Giveaways
AFTER Kuala Lumpur, I headed a short distance southeast to Melaka, a seaport even more historic than Penang. Melaka is more commonly known in the West by its colonial name of Malacca, which still appears on many maps.
Officially known as the Historic City of Melaka, Melaka is the oldest of the four famous trading ports — Singapore, Melaka, Penang, and Phuket — that line the shore of the Strait of Malacca on the eastern side, across the water from the huge Indonesian island of Sumatra. Whatever the reasons, the Sumatran side of the Strait must have been judged a less suitable coast for the establishment of ports in the old days.
The Strait of Malacca has long been one of the busiest and most strategic waterways in the world. Most of the trade between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and India on the one hand, and China, Japan, and the rest of East Asia on the other, has passed through it for centuries past and continues to do so to this day. That’s a lot of trade!
Like George Town in Penang, Melaka is a UNESCO World Heritage Site these days.
Melaka straddles the muddy Melaka River, also still widely known as the Malacca River in English. The river is lined by embankments along which sailing ships from Europe once tied up to receive costly spices and silks, but which are now lined with cafes and old and brightly coloured buildings.
In the following short video of my encounter with a cheeky crow, you can see one of the riverboats go past.
Melaka is, if anything, even more historic and multicultural than Penang or Phuket. The land on which Melaka stands was originally at the very southern limits of Thailand, but not an area in which the Thais took much interest.
The mouth of the Melaka River was wrested from Thailand by the Chinese in the early 1400s during a brief period of overseas expansion. The Chinese founded the town of Melaka at the river’s mouth, which they allowed to be ruled by a local Muslim sultan. The sultan could count on the protection of the Chinese from any attempt by the Thais to win back the territory.
Melaka was then taken over in 1511 by the Portuguese, who dismissed the sultan and ruled the territory themselves until it was taken over by the Dutch in 1641.
The Dutch then ceded Melaka to the British to rule de facto from 1795 until 1825, at which point Melaka, known then as Malacca, officially became one of Britain’s Straits Settlements and, eventually, part of colonial Malaya. Melaka then became part of an independent Malaysia in 1957.
Each one of these layers of past culture has left its residue in architecture, culture, and community, including one of the oldest communities of overseas Chinese, called the Peranakan Chinese (quite distinct from more recent arrivals) and a partly Portuguese community called the Kristang, who mostly dwell in the Portuguese settlement east of the mouth of the Melaka River, around Jalan Texeira.
There are a lot of tourists in the older part of Melaka, but also a lot of shopping malls in the more modern parts, including the Aeon Mall shown in the map just above.
An area of buildings partly built by the Dutch, called the Stadthuys, meaning town hall in old Dutch, still stands somewhat closer to the river mouth than the Portuguese Settlement. The Stadthuys is just across the river from the pedestrianised Jonker Street, or Jonker Walk, officially now Jalan Hang Jebat, where they have night markets.
Jonker is an old Dutch word meaning ‘young master’, meaning, in a place like Melaka, a young man who has gone to make his fortune in foreign parts. It is closely related to the German word Junker, meaning a member of a former ruling class descended from mediaeval German colonisers of Eastern Europe and the Baltic coast, who were mostly driven out in 1945.
However, these days, Jonker Walk, or Jalan Hang Jebat to give it its more modern and less colonial name, is now in the Chinatown district of Melaka. Which is to say, that of the original colonisers who founded the town in the first place.
The Stadthuys area is also called Dutch Square, or Red Square, because its buildings are painted red these days, though the ones that existed in the time of the Dutch were white back then.
The old city had walls around it at one time. One of the bastions on the walls, Bastion Middleburg, still stands. It has an old wooden crane that was made by the Dutch for unloading precious cargoes from the Melaka River, a river that would eventually be the town’s undoing as a port as ships grew larger and came to require better port facilities than were possible at Melaka.
And so, Melaka’s port gradually lost market share to Penang and, still more so, to Singapore. These days, the Melaka River is mainly used for river cruises, which I went on, and cafe embankments.
Here’s a photo I took of a modern pedestrian bridge while I was on the river cruise. Check out the upside-down car as well!
And the very famous Old Bus Station Bridge. I am not sure how old this bridge is, as the ‘Old’ Bus Station was only built as recently as 1969.
Here is the Dutch Harbour Cafe in what looks like a very old building on the river, with the British-built Church of St Francis Xavier behind.
There’s lots of amazing mural artwork to look at on the river cruises. This looks like an image of a hero about to smite his enemies, though I am not sure exactly who.
The sides of the river are gorgeous. I filmed another short video as we were going along, and here it is:
There are murals elsewhere, as well. A highlight of Jonker Walk is the Kiehl’s Mural, which apparently celebrates the five UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Malaysia and decorates a branch of Kiehl’s, a cosmetics company.
Here’s another building with a Dutch name and English and Chinese writing on the side, the sort of thing that is fairly typical for Melaka.
There was a maritime museum in the form of a Portuguese galleon.
And more amazing buildings and murals.
Here’s a link to a blog post that describes the old town further:
I went to Burger King and McDonalds because I needed some Western food for a while, and they were great. But the real highlights of Melaka are its local-cuisine food stalls and restaurants. There are heaps of places to eat along the river, in Jonker Walk, and elsewhere. The following post makes Melaka sound like a foodie heaven:
It is the year of tourism in Melaka and they are trying to boost it. I stayed at the downtown AriannaSuite by way of Airbnb, which has really good local deals, better than Booking dot com in Malaysia in my opinion. AriannaSuite had really good yoghurt, by the way.
As a final note, I also used the Grab app quite a bit. You can get food delivered with Grab, and you can get rides as well.
(None of these final remarks, or any of my earlier endorsements, are paid. They are just my honest opinions.)
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