A Prison in Tanjong

Sultan Zainal Abidin III (1881-1918)was given the posthumous title of Marhum Haji. He was, by all accounts, a devout man whose policy of non-commitment whilst maintaining friendly relations kept both the British and the Siamese at arm's length. Sir Frank Swettenham found him to be "an extraordinarily reserved man, very silent".

Swettenham also noted that for a Sultan, he had little wealth, and he went on to tell a story that he had heard in Trengganu, that on the Sultan's second visit to Bangkok (Zainal Abidin visited Bangkok twice) where he was lavished with presents by the King of Siam –

"he had been told that the Siamese government would lend him $2,000,000 and that he could have $500,000 as advance. This was a large sum to a poor man and it is a credit to him that he declined it."

Things were different then.

In a way the Sultan's other-worldliness also disadvantaged his subjects. He left the affairs of state to trusted men, and although himself a just man, he was unaware of many things that were carried out in his name. The administration of justice was entrusted to one Tengku Musa, and in this he was assisted by Tuan Hitam, a Sayyid who also acted as the Sultan's treasurer, and Encik Abdul Rahim, the Sultan's trusted adviser.

Clifford reported that justice was rough, people were imprisoned on scant evidence, and fines were imposed to punish as well as to collect revenue for the court. On April 22nd, 1895, Clifford went to Kedai Tanjong, not to buy fruits or fish, but to visit Kuala Trengganu's penjara (prison). He was appalled by its condition.

"It consists of an enclosure, built in the very centre of the Kedai Tanjong - one of the most crowded positions of the town - surrounding the cages in which the prisoners were confined. The prison is built of heavy slabs of wood, some 3 inches thick, a feet broad and 10 feet high, which are fitted together so as to form a solid wall. Inside this fence, and at a distance of 30 inches from it, are two rows of cages placed back to back, which are made of heavy bars of wood with intervals of a couple of inches or so in every eight for the admission of light and air. These cages are raised about 6 inches from the ground, and measure some 6 feet in length, 2 feet in width, and 5 feet in height."

He reported that there were 20 cages in all and during his visit, the penjara was 'fairly full'.

Prisoners were not permitted to leave their cages and sanitary arrangements were non existent. "[T]he space between the floor and the ground, and the interval which separates the cells from the surrounding fence, is therefore a seething mess of excrement and maggots," Clifford wrote.

The closeness of the cells, poor ventilation, and the solid wooden walls all added up to something appalling. "To add to this misery," he added, "no bathing appliance of any kind are supplied to the prisoners, and the filthy persons of the inmates of these cells beggar all description."

Reference:
M. C. ff. Sheppard, "A Short History of Trengganu", JMBRAS Vol. XXii Part 3, June 1949.

Taxed By the River

If you look up an old copy of the AAM Guide to Driving in Malaysia and take the road that wends and bends up Bukit Kijal, you'll see as you're coming down on the other side a breathtaking view of the beach in Kemaman, the sea framed by steep hillsides, coconut trees with leaves waving so nimbly and the sun shining bright in a cloudless sky. This was the view I saw many times in our journeys home from Kuantan by bus or taxi, and then maybe a few times more in our trips from Kuala Lumpur with Father when he drove us home in his ailing Hillman Minx and then later from inside a tank called the Volvo 122S that Father picked up from the yard of a second-hand dealer.

In 1936 the young colonial officer M.C. ff. Sheppard, delighted to be re-posted to Kemaman, found the beach there as beautiful and alluring as when he’d left it in 1934, so much so that he wondered how his fellow countrymen, coming as they did from a “nation whose youth has been spent on holiday at Margate, Broadstairs, Filey or Bude” could have left it alone and unspoilt.

Kemaman may have been beautiful and the place to be but not to all of Shephard’s fellow officers. In 1923, G.E.Clayton, a man who survived the Great War mentally and physically intact, found the solitude and the quiet life in Kemaman just too burdensome to bear. He took out his gun and just blew his life away. His successor had much the same view about Kemaman, but instead of pulling out his gun, he took out his pen and wrote his resignation letter just a week after being condemned to this life of beach, sea and sky.

I had no views of Kemaman except as a stopping place after the stomach churning roller coaster roads that we knew as jalan ular (snake road) after Kuantan, and the Kemaman ferry, the floating platform that bobbed up and down from one side to the other of the Kemaman water. Kemaman looked to me like a vast place, with villlage houses sheltering under coconut groves and miles of mostly straight but pot-holed tarmac to Kuala Trengganu. And then of course there was Geliga, that enchanted stone on Kemaman's shore.
A boy who was our cousin or maybe in a position further removed in the kinship line, went on a bus ride to Kemaman one day and came back with other unfortunates stretched out in the back of a lorry. They were all laid out fully clothed, with lungs still drenched in brackish water after the bus lost its brakes in its downward journey down the steep slope to the Geliga ferry. It plunged straight into the swollen river. That was a very long time ago but I can still see them all stretched out on the tarpaulin when the lorry pulled into the street light just after dusk for the bodies to be collected by grieving families.

It marked out Kemaman as a distant place in my mind’s eye, with loopy roads and deep rivers in the shadow of a steep hill. It was, after all, nearly a hundred miles away from Kuala Trengganu. And then there was a town called Chukai shimmering in reflection in yet another body of water. Chukai was allegedly named after the tax (cukai) collectors that kept their post on the river banks, but Mother told us a different story. There was, in times past, she said, a crocodile in the Kemaman river and because of its habit of regularly snapping up local inhabitants for food the place came to be known as Chukai, i.e. the place where the crocodile exacted its toll.

When crocodiles no longer swam the river and drill platforms rose along the shore, the trunk road from Pahang through Kemaman was lit up in the nights by a tall gas flare that signalled that one was entering oil country. It seemed aeons ago now when Tuan Separd (Sheppard) left his local idyll to take up further posts in the rarefied air of Kuala Lumpur, and then staying on after Independence to become the first curator (I think) of the Muzim Negara before moving on to distinguish himself in other things, not as ‘M.C.ff’ but as Abdul Mubin Sheppard, writer, historian, socialite, Tan Sri, Dato’ and Haji.

Kemaman had its ways of luring people. As the historian Heusseler put it: "For bachelors who were not overly reliant on clubs and European society, it was a paradise of vast, empty beaches and tiny kampongs dreaming under a tropical sun, peopled by ra'ayat who were as attractive as they were shy and suspicious of outsiders."