[dropcap background=”yes”]A[/dropcap]nd a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of Children.”
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
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One of my mother’s favorite poems, from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
I started messing around with bonsais four years ago. At the time, I guessed it would take me four or five years to have something decent to show. Four years later, I see that I was wildly optimistic. Still, the progress has been encouraging in places. Like children, you need to take pictures every so often to appreciate the changes.
Duranta the First
Duranta the First, 2011
Duranta the First, 2012
Duranta the First, April 2015
Falling Duranta
A dull beginning, 2012
Trying to keep the top alive and the bottom from rotting
A new direction
Deadwood varnished with polyurethane. April 2015.
Dragon Duranta
That long straight bit in the middle had to go.
The dragon tail
Varnished. Next step is to reposition it so the tail juts upward.
Soon after the Persian Empire fell to the Companions of Prophet Muhammad (saws), the armies of the Caliphate reached to the Door of Doors, the fortress of Durbent which closes the narrow gap between the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, the fortress believed to have been built by Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn (Alexander the Great) to keep out the hordes of the Juj and Majuj (Gog and Magog). Crossing that threshold, they encountered the Khazars.
From the north side of the Caucasus stretching to Kiev in the West and the Volga River to the East they were a mighty nation of Turkic pagans who repulsed the muslim armies in a series of wars from 642 AD. This nation was pressed to the west by the Byzantine Christians, to the east by the Muslims, and to the north by pagan pre-Russian peoples who warred constantly with the Khazars. Then, somewhere in the early 800s, the Khazar kingdom converted to Judaism.
A Rabbi, a Priest and an Imam walk into a court…
According to legend, the Khazar King Bulan invited delegates from the Jews, Christians and Muslims to his court to make the pitch for their faith. Undecided after all three, King Bulan asked the Christian and Muslim privately which of the other two faiths was better. Without hesitation, the priest and the imam both answered: the Jews. With that, King Bulan converted to Judaism.
That story is apocryphal. But the conversion of the Khazar nation to Rabbinical Judaism is a historical fact. There are lots of things we don’t know – they don’t call it the Dark Ages for nothing – but what can be established is utterly fascinating.
There was a fair amount of existing Jewish presence in the region who were responsible for introducing the religion to the Khazars and who likely intermarried with them. The sources of those Jews are from all over: Greek Jews expelled by the Byzantines, Jews of the Muslim world who traveled north, and Radhanite Jews who ran the Silk Road trade since early Roman times. Brook casually mentions along the way that 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish, which dropped my jaw to the floor, but considering how solid the rest of the book seems, I’ll take that as the truth till I read otherwise.
Judaism was not just a court religion but was broadly adopted by the ethnic Khazar population although they were perhaps only a plurality of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious country.
Khazaria existed as a Jewish kingdom in some form for two hundred years, until they were overwhelmed by the proto-Russians.
Where did the Khazars go? The region was conquered by the proto-Russians, and then two hundred years later the region was crushed by the Mongols. The Jews of Khazaria were scattered, and over time adopted slavic languages. Those slavic-speaking, ethnically turkic Jews in turn were absorbed by the central European yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews who pushed east. The only real question is how large the turkic contribution to the population of present-day Ashkenazim is. Zionists would like it to be zero, anti-semites would like it be 100% but the only possible answer is it is somewhere in between. Brook provides a round-up of Jewish intermarriage, conversion and the emerging results from DNA testing to demonstrate that there have been intermittent conversions to Judaism at various times in history and that virtually all diaspora Jewish populations intermarried with local populations to some degree. The details all get a little dense but the upshot is Jewish diaspora men commonly took gentile wives.
The Jews of Khazaria was not a thrilling book. It plodded through reams of very obscure academic work that I hardly had the background to keep up with. The author is also not a professional academic and seemed unable to synthesize some of the divergent opinions of the experts. But if in the end I learned less than I had hoped it is because Khazaria itself has dissolved into the unknowable past.
The Personal Angle
On two of the very few occasions I met Mawlana Shaykh Muhammad Nazim Adil Al-Qubrusi Al-Haqqani (q), he struck my chest with the palm of his hand, spoke to me in Turkish and laughed. When I asked a murid of his what that was about (Mawlana Shaykh could speak English, after all), he shrugged and said, “maybe you’re Khazar.” My mother’s side of the family is in fact Russian Jew, and the incident led me to read Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe some 20 years ago. Koestler suggested a very large if not total Khazar contribution to European Jewry. Brook shows how certain aspects of Koestler’s arguments were overstated or have come to be disproved by later evidence. Khazars are unlikely to be the major ethnic component of modern Ashkenazim. I must confess a bit of disappointment now that my ancestral roots are unlikely to be as exotic as all that. Still, when I look at some old photographs of my great-grandparents, I do still wonder. Maybe one day I’ll take the Genographic Project test just for kicks.
The Malaysian Angle?
Surely not. Surely there is no way an obscure Turkic tribe from the last millennium touches not only the Russian Jewish side of the family but my Malay relatives right here in Sarawak. Folks, one bit of evidence of Khazar ancestry among eastern European Jews is the Turkic vocabulary found in Yiddish but not in German or Slavic languages. One of those Turkic words is Laksa. One of Malaysia’s more popular dishes, it is a sour fish soup served over noodles. The word laksa means noodle, from the Turkic laqsha which became loksh in Yiddish.
Sometimes you don’t realize what you have in your own backyard. I realized I have crocodiles. Jong’s Crocodile Farm is only a short drive out of town but in 12 years I had never been. Time for a field trip! The Crocodile Farm is a bit like a petting zoo in concept, less grand than a proper zoo, but allowing more interaction with the cuddly little creatures.
We arrived just in time for the main event: the daily feeding. When we filed in, the crocs were the image of laziness, wallowing in mud or laying motionless in the sun with their mouths wide open. When the keepers showed up, they perked up immediately and swarmed the tower. Behind what looked like meager protection atop the rickety wooden structure, the keepers began sending down bite-sized hunks of offal on a line.
The epitome of laziness
Swarming the tower
Rising to the occasion
Ngap
Snap
Gulp
Chomp
its nice to know they miss a lot
Excellent form
What a show! These lizards could jump clear out of the water to their hind legs. Their jaws smashing together made a pleasing sort of deep resonating clap; or, pleasing since we were out of the water, anyway. They struck the target less than half the time, and we the audience foolishly cheered them when they did. We should have been rooting for the offal. The rivers of Sarawak are home to a goodly number of crocs, including the famed man-eating crocodile [tooltip text=”Deceased.” trigger=”hover”]Bujang Senang[/tooltip], and Sarawak leads the country in crocodilian attacks: 40 over the last five years. Nevertheless, with the crocs in the pit and us in the bleachers, we were duly entertained, staying till the last chunk of flesh was thrown into the water.
Wandering through the rest of the farm was a bit anticlimactic after that, but still fun. The cages had a modest home-made feel, but they were adequate and clean and the animals seemed healthy if not thrilled to be there. We saw owls, eagles, porcupines, biawaks, a little sun bear, bearded pigs that smelled worse than they looked, a [tooltip text=”binturong in malay, if that helps” trigger=”hover”]bearcat[/tooltip], macaques, and my favorite, a swarming mass of baby crocodiles. I was expecting crocodile to be on the menu of the concession stand, but no: if you want to sample some crocodile soup[1], you’ll have to catch one yourself.
The story of Sultan Tengah ends abruptly. Throughout his life, Sultan Tengah was a tireless Caller to Islam and was a guest in the royal courts of three kingdoms. Returning from an odyssey of 40 years, he was assassinated by one of his own followers within the shadow of the solitary mountain that marked his domain. What clues to his murder can we find in the legend of Sultan Tengah? Continue reading “Who Killed Sultan Tengah?”
Mount Santubong rises out of the South China Sea a lone mountain. Two rivers meet the sea on either side, a narrow isthmus of land between them. Mount Santubong has its own weather, with clouds cresting, writhing or settling around the peaks most days regardless of what the day brings the flat swamps beyond. No wonder fairy tales are sung about it[1]. Kuching, thirty minutes inland, is a recent settlement, only becoming important in the 1840s with the arrival of James Brooke, the famous White Raja of Sarawak. Santubong, by comparison, has evidence of human activity going back a thousand years. Hundreds of years before James Brooke, Mount Santubong was home to the first and last Sultan of Sarawak, whose final resting place is at the foot of that remarkable mountain. He was known as Sultan Tengah.
Mount Santubong.
There are still traces of his memory here and there. I had heard it said that he is the patron saint of the region, and some have related contacting him in dreams and spiritual encounters[2] . He was in any case a man who has returned to his Maker and as such I decided to visit him to read Ya Sin, intending to share its blessing with him bi idhnillah. I arrived on a cool drizzly morning. As I entered the mausoleum, deserted but with fresh flowers upon the grave, I caught the otherworldy scent of Kenanga blossoms [3]. Behind the headstones wrapped in royal yellow stood three large black slabs bearing in English, Malay and Jawi the legend of Sultan Tengah.
The Legend of Sultan Tengah, the First and Last Sultan of Sarawak
In the 1500s, Sarawak [4] was loosely under the rule of the Kingdom of Brunei. The 9th Sultan of Brunei was Sultan Muhammad Hassan, who ruled from 1582 to 1598. When he passed away, the crown passed to his first-born son, Sultan Abdul Jalilul Akbar. Sultan Muhammad Hassan had another son named Pengiran Muda Tengah Ibrahim Ali Omar Shah, who was known as Raja Tengah. According to the oral history, this Raja Tengah also desired the throne of Brunei. Raja Tengah insisted that since his elder brother was born before his father become the 9th Sultan, whereas he was the first son born after his father’s ascension to the throne, he had the greater right to inherit the kingdom.
Sultan Abdul Jalilul Akbar was a clever man. He understood the delicacy of the situation and tried to appease his brother’s desire. He saw a way to resolve the conflict by appointing Raja Tengah as sultan somewhere else. So it came to pass that Raja Tengah was named Sultan of Sarawak, seeing as the region was loosely under the rule of Brunei and was at the distant reaches of the realm.
In the shadow of Mount Santubong.
To Sarawak
According to the annals of the kings of Brunei, Sultan Tengah accepted the appointment and made preparations to depart for Sarawak. He was accompanied by more than 1000 soldiers from the Sakai, Kedayan, and Bunut tribes of the indigenous peoples of the island of Borneo. A number of members of the court also went with him to aid in the establishment of an administration in the new realm. It is mostly from this delegation that the Malays of Sarawak trace their lineage today.
Upon their arrival, the new Sultan and his followers built a palace and a fortified wall around it. Sultan Tengah began to appoint his deputies and arrange the kingdom’s affairs. Among the positions that he designated were Patinggi Datu Seri Setia, Datu Shahbandar Indera Wangsa, Datu Amar Setia Diraja and Datuk Temenggong Laila Wangsa. Only when all was settled did Raja Tengah began to use his new title, Sultan Ibrahim Ali Omar Shah, First Sultan of Sarawak.
The grave of Sultan Tengah, under a perforated dome open to the rain.
A Diplomatic Incident
Around 1599, Sultan Tengah visited Pahang, then a part of the Kingdom of Johor, to visit his aunt Raja Bondan who had married Sultan Abdul Ghafur Muhyiddin Shah Ibnu Sultan Abdul Kadir Alauddin Shah. While he was in Johor, Sultan Tengah was asked to perform a courtly dance. While doing so, the handkerchief of his dance partner nearly struck him in the face. Sultan Tengah became enraged and slapped the offending man. This made the Sultan of Johor terribly angry such that he demanded Sultan Tengah leave Johor immediately. According to the history passed down from the Sultanate of Sambas, Sultan Tengah, known to Sambas as Sultan Abdul Jalil, was forced to leave Johor because he rejected Raja Bondan’s offer to marry her daughter the Princess Cik Zohra. During the return voyage to Sarawak, Sultan Tengah’s boat was caught in a fierce storm, losing its rudder.
Shipwrecked
His boat washed ashore in Sukadana, on the western coast of Borneo in what is now the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Barat. Sukadana was under the rule of Raja Giri Mustika, who had adopted the title Sultan Muhammad Saifuddin after converting to Islam through the assistance of one Shaykh Shamsuddin, an Arab from Mecca. Sultan Tengah was well received in Sukadana, and studied the religious sciences under Shaykh Shamsuddin throughout his time there. While in Sukadana, Sultan Tengah married a younger sister of Sultan Muhammad Saifuddin named Puteri Surya Kesuma. He intended to reside permanently in Sukadana and requested permission to spread the teachings of Islam to the people of the area.
Gravestones at the head and foot, wrapped in royal yellow cloth.
Calling to Islam
Sultan Tengah was only granted permission to spread Islam to the lands around the Sambas River, much further to the north. So, in 1600, Sultan Tengah left Sukadana for the Sambas River with 40 boats equipped with men at arms. Sailing up the Sambas River, they landed at Kuala Bangun, where Princess Surya Kesuma gave birth to a prince named Radin Sulaiman. She was later delivered of two more princes as well during their sojourn in Sambas. The second prince was known as Pengiran Badaruddin who later became Pengiran Bendahara Seri Maharaja. The third prince was Pengiran Abdul Wahab who later became Pengiran Temenggong Jaya Kesuma.
Finally, Sultan Tengah arrived in Kota Lama, Sambas. There he was met by the King of Kota Lama, Ratu Sepudak, who received him with the highest honors and stately protocol. Sultan Tengah learned that Ratu Sepudak would allow him to spread Islam in his realm even though he was not himself a muslim. After a long period of stay in Kota Lama the eldest son of Sultan Tengah, Prince Radin Sulaiman, married the daughter of Ratu Sepudak, the Princess Mas Ayu Puteri Bongsu. They had a son named Radin Bima who would later become Sultan Muhammad Tajuddin of Sambas.
When Ratu Sepudak passed away, he was replaced by Pengiran Prabu Kenchana who was appointed by Radin Sulaiman as one of his advisers. The story goes that Ratu Sepudak desired that the throne should pass to Sultan Tengah due to his experience in governance, but the matter was contested by members of the royal court.
The Journey Home
Thus it was around 1630 that Sultan Tengah went to Matan. There, he married a princess of Matan who gave birth to a son, Pengiran Mangku Negara, who later became the Sultan of Matan. After staying a number of years in Matan, Sultan Tengah decided to return to Sarawak. As the voyage neared its end, he stopped at a place known as Crocodile Rock at the mouth of the Santubong River. There he was murdered by one of his own followers.
When the news of Sultan Tengah’s death reached Sarawak, Datu Patinggi, Shahbandar Datu, Datu Amar and Datu Temenggong went to Santubong to arrange for a burial in keeping with the traditions of the Brunei Sultanate. It is said that he died in 1641, ten years after Radin Sulaiman became Sultan Muhammad Saifuddin I of Sambas. Sultan Muhammad Saifuddin I was succeeded by Sultan Muhammad Tajuddini, and the rest of their long lineage is a matter of record of the Sultans of Sambas down to the present day [5].
An brief account of the Sultan’s life in the Malay language in jawi, a modified arabic script.
Sultan Tengah is buried near the village known today as Kampung Batu Buaya Santubong. The ancient headstone marking his grave is consistent with that of a sultan. With the death of Sultan Tengah, the Sultanate of Sarawak came to an end, the span of the realm the life of a single man. Sarawak eventually reverted to the control of the Sultan of Brunei. Even so, the titles[6] bestowed by Sultan Tengah on his deputies continue to be used for the Sarawakian ruling elite to this day.
Fin.
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Reader, what I have translated and arranged above has reached me without author or attribution and I myself can not confirm or deny a word of it. It is curious though that the memory of the adventures of Sultan Tengah – Founder of dynasties, Spreader of Islam! – is strongest in the Sultanate of Brunei to one side of Borneo and the Sultanate of Sambas to the other, proving true his name: Sultan Tengah, the Middle Sultan.
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Kenanga flowers with a scent so strong
Watered and fed till the blossoms filled
I’ve tried so hard, worked so long
Yet stand I ready to accept His Will.
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Mekar kenanga harum baunya
Kembang mekar disiram dibaja
Puas ku cuba sudah ku usaha
Namun takdirnya ku pasrah saja. [7]
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The spidery yellow-green petals of the kenanga flower, Canangium odoratum
2. Others say the fuss to commemorate the grave was a calculated act of flattery to attract investment from the wealthy present-day Sultan of Brunei, wallahu alam.
3. Kenanga, also known as Ylang-ylang, is Canangium odoratum, a tree often planted near mosques, maqams and cemeteries where its otherworldly aroma brings to mind the unseen world waiting for us all. Its essential oils are also ingredients in fancy name-brand perfumes.
4. Sarawak at that time referred to a smaller territory than it does today, perhaps what is today the westernmost division of the state.
5. The Malay Archipelago contained dozens of princes and kings. In Indonesia, many royal houses became collaborators with the Dutch and were swept away with Independence. The Sultans of Sambas survived and have been accommodated by the Republic of Indonesia as “Head of the Sambas Sultanate for Domestic Affairs”, a hereditary administrative post similar to but less grand as the Sultan of Yogyakarta. More on the Sambas Sultanate including accounts of Sultan Tengah’s presence here.
Note: The narrative of Sultan Tengah’s life that I have translated here comes from an email from a facebook page from an anonymous message-board posting and from there I gave up. If the author of the original Malay text would like acknowledgement here, please contact me. There are several other versions of the story floating around which I have made no attempt to reconcile.
It is well known amongst Malaysians that any illness on earth can be treated by drinking the appropriate 3-in-1 instant coffee. Diabetes? High blood pressure? Sakit jantung? A few micrograms of goat’s milk, morinda, mangosteen, ginseng, or acai berry in with your morning coffee, sugar and non-dairy creamer will set you right.
Here in the tropics, we are surrounded by a wealth of biodiversity. Researchers travel from afar to analyze this cornucopia of species, looking for novel compounds that may hold the cure to cancer. Locals have also been combing the woods and identifying valuable plants, animals and minerals since time immemorial. From durian to leach oil to gambir Sarawak, it would appear that the real contribution of the rainforests to humanity is less in treating mundane illnesses like AIDS and heart disease, and more toward preparations that give increased … energy. Manly energy. For masculine purposes.
No herbal medicine is as popular for boosting potency as Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia). Every MLM in the country from CNI to Omegatrend has their own proprietary instant coffee tongkat ali blend. In the grocery aisle too: Longjack, Powerroot, Livita. To be honest, it has a nice flavor and aroma, a bit like the taste of coffee brewed with chicory root famous in New Orleans. But it isn’t there for the taste. No. The plant is felt to have its power from its long, hard tap-root that extends straight down, penetrating through even the hardest soil. By the principles of sympathetic magic, drinking a concoction made from that root – well you get the idea. Now you may scoff at the idea of sympathetic magic, but our newfangled scientists have determined that tongkat ali may indeed contain substances that can stimulate male properties [1,2]. Modesty prevents me from confirming or denying such things one way or the other. Look upon the glint in the eye of those two ancient Hajjis there and reach your own conclusions.
Tongkat Ali is the Staff of Ali[3], but a tongkat simply means a staff, cane or crutch, as in the following pantuns:
I’m a hopelessly lurus bendul kind of guy, so when I came across a dead tongkat ali tree in the garden, I harvested the slender trunk to make a walking stick, a tongkat tongkat ali. I’m turning 40 this year, you see, I need to make preparations. After stripping the bark and working it with three grades of sandpaper, I gave it two coats of polyurethane. I would have liked to treat it with tung oil first, which is supposed to be a traditional Chinese equivalent of linseed oil, but I can’t find either of those products here. So there it is. I now have a cane made of Michigan Musclewood, and a staff from the Staff of Ali, and yet somehow I remain the same soft-in-the-middle schlub as before.
2. A lot of “bioprospecting” is done on plants already identified as potent by locals according to their systems of magic and medicine. The interesting point to me here is modern science feels it has a lock on what works and why, but traditional heuristics allowed people to identify and make use of these substances too.
3. It is likely that the Ali here is Sayyidina Ali Abi Talib, may Allah ennoble his countenance, since he was renowned as a paragon of manhood. As the saying goes, “There is no manliness except in Ali, no sword but Zulfiqar.” Such a man was Sayyidina Ali that in the heat of battle he knocked down his opponent. As he moved to strike, the enemy spat in his face. Immediately he sheathed his sword and raised the man from the ground. He said, I was going to despatch you for the sake of Allah, but when you spat in my face I wanted to kill you out of anger. It is forbidden to fight except for the sake of Allah. The enemy instantly raised his finger and entered Islam, declaring there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger.
4. Malay pantuns courtesy of UKM’s Malay Civilization database. English translations mine.
An anti-colonial short-course for Malaysians in one volume. The Myth of the Lazy Native was an influential book in post-colonial studies, published a year before Edward Said’s Orientalism[1]. Syed Hussein Alatas trawls through centuries of original sources to find the sources of the persistent idea that Malays, and other native peoples, are lazy. Some of the key points that struck me were:
1. At the time of first contact with Europeans, the peoples of the Nusantara were active economically and were engaged in long-distance trade far beyond the archipelago on their own boats with their own capital and with the ability to defend their own interests. Ocean-going vessels, arms and munitions were manufactured locally.
2. European monopoly shut down thriving multi-national trade zones, impoverishing and over centuries eliminating the indigineous trading class, eventually reducing native society to peasants and rulers. Alatas finds clear and detailed discourse from Ibn Khaldun 700 years ago describing the ill effects of mercantile colonialism (specifically the ruler engaging directly in trade) and promoting a role for the ruler that corresponds closely to the way the trade ports of the archipelago were in fact run. Which isn’t to say the sultans of the region had read Ibn Khaldun, but it does make it hard to believe the colonial regimes didn’t know exactly what their policies would do to the locals.
3. Only after the region was thoroughly dominated by European powers do observations about the laziness of the locals begin to emerge.
4. The heart of the matter. Laziness as used by European observers meant, and could only mean: non-cooperation with colonial exploitation. The Malays would rather live on their own terms in their village than work under near-slavery conditions in the plantations and mines. If the labor arrangement wasn’t to their satisfaction, they would simply walk off [2]. This was not an option for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Indians who were brought in as indentured laborers, often from even more dire situations back home, and worked to death under appalling conditions until their debt was repaid. For this, they were labelled as “industrious”.
5. By the 19th century, European observers were also recording instances of decadent, corrupt, and oppressive behavior from the hereditary Malay rulers, the sultans and rajas. Alatas makes an interesting point: under the terms of colonial domination, the local rulers were unable to conduct diplomatic relations, unable to regulate the economy, unable to wage war, unable to perform any of the functions by which their social class had distinguished itself in the past. Hollowed out and on a short leash, stagnation and slide into decadence seems more understandable.
6. Alatas expresses a view I have encountered more than once, that Malaysia is at a disadvantage somehow because it did not fight a war to gain independence. Personally, I think Malaysia came out ahead from having a peaceful transfer of power, and the diplomatic skills that made that happen deserve to be honored in the national historiography. But he does make a compelling argument that there was no real ideological break between the old colonial masters and the local elite that took their place. This brings us to the last point.
7. The image of Malays as lazy has persisted to the present day because it fits the political needs of the current power structure. It works like this:
Malays are lazy.
Because they are lazy, they are bound to lose in unrestricted competition with Chinese Malaysians.
Therefore, the Malays must elect a government that will protect them.
One could argue Malaysia’s reliance on imported labor for all the most wretched jobs in the country is a hold-over from the colonial system too. The Myth of the Lazy Native came out after Tun Dr Mahathir’s “The Malay Dilemma”, which he scathingly critiques, but before Mahathir’s rise to ultimate power. 40 years later, the myth of the lazy native is just as entrenched as ever, to the extent that it rarely needs to be mentioned explicitly.
1. See Farish Noor’s obituary for Syed Hussein Alatas. 2. In, I believe, Tarling’s Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, it is mentioned that a key check to the power of the Sultan was that his people could simply sail away down the river or off to a different island if they were unhappy with his rule.
After all the terrible imagery the colonial powers left behind about the locals, there are at least a few lingering ideas about the colonials that have remained here. The Malays have a saying “Macam Belanda mendapat tanah”, which literally means “Like a Dutchman getting land”. The usage is identical to the American saying “Give an inch, take a mile” describing grasping greediness. And then there is the monyet Belanda, or “Dutch monkey”, better known abroad as the proboscis monkey.
