Steve and Cathy's Blog

As seems to be the case often, we are treated to a beautiful sunrise, a picture of which heads up this post..  It’s around 6:00am, and we have a fairly quiet day ahead of us.   Steve is determined to file a (long overdue) post on our first day in Hong Kong, and Peter Croyle will acquaint us with Kuching.

In fact, since it is a quiet day without much to discuss, we will introduce Kuching, Malaysia, which is in Sarawak state, one of the two Malaysian states on Borneo.  It has a quirky history that is worth writing about.

There have been indigenous people on Borneo for over 40,000 years, and there are still hundreds of thousands still there, but, as was most of the rest of Asia, the area was colonized, beginning in the 15^thcentury with the establishment of the Bruneian Empire, a Malay sultanate.

They ruled all of the coastal regions of Borneo from that time until the 19^thcentury.  At that time, the Bruneian Empire was significantly declining and finding it difficult to maintain control of their territory.  An uprising, a result of higher taxes on the population due to the discovery of antimony and the wealth its extraction created, forced the Sultan to reach out in 1839 to an English sailor named James Brooke.

Brooke was successful at quelling the uprising and was rewarded with the governorship of a small territory centered around Kuching.  The Brooke Family, now named the White Rajahs, set about increasing their holdings, land and influence.  As the Sultanate of Brunei continued to decline, the Brooke family took over more and more territory.  From 1841 until 1905, Sarawak grew, all under the complete control of the Brooke Family.

It became a British Protectorate in 1888, along with North Borneo (later to become Sabah state where we were a couple of days ago) and what remained of the Sultanate of Brunei. The family ran Sarawak in a paternalistic way.  While there were occasional uprisings against the Brookes, they were all put down with help from local tribal leaders.  A member of the Brooke family ruled Sarawak until the Japanese took over the island in 1942.  After the war, not having the resources to rebuild, the Brookes ceded Sarawak to the Brits, who made it a British crown colony in 1946.

It became a state of Malaysia in 1963, after a lot of wrangling and internal opposition from communists, as well as outside opposition from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Kuching is the capital of Sarawak, and there is a local story about how the city got renamed Kuching. Here is an encapsulated version from Wikipedia; “There was one unlikely theory based on a story on miscommunication. According to the story, James Brooke arrived in Kuching on his yacht “Royalist.” He then asked his local guide about the name of the town. The local guide mistakenly thought that Brooke was pointing towards a cat, and so had said the word ‘Kuching’.” There seem to be several historical discrepancies in the story, but it is still one that delights tourists and locals alike.  In fact, there is a Kuching Cat Museum, and the city has adopted the cat as its symbol. Here are a couple of pictures of it from Wikipedia:

Just a few more words about Sarawak.  There are 2.5 million people in this state, but because it is 48,051 square miles in size, has the lowest population density of any Malaysian state.  The state government is attempting to limit the expansion of the palm oil plantation and logging that is an endangerment to the rainforests that provide habitat to animals, a home to many indigenous people, and a huge draw for tourists. Fortunately, there are substantial petroleum reserves off the coast to provide revenue that will hopefully enable that protection.

So our day is spent learning about Sarawak, its capital Kuching, and Borneo.  It sounds like an interesting place, so we look forward to our arrival tomorrow at 9:00am.