 it was to soar to £264 million,
exceeding the trade of all other British Colonics combined. Even
in 1938, when Malaya’s trade had dropped to £121J million, or
less than half its peak figure, it still exceeded the total trade of
New Zealand, or the combined trade of all our seventeen
African Colonics and was more than half the trade of British
India. Singapore’s three miles of wharves were strewn with
crates and baskets containing all the wares of Asia, Europe and
America; rickshas from Canton; motor-cars from Cowley,
Detroit and Milan; cotton cloths from Manchester, Java, Pulicat
and Japan; petroleum from Sarawak, Dutch Borneo and
Sumatra; tea, silk, porcelain and blackwood furniture from
China; silks, cycles and electric fittings from Japan; piece goods,
books, tobacco and machinery from Britain; watches and clocks
from Switzerland; matches from Britain, Sweden and Japan;
Austrian bentwood chairs; Austrian breakfast services with cups
reduced to fit the local egg; shoes from Nottingham; frocks
and cosmetics from Paris. One-third of Malaya’s imports were
foodstuffs for her abnormal immigrant population: rice from
Rangoon and Saigon; fresh fruit from Java; pickled vegetables
from China; tinned fruits and jams from Britain and New
Zealand; cold-storage meat and fruit from Australia; tea from
India; beer from Germany; whiskey from Scotland; rice-spirit
 TRADE, MONOPOLIZED AND FREE 109

from China; bottled red fish from Macassar; caviare from

Russia. From the same wharves rubber, palm-oil, copra, pine¬
apples, tin, iron ore, gold, tungsten ore, bauxite, manganese
and ilmenite, as well as salted and dried fish, sharks’ fins and
sea-slugs, pepper, rattans and other immemorial produce of the
Malay jungle, were put aboard to be carried to all the markets
of the world. Of those markets none was more important than
New York. For nearly all Malaya’s rubber and more than half
her tin were bought by the United States of America.
In the economic field Great Britain conferred no greater
boon upon Malaya than this: that after centuries of monopoly
by kings and conquerors she allowed its people to sell all the
produce of mine, forest and estate in free markets at competitive
prices, making no attempt to control the price or flow of ex¬
ports for her own interest. If it be objected that the modern form
of monopoly is restriction of the output of tin and rubber, the
answer is that when there is restriction it is imposed as much
for the benefit of the labourer and smallholder as for the
benefit of capitalist and government, and it may even preserve
production for the benefit of the consumer.

ii . , 'zi fyif

Let us turn from the ledgers of the merchant to the ledgers

of the Malayan governments.
At the close of the nineteenth century there was little
disparity between the annual revenue of the three Straits
Settlements and that of the four Federated Malay States; for
neither did it amount to £1 million. Then para-rubber reached
the tapping stage and for more than forty years the Colony was
the poor relation of the Protectorate, even excluding the new
Unfederated States. As Penang and Malacca are now to form
part of a federation with all the Malay states, Singapore will be
left the fragment of a colony whose mean annual revenue for
five years before the Japanese occupation was just over £4
million. It will be interesting to see how the island with its
heavy commitments on public buildings and docks will be able
to keep up appearances alongside its wealthy neighbour. To add
 IIO MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

to its difficulties the sale of opium, which a quarter of a century

ago produced nearly half the revenue of the three Settlements
and in 1937 almost a quarter, has been abolished throughout die
British Commonwealth. Against that occurrence, it is true, an
Opium Fund was built up years ago, and now amounts to about
£6$ million. The next largest item of Singapore’s revenue came
from import duties on tobacco, liquor and petroleum. But free
trade has left possible sources of revenue few. General ad¬
ministration, which in 1937 amounted to 37-8 of the Colony’s
expenditure, will be reduced a little for the surviving unit, and
.it is probable the new Federation will relieve Singapore of part
of the old Colony’s contribution to imperial defence, which in
1937 amounted to io-6 of its expenditure. The war found the
Colony free from debt and with a surplus of nearly £15
million in its Opium Fund and in money lent to the Harbour
Board and to the municipalities of Singapore and Penang.
The largest revenue ever enjoyed by die four Federated
Malay States was just over £12^ million in 1927, and their
lowest in the last twenty years was just over £5 million in 1912.
These violent fluctuations were due entirely to the rise and fall
in the world’s demand for tin and rubber, particularly in the
demand from the United States of America. The end of the First
World War found the Federation a country of arrears in such
services a9 education, agriculture and forestry. But the develop¬
ment of estates continued to demand further large expenditure
on communicadons, and in 1921-2 a loan of $80 million was
raised for this purpose. In 1930 nearly £900,000, or 9-2 per cent
of the Federation’s total expenditure, was spent on medical and
anti-malarial measures, and £471,621, or 5 per cent of the same
expenditure, on education. Four years later, consequent on the
S eat depression, these votes were almost halved and there were
astic economics in every department. With a return to pros¬
perity a Revenue Equalization Fund was created in 1937 and
designed to reach about £4 million.
The revenue of all the Malay States, Federated and Un¬
federated, in 1937 was just about £13$ million, to which the
Federation contributed just under £9} million and Johore just
under £2^ million, the largest revenue in its history. 1937 found
Johore with no public debts and a surplus of more than £5
 TRADE, MONOPOLIZED AND FRBB • III

million and Kedah with no debt and a surplus of £900,000, Of

all the Malay States only Iiclantan and Trengganu were in¬
debted, and their debt was to the Colony and the Federation.
The Unfederated States for years enjoyed the services of govern¬
ment officials of all departments administrative and technical
without having to pay for their training or defray any part of
their salaries. With increasing revenues they agreed to pay a
proportionate share. ;
 »r

i
CHAPTER XII
iffiEa
4t;Ki INDUSTRIES, PAST AND PRESENT

MAN *8 oldest industries are concerned with the getting of food,

The pigmy Negritos, Malaya’s most primitive people today, live
on jungle fruits and roots and game. The races who passed
through the Peninsula eight thousand years ago left the bones of
the wild beasts whose flesh they ate in the caves and rock-shelters
of the northern states and the debris of the molluscs that formed
the diet of some of them in the shell-heaps of ProvinccWcllcslcy.
Not till we come to that higher type, the Sakai (or Senoi)
Indonesian hillmcn, do we encounter agricultural methods that
illustrate how the primitive Malay passed from shifting to
permanent cultivation. Some Sakai move every year or so to
plant fresh clearings with rice, millet, yams, tapioca, maize and
vegetables; others live in the same clearing for a decade or
longer, cutting down the trees and scrub on adjacent slopes in
rotation. This was the stage the civilized Malay had ex¬
perienced and passed many centuries ago. But some modem
Malays still practised shifting cultivation, until the British

aforbade a practice so wasteful of timber. It was not that the

s were ignorant of irrigation. But there were, what has
been recognized, two types of Malay in the peninsula;
the landsman of the Kedah and Kclantan plains and of Negri
Sembilan, and the coastal people whose ancestors were sea-
gipsies and exploited forest as they exploited river and sea. The i
coastal Malay, like the Orang Laut or sea-tribes of today, was
a fisherman originally and a pirate when international commerce V'
offered a richer sea harvest, and die sea-gipsies, who were the
earliest setders in Malaya and the Riau archipelago, turned to
shifting cultivadon for what rice they wanted and took no more >
interest in agriculture dian is taken by their descendants who
dive for coins at the Tanjong Pagar docks. So the polyglot
merchants who made Malacca a port kingdom had to im
their rice from Sumatra and Java. For even in 1512 the
u "j
neighbouring places mentioned by Tom6 Pires as having.
cr
t
 INDUSTRIES, PAST AND PRESENT 113

rice for their needs are Bruas and Muar. The solitary rice-patch
in some narrow valley against a background of dark forest or
green orchards is a delight to the eye, but if it escape drought,
it is 8till too liable to the depredations of pig, rats and deer, not
to speak of the dreaded elephant, to command the labour and
care of any intelligent Malay with other scope. So until Malacca
was founded about 1400, southern Malaya remained sparsely
populated, though in the north some of the fertile plainB may
have been irrigated under the kings of Langkasuka, the hin-
dulzed little state which Chinese clironiclers date back to the
first century a.d. Certainly Kedah Kelantan and Patani must
have planted wet rice under the sovereignty of Sri Vijaya, and
when that Malay Buddhist empire and its colonics fell before
Hindu Majapahit in the fourteenth century, northern Malaya
camo first under the influence of the Javanese and then under
that of the Th’ai, or modern Siamese, both of them expert in the
irrigation of rice-fields. It is for these historical reasons that
rice-planting reached so high a standard in the north, where
wide Irrigable plains attracted a population large enough for
rice to be cultivated even on a commercial scale. Before the
sporadic immigration of small bodies of Javanese and Banjarcse
in modern times, the only other expert rice-plantcrs in Malaya
were the Minangkabau colonists of Negri Scmbilan. A century
ago Kedah and Minangkabau states behind Malacca grew
enough rice to be able to export their surplus to the nearest
ports. Kelantan and Patani must have produced more than
enough for their own needs and Perak’s crop was adequate for
Its small population. But before the days of roads and railways,
drought or pests often meant an insufficient diet of maize or
tapioca for the people of remote isolated hamlets. From 1919 to
1921, when a famine in India led to restriction on the export of
rice from India, the Malayan governments spent £4,900,000
on buying rice from other countries.
Up-to-date statistics on the profits from rice arc badly
needed. Thirty-five years ago it was reckoned that with rice at
2jd. a gantang (about 6$ lb.) the owner of 2$ acres got next
to nothing the first year and after that about £5 a year. The cost
of planting and preparing the fields is made up mainly of the
owner’s labour, and that has risen in value with the riso in the
'-.ft'- v; . h
1I+ MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

cost of living. Rice just before die war cost one shilling a gan-
tang, so that a crop from 2i acres was then worth £26 a year.
But the cash yield is deceptive. Such a holding, it has been cal¬
culated, will provide rice for a family of six with a surplus to
sell. Moreover, to produce a crop of ricetho planter has to work
for only five months in the year. , , , .
Writing in 1884 Sir William Maxwell calculated that a
square mile of irrigated fields in Province Wellesley should
support 1936 souls, which is well below the ratio of 36 per- cent
of all the rice consumed in Malaya, that was produced in 1939
from some 700,000 acres. The increase was probably dud to the
efforts of the Agricultural Department, which, after a decade of
experiment with 1300 strains, in 1925 chose and distributed 16
pedigree lines reckoned to increase the yield by 30 per cent
Work on a rice-field occupies less than half the year. But
the Malay is always a handyman rather than a specialist, so
that the rice-planter has other sources of food and income.
Chinese writers in 1416 noted how the Malacca holdings
were then full, as they are today, of sugarcane, bananas, fruit-
trees, vegetables, gourds and melons. Many Malay fruit-tree#
have been imported from abroad, mangoes from India, the
sapodilla guava and papaya by the Portuguese from South
America. Tom£ Pircs tells how in every street ofi mediaeval
Malacca there were women who sold fruit and other produce
and some had stalls in front of their houses. On his trip up the
east coast in 1830 Munshi Abdullah saw markets held from
sunset to dark by women who carried their garden stuffs to
the town in head-baskets. The Malacca stalls and the Kelantan
markets may have been due to the example of Javanese from
Majapahit. Under British encouragement such markets were
revived in some districts, but, like rice, most garden stuffs are
bought for a low price by the ubiquitous Chinese shopkeeper,
to whom the Malay villagers are generally in debt. ; £
Apart from rice, two only of the Malay’s crops can be counted
important, namely copra and para-rubber. Coconut palms,
though indigenous to Malayan shores, were few in. the south,
when the British first entered the Malay States. Outside
Malacca and Negri Serabilan the population was sparse and
• cultivation scant)-. Often palms had been felled in hostile raids.
 INDUSTRIES, PAST AND PRESENT I15

The Johore Malays felled 7620 coconut palms to make Dutch

earthworks at the siege of Malacca in 1641:. Several times
Dutch punitive forces from Malacca burnt Minangkabau
villages in Naning and Rembau, destroying rice-fields and
orchards. The Minangkabaus retaliated in similar fashion on
Malacca territory. At the beginning of the last century, when
Siam invaded Kedah, 20,000 Malays left their homesteads to
flee into British territory. War inland and piracy along the
consta so disheartened the Malay villager that at first the British
experienced difficulty in persuading him to plant coconut palms
beyond his family’s needs. Even when he had planted them, for
lack of simple means of making copra he would sell the nuts
to the Chinese middleman at an uneconomic price. But bo-
fore the fall of Malaya many Malays had been taught by the
British experts of the Agricultural Department to make their
own copra and they formed the bulk of the 300,000 Asiatic
smallholders, whose coconut plantations were valued at ^15
million. •
Tin was for centuries the greatest asset of Malaya. Then
in 1877 an expedition under Mr. (later Sir) I-Icnry Wickham
brought 70,000 seeds of para-rubber out of Brazil and startod
Asia's rubber industry with 22 seedlings despatched from
Kew to the Botanic Gardens at Singapore. In 1905 Malaya
atill contributed only 200 tons to the world’s market against
62,000 tons of wild rubber from South America and Africa.
But the motor industry had begun and by 1910 Brazilian
speculators were able to force the price up to i2r. a lb. The
boom excited London as cargoes of spices had excited it in
the days of Elizabeth. A barbor in the Strand discovered a
customer to be a Malayan planter in whose estates his savings
were invested, and he refused to take a penny from an alchemist
who had transmuted his copper into gold. By shaking this
modem pagoda-tree an office-boy in the City won a windfall of
several hundred pounds. New companies were floated. Mincing
Lane hourly mangled euphonious Malay place-names. Malays
cut down their orchards and planted up even their rice-swamps
with rubber. By 1914 there was more plantation than wild
rubber. By 1920 Malaya exported 196,000 tons, or 53 per cent
of the world’s production. Then the world slump caused supply
 X.JC6 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

to exceed demand, and, the price of rubber falling to 6d. a

lb., many estates were faced with bankruptcy. The Dutch,
considering it impossible and impolitic to control the output of
Malay holdings in Sumatra, refused to join in any scheme for
restriction. But from 1922 till 1928 the British restricted the
export from Malaya and Cevlon to 60 per cent of the potential
output with a view to stabilizing the price at is. 3a. a lb.
This measure saved many companies from ruin, giving them
time to effect economies, but it failed in the end. The reason
for this failure was that consumers were encouraged to reclaim
used rubber, and the Dutch companies and Sumatran Malaya
planted an area more than three times as large as the rubber
acreage when restriction began. In 1928 restriction was
abandoned and the industry turned for its salvation to the
‘ science it had neglected. Vast sums, for example, had boon
Wasted on clean weeding that led to erosion of soil and inferior
trees. Now the British planter followed the Dutch in selecting
high-yielding strains and in bud-grafting, which more than
doubles the flow of latex with a consequent reduction in the
cost'of tapping. But in 1930 the price of rubber fell to 6 i. a
lb. and in 1932 to just over 2d. From June 1934 until the
outbreak of war all the British colonics and protectorates con¬
cerned together with Netherlands India, Indo-China and Siam
were under agreement to restrict, the basic quotas for 1934
being 504,000 tons for Malaya and 352,000 tons for Netherlands
India. Consumers, American and British, as well aB planters,
were interested in the survival of estates and in a stable price
for their produce, and all took part in the administration of the
scheme. Malaya’s governments got their revenue for social
services, from an export duty on rubber and from import duties
on the commodities required for rubber companies and their
350,000 coolies and for the Asiatic planter. Above all, hundreds
of thousands of Asiatics depended on the survival of the industry
for a livelihood. The League of Nations blessed restriction for
improving the economic conditions in many tropical countries
and for advancing international trade.
It is unnecessary to stress the colossal interests involved
in the competition between natural rubber and the synthetic
rubber perfected during the war. In 1937 the value of the
 INDUSTRIES, PAST AND PRESENT 117

rubber Malaya exported (of which onc-third came from

At the beginning of 1937 the external capital invested in

Malaya’s rubber Industry was £53,599,000. And of more than
3i million acres planted with rubber 537 per cent belonged
to Asiatic estates and smallholdings. ,
Before the days of para-rubber many other commercial
oropa had beon tried. Early in tho fifteenth century
yojiigers reported the manufacture of sago in Malacca. Judg¬
ing from its Malay name the pineapple was introduced in
the Portuguese period, perhaps by fificenth-ccntury Filipino'
settlers, and Malaya now produces 90 per cent of Great 1
Britain's tinned pine. As early as the same period the Mtnpo

Barbosa, writing in 1516, records how in ICcdah “is grown

eighteenth century Riau got gambir from Sumatra (used, for

the manufacture of cutch) for Chinese to plant, which made
the Island very prosperous, and from Riau its cultivation spread
in the last century to Johorc. Cloves flourished once under the
British on the island of Penang, and in 1842 the nutmegs and
mace exported from the Straits Settlements more than equalled
the whole consumption of Great Britain, but in those days there
was no scientific knowledge to combat pests. Pests and over¬
production killed the coffee of Malaya. Millet will grow, and
maize j if only the Malay and Chinese races would turn from
jto maize, which grows easily and without irrigation,
.*$ food problem might be solved locally, Sugat,
ili, citronclla and lemon-grass were all tried before para-
absorbed undivided attention. Kapok or the silk-cotton
8, but its cotton, which makes stuffing for life-belts and
es, is imported in quantity from Java. The fall in the
rubber won a cursory interest for sisal, Mauritius and
s and rosclla. Ground-nuts are grown as a local
it-trees of many kinds abound, though except
us durian and the banana, the fruit is not as
u8 MA.LAYA AND ITS HISTORY

fine as that produced by the volcanic soil of Java and by Dutch

agricultural.aciencd. Oil-palms have been introduced on 31
British estates and suffer only from a fluctuating market.
Older probably than any of Malaya’s industries, except
fishing and perhaps the rice-planting in northern Malaya, is the
mining of tin and of gold. Four times in history there has been
an abnormal demand for tin: firstly in the age of bronze, of
which it "Is a component, then by the Indian for his Hindu
images, then by Europe for pewter-ware and now by the
world for canning and motor-cars. The latest theory would
discover Malaya’s earliest miners of tin in the Yue and Cham of
Indo-China, Mon-speaking people whose language has eft
many loan-words in Sakai dialects. To them arc ascribed what
the Malaya term "Siamese” pits in Perak and in Pahang and
workings at-Kenaboi in Jelcbu where bronze celts have been
unearthed. Whoever these men of the Bronze Age were, the
linguistic evidence suggests that they came by way of the
Lcbir, Pahang and Tcmbeling Rivers, and their arrival must have
occurred a few centuries before Christ. Their successors were
Indian miners as attested by Perak’s Buddhist bronze images
dating from the fifth to the ninth century a.d. Then Arabs
came to buy the metal. Two Abbasidc coins of the ninth
century, unearthed in a jar at Sungai Bujang, corroborate Arab
geographers who record visits of their countrymen to Kedah in
that century in quest of tin. From the beginning of Malay
rule in Malacca blocks of tin weighing about 2 lb. served as a
clumsy currency. And Tomd Pires tells us how it was in tin that
the chiefs of every western estuary from the Perak down to the
Bcrnam paid annual tribute to the Sultans of Malacca. The
Portuguese and Achinese in succession exacted tribute of tin
from Perak, In 1649 the Dutch East India Company collected in
Malacca the "extraordinary” quantity of 344 tons of tin, mostly
from Perak. Nor is there mention of a larger output until free
trade, established at Penang in 1786, gave such a fillip to
mining in Perak that by 1839 Newbold estimated the output at
600 tons, still a pigmy prelude to the 26,000 tons of.Malayan
tin in 1880, the 50,000 tons (or 55'6 of the world’s then output)
in 1904, the 70,000 tons allocated to Malaya in 1937 under the
International Producers’ Restriction Scheme, and its potential
 INDUSTRIES, PAST AND PRESENT Ug

modern output of 100,000 tons. Restriction was- introduced to

remedy overproduction, which had reduced theprice of the metal
from ,£284 a ton in 1926 to £144 in 1930, a figure below coat
E rice. By Newbold’s day there were Chinese mining everywhere,
ut especially In Larut and in Selangor, some on land leased by
themselves, others for tribute on land owned by Malay chiefs.
Even In 1912 80 per cent of the mining was in Chinese hands
and in 1941 Chinese owned onc-third of the mines. It was not
till the end of the nineteenth century that some European
capital was introduced for the installation of Western machinery.
The Chinese form of mining was "open-cast”; that is, ex¬
cavation by hand labour. Western methods include water
monitors (like cannons) that wash down a hill face, and, latest
device of all, bucket-dredges which, set on a pontoon, scrap© up
the swampy earth and drop it into sluices that extract the ore.
There are only a few lode mines, the most famous at Sungai
Lembing in Pahang. The total area alienated for tin-mining is
184,000 acres odd and the total capita! invested more than £13
million. The Value of Malaya’s annual output of tin during the
presont century has varied between £5 to £18 million. Practi¬
cally all the ore has hitherto been smelted by two British
companies at Singapore and Penang, an American attempt in
1902 to convey it to the United States as ballast and smelt it
there having been thwarted by the imposition of a prohibitive
export duty on the unsmeltcd ore.
Gold-mining also goes back to prehistoric times. The earliest
minors would seem to have been the Mon-speaking immigrants
of the Bronze Age, who opened gold mines in Pahang and, to
judge from the absence of Indian remains, may have long con¬
tinued mining in a country devoid of inhabitants other than
aboriginal hill-men and a few hinduized Malays on the
estuaries, whose trafficking in the gold made Pahang the most
important region in tho peninsula between the fall of Sri
V\jaya and the rise of Malacca. From ruins of a tenth-century
temple in Kedah have been unearthed a model bowl, a model
lotus and a model lion, all in gold, articles which, though Indian
in origin, may have been made of local metal, seeing that the
quest for gold was one of the objects that led to Indian immi¬
gration. In the fifteenth century Pahang paid annual tribute of
 120 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

5 lb. of its gold du9t to Malacca. A Chinese Muslim, Fei Iiain,

writing in 1436, tells how girls of rich Pahang families woro
four Or live golden circlets on their foreheads. From about
1550 Minangkabaus accustomed to gold-mining in Sumatra-
crossed the peninsula and started to mine for the metal along
the Jelai in Pahang. Alluvial gold occurs in most of the Malay
States, though not in sufficient quantity to attract even the
Malays in those days of more profitable industries. There is
one European gold mine, namely at Raub in Pahang. The mean
annual value of gold won in Malaya between 1934 and 1938
was £234,311.
In the present century the Japanese opened iron mines in
Johore and Trengganu, which in 1938 produced ore worth
£$58,319. It was the latest of Malaya’s mining industries, and
it is to be hoped there will still be a demand for the ore.
So much for the pursuits of the landsman. But, as we have
seen, from time immemorial there have been Malays who
turned to the sea for their livelihood and devoted nearly all
their time to fishing, which of all Malay industries is the most
specialized.
Hook-and-Iine fishing is highly developed, with or without
rod, by night lines and with long lines of hooka. From the
Johore causeway Malays on a breezy day will angle for the
belone (of the garfish tribe) with a kito from which dangles a
line witn a baited noose. But even line fishing, though not a
method of modern industry, was new to the aborigines of
Singapore when Raffles acquired n site there, and the wooden
fish spear or siligi which those sca-gipsies used lias survived in
the name of a street in the great modern city.
V Upcountry Malays set in the rivers traps of the same type
as our eel-traps, some with inner compartments to prevent
egress, others of thorny twigs with barbed points that deter
the catch from returning upstream to liberty. There arc squaro
and conical traps, where the tug of a fish dislodges a catch and
drops a door. Bait may be used or weirs, dams and converging
•lines of screens to induce or force the fish to enter the trap.
The three main types of large sea fish-traps or stakes are a
development of the riverine traps. In the first the fish are headed
by converging rows of stakes into a large enclosure where there
 INDUSTRIES, PAST AND PRESENT 121

is a submerged screen; this bamboo screen is raised by a wind¬

lass and the fish arc caught. In the second type fish are headed
into successive compartments of diminishing size, to be picked
out of the inmost by landing-baskets or to be left there Iiigh
and dry by the receding tide. In tlte third and simplest type a
tidal crook is enclosed temporarily by a fence of rattan so that
the fell of the tide leaves the fish high and dry. All these are
commercial methods.
The fishing-nets used in Malayan waters may be divided
into floating or drift-nets, drag-nets, casting-nots, fixed
purse-nets, ground or lift-nets. The casting-net that resembles
the not of the gladiator bears a Sanskrit name. A bag-net (too
small for commercial purposes') was bequeathed to the Malacca
fibuerman by the Portuguese. The ordinary seine-nct is some¬
times called the Chinese net. The debt the Malay fisherman
may owe to India (or India to the Malay fishermen) has not
been explored. Even in Malayan waters there aro local differ¬
ences in traps, nets and methods. On the east coast a medicine¬
man enters the water and swims about, diving and listening to
locate a shoal and determine the kind of fish in the neighbour¬
hood, so that his comrades may not heave their great net into
the sea to no purpose. The mcdicinc-man will control perhaps
twenty nets, each boat having a crew that may be as low as five or
ns high as nine. In his exhaustive study of the economy of the
Kclantan fisherman (a pioneer volumo of the greatest valuo to
the administrator) Professor Raymond Firth explains how "in
eaoh lift-net crew there is a fairly stable nucleus, consisting
mainly of the boat captains, their kinsfolk and closo friends or
neighbours. When the number of nets is small, there is a
reserve of labour, in which the semi-independent fishermen
aro one element. But when the number of nets increases, this
reserve disappears and part-time agriculturists and independent
fishermen arc enlisted where possible.” Even in their most
highly specialized industry the Malays arc some of them
amateurs.
The European expert dismisses both the Malay and Chinese
fisherman of Malaya as practising methods that obtained at the
time of the Apostles, and therefore fit to be studied only by the
ethnographer. But in spite of antiquated methods the size of
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY
122
the industry is by no means insignificant, though it is always
liable to suffer from the natural preference of the Malay for
any more profitable means of livelihood. From Trengganu,
with its long coast-line, a state where about ten per cent of the
small population are fishermen, the average value of fish
exported annually before the war was more than £100,000, a
figure that excluded the value of fish eaten by the local
population. The total annual catch by Malaya’s 50,000 fisher¬
men mi then estimated at wholesale prices as worth nearly
£i million. For the net earnings of Malaya's io,ooo-odd
Chinese fishermen no statistics are available, but the individual
Malay fisherman earned before the war £1 a month on the east
coast and £1 6r. on the west: a miserable pittanco compared
with the £16 or £20 a month got by a Malay with five acres of
rubber, although a not inadequate return on the fisherman's
capital expenditure of £5. Moreover, even the professional
fisherman docs not depend wholly on fishing, both food and
cash accruing to him from the coconuts, arccanuts and vegetables
of his garden. Besides, before the war a Kclantan or Trengganu
fisherman with a family of three required to spend only lid, a
month on rice and clothes and sundries. He led a free inde¬
pendent healthy life that the clerk or shop assistant of Europe
may well envy, although the conditions of Malay fisheries have
been neglected by the government t»nd need certain radical
improvements. In the first place, as only in Kclantan and
Trengganu has.thc foreigner been kept from exploiting the local
fisherman and monopolizing fish-dealing, the Malay fisherman
must bo brought to realize the value of co-operative societies so
that so large a percentage of his earnings may no longer pass to
the Chinese fish-curer who puts up the capital for so many fish-
stakes and so many boats. In the second place there must be
some mechanization of the industry, with the introduction of
powered craft such a9 Japanese fishermen used in Malayan
waters to reach remoter fishing-grounds. Then again, although
land transport enables the ICuantan fisherman to transport (or
let a Chinese transport) his catch to the Kuala Lumpor market,
yet ice-boats are needed as tenders on the fleets 90 that the
fisherman may not be forced to sell nearly all his catch to the
cuter but get the higher price for the fresh fish. Co-operation
 IND0STRIB8, PAST AND PRESENT 123

might also finance canneries. With power boats and canneries

the fishing industry would provide a new opening for the Malay
mechanic. And when the mechanic comes on the scene, he is
certain to introduce urban ideas of what is an equitable return
on capital and on the proper apportionment of profit between
fisherman and dealer.
 CHAPTER XIII

LABOUR:HEALTH: EDUCATION:

i. Labour

Apart from justice, the merits of any modern government are

judged mainly by its care for labour, health and education.
Care for labour did not exist in Malaya before the British
period any more than it existed in France before the Revolution
of 1793. To make the position worse, the Malays had brought
with them on their descent from Yunnan the institution of
slavery, long before they were influenced by Hindu ideas.
Ownership of slaves and bondsmen was the mark of wealth,
rank and power. Slaves included prisoners of war, pagan
aborigines snared “like chimpanzees’ murderers who, unable
to pay the blood-price, bartered liberty for sanctuary with the
ruler, the children of female slaves other than those acknow¬
ledged by their owners, Batak and Balinese bought in mediaeval
Malacca and in early Penang, Abyssinian and negro slaves
smuggled back from Mecca in the guise of servants. Most
Iniquitous, perhaps, was the case of the debt-bondsman, whose
\york in his creditor’s house, field or mine was never pet against
the sum he owed and who often had to feed and clothe himself.
Sometimes the desire of a chief or his wife to possess the
services of a particular person led to his or her enslavement on
the score of a debt entirely fictitious. With brutal logic Malay
law laid it down that the hiring of a slave was like the borrowing
of a stick and the borrower had the same responsibility for the
safety of slave or debt-bondsman as he had tot; the safety of a
buffalo. Only in Negri Sembilan was debt slavery rare, the tribe
defraying a tribesman’s debts rather than lose his services.
There was yet another way of solving the problem of
domestic service at the expense of the liberty of the subject.
On the occasion of a royal marriage or birth a Sultan would have
young women carried off to be maids or nurses. If they were
ia4
 labour; health; education 125

unmarried they became courtesans about the palace; if they

were married their husbands, too, became royal slaves.
Aa in many Eastern countries, the Malay freeman also had
to rcndor feudal service as a tenant of the ruler. He was re¬
cruited to build a palace, to make roads and drains, to tend
elephants, pole boats and cultivato the royal domain and to fight
as a 8oldier.The hardships endured is the burden of many pages
in 'Abdullah's Voyage to the East Coast in 1851. The corvee
for all this forced labour was organized by village hoadmen,
who executed orders without forgetting their own interests
as they fined the recalcitrant and pocketed bribes to grant
exemptions.
Slaves figured among the imports into Malacca from its
foundation down to the last century. After its capture by
d’Albuquerque in 1511 the Portuguese kept many slaves- When
the Dutch conauerod the port in 1641 one Portuguese, Pedro
Dabrou, surrendered along with 200 slaves, of whom 60 were
kept for building, the rest incapable of work being left outside
the city to erect their own houses. In the confusion of the
siege the Minangkabau9 of Naning and Rcmbau seized many
slaves, some of them'Christians. The Dutch tried hard to recover
the Christians and on one occasion got back six of them along
with one silver candlestick, two silver spoons, one Spanish
cassock, one undergarment and one red doublet. In addition to
its own 185 slaves the Dutch Company in 1678 was hiring
private slaves at as mdeh as eight to ten stivers a day, aB their
owners took advantage of a labour shortage. Slnvcs accompanied
Dutch punitive expeditions into the interior.
In 1786 the Dutch port officer at Malacca could not tell
the number of his own slaves, but it was over 60. In 1795 when
the British took over Malacca, the Governor’s wife entertained
the officers, playing on her harp with some of her slaves accom¬
panying her on violins. In his will dated 1795 Francis Light, the
founder of Penang, left sums to two female slaves he had freed,
bequeathed all his Batak slaves to Martina Rozells and all hi9
kafir slaves, too, if she wanted them, and released from further
bondage seven Chinese slaves and their children. And though
Singapore was founded after an Act of Parliament had declared,
the keeping of slaves a felony, its first Resident had winked at the
 126 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

trade. It was Stamford Raffles who took the lead in abolishing

slavery. All slaves imported after the establishment of Singapore
were given by him the right to claim their freedom. Needless to
add, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as each Malay
State came under British protection, slavery was extirpated,
without protest.
Even free labour may suffer from exploitation. But what a
change came with the present century! In some respects tho
Malayan attitude towards labour anticipated tho policy laid
down by Geneva. This enlightened attitude was due perhaps
less to altruism than to the country's dependence on foreign
labour for the great tin and rubber industries, which in 1037
employed 300,000 Indians, 200,000 Chinese, 30,000 Malays
and 15,000 Javanese. A Labour Code, ofton amended, forbade
the truck system (or payment in kind), prescribed a maternity
allowance and leave for women, required employers to pay
hospital fees for coolies and their families, to provide creches
for infants and schools for children (who might not be em¬
ployed under ten), and to pay a minimum wage that would
cover a trip to India every three years. 1910 saw the abolition
of indentured labour, 1922 the abolition of penal sanctions for
labour offences and 1937 such a voluntary flow of labour that
88-8 per cent of the Indian males who came to Malaya that yoar
had not been recruited.
The Chinese labourer neither needed nor welcomed so much
interference by the government. No minimum wage waB pre¬
scribed, for he always got higher pay than the Indian. He
preferred the chances of piece-work to the certainty of a fixed
wage. But as he was not so qualified to protect his interests as
he imagined, the government was quick to legislate against
abuses. . *. .>
Guilds were traditional for Indian and Chinese labourers,
but in r<)4o the government legislated for the organization of
trade unions and after the war helped labourers to form them.
Probably the one measure open to criticism in the actions
.of the Malayan governments was the repatriation of unemployed
labourers during the 1929 slump. It cost millions of dollars, but
it may be argued that in the time of booms money should be set
aside for the rainy day. It is, however, a difficult problem, as the
 LABOUR ; HEALTH; EDUCATION 127

majority of coolies would themselves desire to take advantage

of a slump for visiting their homelands.
In i<tyo some 67,000 Indian labourers owned £285,000 in
co-operative societies, For in 1921 the governments started a
department to encourage and assist such societies in order to
help agriculturists to get better prices for their crops and to
rescue labourers and clerks from a burden of debt, that so far as
the clerks were concerned was mainly due to the swing-over
from agriculture to town employment.

ii. Health

Alike for labourers and for all classes and races, British
medicine has been an incalculable boon, modern science taking
the place of mediaeval guesswork. Disease, according to the
Malay notion, is duo to the attack of some spirit or to the
machinations of an enemy over some pnrt of the patient’s body;
for example, the clippings of hair or nails. Bathing, one may
offend some nature spirit. Hunting, one mav be struck down by
the malignant aura of slain deer or pig or bird, to be counter¬
acted by smearing one’s body with clay and so putting oneself
under the protection of the earth-spirit as a Greek actor put
himself under the protection of the god of wine by daubing his
face with wine lees. A woman may be harmed by the bottle-imp
familiar of ft rival. Especially baneful to women arc the banshees
of those who have died in childbirth. Younger than banshees,
bottle-imps and nature-spirits arc the djinns of Islam, the
Malay’s latest faith. Again, “Just as Plato ascribed disease to
disturbances of the balance of power between the four proper¬
ties of earth, air, fire and water, out of which tho body 13 com¬
pacted, so the Malay ascribes all diseases to the four classes of
genies presiding over those properties. The genies of the air
cause wind-borne complaints: dropsy, blindness, hemiplegia
and insanity. The genies of the black earth cause vertigo, vwth
sudden blackness of vision. The genies of fire cause hot fevers
and yellow jaundice. The white genies of the sea cause chill,
catarrhs and agues.” The Malay brought his most primitive
ideas of disease from central Asia and borrowed later notions
 128 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

from contact first with Hindus and then with Indian Muslims
who had got second-hand from Arabia some knowledge of
Greek medical theory.
The Malay knows nothing of surgery, though he can treat
simple fractures. In cases of serious illness diagnosis is made by
means of a shaman's stance, whore Siva is still often invoked
to discover what spirit is causing the sickness and what offering
that spirit demands. For milder complaints the ordinary village
medicine-man omploys a simple clinical method based on
experience, but sometimes rendered impressive by pretence of
divination. His curative medicine consists of contagious or
homoeopathic magic, of placatory offerings, of spoken and
written charms, of herbal remedies and of diet to restoro the
balance between the four natural properties heat and cold,
dryness and moisture. A patient may bo rubbed with bozoar-
$tonc to acquire the vitality of its strong soul-substance. The
placatory offering may be waved over a sufferer or hung up in

ra tray or set adrift in a spirit-boat. The charm or incantation

ars to have spread through Asia from some early centre
Babylon, but in Malaya was further popularized by
borrowings from Hindu and Muslim India. Tho Malay
pharmacopoeia of herbs must have taken thousands of years of
empirical research to collect. But just as the great bulk of Malay
literature consists of translations, so the greater part of the
Malay's prescriptions appear to have been borrowed. As once
in British therapeutics, the pomegranate is used for tape-worm,
but the pomegranate came from India. It is possible that many
of the plants that have provided drugs for the Malay were
brought from India. The word for long pepper, which has
febrifuge, stomachic and anti-spasmodic properties, is Sanskrit.
The word for coriander is Tamil, and as in India it is taken for
coughs. The sandalwood-trec is indigenous in the East Indies,
but it bears a Sanskrit name; it was perhaps from Indians that
Malays learnt of its value as an astringent and for stomachic
pains. Cummin, employed as a diuretic by Indian? and Malays,
came from Persia. Senna was imported from Arabia to India
less than two centuries ago and from India to Malaya. It is clear
that, provided he is given time to assimilate new ideas, the Malay
is not averse to change in medical practice. I myself have seen
 labour; health; education 129
the entire population of one of the beautiful but malarial islands
off Pahang swarm round a government launch to ask for quinine,
and when told that the stock was exhausted they finished a huge
bottle of black draught as better than nothing. It is only surgery
that the Malay dreads and his religion condemns.
The medicine of India and China was as mediaeval as the
Malay. Though China discovered ephedrine to be a specific for.
asthma, its druggists, to the delight of pre-historians, stock
mastodons' teeth. So in such a field as Malaya European medi¬
cine had a chance to work wonders. Not that it sprang up fully
equipped like Minerva from the head of Jove. Penang had
existed for close on twenty years before it got medical officers,
and it was proposed that Indian convicts should be employed
as nurses. Even where there were British doctors, the death-rate
was, for many years, terrific. Stamford Raffles, for example,
lost a wife and all but one of his children. The Malays had long
S iossed that malaria was due to the mosquito, but we find a
ingaporo physician writing on coral-reefs as its cause, and it
was not till the last quarter of the nineteenth century that
J uinine was commonly prescribed as a specific. Sometimes the
Iscovcry of a remedy was due to a lucky chance, as 606 proved
to bo a cure for yaws. Progress might have been quicker but for a
lack of international co-operation. Take beri-beri, which the
Chinese mention as long ago as the seventh century. In 1896
a Dutch doctor in Java had noticed that chickens fed on
>poli?hcd rice were liable to this disease, and published a paper.
But when more than ten years later British doctors made the
discovery in Malaya that beri-beri was caused by a deficiency
in diet they were unaware of the work of Dr. Eykman and there
was a dispute between two of them as to which was the pioneer
discoverer l
Greater even than their curative medicine have been the
measures taken by British doctors to prevent tropical diseases,
especially malaria. In 1898 Sir Ronald Ross, studying the
mosquito under the microscope, discovered the importance of
knOvying the insect’s life history in order to stamp out a fever
that causes more deaths and more illness than all other diseases
put together. In 1901 (Sir) Malcolm Watson started to show
the value of draining swamps where mosquitoes breed, But the
rStiL J/'Jr.' f fit:** • J . j - 1
 13° MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

way of research is full of pitfalls. And it was more than a decade

before it was proved to be a mistake to clear ravines of bushes
that kept the anopheles close to the clear stream where thev
breed. But anti-malarial work in Malaya has earned a world-
£ de reputation. Before the Japanese occupation the disease
d been banished from all the larger towns and from most
estates (whose owners recognized the value of healthy labour),
though it could not be eradicated except at quite prohibitive
cost from terraced rice-fields in isolated valleys. It is possible
that time will bring new methods of exterminating the
anopheles.

iii. Education

To the modem mind education does not exist without

school buildings, though to mediaeval man it was the teacher
who mattered more than the desk. At least as early as a.d. 671
there were Indian teachers ;n the Malay world, when a Chinese
Buddhist, I-tsing, spent six months at the capital of Sri Vijaya
studying Sanskrit, as Chinese were wont to do for a year or so
before sailing on to India. Then at the end of the thirteenth
century Islam, spreading from Pasai (in modern Acheh), brought
a new alphabet and literature. Two centuries later the author of
the Malay Annals, writing in Malacca, is familiar with Sanskrit,
Persian and Tamil, with Javanese literature and Kuranio texts.
He professes also a smattering of Chinese, Siamese and
Portuguese. He knows the Ramayana and apparently the
Mahabharata. He has read Malay translations of the Muslim
romances of Alexander the Great, Muhammad Hanafiah and
Amir Harazah. He is acquainted with the doctrines of Sufi
mystics. Clearly there were means of acquiring knowledge in
old Malacca. The Annals tell us how the Sultans sat at the feet
of missionaries from India, who sometimes pretended to have
come from Mecca, and how irritated those missionaries got with
pupils who were slow at pronouncing Arabic, and how angry
£yith courtiers who laughed at their own efforts to speak Malay;
For centuries there were several definite types of Malay
education. There \yas the training of the ordinary peasant,
 labour ; Health; education 131

boys and girls learning from their parents fishing, trapping,

5 agriculture, weaving and cookery. In proverbs and folk-lore
the girls were perhaps better instructed than the boys. lender
J the influence of the hinduizcd courts a few youths learned to
work in brass, silver and gold, and others to make weapons,
though they were all agriculturists in season and not complete
specialists. Then there was the training of the young raja who
learnt to read the Kuron and to fence and was instructed in
astrology and magical formulae to gain invulnerability arid
achieve success in love and war. There was also the trainiog of
the shaman’s pupil in the cultivation of visual hallucinations
and the special education of the village medicine-man who
1 studied charms and the traditional properties of herbs. Finally
there was the education of the Malay scholar, which till modern
times meant the education of the Muslim theologian. Any boy
anxious to learn the Kuran and understand the general drift of
the text went to live with a teacher, whom he heloed in house
and field. Even today the few who feel the call of religion
strongly do not study English, but, having learnt all they can
from some local teacher, go to Mecca or to al-Azhar University
at Cairo, there to acquire Arabic and Muslim theology, which
to their minds includes all knowledge. Every Malay boy and
girl still has to learn to chant the Kuran from cover to covor in
a language he docs not understand, and this gruelling t&sk
hardly furthers his advancement in the English schools.
The education of foicign settlers in Malaya belonged before
the nineteenth century to the cultural history of India and
China. And in Malacca the Catholics kept open school for their
,801*11 Eurasian flock.
Then, in 1823, twenty-three years before any annual grant
towards education was made in England, Sir Stamford Raffles
laid in Singapore the foundation stone of an Institution that still
bears his name. On behalf of the East India Company he
endowed it with a grant of $300 a month and a large area of
valuable land, endowments dissipated as the years went by.
The Institution was to have literary and moral departments
for Chinese, Malays and Siamese and a scientific department
for the common advantage of the several colleges that might
be constituted. Raffles clearly knew nothing of educational
 132 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

organization and expected his students to run before they could

walk. So it is not surprising that in 1827 the Bengal government
decided to apply die grant solely to the establishment of
elementary schools. Ten years later an abortive attempt was
made to use the Institution for its founder’s purpose, but it is
hardly a matter for wonder that the Chinese pupils fell away
and the Malays displayed apathy at the study of the history
of Greece and Rome, chronology, natural philosophy, trigo¬
nometry and the use of globes. From 1844 till 1871 the building
housed a school for girls. Then in 1870 a Cambridge graduate
was engaged a9 Principal and the modern history of the
Institution began. The Trustees tried to turn it into a high
school with science classes to be fed from the city's 9ix ele¬
mentary schools. But the original endowments had been
wasted, and in 1903 the government took it over and made it a
secondary school. Its history is interesting as an epitome of the
stumbles and falls and advancement of education in Malaya.
The differentiation between education in English and education
in vernaculars, and between nn elementary and a secondary
school, the outlining of a curriculum fitted to local need9, the
education of girls, the teaching of science, the provision of a
college for the sons of Malay chiefs, the difficulty of getting
suitable masters, the problem of aided and of government
schools are all of them matters that cropped up in later days.
In 1872 an Inspector of Schools was appointed, whose title
was changed in 1901 into Director of Public Instruction for the
Straits Settlements, and later to Director of Education. That
Inspector inaugurated an educational system whose develop¬
ment may be traced in (a) the gradual recruitment of an
adequate and efficient staff for nn Education Department, (b)
increasing financial provision for government and missionary
schools, mainly as a result of the representations of that depart¬
ment, and (e) in the development of curricula on lines of higher
proficiency and greater specialization.
Today primary education is given throughout Malaya in
English, Malay, Chinese and Indian schools. The Malay
vernacular schools, which are free and maintained by govern¬
ment, Drepare the brighter boys for entry to English schools and
give those who prefer village life instruction in the three Rs,
 labour: health: education: *33
geography, Malay history, tropical hygiene, gardening, poultry¬
keeping and general handiwork. Malay girls study the same
subjects with suitable modifications. In contrast to the Malay
schools, the Chinese vernacular schools have been largely
endowed or self-supporting and self-governing, though schools
accommodating about half the pupils enrolled were receiving
government grants before the war. Down to the ’20s they
taught the Old Style Chinese learning, till influenced by the
Revolution they adopted the New Mandarin and text-books
too nationalist in tone to make for the children’s adaptation to
their Malayan environment. Interference by the Education
Department was, however, resented except when Communist
students occasionally locked up the staff of a school and assis¬
tance was invoked to release the teachers. At nearly all these
Chinese vernacular schools some English is taught, usually
badly, to meet the popular demand. Indian schools are mostly
situated on rubber estates and the teaching is generally in Tamil.
Their main difficulty is to recruit competent teachers. But if
the schools are efficient they also receive grants-in-aid.
The English schools of Malaya are those in which English
is the sole medium of instruction, though they admit pupils of
every race, the majority of them Chinese. Many of the schools
are conducted by missionary bodies who receive grants-in-aid
to cover any deficit. Most secondary schools proper are run by
government, the aim being to produce youths and girls who
pass the Cambridge School Certificate examination. Three-
quarters of the staffs of the English schools are Chinese,
Eurasians, Malays and others of local birth.
Six months after the liberation of Malaya, some 350,000
pupils had been enrolled in the various schools as against
310,000 m 1941.
In addition to these schools for general education, the
government has established Trade (or Artisan) Schools at
Singapore, Penang, Kuala Lumpor and Ipoh for the training
of mechanics, blacksmiths, plumbers and electricians; Trade
Schools at Malacca and Johore Bahru for carpenters and
tailors; a Trade School at Bagan Serai for carpentry and
cabinet-making. At Kuala Lumpor there is a Technical School
providing courses in surveying and the various forms of
134 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

engineering required for posts in the technical departments. An

Agricultural School at Serdang provides a two years’ course in
English and a ope year's course in Malay for the study of
tropical agriculture. •
At the apex of the educational system are King Edward
VII College of Medicine and Raffles College, both at Singapore.
Together they now form a University, whose site will be
eventually in Johore. Students passing out of the Medical (and
Dental) College are qualified to practise anywhere in the British
Empire. Students passing out from Raffles College enter the
local civil services and especially the educational department.
The Straits Settlements gave annually two Queen’s Scholar¬
ships open to candidates of any race to defray the cost of
study for an honours degree at Oxford or Cambridge. The
Federated Malay States gave annually two similar scholarships,
one confined to Malays. Their value is £500 for the first year,
and thereafter £400 a year. Many of the successful Chinese
scholars now seek a career in China. I have heard a Malay
express thankfulness at his race being thus relieved of their
competition.
 JAPAN’S HOUR OF TRIUMPH )

InAogusti94I Japanese troop9 poured into the south of IndO-

China and reached the new frontier of Siam. On 8 December
Japan declared war on Great Britain and the United States of
America. On the same day her forces raided Manila, sank the
bulk of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour, bombed Singapore
at 4 a.m., marched into Bangkok, captured Malaya’s northern¬
most aerodrome in Kelantan and landed on the beaches
near Kota Baharu. The next day, 9 December, saw Admiral
Phillips’ forlorn attempt to halt the sea-borne invasion by taking
the Prince of Wales and the Repulse up the Gulf of Siam under
monsoon clouds but without air-cover. On 10 December, the
lowering grey clouds broke long enough to let the Japanese
sink both ships and shatter British sea-power in the Pacific as
American sea-power had been shattered two days earlier at
Pearl Harbour.
By 13 December the main Japanese army had smashed our
prepared position at Jitra in the noith of Kedah and started its
descent of 550 miles down the main arterial road to Singapore
at the average rate of ten miles a day. The enemy employed
at least 150,000 men on the campaign, had about 300 bombers
and fighters (against our 141 obsolete planes), and some 300
tanks, a weapon with which for reasons unexplained our
troops were not equipped. The Japanese tactics were as
monotonous as the tactics their spies had employed at
tennis tournaments in peace-time Singapore, and even more
effective. Confronted with an obstacle on their march, they
disappeared into the jungle on both sides of the road, came out
south of it and encircled it, or they got below it as at Kuala
Kangsar by following some by-road, or as at Kampar by
sending forces round by sea to the rear of our defence. From
Kampar our forces, British and Indian, had to retire, having been
outflanked by the Japanese, who landed south of them on the
Bemam River and were about to encircle them from Teluk
 136 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

Anson. The Division was to halt at Slim River and was expected
to make a stand there. But, worn out by three weeks’ continuous
fighting, our battalions were cut to pieces.
On 9 January, 1942, General Wavcll visited the front. He
can have needed no more than a glance at the map and Selangor’s
network of roads to order retreat past Kuala Lumpor, 125 miles
south down to the Muar River, the last obstacle except a strip
of sea between the enemy and Singapore. All the Malay States
were now to be abandoned except the southernmost, Johore.
Eye-witnesses have described the bizarre procession of lorries,
cars,- trollies, ambulances, ordnance vans, tractors, eleven
steam-rollers and two fire-engines that crept along the granite
roads of Selangor and Negri Scmbilan past groups of villagers
who stood stunned and bewildered. It was as if the Japanese
themselves could not believe their good fortune. The ftigitives,
many asleep from fatigue, moved unmolested. No bombs were
dropped. Not a bridge was blown up.
Nothing could halt the invader now, but it was tho turn of
the Australian Imperial Forces to strike a blow. There was a
flicker of phantom hope that somehow the Australians, who had
not so far gone into action, would accomplish the impossible
and retrieve the hour. They ambushed the Japanese at a bridge
which they blew up near Gcmas and they destroyed some
thousand of them for the loss of less than eighty Australians
killed and wounded. Except for this one engagement the defence
never had air-cover, though it had always been tho intention to
dofend Malaya from the air. But of what use was a successful
ambush when Britain’s forces were too small to wrest the
initiative by counter-attack ?
The Japanese advance continued without halt, incxorablo.
Tiie main body of the enemy arrived at Muar and after a battle
of six days crossed the river that was its last obstacle on the
mainland, pushing back an Indian brigade and compelling the
Australians at Gemas to retreat hurriedly across the one
bridge on the Segamat River to avoid encirclement. Bodies of
our men were cut off from time to time. On the coast the
Japanese had landed at Batu Pahat. The main Japanese army
now' pressed confidently forward by road and railway.
On 23 January, 1942, it was decided to withdraw all our
 JAPAN’S HOUR OF TRIUMPH 137

forces to Singapore island on the night of 30-31 January. The

enemy did not interfere with this operation, desiring probably
to let Singapore be crowded to confusion and to have all his
prisoners together in one bag.
The lost regiment to quit the mainland was the Argyll and
Sutherland Highlanders, a remnant of 200 out of 850 men, who
crossed the causeway at night with the pipes playing “Blue
Bonnets over the Border”, ft was one of those gestures which
bring tears of pride to the eyes and create a nation, but which
generally should bring tears of shame for lives thrown away.
An incredible war of outposts General Gordon Bennett
called the Malayan campaign, but it was almost over now,
though many failed to recognize the end was so near. When our
troops reached Singapore, the naval base that had cost
/30,000,000 had been destroyed by our engineers and at sea
the Empress of Asia had been set on fire by enemy bombers.
The Japanese began to shell and bomb what was more like an
open cattle-pen than an impregnable fortneas. On 8 February
tnoy started to bomb intensively the north-west corner of the
island, the one place where their troops could land under
cover. At 10 p.m. they disembarked 23,000 men there in
a mangrove swamp. By 11 February Jnpancso tanks had
reached Bukit Timah in the middle of the island. Two days later
military opinion was unanimous that further resistance was
useloas, but General Wavcll ordered a fight to the end. Although
36,000 fresh troops had just boen landed (from an optimism
or error still unexplained) they were inexperienced and there
was no labour to unload their equipment under the threat of
Japanese bombs. The troops that had fought from Siam down
the length of the peninsula were an exhausted remnant.
Munition and food were giving out and, above all, the water-
supply was cut. On 15 February, 1942, a white flag was
hoisted on Government House and the British surrendered
unconditionally.
Of the conduct of the Malayan campaign there has been
much criticism, some professional, much irrelevant. One soldier
wonders if our troops did not miss victory at the first en¬
counter near Kota Baharu by failing to hold fast. This.clearly
is to underestimate the strength and doggedness of the Japanese.
 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY
138
Perhaps our.chosen position at Jitra was tactically unsound,
constituted as, it was mainly of open. rice-fields with flanks
out so far that the centre was weak, but not far enough
to prevent encirclement Perhaps our position at Gurun was
> worse. But what did we know of jungle warfare then? Lono;-
range artillery becomes useless where the field of vision is
restricted by trees, and having no tanks our tacticians
sought positions where artillery was of value. Besides, how
could our men be expected to enter the jungle, when even a
tough realist like General Gordon Bennett could write how
• '.^enormous snakes hang on the undergrowth or slither along the
ground. Cobras, pythons, hamadryads and the dangerously
poisonous krait show themselves. Hornets and scorpions
abound. Mangy, smelly tigers, dangerous sladangs who will
charge blindly into any humans in their vicinity—all these give
horror to the jungle.” The Malay regiments and the local
volunteers, all of whom would have been delighted to see a
sladang and tackled any cobra with a split bamboo, were kept for
thogreater part of the campaign as separate uni ts, instendof being
attached as guides to the British and Indian regiments. There was
no one the British soldier or the Indian could trust to tell him how
to distinguish between a Malay and a Japanese in a Malay sarong.
Our tactic of trying to throw a thin line of defence athwart the
main road failed all down the peninsula. It was like a man
barring his front door against burglars and leaving open the
E round-floor windows. One man surprised by burglars may
ave no choice; two or three inmates could close tho windows
and open the door, ambushing; the burglars in the passage and
banging them over the head jf they dared to enter. That was
what the Australians did at Gemas, but then, as always, our
forces were too weak to exchange defence for attack. Against
.600,000 troops in Burma we had 125,000 in Malaya, too
few ever to enable us to start an offensive, even if we had then
known the way. Not only did our troops lack an air arm and
protection from sea-landings in their rear; they had a high
percentage, of unseasoned men and untrained officers. As
early as 16 December, the Australian G.O.C., General Bennett,
vwrote: “I spent much time studying the serious position i
of Malaya and realized that nothing could save the country
 japan’s hour of triumph 139

unless reinforcements of experienced troops of good fighting

quality should arrive at an early date."
The loss of Malaya is acknowledged to have been a purely
military disaster. But naturally the soldier and the civilian look
back for the primary cause of defeat. "It is the duty of the states¬
man to assemble a superior force at the decisive moment at the
right spot." By that criterion it was the fault of the British
statesman that Malaya was overwhelmed by a cataclysm whose
repercussions in the Far East cannot yet be estimated. But the
War Cabinet of the day had a valid excuso. "I submit," said
Mr. Churchill, "that the main strategic and political decision to
aid Russia, to deliver an offensive in Libya and to accept a
consequential state of weakness in the then peaceful theatre of
the Far East, was sound." The House of Commons concurred.
Some argued that the Malays, and especially the Chinese, should
have been armed and trained to defend the peninsula. But by
the time world opinion would have condoned such a course
the hour for it had passed and equipment was wanting. Besides,
though the Malay Regiment fought most gallantly, the relations
between Chinese communist guerillas and the Malays before and
after our recovery of Malaya are evidence of the grave risk of
arming a population of mixed races, many of them not British
subjects. Others argued that years ago the Japanese should have
been forbidden access to Malaya’s coastal waters and jungle
paths, not stopping to reflect that such a course would have been
tantamount to inviting war. Journalists unnerved by the
unimaginable disaster babbled of an inefficient civil service,
dancing parties at the hotels and whiskey-swilling planters. As
conservators of precedent no civil sendee can function normally
when precedents are flouted by armed force. There was a ball
in the evening before Waterloo. And General Gordon Bennett,
after extolling the civil servants and unofficials of Malaya,
remarks that during a year there he saw no British man or
woman under the influence of liquor and found less drunken¬
ness than in England and Australia. What all races did for civil
defence has been recorded.
 CHAPTER XV

THE MALAYAN UNION AND

SINGAPORE

Before the Japanese invasion the Malays were probably the

only people in Asia who as a race not only respected but felt
affection for the British. The Strait-born Chinese entertained
the same feeling, but they represent a community, not a race.
Both the Malays and the Straits-born Chinese were wild with
joy at our return and welcomed our troops with single-hearted
gratitude. It might therefore have been expected that after
failure to secure for the peoples of Malaya the protection our
treaties had guaranteed we should have healed their wounds
and assuaged their hunger and perhaps even listened to their
views before we thought of altering their treaties and giving
officials new English designations irrelevant to good government
and confusing for the local inhabitant. But instead of showing
consideration for an unnerved people, Whitehall dashed into the
recovered Malaya as Mr. Birch dashed into Perak in 1874, as if
it were an Augean stable instead of a country that for half a
century had been a model for the smooth administration of
mixed races. As history will diagnose, Great Britain had had
democracy, one of the world’s new secular-religions, fanned
almost to fanaticism by the war against fascism. Democratic
self-government had been a signal success in the dominions
with their British populations. It must therefore be a panacea
to be applied also to Colonies with foreign populations. Only
a few British thinkers detected the non seqitur and uttered a
warning that there is no reason to consider a democratic
electorate suitable for universal adoption, especially in mixed
communities. As for the Chinese of Malaya whom the new
dispensation was designed to benefit, the majority of them still
respect as a mirror for‘administrators the ancient sage Shun
who “did nothing yet governed well”. But following the
example of the Soviet, the modern world, so far from doing
'4°
 THE MALAYAN UNION AND SINGAPORE I4I

nothing, is intent on planning. And incubated in extreme

secrecy (a tactic prompted by the war) Whitehall proceeded to
sponsor a new policy for Malaya that compared with its last
pre-war policy was another complete volte-face. For in 1033 the
Colonial Office had published and accepted the following
opinion of its then permanent head:

"From a purely economic point of view it would no'doubt

be advisable in a country the size of Malaya to have one
Central Government administering the whole territory.
There is, however, the political aspect of the problem....
"Moreover it seems clear that the maintenance of the
position, authority and prestige of the Malay Rulers must
always be a cardinal point in British policy; and the
encouragement of indirect rule will probably prove the
greatest safeguard against the political submersion of
the Malays which would result from the development
• of popular government on western lines. For, in such a
government the Malays would be hopelessly outnumbered
by the other races owing to the great influx of immigrants
that has taken place into Malaya during the last few
years.
"Politically everything seems to point to the desirability
of the Rulers and their respective Governments being
allowed to have control of their own domestic affairs
without interference except in those cases where a unified
policy is clearly necessary.”

The new deal scorned this conclusion, lumping the pro¬

tected Malay States along with the Settlements of Penang and
Malacca into a Union under His Majesty’s jurisdiction, with
Singapore as the one relic of the Crown Colony of the Straits
Settlements. In the new Union the states were no longer
described as protectorates but as a protectorate. Rulers who
had always presided at State Councils were no longer to be
members, and the chair was to be taken by a British Resident
Commissioner. Even the prerogative of mercy was no longer
to be exercised by the Rulers. Crozcn grants were to be issued
for unoccupied lands not by a High Commissioner but by a
 142 MALAYA AND IT8 HISTORY

Governor as in a colony, and the laws were no longer, as here¬

tofore, to be signed and ratified by the Sultans, but by that
Governor whose very title symbolized the annexation of the
protected states, or, let us *ay, their descent to a colonial status
unprecedented for such highly organized and civilized countries.
• Jurisdiction, of course, means full powers of government from
\ Whitehall. This in fact we had under the decent formula of the
old treaties. But the new agreements, which the Sultans, taken
by surprise and without time or leave to consult their people,
were induced to sign, gave us a blank cheque for the future
disposal of the Malays, compelling them to accept "such future
constitutional arrangements for Malaya as may be approved by
His Majesty". One of these arrangements was that any Malay
chief appointed a member of a State Council should swear
allegiance not to his own Sultan but to the King. Humiliation
could hardly go farther.
In clauses as vague as those that adumbrated a Crown-cum-
protcctorate Union, the new proposals talked of a Malayan
franchise. Birth in Malaya or a period of residence there was
to qualify Briton, Chinese and Indian to become citizens with
"all the rights that term implies”. What it does imply is not
beyond legal and political cavil but it is hardly surprising that
one of the Malay Rulers at once challenged a Whitehall state¬
ment that "Great Britain having learnt the richness of an
infusion of new blood and talent”, and having derived strength
from it, was aiming at the same consummation in Malaya. "I
would point out,” wrote His Highness, "that Great Britain has
never at any time accepted as citizens aliens equal in number to
her indigenous population, and that such immigrations as have
Occurred have been of people closely related in blood and of the
same religion, which is not the case with Chinese, Indians and
the indigenous people of Malaya.” The inadequacy of the
official definition of this citizenship was pilloried in tho House of
Commons, but criticism left the Government unmoved (1947),
and since for Malayan citizenship there need be no divestment
of prior nationality (and a Chinese cannot change his nationality),
some of these citizens may one day be enemy nationals, afla:
anyhow it may startle New Zealand and Australia to realize
that within a few years Chinese nationals may be outvoting and
 THB MALAYAN UNION AND SINGAPORE 143

dominating all the other race9 in Malaya and turning a peninsula

that is the key to the Pacific into a province of China. With
their customary acceptance of the inevitable Malays have
agreed to this citizenship for foreigners who make Malaya their
permanent home. But they must still be nervous lest the new
citizens may be admitted sooner or later without any quid pro
quo into the higher civil service and the Malays become liable
to be tried in their own country by a Chinese or Indian judge.
Chinese and Indians have long had seats on the State and
Federal Councils, and in the old Federated States they flooded
the ranks of the subordinate civil service. But as early as 1904
the Rulers’ objection to foreigners other than British in the
higher posts of the civil service had been upheld by Whitehall,
In the Colony of the Straits Settlements superior posts were
thrown open some years ago to all the locally born, but not in the
Malay Statos. There is excuse for the Malay attitude. Every¬
where the Chincso and the Indians are inflexible in excluding
the Malay from commerce. When the Kedah government once
called for tenders for the erection of buildings and stipulated
that a quarter of the labour force must be Malay, no Chinese
or Indians would condone the breaking of their closed ring by
tendering, though payment of ten per cent above the sum
tendored was offered. When a Malay co-operativo society tried
to export its copra by a Chinese coastal stenmer to Singapore,
the first cargo was left on the jetty and the second was found on
arrival to have mysteriously diminished. When the government
gave loans to Perak fishermen to get them out of the clutch of
the Chinese middleman, the Chinese manufacturers at Penang
refused to sell tho fisherman ice. Is it surprising that the
Malay coming down with honours from Cambridge sees
quite clearly that if he is to be edged out of the civil service
also, then he is doomed to political as well as economic sub¬
ordination in his own land ? Why, he asks, should his country
be ruled by aliens who came there for commercial advantage
and have yet to exhibit political ability in the administration of
their own homelands? The Malay knows, too, that before
Whitehall precipitated its aborted Union, the Chinese, except
for a few Straits-bom with English ideas and education, were
quite apathetic about Malayan politics, wanting neither
144 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

government posts nor local citizenship. Asa well-known member

of the Chinese side of the civil sen-ice wrote at the time:
"Popular demand for democratic representation there was
none ” The main interest thinking and responsible Chinese
took in the stir created by the new policy, was as to its effect
on trade. Would it accentuate racial hates and dislocate
business ?
Even before the Malay Rulers had been consulted, the Union
was announced in the Commons as a fait accompli, and nothing
excited more criticism than the method adopted to get the
signatures of the Rulers to a treaty ceding to Great Britain
full political power under the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1890.
For Whitehall’s emissary to the Rulers was entrusted with the
dual functions of getting their signatures and of recognizing
on behalf of the King the four who had succeeded to their
thrones during the Japanese occupation, a joint errand that
inevitably raised an outcry against force majeur. In most states,
though not in Johorc, a pretence was made of getting the consent
of the Rulcr-in-Council, but the Councils had been suspended
by the British military authorities and legally did not exist.
Where there were symptoms of recalcitrance Sir Harold
MacMichael described how a civil servant in brigadier’s uniform
was put up to explain the new policy in Malay, "a method
productive of excellent results”. At best the explanations must
have been vague, as the government had not yet elucidated its
proposals. But the strangest features about these negotiations
for a basis for Malaya’s future democracy was the strict secrecy
Sir Harold was enjoined to require from the Rulers, who by a
British democracy were forbidden to divulge to their subjects
transactions that must affect the future of the Malay race. There
is no doubt that history, implacable in its finai judgments,
will condemn procedure neither in accordance with British
ideals nor even with modern British practice in dealing with
peoples far. less civilized than the Malays.
All these points were raised in vigorous debates in both
Houses, Viscount Elibank and Viscount Marchwood condemn¬
ing the proposals in the Upper House and Captain Gammans,
forraerLy of the Malayan Civil Service, leading the attack in the
Commons. But perhaps the most, notable protest was in a
 THE MALAYAN UNION AND SINGAPORE I45

letter to The Times signed by seventeen retired officials who had

held high appointments in Malaya. Among the signatories to
that letter were a former Chief Justice and four gentlemen
who had been Colonial Governors. Its final paragraph
read:

“We deprecate the manner in which the people of

the Straits Settlements and of the Malay States are being
coerced by Orders-in-Council without regard to democratic
principles, and finally we deprecate with all the emphasis
at our command the issue of the preliminary Orders-in-
Council, purporting to provide no more than a ‘frame¬
work’ for the immediate administration of Malaya, but in
effect an instrument for the annexation of the Malay
States.”

The Government in the end left the matter of Singapore

remaining a separate Colony for local decision, but over the
Union of the Malay States it bowed to the storm. For the
Rulers refused to meet the new Governor officially; Malays
refused to serve on the new Councils, and the Malay people
wore mourning for a week. The upshot was that the British
Government appointed a committee of representative Asiatics
and British officials to explore the possibility of a via media
that would placate Malay resentment. The advice of that
committee was to change the Union into a Federation under a
High Commissioner on the lines of the former federation
of four states with the rights and status of the Rulers as
representatives of their people left unimpaired. It recommended
that the High Commissioner, like the Governor of a Colony,
should have a small Executive Council of officials and unofficials
to advise him. And the Malays in their anxiety to learn the
methods of government asked that the example of Johore be
followed by the creation of an Executive Council and a Malay
Prime Minister for each state. The Committee's report was
published for the information and views of the other races of
Malaya and with few modifications was accepted in London
and implemented in Malaya in 1948.
V, The new policy, while preserving the individuality of each
 146 MALAYA.AND IT8 HISTORY

state, aims at a centralized uniform system of government,

economical and safeguarding financial stability. There are
therefore not only Legislative Councils for each state,
but a Federal Legislative Council to consider and pass laws
applicable to all the states. / ,
The innovation of Malayan citizenship was retained, and
citizenship is necessary to qualify members of other races to
' be appointed members of the various Councils, and in the
£. future to enjoy any electoral rights. Its acquisition Is auto-
matia for subjects of the Malay Rulers, for any person bom
in tho Federation who habitually speaks Malay and follows
Malay customs, for any British subject born in the Federation
and resident there for fifteen years and for any British subject
bom in the Federation to a father born in Malaya or resident
there for fifteen years. Citizenship can also be acquired (il by
applicants who have been born in the Federation and lived there
. for not less than eight out of the twelve years preceding the
S lication, or (2) by immigrant foreigners who have lived in the
eration not less than fifteen out of twenty years preceding
the application. This citizenship cannot, of course, effect racial
fusion. As has been said, most of the citizens will even remain
foreign nationals. And if that may be only on academic diffi¬
culty, the change is still likely to lead to their clamour for
admission to the higher ranks of the civil service and so excite
Malay resentment.
A problem of serious concern is future immigration, Its
importance is recognized by the statement that it will be a
principal matter on which the High Commissioner and the
K Rulers will confer. Should any major change in immigration
policy be contemplated by the Federal Government and 'a
majority of the Rulers object to it and not agree with the views
of the High Commissioner, the proposal willbe referred for the
decision of the unofficial members of the Federal Legislative
Council. In theory, therefore, decision will lie with the sovereign
people as represented by some 31 Malays, and by 14 Chinese,
5 Indians, 7 Europeans, 1 Ceylonese, j Eurasian. The Malay
majority may well oppose any further large immigration of
, 1 foreigners other than Indonesians of their own blood and
;V religion. And though unofficials of other races have always been
 THE MALAYAN ONION AND SINGAPORE 147

disposed to encourage immigration for the sake of plentiful

labour, the trouble caused by Chinese communists and the
readiness of modem Malays to become wage-earners appear
likely to alter^ the attitude, at any rate, of the Europeans.
But Whitehall’s democratic ingenuity can hardly relieve it of
the responsibility of arbitration to settle any conflict of views
among Malaya’s new citizens.
These details aside, it is satisfactory that a great people
were magnanimous enough to see the error of a precipitate
and mistaken policy and explore an alternative acceptable to a
very loyal race. The pity of it is perfectly expressed in the
Malay saying that “Though the wound has healed, the scar
remains.”
 CHAPTER XVI

THE FUTURE

History should throw light both on a country’s past and its

potential future. But too often it has failed to illumine oithor
the past or the future, because it has been perverted into an
instrument of political propaganda, either consciously as in
Nazi Germany and Japan or unconsciously as In so many
historical text-books supplied to the schools of the British
Empire. Propagandist vision is always warped, and the histories
that describe Malaya, for example, as if it were created by the
British out of the void fail even to provide the background
necessary to exhibit their achievements. One must allow that
the false perspective of such English primers is due not to
deliberate misrepresentation but to complacent patriotism and
complete ignorance of Oriental history. Perhaps the one good
effect of a modern war is that patriotism, while growing more
ardent, ceases for a time to be complacent; and though there nrc
still huge gaps in Oriental history Malaya, at any rate, is singu¬
larly fortunate in the quantity of material now available, so that
the British period stands out clearly enough against the Hindu,
Portuguese and Dutch eras.
Against Malaya's background of nearly two thousand years,
what arc the prospects of its future in the political, economic
and cultural spheres ?
Today, with India before its eyes, the East is eager for
independence and self-govornment. But with the illogicality
that is the mark of compromise all races nowadays talk of
independence, while they surrender more and more of their
liberties to cosmopolitan organizations. Internationalism of
some kind is necessary for the peace and prosperity of the world.
And though in this book the faults and fallibility of British
administration have not been extenuated, it would leave a false
impression if it failed to convey the conviction that, in spite of
errors, the British Empire has been the most effective instru¬
ment for international good mankind has ever seen. Even those
 THE FUTURE *49
reluctant to admit so much will hardly deny that, however far it
falls short of their ideal, it has been shown by two world wars to
be the only pattern for a practical system of world-wide inter¬
national co-operation. Some day on that pattern there may be
designed a federation of the whole Malay world, fitting into a
Collective system of security for South-East Asia with the
countries of the Indian Ocean on one side and with Australia
and New Zealand on the other. On a small scale it is no in¬
considerable achievement that within seventy years British
protection has replaced strong jealousies between the states by
a common sentiment of Malay nationalism. The seed of that
nationalism Great Britain sowed by roads and railways and
education, though the flower blossomed finally under a fierce
patriotism engendered by the policy of the Malayan Union.
The impetuous attempt to create that Union, coming on the
top of Malay clashes with Chinese guerillas, mostly young
Communists, during and immediately after Japanese occupation
was not calculated to promote interracial amity in Malaya.
Whitehall talked airily and ignorantly of a fusion of races that
is still offensive to the pride of the Chinese and to the religion
of the Malay. Thore can be no fusion, but before the war there
were two factors making for goodwill between the races of
Malaya: the universal prosperity and the indifference of all but
a few locally educated Chinese and Indians to Malayan politics.
After the Japanese war, inflation and food shortage fostered the
growth of Chinese banditry. Difficulties consequent on the war
may pass, but if ever rubber, for example, should cease to be a
, commercial crop, it will tax all the brains of scientists to dis¬
cover any substitute that will secure continued prosperity and
interracial amity for a country of poor soil and comparatively
expensive labour.
* Of the open Malay resentment against exclusion from
commerce by the Chinese some idea is given in previous
chapters. But it is satisfactory to know that before the war large
Malay retail shops were being supplied with goods at no
discriminatory charge by Chinese wholesale merchants. The
Malay, with his well-balanced statesmanlike mind, recognizes
the fairness of granting citizenship to foreigners prepared to
make their homes in Malaya and advance its prosperity. Those
 150 MALAYA AND ITS HISTORY

foreigners must recognize that citizenship has its obligations

and that it is probably good business to observe them.'
In the cultural sphere as in the political British influence
dominates Malaya, affecting the intellectual and social ideals
of the progressive elements in all races. Democracy, with its
various shades of meaning for Hindu caste and the follower of
Muhammad and the follower of Confucius plus the i^nerican
missionary, is a counter current in all their conversation. And
the newspapers, of which Malaya now has a spate in English,
Chinese and Malay, ignore the point that the governments
of the new free countries of Asia are in fact not democracies
but oligarchies of leaders with a Western education.
“Abstraction,” as Whitehead has remarked, “is nothing else
- than omission of part of the truth,” and the generalizations of
British journalese arc exceedingly difficult to translate so that
the columns of the Malay press, for example, are filled with
phrases incomprehensible to the ordinary Malay reader without
a lengthy commentary. There is no objection to the importa¬
tion of new and useful words from Javanese or English. But
syntax alien to the spirit of Malay and phrases meaningless to
one ignorant of the English original spell the ruin of the Malay’s
instrument for the expression of coherent thought. An imper¬
fect instrument for thought involves imperfect thinking, so that
one can only hope that the future of the race may be controlled
by the few expert in English, and by the many content to think
for themselves on traditional lines without the aid of the ver¬
nacular press. For Malays and Chinese are realists with a
heritage of profound common sense that nothing but intellec¬
tual confusion or continuous propaganda is likely to extinguish,
That common sense recognizes that the races of Malaya have
been ffreatly indebted to the British and still need their tutelage
and their help to restore the ravages of war, to maintain peace
and order and to fight for Malayan interests in the field of
international commerce.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

mm-. 3°“™}, Federated Malay States Museums.

v-,--.v--
' " ilai andEtuiini Ash.
“ 3°umal, Antit&w
TBA'Xn 1
= •?“"“{ K'i* i&y ™'“ SlKi“J> Molqm Branch.
BffSB
- M*
1
° “™* ffoRo?fl Asiatic Society, Straits Branch.
= Papers on Malay Subjects.
A11,thclc P,enod‘cals contain valuable material for the
study of Malaya and its inhabitants.

Arberry, A. J. and Rom Landau. Islam Today. London, 194-?.

rhe chapter on Islam in Malaya by R. O. Winstedc
• is the only study of the subject in English.
Barbosa, Duarte, The Book oj. Hakluyt Society. 1918-21.
The author served the Portuguese Government in the
East from 1500-17, and is one of the original authorities
tor the history of mediaeval Malacca.
Bennett, Lt.-Gen. H. Gordon. Why Singapore Fell. London.
- *944-
A good account of the Japanese invasion of Malaya.
Bort, Governor Balthasar. “Report on Malacca, 1678 ” Tr.
M. J. Bremner. JRASMB, Vol. V, Pt. 1, 1927.
A valuable source for the history of Dutch rule in
Malacca.
Bouloer, D. G. The Life of Sir Stamford Raffles. London, 1807.
A discursive life, full of material.
Chin Kee On. Malaya Upside Down. Singapore, 1946.
A first-hand account of Malaya under the Japanese.
Clifford, Sir Huoh. In Court and Kampong. London.
-* Studies in Brown Humanity. London.
These are perhaps his best tales, giving vivid accounts
of Malay life just prior to British protection, though the
author is inclined to paint the emotional life of the
Malay through his own ardent temperament.
GOEDfes, G. “Le Royaumc de Crivaya.” Bulletin de iFcoleFrancaise
d'Extrfme-Orient. Hanoi, XVIII, No. 6. 1918.
- “Lcs Inscriptions Malaises de Crivijaya. Ib., Vol. XXX.
Nos. 1-2. 1930.
—— L** Hindouises cTIndochine et d'lndonisie. Paris. 1948.
In 1918 Professor G. Coed6s first published his startling
151
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
*5*
discovery of the Malayo-Buddhist kingdom Sri Vijaya.
His latest work is a masterly sketch of the hinduized
kingdoms of South-East Asia including Malaya.
GOupland, Sir Reoinald. Raffles, 1781-1826. Oxford.
The beit general sketch of the life and work of the
founder of Singapore.
d’Albu&otRQJJb’s “Commentaries”. Tr. W. de G. Birch. Hakluyt
Society. London, 1927. 3 Vols.
This work, by a natural son of the Portuguese con¬
queror of Malacca, is another of the sources for our
knowledge of mediaeval Malacca.
Danvers, F. O. The Portuguese in India, a Vols. London.
Inaccurate in detail, this work gives a good general
idea of Portuguese rule in Asia.
d» Moubray, G. A. de C. Matriarchy in the Malay Peninsula.
London, 1936.
A reliable study of the Minangkabnu colonists of Negri
Sembilan.
d'Eredia, Godinho. “Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay.”
Tr. by J. V. Mills. JRASMB, 1920. Vol. VIII.
Another Portuguese account of Malacca written after
a century of Portuguese rule.
Emerson, Rupert. Malaysia. A Study in Direct and Indirect
Rule (in Malaya and Netherlands India). New York,
«937-
A fully documented and expert work by a Harvard
Professor, written with a bias against the old imperial¬
ism and so from an angle unfamiliar to most British
students.
Evans, I. H. N. The Negritos of Malaya, 1937.
Firth, Raymond. Malay Fishermen: their Peasant Economy, London,
1946.

. An expert account of the fishermen of Kelantan.

Fnmi, Rosemary. House-keeping among Malay Peasants. London,

A detailed study of 1301 Kelantan folk, that should

serve as a model for investigation into the economic
structure of other Malay communities.
GresoN, W. S. See G. Maxwell.
Gimlette, J. D. A Dictionary of Malayan Medicine. Oxford, 1939.
- Malay Poisons and Charm Cures. London, 1029.
Exhaustive works on an interesting element in Malay
« culture.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
*53
Hahn, E. Rcdjles of Singapore. London, 1948.
A lively account by a writer who has used Dutch
sources.
Heine-Gbldern, Robert. Prehistoric Research in the Netherlands
Indies. South-East Asia Institute. New York, 1945.
This summarizes the results of all prehistoric research
in the Malayan region (including Malaya), and has a
complete bibliography. *
Hurqronte, Snouck. Mecca.
A reliable account of the Indonesian quarter and
studies in Mecca.
Krom, N. J. Hindu-lauaansche Geschitdenis. The Hague, 1031.
A classical work on the Hindu period, of which the
Greater India Society promises a translation.
Leupe, P. A. “The Siege and Capture of Malacca from the
Portuguese in 1640-1.” (Extracts from the archives of
the Netherlands East India Co.). Tr. by Mac Hacobian,
JRASMB, Vol. XIV, Pt. 1.1036.
A first-hand account of tnc siege of Malacca in

Linbhan, V#“ A History of Pahang.” JRASMB, Vpi. XIV, Pt. a.

T*hc only adequate history of an interesting State.

Majumdar, R. C. Suvarna-dvipa. Political History. 1936.
- Cultural History. 1938. Dacca.
A scholarly account of Hindu influence in the Malay
area.
- Hindu Colonies in the Far East. Calcutta, 1944.
A aummaiy.
Maxwell, Sir G. In Malay Forests.
Charming talcs of the jungle and the rural upcountry
Malay.
—— The Civil Defence of Malaya.
An authentic account of the Local Forces and Defence
Services of Malaya at the time of the Japanese invasion,
with chapters on the loyalty of its inhabitants and on
, the evacuation of Europeans.
Maxwell and W. S. Gibson. Treaties and Engagements, Malay
Stales and Borneo. London, 1924.
Indispensable for students of Malaya’s political history.
Maxwell, Sir Wiluam E. “Law and Customs of Malays with
reference to tenure of land.” JRASSB, Vol. XIII.
- “Law relating to slavery among Malaya.” JRASSB,
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
*54
Vol. XII. Valuable articles describing conditions when
British protection of the Malay States began.
MoNair, Major F. Perak and the Malays (Sarong and Kris).
• ,' London, 1878.
A good account of the early days of British protection.
Mills, L, A. “British Malaya, 1824-1867.” JRASMB, Vol. Ill,
* • Pt a. 1925.
+ A well-documented work on political and economic
history, the civil service, the Chinese and piracy.
- British Rule in Eastern Asia. London, 1942.
Indispensable for its account of all branches of modern
British administration and endeavour in Malaya,
based on a careful study of many official documents.
Morrison, Ian. Malayan Postscript. London, 1942.
In spite of errors of fact and inference this is the best
account of Malaya during the Japanese invasion.
Newbold, T. S. Political and Statistical Account of British Settle¬
ments in the Straits of Malacca. 2 Vols. London, 1939.
Valuable for its contemporary statistics and history.
Pires, Tom*. The Suma Orientalis. Tr. by A. Cortesao. 2 Vols.
Hakluyt Society, 1944.
Written in Malacca, 1512-15. The most valuable of
all Portuguese accounts of Malacca under the Malay
Sultans. The MS. was lost until the translator dis¬
covered it in Paris in 1937.
Purcell, Victor. (1) Malaya, Outline of a Colony. T. Nelson and
Sons Ltd. London, 1^46
A readable and well-informed outline.
- (2) The Chinese in Malaya. Oxford, 1948.
An expert account.
Rioby, J. Law, Pt. U. The Ninety-Nine Laws of Perak. PMS,
1908.
The eighteenth-century laws of Perak with translation.
Rose, Major Anous. Who Dies Fighting. London, 1944.
• An account of what the author saw of the fighting
during the Japanese invasion, with a lively criticism of
British tactics.
Sastri, K. A. N., “Sri Vijaya”. Bulletin de I’Ecole Franfaise
d7Extrime-Orient. Hanoi. Tome XL, fasc. 2 (1940-1).
Contains full bibliography.
Schebesta, P. Among the Forest-Dwarfs of Malaya. London,
*939-

A recent book on Malaya’s aborigines by a trained

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 155

observer: defaced by absurd exaggerations about the

jungle.
Sohurhammer, Rev. G., S.J. St. Francis Xavier. Tr. by F. J,
Eble. London, 1928,
Shaw, G. E. Malay Industries. Pt. 3, "Rice Planting”. PMS,
fc I9X,»
A summary of the existing knowledge.
Skbat, W. W. Malay Magic. London, 1900.
A mine of information on Malay beliefs and magical
practices, with an appendix of invocations in

- and (?. O. Blaodrn. Pagan Paces of the Malay Peninsula.

2 Vols. London, 1906.
A summary of all information at the date of publi¬
cation, with an invaluable comparative vocabulary of
the languages.
Stewart, F. A. The Lift qf St. Francis Xavier. London, 1917.
Swbttenham, Sir Frank. British Malaya. London,
The earlier chapters arc guite obsolete. The chapters
on the author’s own time are valuable, though
that time is not seen in perspective but with con¬
temporary eyes. The account of the Pangkor treaty is
incomplete.
.. Malay Sketches. London.
- The Real Malay. London.
These stones of men and events in the early dates of
British protection have vivid reality and show a deep
knowledge of the Malay of the period.
Taylor, E. N. "Customary Law of Rcmbau." JRASMB,
Vol. VII, 1929.
- "Malay Family Law.” JRASMB, Vol. XV, 1937..
- "Mohammedan Divorce” by Khula.
- "Inheritance in Negri Sembilan.” JRASMB, Vol. XXI,

Four of the best articles on Malay law.

Wilkinson, R. J. Life and Customs. Pt. 1. "The Incidents of Malay
Life. PA/S.
-■—- "Law.” Pt. 1. Introductory Sketch. PMS. Kuala Lumpor.

^r/Wilkinson was the author of the standard Malay-

English Dictionary and wrote many pamphlets that
inspired later writers. The two pamphlets here cited
j , have not yet been superseded.
156 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Winstedt, R. O. The Malays: a Cultural History. London,

- “A*History of Malaya.” JRASMD, Vol. XIII, Pl 1.

- R, £). ^'A History of Malay Literature.” JRASMBt Vol.

XVII, Pt. 3. 1940.
- Malay Proverbs. London, 1950.
- Malaya. Editor of. London, 1923. (Chapter XIV has been
superseded by the editor's later work, and Chapter XV
is obsolete).
- The Malay Magician. London, 1950,
See Arberry, A.J.
All these books have very full bibliographies.
VVrioht A. and Reid, T. H. The Malay Peninsula. London, 191a.
A readable work on modern Malaya with chapters
based on original research.
 INDEX
Aborigines, 7, 10, 13-4, 103, 112 Federation of Malaya, 146; citi¬
Achch, 30, 32, 43-4,48-9,62, 118 zenship in, 146
Agriculture, 112-7 Finance, public, 109-11
Alexander the Great, 37-8 Fishing, 120-3
Arabs, 16,21,30,37-8,41, 104,118 Flora, 9
Australo-Melancsoids, 7, 13, 14
Gold, 119
British in Malaya 22; adminis¬
tration, 78-95; law, 96-102;
social services, 124-34 Health, public, 127-30
Buddhism, 24-6, 28-30, 103, 118 Hinduism, 7, 24-31, 99-101, 103,
Bugls (from Celebes), 10, 16, 52, 128, 131
59, 60, 62-3, 106

Immigration, 18,20-2,60, 141-3,

Census (1947), 18 , 20-2 148
Chinese, 16, 18-20, 25, 30, 33-5, Indinns, 20-1, 34-8, 40-1, 50, 52,
41, 52-3, 60-4, 69, 70, 73, 76, 103-6, 113, 126-7
79, 81-2, 85, 88-90, 92, 94, Industries, 112-23
104, 106-8, 114-5, 117, 119, Iron, 120
121-2, 126, 129, 130, 132-4, Islam, 17, 19, 37-9, 46, 130-1
139, 140, 142-4, 149, 150
Chola invasion, 30
Citizenship, Malayan, 146 Jakun, 13-4
Coconuts, 114-5 Jambi (Mclayu), 16, 30
Commerce, 25, 31, 35-6, 47, 52, Japanese, 120, 135-9
60, 103-111 Java (and Javanese), 7, 31, 32,
34-6, 42-3, 50, 56, 104, 112-4,
126, 130, 150
Decentralization, 91-3 Johorc, 14, 43-4, 48-9, 58-9,
Dutch, the, 7, 47-52, 55-60, 62, 61-4, 71-2, 76, 90, 92-4, 100,
96, 105-7, 116, 118, 125, 129 103, 115

East India Company, 22, 53, 78-

Kedah, 10, 13, 15, 18, 24, 30, 32,
82,97
34, 36, 48, 50-5, 61, 75, 90, 92,
Education, 45, 130-4
94, 96, 100, 104-5, 110, 112-3,
Eurasians, 22, 52, 82
117-8, 135, 143
Kclantan, 10-1, 13, 15-6, 18,
Fauna, 11 28-31, 75, 90, 94, 111, 113-4,
Federated Malay States, 88-91 118, 122, 135
•57
. 158
Labour, 124-7 Penang, 11, 53-5, 59, 61, 78-9, ■*
Langkasuka, 18, 28, 30, 33, 113 97, 107,
107, 119, 141
14!
Law, 96-102 Pepper, 117
• Light, Frauds, 53-5, 78, 125 Perak, 27/ 29, 35, 43-4, 50, 54,
Literature, Malay, 21,37-9,130-1 62-3, 65-9, 85, 88-9, 100-1,
103, 118, 140
Portuguese, 7, 40-51, 96,114, U7,
Mtyapahit v. Java, 7-8, 31, 32-5 118
Malacca, under Malay rule, 32-9; Proto-Malays, 14
under Portuguese, 40-9; under
-X. Dutch, 47-52; under British,
65-7, 79, 80; ceded by Hol¬ Races, of Malaya, 7, 13-23
land, 88 Raffles (Sir) Thomas Stamford,
Sta
Malay administration, 82-7; edu¬ 57-61, 80-1, 129
cation, 130-1; kingship, 85; Rice-planting, 112-4
medicine, 127-9; industries, Rubber, 115-7
112-23; race, 14-7; religions:
Hindu, 25-31,99-101,103,128;
Sakai (Senoi), 13
Muhammadan, 17, 19, 37-9,
Selangor, 32, 35, 62-5, 70
46,130-1; States, 62-77; trade,
Siam, 21, 27, 32, 54-5, 108
103-9
Singapore, 8,57-61, 80,95,107-9,
Malaya, the name, 8-9; physical
141, 145
> features, 9-12; Federation of,
Slavery, 124-6
145-0
Sri Vijaya, 7, 18, 29-31,33-5, 104
Malayan Union, 95, 140-5, 149
Straits Settlements, 78-94
Meru, Mount, 27, 85
Minangkabails, 10, 16, 27, 43,
51,02,82-5, 115, 125 Tin, 118-9
Mining, 118-20 Trade, 103; royal, 105; free, 107-9

Unfederated Malay States, 92-6

Naning, 18,56-7,115
Negri Sem bican, 20-7, 35, 62-3,
70-2, 77, 82-5, 118 Vijaya, Sri o. Sri VtfayA

' Pahang, 10, 15, 30-1, 35, 43-4, X“™'' St' Fran“’
48,63, 72-5,88, 100, 118-20
Pasai, 32, 34, 30,’ 38 Zabag, 30

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