I like the way you experience Kuching's history every time you set out for a walk.

In the cemetery of St Thomas's lie the settlement's oldest graves.




This is apparently the beginning of the "spirit road". (We had already walked some of this before I read this article. We had spotted the graves, but not realized the context.)

The first "White Rajah" had his own spirit encounter, or so the story goes. What he thought was a little boy playing with water near Hong San Si temple turned out -- he was told -- to be the manifestation of Kong Teck Choo Ong, a boy deity. Rajah Brooke had a water hydrant erected there. This later, of course, succumbed to development, but a subsequent, more heritage-conscious generation installed a little garden and hydrant by way of a reminder.


The second Brooke ruler also did his bit for water. According to Tony Sebastian, a waterworks project was initiated in 1887, with the aim of supplying water for the town. As a result: "Government reports record Kuching as the second town (in present day Malaysia) to initiate an urban water supply system after Penang. And they both built an aqueduct -- the only two in Malaysia to this day."

A reservoir was built in 1895, and was in use until 1924. "The benevolent ruler," as a heavily ironic Borneo Post columnist styles him, "must have been convinced about the significance of treated water because almost at the same time in England, many reservoirs were being built for the English".

The lake, which we've lapped many times, was created in 1928, but its size and shape have changed over time.

As Sebastian puts it, the aqueduct "is even more valuable because almost the entire waterworks system still remains... It is a beautiful and invaluable example of Kuchings heritage that is still lived in, preserved as is, as all heritage monuments should be."







The Ranee Museum commemorates the life of Margaret, wife of the second Rajah Brooke (he of the aqueduct and reservoir). It's new (or at least postdates our visit last year), and was inspired by the rediscovery of some Brooke family memorabilia.

Margaret is projected very sympathetically. She arrived in Sarawak with a mind that was open to new inputs and influences; she was curious; she was eager to learn the local language and customs, and adopt/adapt them for her own use. In the last third of the 19th century, this must have been somewhat anachronistic behaviour. As William Dalrymple's White Mughals explains, "going native" was still an option in the 18th century and the early part of the 19th. By the time Margaret was heading for Sarawak, much clearer racial demarcation lines had generally been drawn. Her attitudes also seem much less judgmental than some of her contemporaries.

Despite her attractive qualities as a human being, her backdrop is offputtingly colonial, of course. I found myself drawn to this very human Ranee, but repulsed, as always, by the system that made her "Ranee" in the first place.







POSTSCRIPT 8 February

There's a great little collection of historical pictures in the MBKS Pictorial Gallery in the Jubilee Gardens complex. Here are a few examples: