VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Welcome back to Planet Doug! 🌏 In this video, I take you on a fascinating journey through the Galeri Warisan Kota Melaka in Melaka, Malaysia. But here’s the twist: a few days previously, I filmed a standard walkthrough of this museum. While editing that video, I started fact-checking and realized that I—and the museum exhibits—had gotten a LOT of things wrong about the history of the Melaka Sultanate, A Famosa Fort, and the Portuguese conquest.
So, I went back to the museum to set the record straight in my mind. Join me as I re-walk the exhibits and dive into the “fine print” of history. I explore why 18th-century European illustrations of Melaka are largely inaccurate, uncover the lost history of the original Portuguese “A Famosa” tower (a 120-foot skyscraper!), and discuss the often unspoken religious motivations of the Portuguese conquistadors.
We also look at the history of the “Betrayal of the Malay Sultanate” involving the Tamil, Chinese, and Javanese communities, and how the treasure ship Flor de la Mar* ended up at the bottom of the Malacca Strait
What I talk about in this video:
– Why historical illustrations of Melaka are mostly European invention.
– The mystery of the original “A Famosa” tower (and why it’s missing from museum models).
– The religious motivations behind the Portuguese conquest of Melaka.
– The reality of the “Betrayal” of the Melaka Sultanate.
– The importance of critical thinking when visiting museums!
Melaka has an incredibly rich and dramatic history, and while museums are great, the whole story is often hidden in the margins. Let me know in the comments if I got anything else wrong, or if you have more fascinating facts about this history!
🌏 Location: Gallery Warisan Kota Melaka, Malacca City, Malaysia.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, the title of this video isn’t entirely accurate. It’s a bit of an exaggeration. I don’t think I got everything wrong, but I did get quite a few things wrong.
And what I’m talking about is a few days ago, I visited this museum behind me here in Melaka, Malaysia, the Gallery Warisan Kota Melaka. And I did a fairly standard museum visit. I did a walkthrough, checked out all the exhibits, talked about what I was seeing in the exhibits, added some information of my own, and I was mainly interested in the information about the fortress here, the A Famosa built by the Portuguese in 1511 and then sort of redesigned and expanded by the Dutch and then eventually utterly destroyed by the British.
So I was mainly interested in that and the model they had of the fort. So I kind of went through the museum and pointed out some exhibits that were interesting to me. And then while I was editing that video, I started doing a little bit of factchecking. Okay, I said this. Huh, I wonder about this. And then I started doing research online and while I was editing the video, I came across tons more information, lots of fascinating things. And I discovered that partially my fault and partially through not understanding the exhibits, a lot of things that I said were actually wrong.
So, with all that new knowledge packed into my head, what I’m going to do in this video is go through the museum again from exhibit to exhibit and talk about new things. What is on the margins? What is sort of the context of that exhibit? Where did this information in the exhibit come from? Basically adding context and sort of behind-the-scenes information.
And yeah, I think it’s absolutely fascinating myself. You learn a lot more about Melaka if you stick with me watching this video, but you also learn about how to approach a museum. I’m realizing myself that you have to think critically about what you’re looking at. You can’t just look at the exhibit and go, “Oh, that’s what everything is. That’s what happened.” You have to step back a little bit and put everything in context. So I think this will be quite interesting, fascinating for me. Let’s head inside the museum.
Starting in the lobby, this was a big part of my experience of this museum. These illustrations, these drawings. And I was fascinated by these because I approached them as accurate depictions of what Melaka looked like at that time. And I even read the sign board down here. And you can see it gives the history of this that it is an illustration of the arrival of a Portuguese explorer, diplomat, ambassador kind of guy, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira in 1509. And it was published in Leiden in Europe in 1706, nearly 200 years after the fall of Melaka.
So I read that and I thought about that and then I was kind of done with it and then I was sort of looking at this illustration and taking it at face value. But what you have to realize is that this illustration was done by a European, you know, graphic artist 200 years after the fall of Melaka. And this European artist had never been to Southeast Asia, certainly never been to Melaka, wasn’t there at the time.
So they were publishing books in Europe about Asia, about European colonization, things like that. So they were publishing these books. They needed illustrations. So they just contacted artists and said, “Hey, can you make us a drawing for our book about this event, the arrival of this Portuguese at Melaka?” And then the European artist had never been to Melaka, never been to Southeast Asia, wasn’t there at the time. So he just makes a drawing based on historical records, but he had to fill in all the blanks with his imagination. So you end up with all kinds of details that don’t make any sense at all.
So in terms of the clothing that people are wearing, the ships in the background, I was reading about this, they’re actually like 18th century Dutch ships. So those are not actually the type of ships that the Portuguese came to Melaka in. So you have to look at these drawings and understand that they were actually created by Europeans hundreds of years later and you cannot trust that everything you see here is accurate.
So that’s one half of this illustration and the other half is here behind the front desk. And here you can see much more clearly what I’m talking about because when I saw this illustration, I looked at these buildings on the left and I thought, “Huh, I had no idea Melaka looked like that back in 1511.” And it turns out, of course, that what you’re seeing here is a complete European fantasy. Those buildings, those are European buildings because that’s what the European artist was familiar with. The balcony, the windows, the archways, the gateway here, the stone wall, all of that is just basically a European imagination filling in the blanks.
Of course, Melaka at that time was constructed mainly out of wood like the Sultanate Palace. That huge palace structure, you can see a replica of it here in Melaka was made out of wood. So, buildings here were made out of wood, thatch, bamboo, things like that. And cement walls, gates, you know, double-story buildings with balconies. All of that is basically what you would see in Europe at that time that had nothing to do with Melaka.
And then if you take a closer look at the local guards and their clothing and weapons, none of that is accurate either. And when you think about these artists, none of them had ever even seen an elephant before in their life. So they were actually trying to draw elephants as well based on what they imagined they looked like.
So, this was a big thing that I realized as I was editing the video.
I’ve jumped up to the next floor to continue with this topic about these European illustrations about Melaka in the past. And this was my favorite exhibit here, of course, because I wanted to come look at this model of the fort. More about that later.
But I talked a lot in my first video about this display and how much I liked it because you can look at Melaka at various points in history. So this is the fort of Melaka during the Malay Sultanate, the fort of Melaka during the Portuguese period, the Dutch period, the British period, etc. So I was pretty excited about this.
And here I thought, wow. So here it gives you the date 1509. So that is the drawing, the illustration that we were looking at down in the lobby. And then we can jump ahead to 1511. And this is an illustration of the Portuguese attack on Melaka, on the Melaka Sultanate.
So, in my first video, I was looking at this illustration and I noticed these stone towers and then in the background you see this stone wall with fortifications all along the wall. And I went, “Whoa, I had no idea that Melaka, the Melaka Sultanate, had a big stone wall, a fortress of their own.” So I was talking about how oh so I guess they had the fort they built the fortress before the Portuguese got there and then when the Portuguese won the battle they you know tore this down and built their own fort going all around the hill.
So I kind of left the museum with this impression that this is what Melaka looked like at the time. And then I found out that no, this was an illustration that was done hundreds of years later by a European artist who had never been to Melaka, never been to Southeast Asia. And all of this architecture, that wall, none of it existed. So none of this is accurate. Melaka at the time of the Melaka Sultanate looked nothing like this. This is completely the imagination of a European artist, not even a historian.
And this is what they imagined it looked like. And as I said, they needed to fill in the blanks in the background. And they just filled in the blanks with the things that they were familiar with. So you see European architecture and every battle they’ve heard about in Europe was a European army going up against a fortified position like this. So that’s what they drew. And they didn’t know that Melaka at that time would have looked entirely different. They did have defensive positions of course but they were not stone walls. They were wooden palisades.
And I’ve never been able to find a detailed drawing or illustration of any kind of what Melaka looked like at the time under the Melaka Sultanate. All we see are these European imaginings of what it looked like. And all of this is pretty much pure fantasy.
So that is one big thing I got wrong in my first video where I said, “Huh, Melaka, the Melaka Sultanate had a stonewalled fortress when the Portuguese arrived.” And I base that conclusion on these drawings that you see all around us on the walls and on the displays. But what you have to understand is that those were drawings done by Europeans.
I thought it would be like somebody who was with Afonso de Albuquerque, like part of the Portuguese force. He was there at the battle and after the battle was over, he got out his sketchbook and he drew the scene. That’s what I thought the source of these were. But in fact, these drawings weren’t made until centuries later. And as I’ve talked about, they are not very accurate at all.
So, this is the first exhibit you see when you come into the museum. And in my first video, I talked about this in a fair amount of detail because I found it quite fascinating. And basically what they’re saying here is that the Melaka Sultanate which historically and traditionally has been considered to have its origins around the year 1400. They’re saying that no, the Melaka Sultanate was founded in 1262.
And I kind of talked about that at length and I wasn’t wrong in anything I said, but there’s more to the story that I wasn’t aware of. It turns out that this idea that the Melaka Sultanate was founded in 1262 came about quite recently. In fact, there were a series of seminars like historical seminars put on connected with the Melaka state government and I think it was done by the Institute of Historical and Patriotism Studies. And that word patriotism in the title kind of gives you a clue that it was probably kind of their mandate to add to the legend of Melaka to make it older, more powerful, grander than perhaps it actually was in history.
So they were trying to establish an earlier date for the founding of the Melaka Sultanate that predates the year 1400. So yeah that all took place in 2011 and when these seminars came to this conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to say that the Melaka Sultanate was founded before Parameswara came and founded the city. Then it was adopted as sort of official policy.
So I did know the background behind this debate between the years 1262 and 1400 and they do say as I pointed out in my first video down here at the bottom. However, there is some research stating that the Malay sultanate of Melaka was established by Parameswara, a prince from Palembang in the late 14th century. So in the you know the late 1300s. So that is the traditional story. And here they are talking about how no it was actually founded earlier than that like 150 years 200 years earlier than that.
And I remember in my first video, I thought that made a lot of sense because that extra couple of centuries gave the Melaka Sultanate time to develop and reach the golden era of the 1400s. So yeah, the argument made sense to me. But yeah, it has a very interesting story behind it where this date 1262 came from.
This was my favorite exhibit at this museum and it was the main thing that I came to see this model of the fort of A Famosa. But again, while I was editing my video, I stumbled across a few things that astonished me and that it all makes perfect sense to me now, but I’m surprised that you don’t see this information in the museums.
So for example, everywhere I’ve been in Melaka, every drawing, every museum exhibit, including this one, shows the same basic structure. This is what they always show you as the fort, how it looked. So even here you see this whole exhibit is about the fort of Melaka, Portuguese era. Yet this is not the Portuguese era fort. This is what the Dutch built.
So this model, this all of this architecture that you’re seeing here is based on records kept by the Dutch. And according to what I read, the reason you see this in the history books and in museums is that the Dutch produced the most accurate architectural drawings. So when the Dutch sort of expanded the fort and rebuilt areas of it and redesigned it, they kept meticulous records even about length and height, you know, a lot of numbers as well. So when a museum wants an artist to make a model, those are the dimensions that they give them because those are the most accurate ones they have.
But as I said, this is the Dutch fort 200 years after the Portuguese. And when I learned that my brain kind of exploded. So I spent a lot of yesterday doing research and I learned a lot of interesting things.
So first of all when the Portuguese won the battle for Melaka they defeated the Melaka Sultanate they controlled this area right there’s the bridge across the Melaka River on this side of the river that’s where the Sultan lived so the Sultanate palace was here a huge sprawling palatial grounds at the base of the hill going up over the whole hill. The great mosque was here. I think the great mosque was like right across from the bridge. And on this side of the bridge, this is where all the people lived. This is where all the merchants were. So the city of as many as 100,000 people, they all lived here. And the royal court lived here, the Melaka Sultanate. So that’s how it was divided.
And when the Portuguese won the battle, they took over this whole area. And the first thing they did was build a giant tower, right? I think right where the great mosque used to be, the Portuguese started building a tower. And this is a very common thing in Portugal. You can go on Google and sort of type in some keywords and you can see today all over Portugal these famous square towers, these huge structures. And so the Portuguese were, you know, skilled in building that kind of tower.
And the Portuguese forces, they were sitting here in hostile territory, thousands of enemies surrounding them. So they wanted protection. And the first thing they did was build this tower. And it was literally a skyscraper 120 ft high, five stories, huge square base. And that tower that they called the keep, that’s what they called A Famosa. Like the original name A Famosa didn’t apply to the fort because the fort didn’t exist yet. The first thing the Portuguese built was this massive tower which was going to be a stronghold to protect them, right?
And this tower, as I said, 120 ft high, huge square base, five stories, it would have towered over everything around it. It would have been huge. It would be big today. There are not many buildings in the downtown core that are five stories high. So, if this is the Portuguese fort, where’s the tower? Where is the skyscraper? And as you can see, there is no skyscraper.
When you look at some of the maps, and I kind of breezed past it myself in the past. Let’s see if we can find one here. Right there. Do you see that right there? That is the tower A Famosa, the famous one. And that is the very first thing the Portuguese built. And it would have dominated the landscape in all directions. This massive square tower going 120 ft into the air and there was nothing else around it. And it was over the next years and decades that they built out the rest of the forts. But for a long time it was only that tower and it was that tower that was called A Famosa.
What happened to the tower? Well, of course it was destroyed over the years by the Dutch. I think in 1641 the Dutch defeated the Portuguese and as part of that battle of course they were slamming cannonballs into that massive tower. I mean it was sitting there. It was an obvious target and was the heart of the Portuguese defenses. So that tower was almost completely destroyed during the battle and then it was just in ruins after the battle with the Dutch and then the Dutch tore it down and used the stone of that tower to rebuild, you know, the walls and things like that.
So the point is for me that this model of the fortress of Melaka is completely misleading. It’s shown everywhere as the Portuguese fort A Famosa, but it isn’t. This is actually the Dutch version of the fort and the Portuguese version would have looked very different.
So I was reading about it for example and of course if this was the Portuguese version of the fort we would have had the huge tower right here. It would have dominated everything 120 ft high a massive square based structure and they had four gates. So the original Portuguese fort had four gates through the walls. And when I was talking about this in my first video and I noticed there’s only two gates. This one Porta de Santiago and then the main gate over by the bridge. And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting. Only two gates.” But it turns out the Portuguese fort had four gates and they had a lot of smaller doorways through it, things like that.
So yeah, that is something else that I found interesting and I’ve been to a lot of museums here in Melaka and I don’t think I have seen a single reconstruction of the tower, the keep A Famosa, the original Portuguese tower. I haven’t seen it anywhere. So for me, for a museum, I think they should have four different models right here. Okay, we’ve got a really good model of the Dutch fortress, but how did Melaka look under the Melaka Sultanate? So there should be like a four-step set of models. So we should have a model like this showing Melaka at the time of the Melaka Sultanate. What did it look like? We would see the Grand Palace. We would see the great mosque. We would see the wooden palisades defending all the earthworks, all the defenses that they had. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. I’ve never seen a clear recreation of Melaka underneath the Melaka Sultanate. This is the only one I’ve ever seen.
So, we should have one model like this showing the Melaka Sultanate, how this area looked. Then another one showing the Portuguese fort with the A Famosa tower. Then we would have the Dutch fort. And then after that, of course, under the British when they tore it all down. So there should be four different models to show the flow of the history of the city.
But I guess yeah the main takeaway for me is now when I look at this I see something completely different. I do not see the original Portuguese fortress. This is what the Dutch rebuilt that fortress into. Not the Portuguese.
I just found an illustration here that is interesting. the Fort of Melaka during the Portuguese period. And if we go to 1515, there’s the tower right there. And I think in real life, it would have looked much more imposing, much more like a fortress. It looks like a thin minaret here, but this would have been a much bigger, thicker at the base, like a very intimidating defensive tower. But there it is there. and it had its own fortifications. So it was almost like a mini fortress. So this is what the Portuguese built first and then once this was completed over the decades then they started expanding the walls to go all the way around. So something like this is what the Portuguese era would have looked like.
And in my first video, I talked a little bit about this exhibit which impressed me very much because it shone a light on a new side of the history of Melaka. And I kind of hinted at its significance, but I didn’t go into it because it could be a bit of a sensitive topic. But after I was editing the first video, I decided to look into it a bit more and I found out a lot more really fascinating information.
So, what this is is a copy of the speech given by Afonso de Albuquerque. Oh, by the way, in my videos, I keep saying Albuquerque. And that’s kind of funny because I grew up in the days of Bugs Bunny cartoons. And there was cartoon after cartoon where Bugs Bunny was like traveling underground in a tunnel like rabbits build, you know, burrows. And then Bugs Bunny would pop up, look at a map, realize he was lost, and in cartoon after cartoon, he would say, “Oh, I should have made a left turn at Albuquerque, the name of the city in New Mexico.” So that pronunciation, Albuquerque, is burned into my brain because of Bugs Bunny. You know, I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque. So it it’s in my head, but I think technically it’s Afonso de Albuquerque. Anyway, just a little Bugs Bunny tangent there.
But this is a speech given by Afonso de Albuquerque to his troops, to his soldiers before the big battle, before they attacked the Melaka Sultanate. And I read through the whole speech and it was quite interesting some of the things he said. So for example like again these you can see it’s a quotation mark. This is a copy of his actual speech. And he says here, “The first of these is the great service we shall render to our Lord by throwing the Muslims out of this country and preventing the fire of the Muhammadan sect from spreading any further. I hope in our Lord that as a result of our doing this, the Muslims may be driven out of India altogether etc.”
So there is a lot of talk in here not about trade for spices. I mean when you read about this history and when you look at the exhibits in this museum there is a lot of talk about the spice trade. That’s what everybody was fighting over and they talk about how the Portuguese looted the city to get gold and wealth and treasure. all this talk about trade and money and spices, but most of these museums ignore this aspect which I find kind of interesting that part of the Portuguese mission in coming to this part of the world and attacking Melaka was to drive out Muslims. They were in a war against Islam and once you start looking for that part of the history, you see it everywhere.
So I’m talking about the Crusades for example where the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal and Spain had been invaded by the Moors, Muslims from North Africa. They took over and occupied the entire Iberian Peninsula. And then the small Christian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain spent centuries pushing them back, fighting against the Muslim invaders from Africa and eventually pushed them all the way off the Iberian Peninsula and reclaimed it for their Christian kingdoms.
And then when the Portuguese came here to Southeast Asia and were fighting against the Melaka Sultanate, sure they were fighting for the spice trade to control maritime trade, but just as much they were fighting a religious war against Islam, against the Muslims. And that’s how they viewed it in their minds. And you see, you have to read the fine print to figure this out.
And this made a kind of a personal connection for me because just recently a friend of mine went to Portugal and she completed the Camino, right, the famous pilgrimage, the walk to the Camino de Santiago. And it’s a very famous, very long walk that people undertake today from Portugal to the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela. And there’s also like a 30-day pilgrimage trek that you can do through Spain to get to the same city.
And nowadays when people do this like westerners go to Europe and they do the Camino they do the walk it’s done as kind of a personal journey of self-discovery and reflection and philosophy that kind of thing but historically that Camino de Santiago that was part of the holy war against Islam because and again I didn’t know any of this until quite recently.
You know, I watched a movie just recently, the last couple of weeks, called The Way, starring Martin Sheen. Very good movie, really worth watching. And it’s all about this elderly man from the United States who faced a life crisis. And then he embarked on like a month-long walk along the Camino. He did the one in Spain, which takes over a month to complete. And again it was all about his own personal journey, personal growth and discovery.
But historically it was a religious pilgrimage connected with the fight against Islam and the invading Moors from North Africa because in that city they discovered the tomb of St. James one of the apostles. So they said they discovered the tomb of St. James and St. James is known as the Moor slayer. He is Santiago Matamoros because in the fight against the Moors on the battlefield, St. James, these are according to legendary stories, St. James would appear on the battlefield and help the Christian forces in their fight against the Muslim forces. St. James was essentially the patron saint of the crusades, the war against the spread of Islam.
So you’ve heard me say the name St. James, Santiago. They’re the same like St. Santiago means St. James. And now when you try to connect that to Melaka, the gate of course is called Porta de Santiago. That gate, the Santiago gate, is named after St. James the Moor Slayer. And I think that part of the history is sort of kept quiet in a lot of the museums here because you just don’t want to get into that topic. And it’s a little bit of a sensitive topic.
But the Portuguese when they attacked the Melaka Sultanate forces, their war cry was Santiago. as they charged, you know, here comes the sultan on his war elephants coming towards the Portuguese. And then when the Portuguese attacked with their pikes, they were shouting Santiago. That was their war cry as they engaged in battle with the Melaka Sultanate. And they’re shouting Santiago because Santiago was the patron saint of the ongoing fight against Islam. And they were trying to drive Muslim traders out of Melaka, out of India. And then because they wanted to cut off this source of revenue to the Muslim traders and stop the spread, what they saw as the spread of Islam around the world.
And of course, that’s exactly what he said here. He’s trying to drive the Muslims out of this country and prevent the fire of the Muhammadan sect from spreading any further. So, I found that to be quite an interesting bit of fine print in this exhibit. You don’t see it mentioned very much. They’re always talking about spices and trade and money and gold and treasure. But in fact, if you want to talk about the goals of the Portuguese in Melaka, it wasn’t just spice, it was spice and souls. It was also a religious war for them.
And all of that history, all of that knowledge kind of came out of reading this speech here. and yeah kind of came out as a surprise to me because I hadn’t heard very much about it but it’s a very interesting aspect to you know going through a museum like this what is said but also perhaps what is not said you you got to read you got to read the fine print.
This is another exhibit that I talked about in my first video it’s called betrayal towards the Malay sultanate of Melaka And in the first video, I didn’t really get anything wrong. What I pointed out is that this exhibit is about this betrayal. But a casual visitor to this museum, even if you read every word, which I did, you will have no idea what they’re talking about. Unless you know the story, unless you know the context, this will make no sense to you at all.
So yeah, I did my own research into this and it is a fascinating story and sheds a lot of light on the reality of the Melaka Sultanate. The basic idea is that the Melaka Sultanate or Melaka, the city, the kingdom, was not as unified as you might think. When you do like a casual perusal, you have this idea that there were two sides to the battle. the Portuguese and the people of Melaka. But it was far from that simple because Melaka was made up of many many many different communities. It was an international trading center.
So you had the royal court, the Malays, the Melaka Sultanate. They were the top power. Of course, this was their land and their kingdom. But there were powerful groups inside Melaka itself. the Javanese powerful rich merchants from Java. the Chinese of course the Tamil the Hindu Tamil, the Gujaratis and these groups had their own communities like the city part of Melaka I think it was divided up into quadrants and these different communities had their own quadrants to the point that they were almost separate cities.
So for example, the Javanese had their own fortifications, their own basic, you know, buildings that they could defend and they had thousands of warriors, thousands of soldiers, the Chinese as well, the Tamil Hindu as well. So these groups were centers of power in their own right. And at that time the sultan the Melaka sultan he was not very popular. He was doing some things in his governing of Melaka that was annoying the Javanese the Chinese the Tamil the Gujarati. So there was a lot of conflict in Melaka at the time.
So when the Portuguese showed up and were intent on conquering Melaka, it wasn’t a unified front. It wasn’t a unified force facing them. In fact one of the key figures the name is mentioned here is Nina Chatu and Nina Chatu he was he was part of the Tamil community and he was very important because for years and years and years before the attack he was feeding information to the Portuguese. There were 19 Portuguese in prison in Melaka. And these Portuguese prisoners were writing letters filled with information about Melaka, their defenses, the people, you know, how to attack them. Anything they could, any information they could get, they wrote them in letters to Afonso de Albuquerque. He was over in India at the time. and Nina Chatu, the leader of the Tamil community, he was acting as a go-between and bringing the letters from the Portuguese prisoners full of all this information and delivering it to Afonso in their ships. And that’s kind of what they’re talking about here as a betrayal.
But the Tamil community just wasn’t happy. They didn’t think they were being treated fairly by the Melaka sultanate. So they didn’t really they had loyalty to Melaka but they were thinking you know maybe we can play both sides and feed information to the Portuguese.
And at the beginning when the Portuguese first arrived in 1511 and began the attack the Javanese forces thousands of of well-armed well-trained soldiers were taking part in the defense of Melaka. They were fighting the Portuguese. But midway through the battle, the leader of the Javanese, and now we’re getting into a different fellow here. His name, I think, yeah, I think his name is over here, Utimutiraja. So, he was the leader of the Javanese. And it’s so this is an account of his betrayal towards the Melaka Sultanate, but it doesn’t really give any information at all.
So he reached out to the Portuguese in the middle of the battle and made a deal with them and said, “Listen, I can see which way this battle is going. And you know, we don’t really like the Sultan anyway, so we can make a deal. We will,” He’s talking to the Portuguese. We will withdraw from the battle. I’ll take all of my Javanese soldiers. We won’t fight anymore. And in return, when you win, when you defeat the Sultan, you’re not going to harm us. You’re not going to loot our part of the city. You’re not going to attack us, and then we will arrange these favorable trading terms with you.
So they were hoping that when the Portuguese took over that they were not going to be forced to pay such high taxes to the sultan. They were hoping to get a better deal with the Portuguese. So yeah, essentially they betrayed the sultanate and withdrew all of their troops from the fight.
And when it comes to this betrayal, they don’t mention it here, but the Chinese, another powerful group in Melaka, were also part of this betrayal because they approached the Portuguese with kind of the same deal as the Javanese. And they actually gave the Portuguese physical help. In particular, from what I read, they gave them five big Chinese boats, the Chinese junks, to use as landing craft to bring the Portuguese soldiers to shore. And one of those boats, the Chinese junk, was probably the most instrumental thing in the entire battle because the Portuguese took one of those big Chinese junks, fortified it, turned it into a floating fortress, mounted all kinds of guns on it, and then at high tide, they pushed it in the river right up against the Melaka Bridge that was being defended by the Melaka Sultanate. And then they parked that ship there as an elevated armored position and then for nine days they just rain down cannon fire and bullets at the defenders and basically weakened their defenses that way.
So it was in fact a Chinese junk given to the Portuguese by the Chinese traders in Melaka that was probably the key element to the Portuguese winning the battle.
So that’s kind of the point of this betrayal where Melaka was not a unified society fighting the Portuguese. It was heavily splintered at that time and all of the major powers, the international powers, the Tamil, Chinese, Javanese, Gujaratis, they were not putting their full support behind the Sultan. In fact, they were feeding information supplies to the Portuguese and even declaring neutrality and withdrawing their soldiers from the fight, allowing the Portuguese to put all of their force only against the Melaka Sultanate. They only had to fight his army. They no longer had to worry about the Tamil, the Javanese, or the Chinese.
So, it’s an amazing story. The history is incredible. There’s so much detail there. And this exhibit doesn’t really convey any of that story. So, I just thought I would mention that as part of my second tour of the museum.
I should add to that story that it did not end well for the Javanese, the Tamil, and the Chinese. They made this deal with the Portuguese. Unfortunately, after the Portuguese won, they didn’t really hold up their end of the bargain, at least according to what I read. And in fact, the Portuguese turned out to be worse than the Melaka Sultanate in terms of the taxes that they were applying to the Javanese and the other international merchants in Melaka.
So the Javanese for example found themselves worse off financially under the Portuguese than they were under the Melaka Sultanate. And then the Javanese started working against the Portuguese burning things in the city doing a kind of guerrilla warfare. And then he the Javanese reached out to the Melaka Sultanate the Sultan who was in exile and reached out to him and said you know what we wouldn’t mind if you came back and he started negotiating with the Sultan to organize to fight to get to gang up on the Portuguese and drive them out.
But then the Portuguese Afonso, he got wind of this and then that was like an ultimate betrayal because again according to what I read, Afonso de Albuquerque reached out to the Javanese leaders to his name is so difficult to pronounce Utimutiraja reached out to him and said hey let’s have dinner let’s talk this over and he invited him up to the Portuguese fortress for a meeting and he came with his son and his son-in-law and his grandson and it turned out the whole thing was a trap and Afonso and the Portuguese beheaded them, executed them except for the grandson. I think they let the grandson go, but they killed like they invited him up for dinner basically and for a meeting and killed them when they got there, executed them because they knew that he was now plotting with the Sultan against the Portuguese.
So, as I said, the stories in Melaka are incredible. There’s so much drama, betrayal, alliances, strategy, military strategy. There’s so much going on here. And I just wanted to talk about that because this display betrayal towards the Malay sultanate of Melaka. It’s a huge fascinating story, but none of that story is really told here. You kind of have to go find out about this story on your own. That’s really quite interesting. Big part of the Melaka history.
Finally, I wanted to talk about this exhibit. Not because in my first video I said anything wrong about it. In fact, I don’t think I mentioned this exhibit at all. I was actually quite excited about it when I saw it on the museum display that it had an exhibit about the bridge, the Melaka Jambatan, because the bridge is a fascinating part of Melaka’s history. But in the end, it turned out there really wasn’t much of an exhibit here. They have a model of a bridge here basically and then they have a painting showing the river.
And actually there’s a very good example of what I was talking about. This would have been the Melaka Sultanate period. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it like that before. I never noticed I mentioned all those European illustrations showed Melaka in the 1400s and 1500s as having stone walls, but as far as I know, it didn’t. This is what it would have looked like, a wooden palisade. So when the Portuguese attacked that is what they were facing. Those were the type of fortifications that they had during the Melaka Sultanate wooden palisades. Yeah. Odd. I never even noticed that until just now.
But they don’t have a lot of information about the bridge. But the bridge is really quite important. You could actually use the Melaka Bridge as a kind of lens. Looking at Melaka’s history through the lens of the bridge, you can actually yeah, see some interesting things.
For example, when the Portuguese arrived, they realized very early on that the bridge was the key to the city’s defenses. If you can take the bridge, you essentially cut the Sultan’s forces in half. If you control the bridge, you divide the Sultan’s forces in two. You got the side with the royal court with this fort over there, the wooden palisade, and then all of the people on the other side in living in the city itself. And there would have been troops over there as well. And if you take the bridge, you’ve cut them in half. They can’t communicate. They can’t support each other.
So, Afonso de Albuquerque, he realized early on that he needs to take the bridge and if he can take the bridge, he can use that as a base to take the rest of the city. And it turned out to be true. So, it is key to Melaka from a military point of view.
But when you think back to what the bridge looked like, it’s interesting how it changed in each era. So under the Melaka Sultanate essentially it would have looked like this. A lot bigger than this of course but it would have been a flat wide wooden bridge because it was open for people to go back and forth. An easy way for animals, carts, humans to carry goods back and forth across the bridge.
And then when the Portuguese took over, they turned it into a fist. It was like a military fist. They built an iron drawbridge because for them they built a fortress, the big stone walls of A Famosa. And the bridge they needed to fortify it and protect it so that people cannot attack them. they were in a very defensive position. Under the Melaka Sultan, it was open. It was like a free trade kind of port where people were encouraged to move back and forth across the bridge. It was open. Under the Portuguese, they turned it into a fortified position like an iron draw bridge that they could raise and then defend themselves from any attackers.
So the nature of the bridge, its construction and its engineering changed dramatically. And then when the Dutch took over, they built something quite odd. I’ll put a photo in here of it. The Dutch built a bridge to allow for ships to pass underneath it. So they built like a high bridge with a steep staircase on each side. And from what I read anyway, that bridge was disliked heavily by all the local people because they could no longer go across it with animals pulling carts carrying all their goods. The only goods that could cross the bridge. People porters basically had to carry everything up the stairs across and then down the other side.
So that bridge built by the Dutch yeah was a completely different style and nobody liked it and then the British built more of a modern bridge leading into today’s bridge in Melaka and if you look at that bridge I think it was designed to look historic like it has certain elements to make it look like a historic structure but of course in modern days it is a modern bridge designed to carry the weight of cars, trucks, even buses and a lot of traffic. So, it’s a modern heavy-duty bridge, but it has elements of a historic look to it.
So you can actually take this bridge and you could make quite an interesting museum display tracing the history of Melaka just by talking about the bridge, how it was viewed, how it was used and how it was constructed under the Malay, under the Portuguese, under the Dutch and then under the British and then modern tourist Melaka. Now the bridge has to support tourist buses and it never had to do that in the past. So yeah. Yeah, the bridge is also kind of a fascinating topic.
There are a couple of other smaller stories to be told about this museum and I talked about this one at length in my first video but it bears mentioning again. So this is a exhibit, a display about the Flor de la Mar, a famous Portuguese treasure ship. And they have a big exhibit here showing a lot of the items that were carried on the ship. Cuz after the Portuguese defeated the Melaka Sultanate, they looted the city and they loaded all the treasures of Melaka into this ship and sent it off to Europe.
And as you can see, the name of the exhibit is Melaka’s treasures brought to Europe. And again, a casual visitor would walk away thinking, “Oh, wow. All the treasures of Melaka are now in museums in Europe.” But what this exhibit doesn’t really tell you is that this ship never made it to Europe. It sank. It sank in the Melaka Strait during a storm. And now it is considered one of the greatest lost treasure ships of history. No one has been able to locate it.
So that I mean it’s a fascinating story. And yet this museum exhibit does not tell that story. It actually gives you a different idea. They it makes you think that all this treasure went to Europe and then you end up thinking, well, where did it go? and did they eventually bring it back to Malaysia? But in fact, all of this treasure is at the bottom of the ocean in the Melaka Strait because this ship sank. But this exhibit doesn’t actually tell you that, which I find kind of interesting.
And it’s quite interesting that as I’m walking around the museum a second time, I’m seeing things I didn’t notice. And I’m seeing a couple of things that connect with what I’ve been talking about.
And one big topic of course is this idea that a lot of the illustrations in the museum were done by European artists centuries later who didn’t really know anything about what Melaka looked like. So these drawings and illustrations that you see are not true representations of history. But here in this museum you start to see some more realistic images. So here for example in this painting in the background you can see traditional Malay houses built of wood thatch roof on stilts and then you can see the massive sultan’s palace in the background. So when the Portuguese showed up here, that’s what they would have seen. And all of this would have been surrounded by a wooden palisade and earth defenses. And that is what it would have looked like. All those European illustrations don’t really capture what Melaka looked like at the time. Even the way people dressed, all the people in the European illustrations, they look like Europeans. There’s not a lot of detail, but they kind of look like Europeans in European clothing. But at least here with the museum paintings, you get a better idea of what Melaka would have looked like at that time and what the people would have looked like.
Another exhibit that I talked about briefly in my first video is this one. It’s similar to the other exhibits in which the title tells you what it’s about and then it gives you some illustrations, but it doesn’t really tell the story, though there isn’t a whole lot more to this story. It’s a pretty simple one. And this is the destruction of Melaka Fort during the British period.
There was an agreement made between the Dutch and the British that the British would take over administering like they would take over Melaka temporarily as part of a treaty arrangement because the Dutch were busy in another war in Europe and they couldn’t really they didn’t really have the resources to stay in Melaka. So they handed it over to the British and one of the things the British did was destroy the fort and they did that with explosives and by hand, you know, tearing it down and blowing it up.
And as far as I understand it, the reason they did that was simply to protect their own interests. They did not want Melaka to be a competitor to places like Penang, to Georgetown, to their own trading centers. And they didn’t want to leave a powerful, you know, fortified position available to fall into the hands of an enemy. So they basically tore down the fort and blew it up. And the only part of the fort that remains to this day in its intact condition more or less was this the gate the Porta de Santiago that I talked about and this was saved at the very last minute and that was about it.
But yeah, there isn’t much more to the story than that. But it doesn’t actually talk about why the British blew it up. But it was basically to prevent a fort, a powerful, you know, fortified position from going back to the Dutch or falling into the hands of any other group. They didn’t want it competing with their own trade routes and their own free trade ports.
And that’s the end of my second walk through of that museum that you see there behind me. I promise it’s my last walkthrough. I just, as I said, editing the first video, I just had so many thoughts going around in my head, I thought I had to come back here and at least talk about them a little bit. And probably in this video, I made a dozen more mistakes in terms of my accounting of the history, but the general idea was probably there in what I was talking about, things that are behind the scenes on the exhibits, sort of on the edges, in the margins. And hope you found a little bit of that interesting.
Yeah, it’s a Friday here in Melaka. Very busy. It’s been a lot of people here. The sun is out. very hot day. Despite the heat, I’m going to walk around the city a little bit more, take in some of the sites, some of the weekend activity. But that is it for now. I hope you enjoyed that. Shutting down and I’ll see you next time.
Oh, if you made it all the way to the end of the video makes you a member of the Planet Doug Crunch Club, welcome. Put CC in the comments to let me know you watched the video all the way to the end. And of course, I’m sure some people out there know a lot more about the history of Melaka than I do, particularly the Portuguese era, the conquest of Melaka by the Portuguese. Anything else you want to add of interest, corrections to anything that I said? Yeah, sound off in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions. So, that’s it. Shutting down. See you next time.