Malacca Reminiscences

Malacca Reminiscences My Story is a memoir of a resident of Malacca in the five decades after independence in 1957 of Malaysia from Britain. Most books on Malacca hark back to the fifteenth century and the era of Parameswara founding the Sultanate of Malacca, but very little on the modern events that have shaped Malacca to become very different from the sleepy hollow that it was. The book captures the spirit of such a modern and vitalized city that has gained world heritage status. While many tourists from overseas and other parts of Malaysia visit Malacca for a few days or a week, they walk the streets of the town without understanding the layers of history that are hidden under these streets. While describing the streets, the bridges, the foods and eateries, the antiques shops, and the nooks and corners of the town, I have woven bits and pieces of my experiences as a resident of the town, born and bred since the 1950s. It is not a memoir per se but a tapestry of the story of Malacca stitched with anecdotes of personalities and ordinary folk of the town in the last fifty years. A Malacca street like Heeren Street has many secrets to unfold, and every house or building along this famous street has a worthy story to tell. It would be impossible to dig into the details of every house, but the mansions of the rich and famous towkays will be told. In short, this book of about 150 pages will paint Malacca in colors that are different from the average travel book from Lonely Planet or Fordor, which are compendiums about cities but do not touch the heart of the matter. I have been influenced by the travel writings of Peter Jenkins and Bill Bryson, whose travel books breathe life into the places they write about. I invite you to view Malacca through the panorama that I have personally tried to portray about my city, Malacca. I have interspersed cameos of notable citizens of the city who have contributed to its development. Interesting snippets about my family and myself have been inserted in relevant chapters of the book. I have added some tables of statistics about people and places culled from my daily visits to the Internet. You will get an insight into how a new Malacca has arisen over the ancient town of the days of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. The new commercial heart of the town, Melaka Raya, and the adjoining malls of Dataran Pahlawan and Mahkota Parade are just a stones throw from the A Famosa Gateway. You will get an account of the stalled Gateway Island project, said to cost 40 billion ringgit, a small version of Dubais dazzling reclaimed island development. Napoleon is said to have derided Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. I will describe Malacca today as a city of hotels. This is not an overstatement, and my book will show you why.

There was a gap of fifty years between the last book on the history of Malacca and this one written by Allein G Moore. Sultans and Spices, Guns and Greed, Race and Religion: The Story of Malacca will be valuable not only to a visitor to this historic city but will also inspire pride in Malaysians for it is also the story of the birth and growth of a nation. Allein takes the reader on a comprehensive but easy-to-read journey from its beginnings as a sleepy coastal fishing village on the west coast of Malaysia to its development into one of the most important trading centres in the world. The author brings to life the events and individuals who helped created Malacca in the long distant past and in more recent years. This book grew out of his own personal curiosity, and he writes not only to tell visitors more about his home town but also to inspire Malaccans to love and preserve their heritage.

Five hundred years later, a conference held in Singapore brought together a large group of scholars from widely different national, academic and disciplinary contexts, to analyse and discuss the intricate consequences of Portuguese interactions in Asia over the longue duree. The result of these discussions is a stimulating set of case studies that, as a rule, combine original archival and/or field research with innovative historiographical perspectives. Luso-Asian communities, real and imagined, and Luso-Asian heritage, material and symbolic, are studied with depth and insight. The range of thematic, chronological and geographic areas covered in these proceeding is truly remarkable, showing not only the extraordinary relevance of revisiting Luso-Asian interactions in the longer term, but also the surprising dynamism within an area of studies which seemed on the verge of exhaustion. After all, archives from all over the world, from Rio de Janeiro to London, from Lisbon to Rome, and from Goa to Macao, might still hold some secrets on the subject of Luso-Asian relations, when duly explored by resourceful scholars.