So here are lots of photos of our weekend in Melaka. It's a lovely little town, that despite lots of development, the government have decided that building a new town next to the old one and doing up the old one is a smart idea (wowee, they never figured that one out in Kuala Lumpur, oh no, they love knocking down beautiful old buildings to build rancid generic towerblocks over here).
Malacca is a very old town, and was one of the most important in the world for hundreds of years. The old town is a mix of dutch and british colonial architecture - along with a load of Straits Chinese (a mixed race of chinese, malay and indonesian also known as Baba-Nyonya or Peranakkan) shophouses - the really colourful upper floor on one of the pics is a good example.
The Baba-Nyonyas are famous for their amazing food (yum) and gypsy like bizarrely gaudy but beautifully intricate furniture, houses, clothes, and general style. These dudes knew how to mix up styles and colours that would ordinarily look utterly vile, but pulled it off with style for a long time.
Malacca is pretty small, but for such a small town it has a wealth of history. It started back in the time of the Ming Dynasty, when a hindu sultan from Indonesia came here and started a small trading port where the East and West Monsoons meet. His settlement was in the perfect position, because ships could come down the straits instead of circumnavigating the dangerous path around the indonesian archipelago. Ships from India and China would ride their individual monsoon winds, meet in Melacca, trade goods and then ride home when the winds changed.
The portugese were the first europeans to make a move on the place, deciding to go straight for the heart of the lucrative spice isles instead of trading with india - so they invaded and built the town into an massive fortress. They settled here for 130 years, and because of their enforced interbreeding with the locals, there is still a settlement of portugese eurasians by the waterfront. These guys speak Cristau, which is a completely dead medieval language from southern portugal (I think some people still speak it in Goa, but not too sure).
After the portugese came the Dutch, who lay seige to the place for 8 months or so, totally annihalating all of the portugese buildings in town, all that now stands is one of the old gatehouses - but the dutch rebranded even that with the logo of the Dutch East India Company.
The Dutch settlers stayed even longer than the portugese, and built a large amount of beautiful buildings (using most oddly, pink bricks which they shipped over specifically from Holland. Weird). Most of which are still standing and make up a really lovely little quarter of town, now mostly museums, that stands out as some surreal european outpost. There's the pink, bell gabled Christchurch, next to the enormous Stadthuys, a little windmill, clocktower, warhouses with the little winches that they have all over amsterdam. Very photogenic indeed.
They also built an enormous city wall to protect Malacca from outside invasion. Which looks like it would have been amazing.
However....
Then along came the might and majesty of the british empire, the good old glory days of Victoria and her utterly insane Generals. We got a hold of Malacca, not really through conquest but by being more powerful than the Dutch by that point, I don't really know how, something to do with politics and all that. Anyway, we got hold of Penang (in the North of Malaysia) by conning the Sultan of Kedah, and we got hold of Singapore but conning and threatening the Sultan of Johor. So the one in the middle just made sense - thus Penang, Melaka and Singapore became the Straits settlements, and lovely they were for it.
Because we put more importance on Singapore and Penang, the once mighty international trading hub of Melaka was relegated to the sidelines. Some utterly insane toff (I think it was Lord Farquand or some other sill rich inbreed) figured the best idea was to move all the people out to Penang (why?) and just leave Melaka to rot. However some other silly Brits got all paranoid that leaving a fortifed city just sitting there would be too much of a good thing for those naughty Dutch (even though the Dutch had willingly handed the place over as a British protectorate to stop the smelly and untrustworthy garlic eating Frenchies from getting hold of it) so this lunatic Lord Farquand decided to totally raze the city walls. He tried getting a bunch of locals to do it, but it was too well built and a bugger to knock down. So instead he opted for getting them to knock holes in the walls, then pack them with dynamite, then the mad lord ran around on his horse with a long burning torch and set the whole lot off.
Stamford Raffles (the father of Singapore and all that) arrived just a little bit too late to stop the lunatic Lord. He told him to stop it as he was being rather silly and wasting good quality dynamite, as well as making a jolly awful racket and a lot of mess which the darkies would spend ages having to tidy up. Or something like that.
But alas the city walls of Melacca were no more, but Stamford no doubt stopped the deranged royalty from making a giant bomb crater out of the whole town.
As for the Dutch trying to regain control of Melacca? They didn't care, they were beaen anyway, but there we go.
So hows that for a history lesson? Not bad eh. Nice town, great food, brilliant museums and lots of markets, we all had a jolly spiffing time. Shame it was about 38c in the shade though, my skin is blistered.
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