Little Old Town

Walter William Skeat, an anthropologist who visited Kuala Trengganu in 1899, was impressed by Sultan Zainal Abidin III's urbane humour. From his library the Sultan produced Wood's Natural History to pick out 'some of the beasts we were discussing'. And then, looking out at Kuala Trengganu, Skeat said, it was 'a hive of industry'.

The capital was composed of many kampungs and the shops

“were well-supplied with bread, light beer, soda, cheroots and similar European wares, as well as with an extensive assortment of Malay goods and, above all, Chinese and Indian articles. The streets, except around the istana, were ill-kept and destitute of drains. Yet even here the local talent for craftsmanship showed itself clearly in the well-built bridges across the creeks. We also saw a few wooden lamp-posts, which must have been unique among the east coast states at the time of our visit.”

Skeat would have seen Kuala Trengganu very much as it was seen below, in a photo taken nine years before his visit and published in the Illustrated London News.In 1846, during the reign of the illustrious Sultan Baginda Omar, an anonymous visitor gave a description of Kuala Trengganu that wasn't far removed from the photo that we see above. Looking from the river, the visitor said, the town of Tringanu

“has a very pretty appearance...the houses line the south bank for a couple of miles and are built very close, on piles; in the back ground are two hillocks, on one of which the standard of Tringanu is hoisted on great occasions, and behind the hills is a forest of cocoanut trees; on the north bank there are a few isolated houses , built in groves of cocoanuts.”

The Kuala Trengganu of the picture above was the Trengganu of Sultan Zainal Abidin III, and of Tok Ku Paloh, one of Trengganu's many scholar-saints. Hugh Cliffford, then British Resident in Pahang, met the man and was apprehensive about the rabble-rousing speeches that he directed at the natives. Tok Ku Paloh was, in other words, a totally unreasonable character who was dead against British rule. This 'saint', he said (and you can almost sense the sneer here), 'lives secluded in the retirement of a shady, sleep-steeped village.' He was 'powerful, magnetic...a little, shrivelled, glassy-headed man from out of whose deep-sunken eyes there glares a soul of a fanatic.'

Looking at the photo now, more than a hundred years later, I think I can still recognise the houses and the boats in the water, but is that really Bukit Putri in the background with what looks like the fortress above? Are we looking from Pantai Teluk, or is this a view form the river? What do you think?

Mass Movements

Under the henna tree, on the weather-beaten bench in the compound fenced by a grill of thin metal spears over the low brick wall sat Pök Mud, wizened by time and jangling with a ring of keys that hung from his Haji's belt that was broad and green with pockets for loose change and the odd dollar. Hajis wore that belt to punctuate the middle of their elaborate gear, trousers underneath their kain pelikat dropping to the ankles, and an undershirt of silky material, collar buttoned halfway down the chest in a style that Father sometimes referred to as kanciperat, a word that's as elusive as its flavour's regal. At a wild guess I'd say that it's a marriage between kancing [buttoned] and sekerat, [halfway] from the style of its collar. Over this kanciperat went the baju melayu with its two patched front pockets to dip into when the conversation came to a standstill, and then the turbaned head, tasseled and tailed, that swung round quite breezily when talk turned to raucous laughter.

There were men who wore the kanciperat as de rigueur in Kuala Trengganu, firemen walking around in their off-duty hours wore it too as they loitered in their fenced area in Kampung Daik opposite the 'flowered shop', our kedai bbunga. But Pök Mud wasn't a fireman; he was a genial man and a retired warder as he'd tell you. In his working days he carried a heavy bunch of keys on his belt that held up his regulation trousers in the Kuala Trengganu gaol. I saw Pök Mud on his bench seat under the tree in the compound of the Masjid Abidin for many years before learning the true meaning of that glint in his eye. It transpired that in the last year of his wardering days he took into the prison walls some tiny brightly coloured laxative fruits of a palm tree that was known in Trengganu as buah manjikiang and dosed it liberally into the prisoners' meals. It was the day of the mass breakout of diarrhoea among the inmates of Kuala Trengganu.

Going back two generations or so before Pök Mud, prisoners were lucky to have found food in Trengganu gaols. Walter Skeat, who went on a 'scientific' expedition for the British in 1899 to Trengganu and beyond, illustrated Sultan Zainal Abidin III's 'original mind and a shrewd sense of humour' by his answer to the question why he did not pay off his debts promptly. His creditors would be constantly praying for his continued well-being for as long as they were waiting to be paid, answered the great man, deploying, no doubt, the Trengganu penchant for the leg-pull or mengayör as we call it even now. Unlike other states, Trengganu did not provide free food for its prisoners then; when tackled by Skeat on this matter the Sultan replied, according to Skeat, that if it were so then the entire population of Trengganu would be clamouring to be gaoled.

Pök Mud the prankster warder would have loved the humour even if there wasn't enough manjikiang fruit to set the population going behind those walls.