Exact conditions vary but longhouses were usually built on stilts and raised 5 to 10 yards off the ground. An entire village of several hundred people live in a single building, the longhouse. The longhouse is a form of lodging for communal living employed by the indigenous tribes of Malaysia and still practiced by many communities of the interior. One of the museum's most startling exhibits is a longhouse modeled after those built by the Iban tribe. The state's main repository for cultural, ecological and historical artifacts, the museum is open every day except Friday from 9 A.M. The villa was built in 1891 to specifications drawn up by the second Rajah's French valet in imitation of a half-remembered Norman town hall. Most of the boatmen who ferry passengers across the half-mile-wide river are Muslim Malays.Ī dignified French villa with a large, modern extension houses the Sarawak Museum. The sentries gave the traditional cry not so much to comment on the state of the kingdom as to prove to the Rajah that they were awake.Īs you cross the river back into Kuching at sundown, a loudspeaker carries the tinny chant of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer - an unsettling blend of past and present. With only the apparent backing of the British Empire, a handful of white administrators and a few Sarawak Rangers acting as a police force, the Brookes had to rely on tradition and bluff to maintain their rule.įort Margherita did serve one useful purpose, however it was the starting point for the cry of ''All's well'' that echoed around Kuching every hour from 8 P.M.
Much of the legacy of the days of the Rajah in Sarawak is on the same diminutive scale, a constant reminder of how precarious outside control of Sarawak was. It is tiny, almost toylike, a miniature tower poking up 30 feet above the comic battlements. The surprising thing about the fort, now a museum of military hardware, is its size. The fort was completed in 1871, by which time the Brookes had consolidated their rule to the extent that defenses were no longer necessary around Kuching. Fort Margherita, named after Ranee Margaret, the wife of Charles, the second Rajah, was built about a mile downriver from the Istana.
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To protect his kingdom, Brooke built a series of forts in and around Kuching. The attack almost cost the Rajah his life and only failed because of the loyalty of local tribes to the crown. Just visible downstream, the Brookes' Istana shimmers in the afternoon sun, incongruously European amid the banana plants and palm trees.Īs late as 1857, much of Kuching was destroyed and the Istana taken when 600 Chinese miners from an encampment upriver at Bau decided to take over Sarawak from Brooke. The only sign of human presence is a collection of wooden houses on stilts, a Malay kampong, or fishing village. All that remains is the jungle, smothering the hills and creeping to the water's edge, the odd mangrove swamp an outpost of the forest in the river. As you float by on one of the prahu tambang passenger boats that ply from bank to bank, the buildings and wharves of the town disappear with a few strokes of the Malay boatman's oars. But it is the river, broad, ponderous and brown, that is like a road to the past.
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Today, the Istana is the State Governor's residence, but the only evidence of change in ownership is a billboard sunk into the lawn that proclaims in Malay, ''Human development is the basis of a model state.''Įven in Kuching, a noisy, modern Asian town full of Toyotas and bristling with television antennas, the flavor of the last century lingers on in the diminutive colonial post office and the columned court building. The Istana's understated, cottagelike appearance, its rolling lawns that sweep down to the water's edge and the ceremonial arch built to impress Iban chiefs arriving in their longboats are the epitome of the civilization that the Brookes thought they were bringing to Sarawak.
The Istana, the palace built by the Brookes on a bend in the Sarawak River, still looks coolly over the muddy waters into the bustle of Kuching, the trading town James Brooke made his capital. Parts of Sarawak are modernized, but the pace of change is uneven and turning a corner can strip away a century. The kingdom of the white rajahs is now part of the Federation of Malaysia, separated from the mainland peninsula by the South China Sea and by several decades in industrial development.
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