Areca Books: books 06b

There are lots of interesting facts sprinkled within the pages of the Perak Academy’s mammoth book Kinta Valley: Pioneering Malaysia’s Modern Development which was published in December last year.

Written by researchers Khoo Salma Nasution, 42, and Abdur-Razzaq Lubis, 45, the page book chronicles the social history of the area and its personalities from prehistoric times to Independence Day.

“The book is basically about the transformation of the Kinta Valley in the wake of the British intervention, and how that has brought us to where we are today,” says Abdur-Razzaq during an interview in Ipoh recently.

The 428-page volume, which took over a year to write, covers a broad range of topics from the valley’s unique local and immigrant communities, its roads and railways, to the lean times of the Japanese Occupation and the Emergency.

While some may think a coffee-table book on the valley might not make for very riveting reading, the husband-and-wife team has taken pains to make its story come alive, be it for student or serious scholar.

“There is more to Kinta Valley than being the largest tin-producing region in the world until the mid-1980s and one of Malaya’s most important districts.

“We wanted to write about the things not many people know about the valley, things that tend to be overlooked in the history books.”

One such example is the orang asli whose significance and role in the development of Kinta Valley appear to have been forgotten, according to Abdur-Razzaq.

An entire chapter has been devoted to the indigenous group, which explains their little known history as one of Kinta Valley’s earliest tin miners. Also included is the part they played in “fighting other people’s wars”.

“This aspect is interesting because the orang asli are known to be one of the most non-violent races in the world. They have always been very important to Kinta and this has not been explored.”

One account describes how the Senoi orang asli cleverly dealt with the government and the communist terrorists during the Emergency in order to survive.

Often caught between the two sides, Senoi groups either “played dumb” and pretended to be “stupid, dirty aborigines”, or simply claimed to support one or the other side, depending on which was nearer.

Also mentioned, of course, is the famous orang asli army known as the Senoi Pra’aq, which has been very successful in tracking down communist terrorist guerrillas and identifying their camps during the Emergency.

The orang asli are not the only community featured in the book, says Khoo.

“As tin rose in popularity in the 18th century, Kinta Valley increasingly became a social melting pot for migrating Chinese of the Hakka, Cantonese, Teochew and Hokkien clans.

“They in turn mingled side by side with a breathtaking mix of Malays, orang asli, Mandailings, Acehnese, Rawa, Javanese, Tamils, Pathans, Punjabis, British, Eurasians, French, Dutch, Germans and Americans.

“In the book, we tried to give each ethnic group the attention they deserve, especially the ‘forgotten communities’ whose role Malaysians today might not be aware of.”

The first chapter opens with the authors narrating the historical significance of the Kinta Valley area as the site of ancient Buddhist and Hindu civilisations.

The valley boasts a historical wealth of archaeological artefacts dating from prehistoric times, and tin miners have been known to unearth bronze sculptures dating back to the sixth century.

“A capital of the ancient Hindu kingdom of Gangga Nagara dating back to the early sixth or seventh century was thought to have been located in Kinta Valley.

“Around the same, sixth to 10th century artefacts unearthed from the valley also suggests that there had been a Buddhist settlement at one time,” says Khoo.

The name ‘Kinta Valley’ itself tends to summon up images of great tin dredges churning up soil at mining ponds, or of colourful little towns set in the backdrop of Perak’s limestone hills.

Those same frontier towns – Sungai Siput to the north and Kampar to the south, with places like Papan, Batu Gajah, Gopeng, Kepayang, Chemor, Kota Bharu, Malim Nawar, Kuala Dipang, Pengkalan Pegoh and Menglembu in between – are all described in the book.

Although based in Penang, the writers had to do a lot of legwork across Perak to take photographs and gather material first-hand from the people who know best – the residents themselves.

“We wanted to put a local perspective to the story so that it would have that connection and become meaningful to them.

“Besides the other research material, we also garnered a wealth of information from the Perak Government Gazette issues stored in the National Library in Kuala Lumpur,” says Abdur-Razzaq.

Their fieldwork resulted in 32 pages of colour photographs as well as over 600 black-and-white photographs and illustrations borrowed from friends and private archives.

The exploratory trips also sprang their own surprises on the couple, like the time when Khoo and Abdur-Razzaq were researching Batu Gajah, at one time one of Kinta’s busiest towns. During one visit to Perak, the couple were dismayed to learn that the Alma Baker House in Batu Gajah, a landmark thought to be at least 95 years old, had been torn down last September.

Charles Alma Baker, a surveyor from New Zealand who owned vast tracts of land and rubber estates during the early 1900s, had built the house, which was used to film several scenes for the movie Anna and the King in 1999.

“I was shocked because we had just visited the house to take photographs of it a week before it was demolished.

“It could have been Batu Gajah’s most important asset in drawing in visitors to this Perak town. To have something like this torn down, it’s like nothing is sacred,” says a visibly upset Khoo.

Her husband points out that one of the interesting stories to come out of Batu Gajah was the interaction between Baker and a Scottish planter named William Kellie Smith.

The two men had started out as associates in early life but ended up as “rivals in business and in lifestyle, from the grandeur of their homes down to the appearance of their horses and carriages”.

“Until recently, Batu Gajah had the Alma Baker house and Kellie’s Castle built by William Kellie Smith.

“Although the state government has done a lot to promote the castle, the story of these men is impoverished by the destruction of the Alma Baker house,” he says.

The couple say that if handled correctly, Batu Gajah could have been modelled after Taiping as a Bandar Warisan (heritage town) in its own right.

Mine it for education and tourism
By Christina Koh

A book on Kinta Valley would not be complete without mentioning the tin-mining activities that put the area on the world map.

Everything is covered here, from the mountain mines called lampang preferred by Malays, and the cangkul (hoe) and wicker baskets used by the early Chinese miners, to the mighty dredges brought in by the Europeans.

Tin is not Kinta Valley’s only legacy, however, according to Prof Wang Gungwu of the East Asian Institute in Singapore.

The valley, wrote the professor in the book’s preface, was also the site of sweeping achievements in politics and education, besides the bustling commerce at numerous frontier mining towns.

It was in Kinta that men like nationalist Datuk Ahmad Boestaman and Aminuddin Baki, Malaysia’s most important educationist, had been active, as well as key leaders of Umno, MCA and the Malayan Communist Party.

Casual readers flicking through the pages of the book may find themselves tickled by some of the candid black-and-white photographs of yesteryear.

Among the collection are rare shots of Ipoh in its early days, photographs of the Hong Kong child star Fong Po Po advertising Menglembu groundnuts, and of Kinta nobles going on a picnic on the backs of 56 elephants.

The couple are no stranger to the tricky research and legwork needed to write a book on a subject as encompassing as the Kinta Valley.

In 1999, they penned the popular heritage map Ipoh: The City that Tin Built, which provides reader-friendly snippets of heritage sites around the town.

They later joined forces to write Raja Bilah and the Mandailings in Perak: 1875-1911, a 278-page book about Abdur-Razzaq’s ancestors which was published by the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in December 2003.

With their latest book finally out of the way, Abdur-Razzaq reflects that Kinta Valley has three main “attractions” – the orang asli, its tin mining history and the splendour of its limestone hills.

“As long as there has been Man, there has always been a human relationship with the limestone hills,” says the self-proclaimed social activist.

“Even now, it becomes all the more urgent to preserve Perak’s limestone hills before they disappear. The past is so rich that people should cherish and appreciate that.

“Like the limestone hills, like the traditions of the orang asli, these should be kept for the future.

“Of course, I realise that it is not possible to save everything and I’m not suggesting that all development should freeze.

“I just think that cultural and heritage sites should be treated as education and tourism assets. They are our investment for present and future generations.”

The story of Kinta, once the wealthiest district in British Malaya, is essentially the bittersweet tale of the country’s birth into the modern era, says the author.

“This is a book in which we try to say that Malaysians should understand their history. Without a past, there is no future.”

The authors are currently working on the Perak Postcard Collection with postal historian Malcolm Wade, and hope to produce the postcards by the end of the year.

Kinta Valley: Pioneering Malaysia’s Modern Development by Khoo Salma Nasution and Abdur-Razzaq Lubis; preface by Wang Gungwu; published by Perak Academy, a non-profit organisation that aims to nurture the state into a centre of excellence in thought, culture and technology; 3,000 copies; 29cm x 26cm, 428 pages; 607 illustrations – 410 b/w, 197 colour; RM149.90. Direct orders/enquiries to Mr Yeap (04-2620123, fax: 04-2633970, or e-mail: januspenang@myjaring.net).