O Empayar Revisitado

Zheng Ho has been made into part of the Stadthuys museum complex by the addition of a somewhat modest and isolated but good gallery. To reach it I have to pass by a larger than life statue of him. The supposedly wondrous Dutch drainage system - in fact the subject of the very first display the visitor comes across as he goes into the complex - is apparently no longer working properly in the postcolonial era so I have practically to wade through the water into the gallery past the statue. A downpour has been relentlessly lashing town since after lunch. Soon it will cease and then it will be cool and pleasant instead of sultry and sticky.

Just as elsewhere in Melaka's museums, there are unattributed paintings of indifferent artistic quality depicting historical scenes. I am in fact being nice: the paintings are actually quite tacky and the scenes depicted hover between the unlikely and the impossible. In one of them Hang Li Poh, the Ming princess, arrives in Melaka to marry the sultan with a small group of ladies-in-waiting (she in fact apparently came with thousands of retainers). Accordingly Her Highness arrives in Melaka in full view of everybody dressed as a Chinese opera princess and as if she had just stepped out of her boudoir.  The famous alliance between the two empayars is then sealed, and Bukit Cina is born. A board announces that a well dug by the sultan for his bride and her retinue is still to be seen on the bukit. This is the second well dug for Chinese visitors that I come across in my visit: the first was Zheng Ho's well rimmed with Portuguese bricks.

Both Chinese visitors were of course august personages (Zheng Ho was a eunuch very close to the emperor and commander of the imperial fleet). Also, they were not necessarily thought of as transient visitors. In fact the Zheng Ho gallery was apparently created because of the visit of another high Chinese dignatary, namely, former President Zhiang Zemin. He of course mentioned during his visit the five hundred-year old ties between China and Malaysia (he got his dates wrong - that is the timespan of the Portuguese ties, the Chinese being older by at least a hundred years. But maybe six hundred is less of an auspicious number than five hundred). So the existence of the gallery is tied to a postcolonial reality: it opened after the Muzium Samudra in 2004 (which does not commemorate Zheng Ho). It is not about local power but about the rise of Chinese capital and power in Southeast Asia, and therefore about a new emerging empayar. What is therefore almost an afterthought in the Stadthuys, tucked away in the upper part of the complex, is in fact not so much about the past but the present and future.

It is nonetheless interesting to note that Melaka - Malaysia's avatar - is the product of a centuries-old symbiosis that goes on unabated to this day. And all because of the Javanese and the Siamese, whose threat the close alliance with Ming China was supposed to contain (neither is represented in the displays of the Stadthuys and so I guess the alliance worked out quite well). Of course, Ming China also had her eyes on the straits as a prime location for international trade. No wonder Chinese communities over the centuries have settled so thickly on both shores of the straits, to the point that cities such as Melaka, Penang, and Singapore are nowadays Chinese-majority cities in a Muslim-dominated region (and Medan, Sumatra's largest city, is a Dutch colonial creation with a sizeable Chinese minority).

After that I visited the Muzium Sastera. The rain had abated considerably. The literature museum is of course only about Malay literature - written by Malays - as being representative of the whole literature of Malaysia. No Zheng Ho here. Interestingly, there is at least one Chinese book inside the muzium: the translation of Munshi Abdullah's Hikayat Abdullah, considered to be a founding work of modern Malay literature. The Munshi was a son of Melaka with Indian origins. In fact, a note in the display assures the visitor that the Munshi only learned Malay after the age of seven when he started mixing with Malay speakers. The man who is hailed as the father of modern Malay literature is therefore an Indian Melakan who was a mother tongue speaker of Tamil. In fact, one of his works is exactly a Malay translation from the Tamil (of the Kalila and Dimna story, originally a Sanskrit story that reached the Islamic world via Pahlavi, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian translations). Also, the Munshi gained his title because he was a very learned linguist since an early age, mastering as he did Hindustani (a language postcolonial India and Pakistan decided to kill or rather partly transmogrify into two different official media with diverging scripts), Malay, Arabic, and English. The father of modern national literature was therefore not a parochialist, but a multilingual cosmopolitan man. He would in fact die in Medina in the mid-1850s during a pilgrimage (and as a consequence leave an unfinished travelogue as part of his literary bequest).

Munshi Abdullah was therefore cosmopolitan because he was a man of his world. And that world was once Melaka. That I find far more appealing than any empayar.