EUROPE‘S colonial powers never had much respect for the "possession is nine-tenths of the law" attitude to empire building.
Almost 500 years ago, convinced that the Islamic sultanate and trading port of Malacca would make a great strategic base in the East Indies, Portuguese seafarers simply sailed in and seized it.
They built a fort on the shore and settled down with dreams of dominating the regional spice trade from the narrow Straits of Malacca on the west coast of the Malayan peninsula.
They‘d hardly made inroads in that ambition before the Dutch sailed in, blockaded the town and took it from them in 1641. In turn, the Dutch lost Malacca to the British in the early 19th century, but the British were displaced temporarily by the Japanese in World War II and then permanently in 1957 with Malayan independence.
You might not imagine, though, if you stood today on Malacca‘s rather dismal and litter-strewn foreshore, that great names in history sailed through these straits and into the river that still threads its way under the dreary concrete motorway bridge on Jalan Syed Abdul Aziz, into the heart of the modern town.
Magellan was here, as was another accomplished Portuguese navigator and military commander, Afonso de Albuquerque, who seized the place in 1511. The great Chinese admiral Zheng He knew Malacca almost a century before them, and the Jesuit missionary Saint Francis Xavier made it a base in the late 1540s.
All this makes Malacca, or Melaka as it is called in Malay, one of the most interesting places to visit on the peninsula and certainly its most historic.
That many of its early buildings, including part of the first Portuguese fort and several fine 17th and 18th-century Dutch structures survive, adds weight to its credentials as one of the best-value short-stay trips out of the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
But Karuna, the tour guide who picked me up at KL‘s international airport (KLIA), must have wondered why I wanted to drive all the way to Malacca (a 2½-hour journey) to fill in a transit stop en-route to Brisbane.
At best, I‘d have maybe three hours to soak up all the history, but to my mind, missing Malacca if I got within cooee of the place would have been akin to visiting Sydney and never seeing the harbour.
To drive from KL to Malacca, you take the North-South Expressway, a toll road that heads southwest through the states of Negeri Sembilan, Malacca and Johor. Fortunately, it‘s a shorter trip from KLIA, which is 75km south of the capital and virtually on the way. It is a lovely drive through lush, tropical country splashed with palm-oil plantations and bordered by thickly vegetated hills.
The entrance to Malacca past the zoo on the tree-lined Ayer Keroh Rd is impressive, too, but it is only after you have driven past a lot of rather uninspiring modern architecture that you see a fine, yellow-washed church (St. Peter‘s, built in 1710 by the Dutch) and start to get a sense of the history waiting for you.
The main sights in the compact, historic part of Malacca include what remains of the old Portuguese fort, A‘ Famosa (1511), St Paul‘s Church (1521) with its monument to St Francis Xavier, the old Dutch official residence Stadthuys (1650) which now houses a fine history museum and the ochre-coloured Christ Church, another Dutch structure built in 1753.
There are also many museums, including the intriguingly named Museum of Perpetual Beauty and the Maritime Museum, housed by the river in a full-size replica of a 16th-century Portuguese treasure galleon. You can see all of this and much more on foot, including the souvenir and antique shops and restaurants along Jalan Hang Jebat (Jonker St). But for a bit of fun, it‘s not a bad idea to take one of Malacca‘s gaily decorated, ghetto-blasting bicycle rickshaws.
I wanted to get up to the ruins of St Paul‘s Church on top of the hill above A‘Famosa and see the Straits of Malacca through the eyes of those 16th century Portuguese invaders.
But Karuna insisted we first try a local delicacy at the Famosa Chicken Rice Ball Restaurant on Jonker Walk. The rice balls, which filled a gap but were uninspiring, cost less than $2 a plate, or two-thirds the price of a beer.
He told me Malacca was a favourite weekend destination for travellers out of KL and I wasn‘t surprised.
There‘s everything in this city to keep weekenders happy, including lots of shopping and an array of restaurants, and there is even a sound and light show.
But the history is what I came for. I got a real sense of it when we finally climbed the steps up Bukit St Paul to the ruined church and I looked out over the straits across a modern part of the city reclaimed from the sea.
A few years ago, during reclamation and rebuilding work, excavators discovered a treasure trove of artefacts from the Portuguese and Dutch eras, including 16th, 17th and 18th century coins still clearly bearing the stamps of the old colonial powers.
I found some on Jonker Walk at Hang Tuah Handicraft & Souvenirs, a shop run with enthusiasm by a woman named Monica Loh. Did I want the fragile 1511 Portuguese tin coin with a the faint outline of a galleon on its reverse side, or the more solid 1770 Dutch coin embossed with the impressive VOC stamp of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)?
I stood there for at least 20 minutes, talking to Monica and unable to decide, but in the end chose the Dutch coin because, as an Australian, 1770 seemed a fitting date.
I left with this little treasure and memento of Malacca in my bag and, all the way back to KLIA through a driving storm, thanked goodness that so much of this Malaysian city‘s history had been preserved and that I‘d seen something of it.
Source: www.news.com (21 Mei 2007)
