[
    {
        "id": 207991,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 30,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "14\n\nLEIGH WRIGHT\n\nAt the height of Brunei's \"golden age\" the earliest contacts with Europeans occurred. The best records of the early contacts are found in the account of Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan's circumnavigation voyage. In 1521 Magellan's fleet visited Brunei. I quote at some length a description of Brunei under Sultan Bulkiah.4\n\nWhen we reached the city, we had to wait two hours in the prau, until there had arrived two elephants, caparisoned in silk-cloth, and twelve men, each furnished with a porcelain vase, covered with silk, to receive and to cover our presents. We mounted the elephants, the twelve men going before, carrying the presents. The present for the king consisted of a vest velvet in the Turkish fashion, a chair of purple velvet, five yards of red broad-cloth, one cap (beretoo), a gilded goblet, a glass vase with a lid, three quires of paper, and gilded inkstand. We brought for the queen three yards of yellow broad-cloth, a pair of silver-embroidered shoes, and a silver case filled with pins. We thus proceeded to the house of the governor, who gave us a supper of many dishes. Here we slept for the night on mattresses stuffed with cotton (Bambagic), and cased with silk. Next day, we were left at our leisure until twelve o'clock when we proceeded to the king's palace. We were mounted, as before, on elephants, the men bearing the gifts going before us. From the governor's house to the palace the streets were full of people armed with swords, lances and targets: the king had so ordered it. Still mounted on the elephants we entered the court of the palace. We then dismounted, ascended a stair, accompanied by the governor and some chiefs, and entered a great hall full of courtiers, whom we shall call barons of the realm (Baroni del regno). Here we were seated on carpets, the presents being placed near to us.\n\nAt the end of the great hall, but raised above it, there was one of less extent hung with silken cloth, in which were two curtains, on raising which, there appeared two windows, which lighted the hall. Here, as a guard to the king, there were 300 men with naked rapiers (stochi nudi) in hand resting on their thighs, at the further end of this smaller hall, there was a great window with a brocade curtain before it, on raising which, we saw the king seated at a table masticating betel, and a little boy,\n\nPage 30\n\nPage 31",
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    {
        "id": 207993,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 32,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "16\n\nLEIGH WRIGHT\n\nporcelain cup full, the size of an egg, of a distilled liquor made from rice. We ate also rice and sweetmeats, using spoons of gold shaped like our own. In the place where we passed the two nights, there were always burning two torches of white wax, placed on tall chandeliers of silver, and two oil lamps of four wicks each, while two men watched to look after them. Next morning we came on the same elephants to the sea-side, where, forthwith, there were ready for us two praus, in which we were re-conducted to the ships. The city is entirely built in the salt water, the king's house and those of some chieftains excepted. It contains 25,000 fires or families. The houses are all of wood, and stand on strong piles to keep them high from the ground. When the flood tides make, the women, in boats go through the city selling necessaries. In front of the king's palace there is a rampart constructed of large bricks, with barbacans in the manner of a fortress, on which are mounted fifty-six brass, and six iron cannon. During the two days we passed in the city many of them were discharged. That king is a Moro and his name Raja Siripada. He was forty years old and corpulent. No one serves him except women who are the daughters of chiefs. He never goes outside of his palace, unless when he goes hunting, and no one is allowed to talk with him except through the speaking-tube. He has scribes, called Xiricoles who wrote down his deeds on very thin tree bark.\n\nThus Pigafetta's description of Brunei.\n\nII\n\nThe nature of the traditional kingdom in the Malay world differs markedly from the western conception of state. In very general terms it consisted of a ruler and his followers whose kampong or court was at a relatively strategic location such as on a narrow strait, (e.g. Malacca), at the mouth of a large river, or at the confluence of two streams where his forces could collect tolls on water traffic and his city could act as a trading center or entrepot. From his court the sultan's power radiated outward along the coasts, up rivers and along waterways as far as both his revenue collectors could operate, and his ecclesiastical title as sultan was respected. His kingdom or “empire” had no bounds as such. He \"owned\"",
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    },
    {
        "id": 207996,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 35,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "BRUNEI: A HISTORICAL RELIC\n\n19\n\nin insurrection; but being disunited, they have not thereby improved their condition: the Bornean Government always threatening them with calling in the Kayans to subdue any opposition. The Muruts and Bisayas of Limbang are the most impoverished people I have ever met,\n\nMy own findings concerning the sultans of Brunei during this period show quite conclusively that they supported and frequently had financial interests in pirate fleets.\n\nBrunei throughout the nineteenth century is pictured by most authorities as a decrepit principality whose chief characteristics are political weakness and anarchy.\n\nBrunei is in a state of anarchy and the sultan too mixed up with trading affairs and piracy to care for administration of justice or the welfare of the country.8\n\nThat less than sanguine description was written in 1854. Almost twenty years later the situation remained generally unchanged:\n\nThe picture that has been presented to us is of an aged prince devoting the last years of his life to the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth... ruled by his petty rajas, whose first aim is their own aggrandizement.9\n\nBy the middle of the 19th century the physical look of Brunei, built over the mud flats of the Brunei River, had changed only in terms of its now lack of pretension and prosperity from what Pigafetta had observed three hundred years before. The following is a description of the place by Raja James Brooke of Sarawak—taken from an 1841 entry in his journals. It describes the town and Brooke's reception by the sultan's court, and contrasts rather vividly with that of Pigafetta.\n\n**24th At 7 A.M. the state-boat, a shabby concern, decorated with yellow flags, arrived; at eight the letters were borne away under a salute. Thus we had a second time the satisfaction of getting rid of the mob at an early hour.\n\n\"25th At 9 A.M. I started with Williamson in the gig, with the long-boat in company, carrying the presents. On approaching the town, before the ebb had run long, it appeared to be a very Venice of hovels, a river Cybele rising from the water. For those who like it, the locality is not ill chosen. The hills recede from the river, and form an amphitheatre; and",
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    },
    {
        "id": 207998,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 37,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "BRUNEI A HISTORICAL RELIC\n\n21\n\nvery small, and rises but some fifteen to twenty miles inland. Where the town is, the river is very broad, forming a large lake. The town is commanded by hills once under cultivation; on an island at the mouth of the entrance are the shattered remains of an old Portuguese fort, which was still standing, though ruinous, when Hunt visited the place in 1809. The town itself has been designated the \"Venice of Borneo\" by old writers, a description to which the Italian Beccari rightly objected,* and is mainly built on piles driven into the mud on a shallow in the middle of the lake, the houses occupying wooden platforms elevated some ten feet above the reach of the tide. Communication between them is effected by canoes, in which the women daily go through the town selling provisions. It is, in a word, similar to the palafitte villages found in prehistoric times in the lakes of Switzerland and Lombardy. A part of the town, including the houses of the Sultan and the wazirs, is situated on the left bank of the river. It is the Brunei of Pigafetta's time, though sadly reduced in size and importance. Then the Sultan's palace was enclosed by a strong brick wall,† with barbicans mounting fifty-six cannon, now it is but a roughly built barn-like shed. Gone are the richly caparisoned elephants, and gone too is all the old pride, pomp, and panoply, including the spoons of gold, which particularly struck the old voyager.§ Brunei has no defences now, but, at the period of which we are writing, there were batteries planted on each side of the inlet commanding the approach, also two forts on the heights, and one battery on a\n\n* \"I admit that Bruni has its points, but what irony to compare for a moment the city of marble palaces with the mass of miserable huts which a single match could easily reduce to ashes.\" The Rajah called the place a \"Venice of hovels.\" Mercator in his Atlas describes it as \"being situated on a salt-water lagoon like Venice,\" hence probably it became known as the Venice of Borneo.\n\n† Kota batu, stone fort. The name still remains. It was built towards the close of the fifteen century by Sherip Ali, the first Arab Sultan, with the aid of the Chinese subjects his wife's mother had brought to Bruni. The city was then nearer the mouth of the river. It was moved to its present position by Sultan Muadin about 200 years ago.\n\n§ The Portuguese Jorge de Menezes, who visited Bruni five years after Pigafetta, notices that the city was surrounded with a wall of brick, and possessed some noble edifices. Other early voyagers describe the sultans and rulers of Malayan States as maintaining great style, and their equipments, such as swords of state, saddles, chairs, eating and drinking utensils as being of pure gold. Allowing for some exaggeration, this would still point to a former condition of prosperity which enabled rulers and nobles to keep up a pageantry which has long since vanished.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208004,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 43,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "BRUNEI: A HISTORICAL RELIC\n\n27\n\nMalaya a \"new nationalism” has not yet emerged. It is in a sense \"bought off\" by the prosperity and good times made possible by the oil revenues.\n\nA recent account of Brunei in a well-known western journal began this way: 21\n\nThere are moments when visitors feel this sleepy state on Borneo island's northern shore is something dreamed-up in a Hollywood script conference.\n\nOur film opens in some place wild like the South China Sea coast. It's a place run by a sultan — you know, a chap with a turban and a name like Sir Omar Ali Saifuddin. He lives in this big box of a palace with a flock of cars and a bunch of hungry relatives.\n\nAnd get this, the country sits atop a huge pool of oil so nobody wants to work. In fact, most everyone just kinda mooch-es off the government, which sits back and collects millions from the oil company.\n\nThen we need something spectacular like a huge mosque with a gold-plated dome that's lit with coloured floodlights at night.\n\nExcept for the presence of the opulent gold-domed Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin mosque which now towers on the skyline Pigafetta of Magellan's crew would still recognize Brunei if he were able to sail up the river to the town today,22\n\nThe \"Water Village” (Kampong Ayer) has changed little in character. More than half the people in the capital live in houses built on piles above the water of the river, and it is said that some old women in the kampong have never set foot on land, having spent their whole lives in the river village. Today, however, Kampong Ayer is dominated by the mosque, constructed at the water's edge and opened in 1958. This dignified building, the pride of the present and the fulfilment of the hopes of the past, approached from water on one side and land on the other, seems to stand symbolically where tradition and progress meet. For although the water village changes little, on the landward side Brunei Town grows, encouraged by the easy wealth obtained from oil revenues and by the fervent desire, both patriotic and religious, to outdo its neighbours,",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208005,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 44,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "28\n\nLEIGH WRIGHT\n\nThe state of Brunei annual report for 1956 describes the water city, Kampong Ayer, this way,\n\nSet in a wide sweep of the river, this river town is in its way unique. At high tide under favourable conditions of light it takes on quite a remarkable beauty; viewed at close quarters it is even more remarkably ramshackle. The houses are grouped together in small villages, being connected by precarious plank walkways, and there the inhabitants carry on their multifarious activities in much the same way as if they were on land.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 See e.g. O. W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce; a study of the origins of Srivijaya, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); and D. E. Brown, Brunei: the structure and history of a Bornean Malay sultanate, (Brunei: Brunei Museum, 1970).\n\nThese works have drawn upon the earlier studies of such scholars as W. P. Groeneveldt (1880) and Lien Sung (1919).\n\n2 See Brown, op. cit., Ch. XI.\n\n3 The fullest account of the Moro wars is in E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493 - 1898, (Cleveland, 1903 -09).\n\n4 Lord Stanley of Alderley (ed.), The first voyage round the world by Magellan, by Antonio Pigafetta, (London: Hakluyt Society, 1874).\n\n5 J. Hunt, \"Some particulars relative to the Sulo islands in the Archipelago of Felicia”, in Malayan Miscellany, I, (Bencoolen, 1820).\n\n6 James Horsburgh, Directions for sailing to and from the East Indies and China, (London, 1811), the navigational handbook for generations of British sea captains. This work drew heavily upon the surveys of eighteenth century seafarers such as Alexander Dalrymple (1774) and Thomas Forest (1780).\n\n7 S. B. St. John, Life in the forests of the Far East. (London, 1862), Vol. 2, pp. 248-49.\n\n8 British Parliamentary Papers, 1854-55, XXIX (253),\n\n9 Sarawak Gazette, 26 April, 1872.\n\n10 Henry Keppel, The expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido for the suppression of piracy, with extracts from the Journal of James Brooke, Esq. of Sarawak, (London, 1847),\n\n11 S. Baring-Gould and C. A. Bampfylde, A History of Sarawak under its two white rajahs, (London, 1909), pp. 82-83.\n\n12 Lennox Mills, British Malaya, 1824-67, (reprint: Kuala Lumpur, 1966), p. 248.\n\n13 British interests in Borneo are treated extensively in, L. R. Wright, The Origins of British Borneo, (Hong Kong, 1970).\n\n14 See L. R. Wright, \"The Foreign Office and North Borneo\", in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. VII, No. 1, (January 1969).",
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