VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
When you walk down Heerenstraat in Melaka, you see stunning mansions and beautiful architecture. But most people don’t realize they are looking at a city that burned to the ground more than 20 times.
In this deep-dive walking tour, I uncover the real reason these buildings look the way they do. It wasn’t just “Dutch colonialism”—it was a desperate battle against fire that shaped the city’s famous “tunnel houses.”
🏛️ In this video, I decode the streets:
- Why the Dutch banned wood: How constant fires throughout history forced the Dutch to implement strict building codes.
- The “Tax Loophole”: Why these houses are incredibly narrow but stretch back over 200 feet (and how the Dutch tax system made it happen).
- The Clever Engineering: How they added courtyards (air wells) to survive the tropical heat inside a 250-foot tunnel.
- The Transformation: How wealthy Peranakan Chinese buyers turned plain Dutch homes into the elaborate mansions we see today.
- The Missing Coastline: I use Google Satellite view to reveal where the Melaka Strait used to run right behind these houses.
🗺️ In-Depth Analysis Included:
I use Google Maps and street view to measure the exact lengths of these tunnel houses, point out the original Dutch firewalls, and trace the old shoreline before land reclamation.
🌏 Why watch?
If you’ve ever visited the Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum or wandered Jonker Street and wondered “why,” this is the history you missed.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to Planet Doug and welcome back to the historic city of Melaka here in Malaysia. And right behind me is the famous street originally called Heerenstraat by the Dutch. And Heerenstraat is one of the biggest attractions here in Melaka. Melaka is a city that gets somewhere between 14 and maybe 20 million visitors a year and a high percentage of those visitors go for a walk along Heerenstraat which runs parallel to the famous Market Street, Jonker Street, which is right over there. And I’m willing to bet that most of those visitors like me wander up and down this street and we marvel at these amazing centuries old buildings. Gorgeous architecture all up and down Heerenstraat. We look at these buildings and go, “Wow, what an amazing looking building.” But I think a lot of people just like me don’t really know the history. To be honest, I’ve walked up and down this street and I was actually confused by it because I didn’t know the history. I didn’t know where these buildings came from. They look like in a way European constructions, traditional Dutch buildings, but with a Chinese decorations and a Chinese style. Where did these buildings come from? In fact, I was going to visit the famous Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum, which is a preserved family home on this street. It’s preserved as a museum. You can pay a fee and go in and look at the interior. I was going to go there to learn a little bit about this area. But I realized that if I went into this rich person’s house, I would just wander around and go, “Wow, look at all this rich person’s furniture.” And I mean, it’s always fun to see how the 1% lives sort of thing, but I realized that even if I went into this museum, I wouldn’t really understand what I was looking at. So instead of going into that museum, instead of just wandering up and down the street and looking at beautiful architecture, beautiful buildings, I did a bit of reading, a bit of research, and now I have some knowledge in my head and I understand a little bit better how this place, how these streets developed. And as I said in the title of the of the video, the key is that Melaka, these streets, it’s a city built by fire. And I’m going to explain what I mean by that.
To understand what I mean about Melaka being a city built by fire, we first have to go back in time to the days of the Melaka Sultanate in the 1400s. So back in those days of course the city just as it is today was divided by this river. Interesting factoid by the way if you look at the Melaka River today like right now do you see how low the water line is. I’ve never ever seen the river exposed like this before. The water level has dropped maybe 7 ft or more something like that. And I think that is because we’ve had severe rains, like heavy heavy downpours in Malaysia over the last little while. And I think up river they this river has been heavily engineered with all kinds of sluice gates and water flood control mechanisms. And I think there’s been flooding in Melaka and they’ve used all these sluice gates and dams and things like that to control the flow of water which is why the water level has gone down. They were preventing a giant flood occurring down here in Melaka. So that’s an amazing bit of history too. And by the way, when the water goes down, you see a lot of new things and you see this monitor lizard directly ahead of me. That’s a big boy. And normally, yeah, you probably wouldn’t even see that that monitor lizard because the Oh, there’s two of them. Another one over there. There’s probably a whole bunch of them along the rocks here. And because the water level has gone down so much, they’re now out in the open and kind of exposed. But yeah, look how low the water level is. You can see the mud flats over there. Even the the river cruise boats are actually resting on the bottom on the mud. So, I wonder if they’re even operating right now. But anyway, that was just a little bit of a tangent.
I was talking about how Melaka historically has been a city divided by the Melaka River. And on that side of the river during the Melaka Sultanate, that was where the Sultan’s palace was located, the Grand Mosque, the elite of the Melaka Sultanate, they all lived over there behind fortifications. And then on this side of the river, this is where all of the merchant communities lived. The trading communities of the Gujarati, the Javanese, the Bengali, the Chinese, all the people who came to Melaka with their ships to buy and sell and trade their goods. They lived over here on this side of the river. And in those days, I believe it was called Upeh. So this was Upeh over here. And at that time this whole area of Upeh and of course even the Melaka Sultanate on the other side the palace was built out of wood and thatch traditional Malay architecture houses sitting on wooden stilts to prevent damage from flooding and a roof made out of thatch. So we’re talking about wood, bamboo and thatch. And this area of Upeh was incredibly dense, packed with thousands and thousands of people. Very very tight quarters. And a big danger of course was fire. Back in those days, even a kitchen cooking fire could get out of control and before you know it, an entire neighborhood has burned to the ground. And that was a constant problem here in Upeh. So that was a situation under the Melaka Sultanate, constant risk of fires and everything burning to the ground.
And you could see that when the Portuguese came, of course, in 1511 and there was the big battle between the Portuguese and the Melaka Sultanate. And as a result of that battle, all of these hundreds and hundreds of buildings, all of them burned to the ground. During the fighting, fires were lit and the whole city caught on fire and burned to the ground. And from that time period, if you trace the history of Upeh, like you can do it yourself, just go online and read about all of the battles. Even while the Portuguese held the city, they were constantly under attack by fleets from Aceh, from Johor, you know, from the Dutch, from they were under the Siamese, from Siam. All of these kingdoms were constantly attacking the Portuguese. And at that time, of course, the Portuguese had constructed a fort. You can see some a reconstruction of part of the fort right there. The A Famosa, a massive walled fort made out of laterite. And all of these fleets, all of these armies kept coming here to drive the Portuguese out, but they could not defeat the fortress. Time and time again, they had to give up and they were driven away by the Portuguese because they were safe inside this massive fortress and the opposing armies couldn’t get couldn’t get over these walls, couldn’t get through them. But this side, Upeh, was not protected by these huge laterite walls. So all of these armies that were attacking the Portuguese, they could come from they could land on the river or on the Melaka Strait over here, take over this whole area and in the fighting everything was burned to the ground. So these armies would come take over this area, set up camp here, and then they would bombard the Portuguese, lay siege to the Portuguese, and try to starve them out, try to drive them out. So time and time and time again, all of Upeh, all of these wood, thatch bamboo houses just burned to the ground. And as I said, if you go through just the a standard timeline of each one of these battles, you’ll see that Upeh burned to the ground 20 25 times at least over and over. The whole place burned to the ground and they rebuilt and they kept rebuilding with wood and thatch because it’s cheap and it’s easy. Your wooden house burns down. Well, the first thing you do is you rebuild it with wood and thatch. The next army comes along, the next battle takes place, everything burns down again. And that was the history of this side of Melaka. Over and over and over, everything was burned and destroyed.
And now cue the Dutch. The Dutch came. They with the help of the Johor Sultanate finally defeated the Portuguese, drove them out of their fortress and the Dutch took over in 1641. And as soon as the Dutch arrived, they started laying out a grid of streets here in Upeh on this side of the river. And with all their experience with Melaka and seeing everything burning to the ground over and over, the Dutch said enough is enough. Enough with the wooden houses and everything burning to the ground. Because even when these buildings and houses burned down, you weren’t just losing the building, you were losing all of the trade goods inside. So if you had a warehouse made of wood in Upeh filled with expensive spices, porcelain, all of the trade goods of Melaka, and that warehouse burns to the ground, you lose the building, you lose all of that valuable trade good as well. And the Dutch said, uh-uh, enough is enough. No more fires. And when they laid out the grid of streets, they started instituting building codes. You could no longer build with wood. They wanted you to build with brick walls and they wanted terracotta roof tiles and to prevent fires in this in Upeh. And at the very beginning, maybe from like 1641 up until the 1680s, they had this building code in place. But it was enforced a little bit loosely. All new buildings. They had to follow the the code and build with brick instead of wood. But a lot of the local people, they still kind of skirted it a little bit and they build with brick, but they would also build with wood and thatch. There was kind of a mixture. And then in the 80s there was another series of big fires and I think one in 1680 1686 in particular. The last huge fire of Melaka burned lots of the city to the ground. And then the Dutch got very serious and said that is it. No more wood, no more thatch. And they instituted this building code, brick construction only, terracotta clay roof tiles, and every single building had to have a firewall between it and the next building. And this firewall had to extend above the roof line in case a fire started in one building and then maybe it could flow under the roof tiles, get to the next building, and spread that way. The Dutch says, “Uh-uh, no, not a chance. Your firewall, this thick brick fire-resistant wall, has to cover the entire side of the building and extend above the roof line to prevent any fire from spreading in any direction.” And when you think about those Dutch codes, the fact that the Dutch basically built a city here very similar to the cities that they built in the Netherlands, that is how all of these buildings came to be. So right here, for example, you can see the roof tiles, right? You can see everything is made out of brick. And you can see these walls in between each building. Every one of those walls is a firewall. And you can see how it extends like 12 in above the roof line. And that was a strict building code implemented all across Melaka. And it was all about preventing fire. Melaka, a city built by fire. So that is one part of the history here.
And eventually I’m going to walk down Heerenstraat. And as we walk along we can keep an eye open for these firewalls and the terracotta roof tiles all put in place through strict building codes by the Dutch to prevent all of these fires that have been such a problem in Melaka over the centuries. But the Dutch had one other policy that perhaps was even more influential in dictating how these incredible buildings were designed and built. And that is that the Dutch had a taxation system built on the width of your property on the street. So of they had people who owned property here had to pay property taxes to the government. Of course that’s just how governments work. And in most places of course you would pay by area like how many square feet square meters is your property and you pay tax based on how big your house is, how big your land is. But the Dutch for some reason did it differently and they based their taxation codes not on the area of the house but on how wide the front of the house was. See what I mean? So a very smart builder says, “Well, if I can lower my taxes by making my house narrower and narrower and narrower, I can save money.” And that led to a distinct design to the houses here in Melaka. And we will see that in Heerenstraat. And I’m going to use Google Maps street view and satellite view to show you what I mean because it becomes very clear when we see the city from a bird’s eye point of view. So but you can get a sense of it right now if you look down just this first part of Heerenstraat. Look how narrow each section is. When the Dutch divided up the streets and the plots that they were going to sell, they set it up in these narrow plots. And a builder, he could he could make it as big as he wanted to. Like he could buy four or five plots and combine them, but that’s not what they did as a rule. What they would do is buy one skinny plot, as skinny as they could get it, maybe 15 feet across, like five meters, and then they would make the house as long as possible. You can see this is all one house that we’re looking at. Normally, you would think, well, this has got to be one, two, three houses, right? Cuz you can see three distinct A-frames. Here’s one house. There’s a second house and there’s a third. But no, in the original architecture, the original construction, this was all one long, long house like a tunnel house. So, you got a very narrow front and then the building goes back and back and back. Let’s walk around some of the modern infrastructure here so that we can get a better better look at it. And everything we’re looking at here is one house. So these houses as built by the Dutch could be as long as 200 ft. Some of them even longer than that. 250 ft long with a very very narrow profile like a tunnel house going all the way back here.
And when you think about it, having a long skinny house connected to all the houses on either side of it with a firewall, you’ve got a few problems you’ve got to deal with. The main one is light and ventilation because you’re essentially living inside a tunnel because the building has a very very narrow front with a door, maybe two small windows, a very very narrow rear entrance, and that’s it. There are no sidewalls for windows or ventilation to let in light and air. You’re basically living inside a, you know, 250 foot long tunnel in the Malaysian heat in the tropics of Southeast Asia. I mean, there’s no way you could live in a in an oven like that. So, they came up with some very clever designs. And you notice, as I said, there’s a peak here, goes down, another peak, goes down, a peak, and down. And where this peak comes down here, that marks a space where they built an air well. So there is actually a big open square in the roof right here leading down to an open courtyard. And that lets in light and air. And then you get another A-frame, another peak. And there’s another courtyard here. So, when you’re looking at these buildings, this one, to be honest, is actually a short one because it’s at the end of the street and it’s a bit unusual because it’s at the end, it can actually have windows. But most of these buildings are stuck in the middle. So, they can’t have any of these side windows and you can’t even you can’t really see their design or their architecture. But here, we can see it. And when you look at these buildings, they look like a roller coaster, you know, up and down, up and down, up and down. 250 foot long roller coaster. And every time the coaster goes down, that’s where you’re going to find it. A big sunroof, basically an air well leading down into a courtyard. And then you get another courtyard here. And then normally there’ll be one more section and then another courtyard. So courtyard, courtyard, courtyard, each one with a big open square. And that led to another architectural problem which I find quite fascinating is that every one of these air wells has like a sloping roof on each side leading down to the square. So when you get one of these intense, heavy tropical monsoon rain storms, a downpour here in the tropics, all of that water rather than being funneled off the side of the building, it’s all being funneled inside into these air wells. So they had to design very sophisticated ways of handling this flood of water coming into these air wells cuz all the water in the rainstorm, every bit of water hitting the roof is all being channeled inside the building rather than outside as you know you would see in a normal like Canadian house. We have one big A-frame. The rain hits and then the water flows off into a eaves trough and then goes down onto the ground. But here all of the water because of the architecture flows inside the house. And according to what I read, one of the ways they dealt with this to prevent flooding is that each one of these courtyards was sunken. So the very front of the house, this section of the house right here, this would be the formal reception area. You know, this would be like their living room where they entertain visitors and guests. So that would be the formal part of the of the home. But then you get the open courtyard and this part would be sunken, dropped down below the ground level. So in case there was some flooding, the water would gather in this open courtyard and not flood the living quarters of the building. And inside these buildings, there was often a well. So if you go into these courtyards, you will find a well inside the courtyard. And that was necessary for the family’s water. But also in these days, they had to think about all of the attacking armies. And there were times when they would be stuck inside their home while the city was under siege by opposing forces. So they needed access to their own water supply inside the house. But having the courtyard sunken wasn’t enough because they had to have very sophisticated irrigation systems to get all of the water pouring inside each air well and channeling it to the outside. So they had underground channels. According to what I read, they were quite big. They were huge channels, like big enough for a human, for a person to crawl inside of them. And those channels would flow the water from there out into the river or out into the streets, wherever they wherever they were able to send it.
Something else that’s really important to understand about Heerenstraat is that when the Dutch laid out this road and they built all of these houses, all of these houses were on the ocean. These were ocean view houses because the Melaka Strait was right here. I’m going to walk around the corner to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about. So over here is the street. The front entrance to the house is on the street. And then if you walk through the house, here’s the, you know, the living the the formal living room, the reception room, the first courtyard. This could be the family’s living space. Then another courtyard. And then back here could be bedrooms for all of the family. Then with a longer house, there would be another courtyard. And then one more section at the back, which is where all of the servants and laborers would live. And the kitchen would be back here. And this rear entrance to the house, there was no street here. This was the Melaka Strait. So when this was built, you have to imagine all of this being water. All of this was the Melaka Strait and all of these long tunnel houses where this tunnel house, this one, and this one, they all opened up back here. It opened up onto directly onto the beach. So, this was a beach right here. And the people who lived here originally, the Dutch, they would have piers back here over the mud flats and over the water. And then there would be constant deliveries, people coming and going by boat because they’re they’re coming in from the Melaka Strait. They come up to the pier at the back of their house, park their boat, climb onto the pier, and then go into the house through the rear entrance. So, you have to imagine that this was actually beachfront property, and that’s one of the reasons that it was set aside for the Dutch administrators. So, Heerenstraat was originally meant for housing for all of the Dutch elite from the Dutch East India Trading Company, the VOC. So, all of the senior members of the VOC, basically the elite of the Dutch community, they all lived here on Heerenstraat and their houses were all waterfront property with a rear entrance that opens right up onto the Melaka Strait, which I I find really fascinating. And here as well, we can see what I was talking about with the firewall in between every building. There’s a firewall, firewall, firewall. And you can see how they go up above the roof line by a few inches. And of course, all the rooftops are made out of nonflammable material out of terracotta.
I think to understand all of that fully, you have to look at this area from Google satellite view. So, I’m going to switch over to my laptop now, and I’m going to turn on Google Maps, go to satellite view, and I’m going to use the mouse pointer and and point out some of the features, and you can get a really clear idea of what I’m talking about. This is Melaka from very high up. So, right here in the middle is Melaka’s downtown historic core. And what’s really interesting about this view is that you can actually see the old Melaka Strait coastline before all the land reclamation. So if you look here, you can kind of make out a line where all these houses are meeting open land. So you can sort of mark a line along here and that is essentially the shore of the Melaka Strait back in the days of the Melaka Sultanate, the Portuguese era and the Dutch era. And if you follow this line all the way down here, this is the shoreline that I was talking about. In fact, this right here is Heerenstraat and beside it, this is Jonker Street. So there is Heerenstraat and these are the houses that I’m talking about and they extend from the street to the shoreline. So this used to be the water line and all of this is brand new land that has been added later on with land reclamation. So let’s zoom in and we’ll get a better look at what I’m talking about. So here of course is the Melaka River. This is the Stadthuys down here, Dutch Square. Cross the bridge onto Jonker Street. So, this is the busy market street that everybody visits. And over here is the street I’m talking about. This is Heerenstraat right here. And then as you go around the corner here, this is where the Melaka Strait used to be. So right here you see a paved street. You see cars, you see garages and driveways where everybody parks their car. But when these houses were originally built, this was all water. And instead of cars and driveways, you would have seen a beach, docks, and boats. So this all would have been water. People would come on their boats, dock their boat here, and then walk into the house. And the house that I’ve been looking at as an example all this time is right here on the end of the street. So you can see a couple of things that I was talking about. One is that this house that I’ve been using as my example is actually a little bit shorter than the norm. And that’s because the shore curved around here. If you look here in the middle there, you can see just how long these tunnel houses actually are. Look how narrow the front is. That’s somewhere between like 18 to 20 ft and then it extends all the way back here. And we can even measure how far that is. So, let’s do a little bit of a Google Maps measurement. So, I’ve got my starting point there. And if we go all the way to the back of the house and measure to here, the back entrance, 190 ft, almost 60 m. So that is a house that is about 5 m wide and they chose that narrow narrow frontage because that’s what they paid tax on. But they could still make the house as big as they wanted to make it without paying extra tax simply by making the house longer and longer and longer all the way to 200 ft long. Some of them as long as 250 ft. And in this satellite view, you can see the other features that I’ve been talking about. One thing of course is the red terracotta roof tiles. All of the roof tiles here are made out of fire resistant or fireproof clay tiles. And in between each individual building there is a firewall. So this long white line that is a firewall on one side and then a firewall on the other and then another and another. So all of these white lines is a firewall separating all the houses and they all stick up from the roof line by a few inches. And you can see from this view the courtyards that I was talking about. So you’ve got the front of the house here. This is like the formal reception room at the front and then it goes down to an open courtyard. Then there’s another section of the house goes down to another courtyard. And then some of them have three. So this one here, this very long skinny house, you got an open courtyard here, an open courtyard here, and then down to a third one here. And then finally down to the rear entrance. And this would have been the Melaka Strait. And they would have a a dock here. here. And this is where they would dock all of their boats for unloading goods in in and out of the house. So, one end of this tunnel house is on the street and the rear entrance is actually here on the water. And this house that I’ve been using as an example, you can see that it’s different because it’s at the end of the block. So, this house actually has windows. But when you think about it, one of these houses in the middle cannot have any windows because it’s got a house on either side of it with a solid firewall going the entire length. And the only light and the only air coming into the house would come through these open courtyards. And they were designed in such a way as to increase the air flow. So that for example when water when it rained and water drained from the roof from all directions into that courtyard, the water in there would evaporate in the heat rise up through the courtyard and it would pull air in through the door and the windows at the front and the entrance at the back. So you had circulating air coming in from the back, coming in from the front, and then rising up through these central courtyards. And this was absolutely essential because I think it bears repeating that these long tunnel houses could not have any windows. Just by a factor of their design, they cannot have any windows on either side. So they had to have these open courtyards. Otherwise they would be living in a enclosed 200 ft tunnel just baking in the Malaysian sun and yeah that would quickly become unbearable and it would be very very dark on the inside. I find when I go into these structures, they’re pretty dark anyway because these courtyards don’t let enough light in to light up everything. But, yeah, that’s all they could do at the time was put in these open air wells. So, this one that I’ve been looking at, let’s do a little measurement on this one as well. Starting down here at the front and then if we measure it to the very back of this house which is one of the shorter ones on the block, it is 120 ft long about 37 m from the front all the way to the back with a very very narrow front facing onto the street.
But even once I learned all of that, all of that history, this street in particular still really confused me. I couldn’t quite connect the dots between everything that I’d learned. You know, the Melaka Sultanate era, the Portuguese, the Dutch. Okay, I’m hanging in there, but how in the world did it suddenly turn into a giant Chinatown essentially? And that is a key to understanding everything you’re seeing in Melaka. And there’s something very special right around the corner here that will help me talk about this. Very important. Right around the corner here, there is number eight, Heerenstraat. I think this is included on a lot of local tours. People are aware of this. Tour guides bring visitors here because right here, I believe this is it. Number eight, Heerenstraat. This is one of the last remaining buildings that stays true to its Dutch roots. So when the Dutch developed Heerenstraat, they built this road and then they divided up all of the plots and then all of the Dutch elite from the VOC started buying it up and they’re building houses. These are not the houses they built. All of this came much later. These elaborate two-story, three-story structures with all of this decoration, things like that. That was not what the Dutch built. The Dutch are something of a plain and simple people. I have Dutch heritage, so I can relate to that. And when the Dutch built these houses, this is what they built. Kind of one and a half story houses, kind of very plain and simple on the outside. But again, you can see the firewall right there. and of course the terracotta roof tiles. It’s going to be hard for me to do my filming today because it is a Sunday and a bright sunny day. So, there’s going to be a lot of people and a lot of traffic, but I will do my best. But right here, we can see the original firewall between the two buildings. And up here, you can see how it goes up above the roof line. So, even if this wood caught fire, it couldn’t travel from here to this roof because it would hit that firewall raised up against the roof. And I mentioned how they had very elaborate drainage systems inside the house, quite large ones. You can look down there and see some evidence of that. So this would have been the water flowing from inside being gathered in the air wells and then it would be channeled to these very wide channels and then sent down the street to the river. And here is the sign for this building. You can see it is number eight University Malaya faculty of built environment. So it is a preserved cultural and heritage research center. It’s not really open to the public. You can’t come here and just go inside to look around. But if you want to understand Melaka and this street in particular, I think it’s worthwhile to start here at number eight. Look at that. And now you are seeing original architecture, original engineering as built by the Dutch. And all of this that came, you can see beside it, that came much later under the British and the Peranakan Chinese. Looking into these irrigation channels like this ditch work alongside these buildings reminded me of something else that I read and something else I found out about because I was confused about where did all the bricks come from. Right? Because before the Dutch said to everybody, “All right, no more fires. Nobody can build with wood anymore. You all have to build with bricks. Well, where were they going to get the bricks? The Portuguese didn’t build with bricks. The Melaka Sultanate didn’t build with bricks. It’s not like there were hundreds of kilns all up and down the river making clay bricks. The Portuguese, they built with laterite, which you could just dig out of the ground. It’s a kind of clay, but very, very different. Laterite is like big irregular stones that they built their fortress out of. So when the Dutch, the VOC, declared that’s it, no more wood, no more thatch, everybody has to build with bricks to get rid of these pesky fires. Where did they get the bricks from? They couldn’t go down to the local hardware store and order 10,000 bricks to build their firewall. So I I did a little bit of digging into that and one thing I found out is that some of the bricks came from the Netherlands because they they built with these bricks in the Netherlands of course historically and all the ships that came from the Netherlands if they needed ballast to keep the the boat steady they used bricks as ballast inside the ships and the ship came here and they would unload the bricks and use them in construction. So as you wander around Melaka and you see some exposed brick work, you could be looking at a brick that came from the Netherlands hundreds of years ago. And a lot of the bricks also came from Java at that time because they had kilns and brick works in Java. So a lot of bricks were brought by ship from Java during the construction boom here. And then eventually, of course, they built their own kilns on the upper stretches of the river. And again, when the Dutch built these kilns, of course, they said, “We’ve got to build them way outside the city limits because kilns need very, very hot fires, and they didn’t want to risk fires.” So, even the kilns had to be way outside of the city. But I was thinking about all of that because when I looked down inside here, the exposed bricks look to be very thin. So, it’s a possibility that these bricks down here are original Dutch bricks that were part of a ship’s ballast because the the bricks from the Netherlands were kind of like paving stones. They were thinner, like bigger and thinner than the average brick today. So, they probably aren’t. But I when I spotted those narrow bricks down there, it just made me think about, you know, maybe those are original paving stone bricks from the Netherlands. So, if my thesis is correct and that this is an example of the original Dutch construction and this is what all the houses looked like, how did we get from this to this and to something like this or what’s right across from me here, this Ginger Flower Boutique Hotel. How did we get from the very plain and simple low 1.5 story Dutch housing? How did we get from that? Here’s a good example for my story. How did we get from that Dutch house at number eight to this? What we’re looking at right here.
The key to that mystery, we have to go forward in time basically to the end of the Dutch era. The Dutch were involved in a war in Europe with Napoleon with France and they couldn’t really keep their eye on Melaka anymore and they signed a treaty with the British and the British took over administration of Melaka. They kind of kept Melaka for the Dutch with the idea that they were going to give it back later, which they did do after the end of the war, but then that was only for a very short time and then the British took over permanently. So now Melaka was under British control and then the Dutch moved out. It was no longer a Dutch possession, no longer a Dutch colony. So, a lot of the or all maybe all of the Dutch sold their houses. They moved to Batavia, which is modern-day Jakarta. They basically moved to the Dutch colony in Indonesia. And they sold their houses here. And who did they sell them to? Well, they sold them to the to the newly rich Chinese community, the Peranakan Chinese who had suddenly become super wealthy because of the rubber and the tin boom here in Malaysia. So it was like perfect timing because the Dutch wanted to leave sell their houses and the local Chinese had suddenly they had all this money to spend and they says oh yeah we’ll buy all these houses. So the Peranakan Chinese bought up all of this property and they used all of their newfound wealth to rebuild, reconstruct and expand. So they added stories. So they became fully two-story, three-story buildings. They imported all kinds of luxury items from around the world, tiling and furniture, and they made them into much more luxurious homes. And one right here, I mean, you can see on the outside a lot of the the Chinese elements, the lanterns, the clan. I think that’s the clan name on that sign up above the Chinese decorations, the painting. But at the same time, it’s interesting that it maintains its basic Dutch architecture. And when you look at it from the outside, you still see the original Dutch bones. Of course, you see the firewall, the terracotta tiling, the firewall extending up the top. The basic plain exterior is all very well-maintained. And a lot of the renovation that the Chinese did, you don’t see it until you go on the inside. It’s on the inside where they really made a lot of changes. And to see that, of course, you have to go inside one of these buildings. But from the outside, you just get a sense of the changes that the Peranakan Chinese made. And a lot of them would buy several plots. Again, going back to number eight, Heerenstraat here, a very typical Dutch plot and construction. Maybe 15 ft wide. and the the Peranakan what they would do is buy two of them and combine them into one dwelling but they had to keep the firewall. So on the outside it still looks like two separate dwellings but when you go inside what they did was take the firewall which is a loadbearing wall but they would cut archways and reinforced archways. So all through the 200 ft length of the house, they would cut openings in the firewall, reinforce it of course, and then combine them to make bigger living quarters on the inside and fill it with all kinds of luxury furniture and decorations.
Of course, very few of these are family dwellings anymore. People don’t really tend to live in them anymore. They’ve been taken over by a lot of like luxury boutique hotels. But you can see in the hotels they’ve continued that pattern where this one for example, the Heeren Street Hotel owns one, two, three at least three properties there. That is all the in all the same hotel, but it still looks like it’s divided into three properties, but on the inside they may have cut through the walls and combined it into one big living space on the inside, but on the outside it still looks like three separate buildings. Another interesting detail that you can pick out on the front of these buildings are these half doors and they have a long history as well. Has a special Malay name for them I think but I can’t remember it. But the idea here again is that these buildings being 200 ft long tunnels need a lot of ventilation. So what they would do is take the main doors, these heavy-duty wooden doors, leave them open, but then they would still maintain some privacy with these half doors. So they are essentially like a screen door from Canada where you can open the main door, but the screen door keeps out animals and mosquitoes, insects, but it lets air flow through. So this very first room was the the main reception room for the Chinese. That’s where they would entertain guests in this first main room. But they didn’t want people walking down the street and just looking inside their living room, right? But with these half doors, they could open the main doors for ventilation and keep these half doors closed for privacy so that people can’t yeah can’t look inside.
If you slow down on this street and really start looking around, you’re not going to make any progress at all. You start seeing so many interesting things. I just noticed this exposed wall there. You can see the bricks and I’ve been looking at all of these bricks trying to figure out how old they are based on their size and their color. Which ones might be like these ballast bricks from the Netherlands? Which ones might have come from Java? And which ones might have been made locally here on the Melaka River? It’s probably a mixture all through there. And just on the other side, I was looking at this one. That’s where I was looking at the little doorway, the half doors, and I noticed right here behind this blue tin barrier. There’s another building. Looks like it’s Yeah, maybe it’s going to be rebuilt and renovated. But look at the artwork on that building. So elaborate. Tall arched windows, carvings in the plaster. Yeah, that that building must have a very interesting history, but I have no idea what it is. I mentioned that there are very few, maybe even no occupied dwellings anymore, and this one right here might be a good example of that. It doesn’t look like anybody lives there regularly, but of course there would be a lot of restrictions on selling this kind of property, both, you know, legal and historic reasons. You can’t just do whatever you want with one of these houses. Plus with a family like that, the family owners of this house, they would be under pressure to keep it because it would be like so important to their own family and to their traditions. So they probably live in Kuala Lumpur, live maybe elsewhere in Melaka and perhaps they come here for holidays, Chinese New Year, things like that. But I think a lot of these buildings, they they look abandoned, but I don’t think they’re actually abandoned. It’s just that the people don’t live here very often. They just come here once or twice a year.
One other thing to think about is that the Dutch and the Peranakan Chinese had somewhat different purposes for these homes. When the Dutch built them, they built them as sort of a combination living area and work area. They were where they lived, but they were also warehouses. They were like secure places to keep valuable goods that they were selling and trading. And you can think about that with the the fact that all of the houses on this side of the street, as I talked about, the front of the house opened up onto Heerenstraat, but the rear of the house, it opened up onto the Melaka Strait. So if you’re looking down here, the Melaka Strait would have been right there where that white car is turning. So at the back of all of these houses, there would have been a dock and a dock opening up onto the water. So deliveries of valuable trade goods would be going in and out of the back of these homes and the rear of the home would be like a storage area for their goods that they were trading in. But as far as I understand it, when the the wealthy Chinese with all this money from the rubber and tin boom bought these houses, they bought them purely as a place to live for their family. So all of the back areas that the Dutch used as kind of a warehouse, they got rid of that and converted it into more living space because the Chinese would have multiple generations of the family living in the same house. So, as you go back section by section, the front would be the guest, the the reception area for honored guests. And then you get back into the living quarters of the family, generations of the family all living there. And the Dutch didn’t have that. It was more of a a smaller family unit, of course. And they also used it as warehouse space, a secure location to keep their valuable goods. We’ve reached a cross street. There’s Jalan Hang Kasturi called a second cross street on that other sign there. And here we get another opportunity to see a kind of cutaway of one of these long tunnel houses. Maybe it would make a maybe it would be more interesting if we start at the very front to get the contrast. Yeah, this is a very interesting. So if you look at this house right here, I mean what would be your impressions of it? I mean it looks like a tiny house, right? Very narrow, very small. It looks a little bit like a cottage. A very humble sort of dwelling from the front at most 20 ft wide, maybe 18 ft wide. And as I talked about earlier, it would be based on this width that the Dutch would apply taxes. So the homeowner would kind of get away with murder cuz it was like, “Okay, tax me on this because I have a very tiny house. I don’t have to pay much in the way of property taxes, but surprise, my house is huge. It may be narrow at the front, but look how far back it goes. It’s actually a huge property. Narrow at the front and then it goes back and back and back. And it probably had one more section behind that. It was probably torn down to make room for the 7-Eleven. But yeah, this is a very good example of what I was talking about. A very humble home at the front, narrow, but then we got a big living space here, open courtyard here with a air well, a skywell, another living area here, down to another sky well, and then out the back entrance and then back here would have been the docks where they kept all of their boats. So yeah, like I said, like a roller coaster up and then down, up and then down, up and then down all the way to the back.
I’m standing on the the rear side of all of these houses from Heerenstraat. Now, this is this street here, I think, is actually called Lorong Kota Laksamana, the Admiral Street, basically. But if I were standing here back when this was all new, I would be up to my waist in water. I would actually be standing in the the beaches of the Melaka Strait right now, which is kind of interesting. So, this would have been all of the the rear entrances to all of these fancy houses with all of the docks and the boats coming up to the back of all of these houses here. So today, you know, they look like modern places. You’ve got a garage and a car, but now you have to flip it. Imagine water and a dock and a boat and then the houses extending like tunnel houses all the way, you can see, all the way over to Heerenstraat on the other side. And one thing that jumps out at me here is that Melaka is a much taller city than you would think because as you walk around at street level, this is what you see. Like one and a half stories, right? That’s where the house usually begins either from the front or the rear, one and a half stories. But then as you go back into the interior, you can see it jumps up. So if you go inside this house inside the courtyard with the the sky well the opening you will find a complicated network of balconies and wooden stairs going from level to level to level. So in it’s very very deceptive these buildings. You think from the street that they’re very very short but once you go inside it has a surprising amount of room in the upper levels.
So, this area might be another interesting place to take a look at from the perspective of a Google Maps satellite view. So, I’ll do that right now just to get oriented again. This is Melaka from high high up in the air. And as I talked about the first time we looked at Google satellite view, all of this here, if you follow this line where my mouse pointer is, everything here is new reclaimed land. And back in the historical period that I’m talking about, all of this would have been water and this would have been the shoreline. And right here is Heerenstraat. So there’s the street that we’re exploring today. And right beside it there is Jonker Street. And if you kind of look over this area, just sort of this rounded area here, this is the historic historic district of Melaka right here. So let’s zoom in on where we are right now. And since this is a Planet Doug video, it’s already 1 hour long. And all we’ve done is walk from right here where you see my mouse pointer. That’s the beginning of Heerenstraat. And then number eight, Heerenstraat is right here. And then we walked basically from this point on the river to this intersection. And that’s as far as we’ve gone. It’s taken me 1 hour of video to get from here to here. And this is where that last segment of video was recorded because here we’ve got another block ending because there’s a cross street. And we can see a cutaway of one of these buildings. And that’s why I found it so interesting. So if we zoom in, this is the building that I was focused on. And you can see just how narrow it is at the front. And then you can see that it extends for a long way to the back. And we can do a another measurement here. So let’s drop a marker here. And let’s measure the distance all the way to where the original building would have ended right here. And look at that. 240 ft long. Even though it’s so narrow, we’re talking about a building 240 ft long. And if we go along towards the middle of this block, you can see that that matches the length of a lot of these places. So if we measure this one here from Heerenstraat and then we go all the way back following this to the shoreline here we’re looking at yeah 240 ft. So these are all extremely long extremely narrow houses and as always you can see the firewall and then if you look closely you can see the open courtyards that I keep talking about. So there will be one big section of the house, then a big open courtyard, another section of the house, another open air well, and then another section of the house, and then a third open air well, and then the last section. So yeah, it’s really quite interesting. And I was talking about how Melaka is surprisingly tall. And you can get an idea of why that would be. If you look at this building here down at street level, you’re looking in this direction. You can see it’s just like a very tiny rooftop. And you think, “Wow, this must be a very tiny little house.” But then it goes up and up and up and becomes a much higher house. There’s much more interior space going up to a second or even a third floor. Even though at street level it looks quite low. And just to emphasize again how small these houses look compared to how big they actually are, let’s go down to a street level here, street view, and let’s take a look at the front of this house. So there it is again. That’s what you just saw on my video. And that is how narrow the house looks from the front. And it looks quite short. It looks very very unimposing from here. But then if we jump over to the side, look at that. You can see the difference just how long this house is. And if we go to the back all the way to here, and as I said, this is where the Melaka Strait was. So this would have been water and beach. And then we can see what this building looks like from the back. And that gets across as well. This illusion about these houses in Melaka. Everything here looks very unimposing. Right here you’ve got a door and this is where they would park their car on the inside. And then there’s a little house here. It does not look that tall, nor does it look that big here when you look at all of these houses from the back. So this is what it looks like from the back. But if we pop over to the side and get a look at it from here now, you can see that it climbs up courtyard goes up and then courtyard and then stays quite high all the way through here. And this is a much bigger property than you would think it was if you’re looking at it from the front or from the rear. Same thing on this side with that building. Going back to satellite view just to see it from the air. Again, this is the one building that I was talking about. Very narrow at the front and then very long to the back. And this is the second one that we could see. Very narrow at the front. And from the rear it looks quite low, but you can see how it climbs up and up and up and actually becomes a much bigger property than you would think if you were just walking by as a typical tourist down on Heerenstraat.
Something else to notice about Heerenstraat today is how crowded it is. Especially on a Saturday on Sunday and you get all of this traffic, cars, motorcycles, and people. And you consider that all of these are businesses. Like most of these are now businesses trying to make money. And yet it’s very very awkward for them because there’s no space for pedestrians. Like there is no public space here. And that is because originally this was meant as a residential street, right? Heerenstraat was built for people to live here, not for businesses. When the Dutch laid out the grid and they designed the city, Heerenstraat was meant for people. Jonker Street, Jonkerstraat, that was the street meant for commercial properties. So it has more public space. But here when you walk along Heerenstraat, all of this is private property. So this is not a public walkway. This is the front porch of the house basically. And that is because it was a residential street. That’s how it was designed. Another difference between Heerenstraat and and Jonker Street is that the the British put in a rule I think called the 5-ft way and on Jonker Street there is like a pedestrian walkway and the British put in a rule that there had to be a 5ft overhang like a roof extending 5t from the edges of the street basically to protect pedestrians from sun and rain because Jonker Street was meant for people markets going shopping and they have this 5-ft way rule. But here on Heerenstraat, they can’t really have a 5-ft way because the 5T extension is actually going over private property. That’s not a public walkway over there. It’s not a sidewalk. That’s all basically the front porch. So, the British 5-ft way doesn’t have much impact over here. You can have a 5-ft roof over top, but there’s no pedestrian walkway being covered up. This might be a good spot to emphasize the fact that these are long narrow tunnel houses and because of that they have tremendous difficulty with ventilation and light. So here for example every one of these buildings extends backwards somewhere between 200 and 300 ft. Right? And because every single building is pushed against the next building with a firewall, there’s no windows. So you’ve got this 250 ft tunnel with no windows at all except for the windows on the front and the rear entrance. So no windows down the sides because there are no sides. 250 foot long buildings with no sides at all to let in light or air. And that’s why they had to be so precise with the the design and the architecture with these central sky wells. And there’s a lot of interesting facts about how that works, how those sky wells interact with the the water that flows in the terracotta, the tiles, the cooling, the the airflow that gets forced through. Right here is the Baboon House. And it it would be a very good place to visit if you’re interested in seeing a lot of these things that I’ve been talking about because it’s open to the public. It’s a restaurant and a cafe and it goes all the way from Heerenstraat all the way back to Lorong Kota Laksamana the rear entrance. So it’s a long long narrow building and they own the entire property as far as I know and if you go in there as a customer you can walk through all of the different sections. They do have some fairly strict rules about videography and photography, but I did walk through there a little bit with my GoPro on my visit. I stopped there for lunch and maybe I’ll include some of that video.
There are a lot of well-known restaurants all up and down Heerenstraat, of course, Peranakan Mansion right here. A couple more there. So, you can get a lot of good Peranakan food. And I stopped here because this is one of the more striking landmarks along Heerenstraat. A private home. The Chee ancestral mansion. It says over here says the mansion was built in 1925. I think in honor of Chee Yam Chuan, a prominent Baba businessman whose ancestry in Melaka dates back to the early 18th century. So yeah, of course they have strict rules here. No parking, CCTV in operation, but I can put my GoPro right here to go through the fence. And I was reading about this building and they were saying something about how that tower was not just ornamental because from up there with a high tower like that, you could actually see ships coming in on the Melaka Strait and that could give you an edge in shipping and dealing and making trades cuz you know what ships are going in and out. But now I’m not so sure about that story because it was built in it says it was built in 1925 and I’m not sure how much effect a tower like that would have in terms of watching shipping on the Melaka Strait in 1925 but it’s an interesting story certainly a beautiful building quite an elaborate modern-day version of Melaka here the Baba House set of hotels and restaurants. Like they bought up all of these properties here. There’s a section that’s inset a little bit and extends all the way along there with their rooms. Yeah. Could be as many as, you know, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 even nine properties. All the nine narrow original Dutch properties all purchased and combined into one modern business. I’ve made it essentially to the end of Heerenstraat. It continues on from here, but in terms of the the dense historic district, it’s all down in there and then so there’s a street here that kind of it ends at. And this is important because historically this would have been the edge of protected Upeh. So the whole area of the city here comes out to this point and it’s here that the Dutch built a series of fortifications. And in fact if you walk up here just a short distance right here on the left you see the remains of the Dutch moat. So right here at the very end of Heerenstraat, the tourist part of Heerenstraat, you reach where the Dutch fortifications began protecting the city from invasion from the land basically. So this was part of the original Dutch fortifications, the Dutch moat. And then they would have had walls and bulwarks along here with fortified positions with soldiers guarding the entrance. And somewhere along here there was a gate like a big gate that you could go in and out of the city from here. So basically in our walk down historic Heerenstraat we’ve reached the edge of Dutch Melaka and the the Dutch fortifications here.
So when I came walking up Heerenstraat talking about all these things, I was focused almost entirely on the buildings on that side when I was coming up on the left hand side now on my right hand side. And all of those buildings were the ones that went from the street front entrance to the Melaka Strait and the boats and the docks on the rear entrance. So, I was focused mainly on that side of the street. Now, what I want to do is walk back down the entire length of the street, but now I’m going to be focusing on the other side. And it’s quite interesting to see the differences because on this side though, on that side, the house has an entrance on Heerenstraat, but the other side over there is Jonker Street. So on this side, Heerenstraat and the Melaka Strait, but on this side, the entrance is here and then the rear of the building is over there on Jonker Street. But as you move this direction, the the distance gets wider and wider and wider. So in fact it would be like 400 ft to go from Heerenstraat to Jonker Street and that’s too far for even one of these tunnel buildings. So what they did is they input an alleyway. So there’s an alleyway running down the middle, a laneway that splits it into two. So again, I’m going to go on to Google Maps and go up to satellite view and show you what that looks like.
All right, here we are back at satellite view. This is the historic core of Melaka. Of course, the Melaka River right here. And the street that I’ve been walking along, Heerenstraat, is right here. And running parallel to it is Jonker Street right here, or Jonker Street as they call it today. And right here would have been the shoreline of the Melaka Strait running behind Heerenstraat. All I’ve done so far is walk from here down by the river and then I walked all the way up Heerenstraat all the way to the end up until this intersection. And right here on the left is the section of the Dutch moat that I pointed out. So this would have been the edge of Upeh, the edge of old Melaka. And the Dutch built a moat that started here on the shoreline and then continued in land eventually meeting up with the Melaka River and then they had fortifications all along this line. But what I was pointing out is how Jonker Street diverges a little bit from Heerenstraat. They aren’t completely parallel. So as you move along Heerenstraat, the distance to Jonkerstraat gets wider and wider. So way down here, for example, on Heerenstraat, you’ve got all of these tunnel houses, as I pointed out before, are about 200 ft long. And the it’s one property that extends all the way from the street all the way down to the shore of the Melaka Strait. But if you go further in this direction, you can see that the distance from Heerenstraat to Jonkerstraat is getting wider and wider. So now you’re looking at something like 400 ft, 500 ft from one street to the other. And that is too far for even one of these huge long tunnel houses. So what you see is that you have one property running off of Heerenstraat and then it goes inland until it meets an alleyway right here. If we zoom in you can see that there is a lane way, an alleyway and then another property picks up on the other side and goes from the lane way to Jonker Street. So again here you can see on Heerenstraat one very long property extending all the way to the alley and then there’s a break cuz this is the lane way gives access to the rear entrance to this house and this house and this house and this house and then on the other side of the alley is the rear entrance to all the properties that start on Jonker Street and these are a mix of residential and commercial properties. So yeah, that I find that really fascinating. And then if you go down in this direction, you see that something quite interesting happens where there is no lane way at all. So there’s one property starting here on Jonker Street, extends down to here, and then another property begins that has its front entrance down on Heerenstraat, but there’s no alleyway separating them. So I’m very very curious what happens here. Does this building just connect with this building? Do they share a wall or is there like a 1-ft gap or twoft gap and you look out a window of this building into the window of this one? I really don’t know what happens back here because the only way to get there would be to go all the way through one of these properties from the front entrance all the way to the rear entrance and then just to see for yourself what’s there. And something else really interesting happens here where you have cross streets. So there’s Heerenstraat, Jonker Street and then connecting them is modern-day I think this is Jalan Hang Kasturi. So you see that the properties that abut onto Jalan Hang Kasturi they have a different orientation. They go in this direction. So suddenly you have an area right here in the middle where these buildings go in this direction inward from Heerenstraat. You got these buildings that come inward from Jonker Street. But the all these buildings go perpendicular and come in in this direction. And they all meet right here. But there are no streets here. There is there are no lanes. There’s no alleys. There’s no there’s nothing here to separate them. So, I’m really really curious what happens where all of these buildings meet. One going in this direction and then this one going in a different direction. They’re perpendicular to each other. So, what happens where they join? And right here, three sets of buildings all join at the same place. So if you if you had a person back here where all three sets of buildings meet, how do they get out of there? I mean, the only way to get out would be through one of these buildings. And again, this looks like an open courtyard here where all of them meet up, but the only way to get to that courtyard would be to physically go through the buildings themselves. And so that’s the only way you could find out what’s yeah, what’s back there. In the modern era, of course, I don’t think they would ever design a city like this. There has to be some sort of access for like fire engines. If there’s a fire back here, how in the world are they going to put out the fire? Because a fire truck has no access. And then that raises an interesting issue as well because back in the days of the Portuguese and the Dutch when all of this was built and laid out, there was no internal plumbing. So they had basically buckets inside the house that they used as a toilet and then the servants would carry this night soil out to this alleyway and then the night soil pickup would be happening in the off hours, you know, late at night or early in the morning and they would move along this laneway and then pick up the night soil and then carry it away. But again, all of these buildings down here that are cut off from any kind of a lane, there’s no alleyway for garbage pickup, for night soil, for fire trucks, for police, anything like that. So, it raises some interesting urban planning issues, how you handle that sort of thing when you have an urban layout this complicated. But yeah, it’s a very fascinating city from that point of view. And you only really see it for what it is when you go up here to Google satellite view and you can see just how the streets are laid out and how all of these buildings are designed and how they meet up with each other and interconnect. Yeah, it’s very very cool stuff. And before I head back down Heerenstraat, just for fun, I’m going to duck into this lane way that I’m talking about. I have never been down here before. I’ve only looked at it on Google Maps just to how I showed it to you. So, what we have to do is go around this corner. Right over there is Jonker Street. Yonker. I think I think today they call it Jonker Street in Malaysia, but I think in the original Dutch it would have been Jonkerstraat like Heerenstraat. Jonkerstraat and right here is the laneway that cuts this neighborhood into two sections. So the buildings from Heerenstraat would have their entrance on the street and then their rear exit the backyard would be here in this alleyway. So this is the dividing line. So all these buildings go to Heerenstraat and on this side all the buildings go to Jonker Street. Yeah. This is basically a a back alley designed by the Dutch when they laid out the city to divide this section into two more manageable real estate plots that they could sell because the full distance from one street to the other was too long. even for one of these classic tunnel houses. So, they cut them in half, half on each side.
And I noticed on Google Maps there was a coffee shop here. This is a backlane coffee. So, if you wanted to come to this alleyway and have a coffee here. But interestingly, just like these tunnel houses go from one street to another, if you go into Backlane Coffee, you’ll notice that there are a bunch of businesses connected.
So, this is the the coffee shop. Wow. Very, very nice. Wow. I like this place. And then connected to it. I don’t know if the door is open. Probably not. But there is another business in the middle. Oh, so you can go through the coffee shop. And now there’s a little tourist shop selling souvenirs and things right here in the middle. And then you can go through this shop into the next one right over here, a clothing shop. Look at that. So, we’ve essentially gone through a tunnel house, but the whole house from one end to the other has been converted into a series of three or four stores. Right, there’s the alleyway all the way through the building. And then on the other side we come out onto Jonker Street right here. So basically we just went through a tunnel house but the entire tunnel house has been converted into businesses. And here on Jonker Street, you can immediately see the difference, right? How this was designed as a commercial street. Much much wider from one end to the other than the residential Heerenstraat. And then over here is the 5-ft walkway that I’ve been talking about. So under the British, they decreed that every business had to build a roof over a 5-ft walkway so that pedestrians could walk along and stay out of the sun and out of the rain. And they have enough room to do that here. So this is essentially a covered public sidewalk, but they couldn’t do that on Heerenstraat because the road is just way too narrow. So there is a Jonker Street. And now let’s work our way back to the main focus of today’s video and head back to Heerenstraat. Since we just left from Jonker Street, you can immediately get the difference, right? You can see the stark difference between commercial Jonker Street and residential Heerenstraat.
Much narrower, no public sidewalk access, no overhanging roof to protect you from the sun or the torrential rain. But as I said, I’m going to walk back along Heerenstraat. This time I’m just going to keep my eye on the buildings on that side and see if anything catches my eye, anything interesting to chat about to uncover some of the history of Melaka.
One of the first interesting sites that I came across. I actually saw this on Google Maps as well when I was mapping out this little walk. And the interesting thing is that you know at a casual glance you would probably think this is a temple right it looks like a temple but in fact it is what they call this is the Angun association and these are very common and I must admit I have never fully understood the differences between a temple and an association But you can think of this as a clan association for the support of all of the family members belonging to this Chinese clan. And these clan associations I think they developed as a support network for immigrants from China. So if you were from one particular part of China and you immigrate to another country, you connect with people from your part of China who share the same family name. And so you go to your association and the people here, you become a member of this association. You probably pay dues and then they will help you find a place to live, find a job, things like that. basically get settled in your own country and if you have any kind of legal difficulty, anything like that, your clan association can help you with that as well. And I was a little bit confused about that because I mean I didn’t understand the specifics and I was wondering well how come I don’t have a Canadian association? Why is there a Chinese clan association? What is different about them and me? And then what I was told was very interesting. They basically said, “Well, you kind of do have a Canadian clan association. It’s called the Canadian Embassy, right? I can go to the Canadian Embassy in Malaysia and I can get help and support as a Canadian citizen.” Of course, they’re not going to help me find a job or a place to live, but that is somewhere that I can go for protection in legal difficulties. something like that. And when it comes to these clans from China, according to what I read, when they came back in, you know, the the 18th century to Malaysia to Malaya at that time, they weren’t supported by the Chinese government. They were completely abandoned. They had no government embassy, no government support that they could turn to. and they turned to clan associations. And that’s probably way way too simplified, but there is an element of that to it. And of course, when you dive into clan associations and the clans of China, you get into a lot more Malaysian history and history of other countries because a lot of these Chinese clans fought against each other. So in tin mining towns for example here in Malaya the various Chinese clans were a bit like gangs fighting each other for territory and for control of certain businesses and things like that. So yeah you can sort of look at the history of Malaysia through the lens of Chinese clan associations as well. And as you walk around a place like Melaka you can try you can play a game with yourself. Is that a temple or is that a clan association? And one trick I learned is that clan associations always have a temple on the inside. So a clan association is always a temple, but a temple is not always a clan association if you see the difference. So a number of these buildings of course have been converted into hotels and restaurants, boutiques and antique shops, things like that. And a couple of them have been preserved as museums. So this is one that I’m aware of, Melaka House. So you could go in there and see the interior of one of these houses. And I think a lot of the things that I’ve been talking about would be visible on one of those tours. And then the most famous one is just up ahead here. I think it’s called the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. Not surprisingly, that’s it right here. The front of it certainly looks like a grand grand house built by someone who had a lot of money to draw on and it’s been preserved today as a museum. And yeah, I would go in there but not right now because being a Sunday is going to be really really busy. And I believe inside this museum you can get an audio guide. You basically connect by QR code to a website that gives you an audio guide as you walk through the house and you can get guided tours. So when I go to this museum, I want to do it all by itself like a full-on standalone experience rather than going in there today cuz I’m I’m just way too tired to fully absorb it now anyway. So I’ll reserve that for another day. But there’s one of the highlights of Heerenstraat, the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. It is interesting to see the variety of the conditions of these old houses. You got that one perfectly preserved. Right beside it is something that is in okay condition. And then right beside it is pretty much a derelict building. completely abandoned, exposed brick work, smashed out windows, and it looks like on the inside the entire roof has caved in, which is kind of interesting considering, you know, a derelict structure like that is right in the middle of all of these very elaborate palaces almost. But at the same time, it makes me think of again about the Dutch codes of fireproofing because this could be a fire risk to the museum. But even if a fire was started inside here, you can see it has the firewalls on both sides of it sticking up above the roof line. So the Baba and Nyonya Museum can be a little bit more secure because it has several firewalls between it and this derelict building, right? Like you can imagine some delinquent teenagers or something just for fun setting fire to this building and then it would basically be the fire would be kept away from all the neighboring buildings because of that strict fire code going all the way back to 1641. Very interesting. I’m back all the way back at the beginning. Right across the road from me here is the number eight Heerenstraat that I talked about at the very beginning. A classic example of the Dutch construction of the houses on this street before they were purchased by the Peranakan Chinese and converted into all of these gorgeous buildings down there. Yeah, this is where it all started from. Something that looked like that. All we need is a classic Malay Kampong house right beside it to see the evolution. We could have the wooden stilts, a beautiful kampong house with a nice yard around it and we go from there cuz they kept burning down and then we go to something like this and then we go to all of that down the street. It’s quite a history and I’m just about back down on the river. I’m curious whether the the water level has gone up or not to see if they’ve released their flood control measures and the water is returning to its previous levels. Nope. Still still very very far down. Maybe even lower than before cuz now I can see the mud down there. You can see how shallow the Melaka River is now. Yeah. I don’t think I’ve seen a single river cruise boat going up and down the river right now. So yeah, I don’t know if they’re running. The water might be way too low for them. So there you have it. Melaka, the city built by fire. Have I convinced you of my thesis that Melaka as it exists today owes its existence to fire and fire prevention in the building codes? I think it’s a pretty strong argument. So, yeah, I enjoyed that quite a bit to see everything in real life that I’ve only been reading about. And of course, shout out to the Crunch Club. If you made it all the way to the end of the video, put CC in the comments to let me know and tell me you’re a fan of the long form Planet Doug style of video on YouTube. And thank you to all of my Crunch Club members and all the other Planet Doug supporters helping me keep Planet Doug Productions alive. Everyone supporting me through Touch and Go e-wallet here in Malaysia. I appreciate it very much through the buy me a coffee. Shout out to my coffee posse and all the members of the Planet Doug Patreon. Thank you very much to all of you. Links to all of those and my Planet Doug PayPal link is all in the video description. So, right now I’m going to put in a 3D flyover map showing you everywhere that I walked on this journey. Then the end credits, the end of the video. Thank you for hanging out with me and I’ll see you next time.