Melaka - History and Architecture

by Holly

I think Melaka is one of the coolest places to visit within reasonable driving distance of KL. The city is small and dense near the center, so you can walk everywhere. The historical fabric of the city is many layered and extremely colorful; the place just oozes character. Though many buildings and areas are in various states of decay, it gives the town a sort of shabby chic appeal. Streets are lively with vendors and people, and the river serves as a picturesque central axis to the city. We have visited Melaka twice, once with our neighbors who came to visit and once with Becky's brother and his kids.



I'm using the Malay spelling for this city, since we are in Malaysia after all. It is interesting how so many things here are spelled differently in English and Malay, despite being pronounced about the same and both spelled in latin letters.

"Malacca" is the English spelling, and presumably was an attempt at transliterating the sound of the word into english syllables. When under Dutch and Portuguese administration it had similar but different spellings. Despite all four of these languages using latin characters, there are differences in the application of the latin symbols to capture the sounds of the spoken tongue. I'll say that in Malay, the consistency of written letters to spoken sounds is much better than in English! And the Malay spelling, when put through the rules for Malay pronunciation, produces exactly the sounds that are used by locals to refer to the city (and state) of Melaka.


History
The history of Melaka is long and complicated. I will give an overview with some pictures from our trips there.


The Sultans Came In
The city was founded about 1400 (though apparently there was already a fishing village there..), by the meandering prince Parameswara.

The origin myth of the city has it that he was sitting under an indian gooseberry tree (bokok melaka in Malay) and watched a mouse deer fight off his hunting dogs. He was inspired by the bravery of the deer and decided to set up shop there. He may have converted to Islam when he married a princess from the Sumatran kingdom of Pasai. Melaka became a Sultanate either when he converted or when his son did so.

Melaka sits at an advantageous spot in the world for trading; along the eponymous Strait of Melaka. This is a narrow body of water through which most shipping passes between east asia on one side and south asian, africa, and europe on the other side, with southeast asia to the north and indonesia to the south. It is an ideal spot for goods and people from all these regions to mix and trade.

Melaka became successful by providing a good location and stable system under which trade between many different cultures and locations could flourish (and possibly by employing orang laut pirates to encourage ships to port in the city). It enjoyed about 100 years of a golden age under a succession of 8 sultans.


The Portuguese Came In
With success and wealth however came the covetous attention of invaders, and while Melaka was able to hold off the Siamese and other interested parties through skillfully forged alliances and political gambits, the city eventually fell to the Portuguese in the early 1500s. The fortunes of Melaka began to decline since the Portuguese taxed trade heavily and also because of declining popularity as venue among Muslim traders.

At that time, the Portuguese Inquisition was getting rolling and blood curdling reports of their exploits in India had made their way to Melaka. Also, when the Portuguese took the city they got right down to business destroying mosques and muslim graves, which probably did not do much to encourage muslim captains to want to dock at Melaka. Over the next 76 years, the Portuguese built up a series of fortifications and walls, supposedly incorporating stones from razed muslim graves and mosques.

Remnants of the Portuguese period are still visible at a few places in the city. Here is a gateway through the now mostly dismantled fortification wall, know as A Famosa.

Under Portuguese rule, a church was built on the main hill of the town, originally dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This is thought to be the oldest christian church in southeast Asia. It was later taken over by St. Francis Xavier, who is credited with bringing christianity to China. Later on the church was repurposed numerous times and eventually became known as St. Paul's.

Much of the Portuguese remnants make use of a deeply textured rust brown stone called laterite. It has a striking appearance, like a very coarse rusty stone sponge. Mineral analysis indicates these stones were likely quarried near Port Dickson and Pulau Upeh, both not far from Melaka.

We went to the Maritime Museum by the river, which is mostly inside a reconstructed Portuguese galleon. It was ok, but had too many placards for the younger kids.

The Dutch Came In
As time went on, the Dutch became more powerful in the region and schemed to eliminate the competition in trading rights, territory, and influence posed by the Portuguese operating out of Melaka. After a 5 month siege and battle which laid waste to much of the city, the Dutch took over in the mid 1600s. They stayed in charge for about 180 years.

There are far more remnants of Dutch occupation than from the Portuguese period. In the center of town there is an area know as Dutch Square which is comprised of dusky red painted Dutch buildings.

These house a number of small and interesting sounding museums, but we didn't visit any since some of our kids hate reading placards at museums.

The Dutch rebuilt and reinforced the fortification system around the city they took over to make it even more formidable. However, the next set of European occupiers deemed the fortress and walls too unwieldy and destroyed most of it.

Here is a small part of reconstructed fort from the Dutch period near the river. We got in trouble for climbing on it a couple minutes after this picture.

The Dutch put their mark on the church atop the central the hill as well and used it as a house of worship for about 100 years. I have a Dutch co-worker who came for a visit to Melaka and he said he could read the tombstones in the church perfectly well even though they are in the dutch language of circa 350 years ago.

Melaka remained important in the region during Dutch rule, but they tended to favor their commercial capital in Java and encouraged more trade to go through Batavia, so while Melaka grew in size somewhat it still did not return to its former glory.

The British Came In
In the mid 1800s, Melaka passed into British control. The British made it one of the Straits Settlements along with Singapore and Pinang. You can really feel the similarities between these three places, especially between Pinang and Melaka. However, the British prioritized development of Singapore as their primary hub of commerce and administration, so Melaka remained much as it had been. It is certainly the smallest of the three former Straits Settlements, but this makes it charming and small enough scale to walk around and enjoy for a one weekend trip.

Many buildings still standing in the town today were built during British rule, according to the shop house principal. This was a sort of preferred row house type building plan which put commercial establishments on the first floor, with a walkway in front.

Second floor was residential and extended out over the walkway. In theory this would provide a nice place for pedestrians out of the sun and the road traffic. In practice, the walkway is often not usable as a public thoroughfare because it is either blocked off with gates, full of merchandise or seating from the shop, or used as a parking space for mopeds. Or in this case, it is filled with a tiny shrine:

Still, it makes for an attractive building design and resonates with the cityscapes you see in Singapore and Pinang.

The blocked walkways are kind of a shame, because half the time you end up walking in the road and hoping you won't get run over.

If you are lucky, you may be able to walk on the covers of the ubiquitous storm sewers, hopping over the broken sections. One time when we were walking by our apartment my nephew saw a giant water monitor crawling along in one of these drains!

This is de rigeur for Malaysia however; actually the walkability of Melaka is better than most places. Occasionally you will get a stretch of shophouse walkway you can use as a sidewalk.

Sidenote: water seems to be distributed here via surface runs of PEX tubing with compression tubing, rather like you would use to make a drip sprinkler system.

Sometimes it gets buried a little to dive under walkways, or sometimes it runs along inside the storm drains. Maybe these small diameter and probably low pressure tubes are the reason water pressure varies wildly at end use points. I'm sure retrofitting running water into a city with over 600 years of history is a tricky infrastructure problem.

Accomodations
We stayed in a set of renovated shop house buildings near the river off Jalan Jawi, booked through Airbnb. It is actually four shophouse bays built together. We stayed in two different ones on our two different trips. We hired a mini-bus to take us to and from Melaka, and the place has a private parking lot so it was no trouble to get in and out of our transport. If you are in Melaka with a group or family, I could certainly recommend this place. Location is unbeatable, hosts are friendly and on-site, house is interesting and large. A/C in bedrooms only, but fans in common areas. No glass in windows, which is nice for breeze and air during the day, but you will want to close the shutters at night to keep out the bugs.

This was a really cool building to stay in and had been tastefully renovated. The plots for these shophouses lead to extremely deep but narrow buildings. It is a little strange because the building looks small from the streetfront but is actually quite large in floorspace.

One neat feature that makes this design tenable (very deep with no side windows) is airwells placed inside the footprint of the building. Originally these were open to the sky and had floor drains to take away rain. They end up creating a sort of mini-courtyard effect and let in natural light and air. The ones in our houses were mostly covered to keep out weather and birds, but were in fact open on the sides of the roofing to allow hot air to rise up and out. It is kind of neat to have whole sections of your house just open to the outside air - not something that would be feasible with the climate back home.

Baba Nyonya Heritage Museum
One museum we did have the pleasure of visiting and which is an example of shophouse architecture at its finest is the Baba Nyonya Museum.

Baba Nyonya is a term for the unique hybrid culture created by southern chinese traders settling down and marrying local women through the 15th to 17th centuries. Their culture is partly centuries old chinese and partly malay, and they have distinctive rituals and beliefs as well as styles of food and dress.

Melaka has a wonderful small museum around this culture and heritage housed in the private quarters of a well to do Peranakan chinese family. It is a beautifully designed and built house and well worth a visit. Photos are only allowed in the foyer room, but here is some of the impressive furniture they had there.

The foyer room was air conditioned, which was sincerely welcomed by some members of our party who were feeling hot after walking over here in the middle of the day.

One set of items they had displayed on the walls in the thia gelap (dark hall) were some antique chinese style embroidery panels which were absolutely mind blowing. Executed in a bewildering range of shades of what appeared to be single strands of silk, animals and nature scenes are depicted in unbelievable detail. Even for an expert practitioner 100 times better than me at embroidery it must have taken literally years of work to make even one of these monuments to human skill. Even if I had a picture I'm sure it wouldn't do justice to the work.


Villa Sentosa
On our second trip to Melaka, we walked up the river to check out Kampung Morten, a small area filled with traditional village style houses.

These houses were generally small but cute and well kept. Most have the dual pitch tin roof with gables and very steep center portion that is so distinctive to Malaysia. Here is one with a tiny model house in the garden next to the full size house.

For some reason Melaka is chock full of cats, and Kampung Morten is no exception.

One of the houses in this village is generously opened to visitors by the family living there, Villa Sentosa. It was really neat to be able to check out a traditional house like this and talk with the owner. Here we are in the inner courtyard.

Our host Mr. Ibrahim was very generous with his time and incredibly friendly. We got there around 10am and he said he had already had 70 visitors! He has been doing this now for decades almost every day.

The house was decorated in pictures showing generations of his family.We took a turn sitting in these chairs as a newly married couple would do.

On the walk back it was getting toward mid-day and we felt hot, so we ducked into the Tangs shopping gallery building off the river walk for a Boost juice and a rest in the AC. The kids had an arm wrestling tournament.

Menara Taming Sari
One last bit of architecture in the city which allows you to appreciate a lot of other architecture is the rotating tower down by the Maritime Museum. The line was short, the tickets cheap, and the view fantastic at sunset. From this vantage point you can get a better sense of how the town is layed out and where things are in relation to one another.