Reviews & Press : : Kinta Valley

The Penang File
http://thepenangfileb.bravepages.com/jul-2005/books41.htm
by Lim Kean Chye

Kinta Valley

IN THE 1880s, Isabella Bird visited Perak: "... the richest and most important of the States of the Peninsula, ..... The great artery of the country is the Perak river, a most serpentine stream. Ships drawing thirteen feet of water can ascend it as far as Durian Sabatang, fifty miles from its mouth, and boats can navigate it for one hundred and thirty miles farther. This river, even one hundred and fifty miles from its mouth at Kwala Kangsa, is two hundred yards wide, and might easily be ascended by "stern-wheel" boats drawing a foot of water, such as those which ply on the upper Mississippi", so wrote Isabella Bird on her visit in the late 19th century.

The Silver State's Kinta valley, enormously rich in tin, was to become imperial Britain's voracious dollar earner for the sterling area. With the invention of tin cans and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 the state's output reached 55% of the world's tin supply..

Empire swashbucklers like Birch and Swettenham were quick to find excuses for seizing the territory from the Malay chiefs, whose people Swettenham found afflicted with "a disinclination to work... no stomach for really hard and continuous work, either of the brain or the hands..."

Khoo Salma and Abdur-Razzaq Lubis's "Kinta Valley" is a well-researched account of that same valley. The book of 428 pages is heavy with photos both black and white as well as coloured, and is divided into sections which range from English society to the neglected Orang Asli.

We learn from this book that the "lazy" Malay in fact did mine for tin, that Kulop Riau, the principal miner, dug for it as far back as 1861, that the chiefs brought in Chinese labour to help, that there were even Siamese labourers employed. We do not know when tin mining started but we do know that the Dutch invaders built a fort as far back as 1670 on Pangkor island to protect their interests in tin and other products; and we know that Chinese mines were in Toh Allang before Francis Light grabbed Penang.

The Orang Asli, a largely ignored bumiputera group, has pride of place in this narrative. The department of aborigines, set up in 1954 in conditions of the "Emergency", still maintains an iron grip on this minority group. Once hunted for slaves they are still without full rights as we learnt from the bitter battle in 1993 in Kelantan for their ancestral lands. Neither (contrary to the Constitution) do they have freedom of religion. T N Harper, quoting press and government sources, writes:-

"Approaches [by the Christian churches] had been forbidden, "as a matter of politics" after the war. After independence a new policy followed ‘suitable measures designed for their protection and advancement with a view to their ultimate integration with the Malay section of the community."

There are good photographs of Perak's limestone hills whose magical presence adorns the land and create that unknowable and poetical beauty that is peculiarly Perak's. Much has been written about these valuable hills by the Cambridge scientists but their gradual destruction by excavators, greedy for rock and marble, goes without protest. The people of Perak remain silent while the murder of their environment rampages on.

In the section on English society, the colour bar is strangely not mentioned. Much space is given to such English tuan as Baker and Smith. A similar bias is shown in the selection of the two "European" legal firms for prominence. The renowned lawyers, the Das brothers and their impressive library are not mentioned. The list of talented people from Ipoh is an impressive one. There were the first two articled clerks to become lawyers: Seenevasagam, the father of the famous brothers, SP and DR, and Khong Kit Seng, the father of a Peoples Progressive Party lawyer Khong Kok Yat; Chin Swee Onn, a British stalwart and a pillar of Ipoh society, the brother of Chin Kee Onn, who left us a memorable book on the customs of the Ipoh Baba and Nyonya, "The Twilight of the Nyonyas;" Yeoh Cheang Lee, a Cambridge man whose partner in Cheang Lee & Ong was H T Ong, later to become Chief Justice and whose brother, H S Ong, became a Federal Judge; Cheng Hock & Yew Koh whose partner Leong Yew Koh was to become governor of Malacca. And there was C N Lim, the lawyer who had his own club, and whose violin illuminated the cultural gloom of the Ipoh Bar.

Ipoh was also the beginning of the careers of Abraham Ho Ah Loke and Runme Shaw, early partners who were to go their separate ways and build cinema and film empires and groomed Malay film stars. It was the partnership that in 1928 brought the first talkie - Al Jolson in "The Singing Fool" - to the Sun Cinema in Brewster Road. And remarkable is the fact that A. Devadason, the accountant, was the only Indian miner in the history of tin, another plus for Ipoh.

The FMS Hotel was a watering hole for those whites who were considered, for one reason or another, as not fit for the membership of the snob Ipoh Club, lying at the end of the Padang across the road. The "FMS" was also the hotel pre-war for visiting Asiatic lawyers who were not admitted to the "European" hotels.

It was in Ipoh that Dato Lau Pak Khuan OBE, and his Kuomintang loyalists establishied the MCA, of which he became its first chairman; and it was this same group that helped launch the Chung Khiaw Bank. It was also Ipoh that broke the monopoly of the cement plant at Rawang with the establishment of two cement works.

I cannot part with the subject Ipoh without disclosing that besides its reputation for tin and pomelos and cave temples it had an enviable reputation for possessing the most beautiful girls in the country. A cabaret girl, with reasonably good looks and anxious to increase her popularity, would not hesitate to claim that she came from Ipoh
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On the Japanese occupation, the book gives the impression that Force 136 was a force to be reckoned with. But As Tan Chong Tee points out in his "Force 136," it was only a small force of KMT radio operators and liaison men air -dropped towards the end of the war but virtually wiped out with the capture of Lim Bo Seng and others. "The British operation was exploded by the loss of Lim [Boh Seng] and other Chinese agents" ... "The collapse of the Kuomintang operation made the British entirely dependent on the Malayan Communist Party . Their claims to represent SEAC were redundant in the absence of radio communication.." (Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper: "Forgotten Armies," 2004)

The section on the Malay Nationalist Party gives the impression that they were a small organisation confined to Perak. In fact it was a vast pan-Malayan organisation led by the pre-eminent Boestaman and Dr Burhanuddin that dominated the political scene in the immediate post-Japanese surrender period.

The account of the post-Japanese surrender military administration is very useful. It chronicles the disgraceful demonstrations of the British iron fist by the shooting down of unarmed crowds. As early as the 22nd of December 1945 British Indian troops in Taiping fired on protestors killing three - the demonstrators were merely demanding that the Youth League, which had seized rice stocks from the Japanese, should continue to be in charge of distribution. We are reminded by the authors that the 1945 British Military Administration was so corrupt it was popularly called the "Black Market Administration." The returning tuan, it seemed, had not heard of the Atlantic Charter or the United Nations. In London the Old Malaya Hands were plotting the Malayan Union and the reestablishment of colonial rule with the help of the Trades Union Congress.

By 1947 it became clear that Britain had determined to restore the old regime. This is how Sir G Tory (British High Commissioner at Kuala Lumpur, speaking in 1963) articulated it:

"... Here in Malaya we have something like 400 million pounds sterling permanently invested, mostly in rubber and tin, investments which we cannot withdraw. This is far greater, for example, than our corresponding investment in India and Pakistan. Gold earnings from rubber and tin are, I believe, essential to our balance of payments. Annually some 7 or 8 million pounds sterling of new British investment enters Malaya. Our hope of keeping these investments and of maintaining our present earnings from them depends not only on the stability of a government which is strong and friendly, a government which is not, through external or internal weakness, compelled to compromise with an opposition which is prepared to play along with the communists ... we and the Malayans have to remind ourselves that we are going ahead with it because we estimate that failure to secure the containment of Singapore before the end of this year might result in Singapore going Communist and starting a chain reaction which could end in the subversion of the whole region. That is why we are going for Malaysia ... " (27- 29.5 1963 Speech by Sir G Tory at Eden Hall Singapore)

As the screws tightened in 1947 - 1948 it was inevitable that it should meet with resistance. The relentless crushing of the political associations and unions resulted in the inevitable, a violent reaction that led to the guerrilla war of 1948, called the "emergency" for the sake of insurance policies. "The secret Information Research Department (IRD) quickly got to work to ensure that this was an attempt by the Chinese Communists minority (40 per cent of the population) to impose Communism on the Malay majority. " ( Lashmar and Oliver: Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948 - 1977). "... coercion tended to be the first resort of policy. The bogey of Communism was invoked , where it was not already present, and this surfaced in the early stages of the Cold War to legitimise the use of force" (Cain and Hopkins: British Imperialism quoted by Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977 by Paul Lashmar and James Oliver)

As Harper put it: "The Malayan Emergency was fought in large part to make Southeast Asia safe for British business".

And the war was executed with great cruelty. Villagers were herded into concentration camps - euphemistically called "new villages" - copied from their predecessors of the Boer War. In 1970 the British newspapers revealed that 24 villagers had been massacred at Batang Kali. More horrors were to be exposed. Photographs showed British soldiers holding severed heads of the "enemy." Homes were burnt down in Jalong, Lintang and Tronoh. In Kacau, 50 houses and shops were put to the torch on orders of the OCPD. As the authors say, during the emergency Malaya was a police state akin to the police state in Palestine.

But if the British had thought that the "emergency " was a pushover they were wrong. By 1953, the real cost of war was something like £100,000,000 per annum - and probably more. In 1954 the High Commissioner gave the approximate cost to Britain of Army Naval and Air Force units engaged in Malaysia of £550,000,000 per annum (Anthony Short: "In Pursuit of Mountain Rats"). The urgent task for Britain to do was to find local elements to whom they could safely hand over safeguarding their stake in rubber and tin and who, at the same time, could share the burden of the war. For this purpose all "negotiations" were aimed at concocting tempting morsels of "civil rights" with which to enhance the prestige and power of those they had anointed their successors.

One correction. The authors, misled by the special branch, use the term "races liberation" instead of "national liberation". The Chinese phrase is but a translation of the English. To retranslate literally from the Chinese afresh is as inept and as wicked as retranslating "Parliament" back into English as "State Society". One has to be aware of special branch propaganda.

Kinta Valley
Pioneering Malaysia's Modern Development
Khoo Slma Nasution & Abdur-Razzaq Lubis
Perak Academy 2005

(Photo: A palong, an elevated sluice box for extracting tin)