EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Key Takeaways
- I stumbled across Munshi Abdullah, a 19th-century Melakan writer and teacher, and quickly became fascinated by his autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah—a remarkably personal account of life in Melaka during a period of enormous change.
- His childhood education, his criticism of traditional schooling and superstition, and his eventual passion for language reveal a man who was already thinking about reform, education, and modernity long before those ideas became commonplace.
- His autobiography also gives a rare firsthand glimpse of the destruction of Melaka’s fortress, which he witnessed as an 11-year-old boy—including the increasingly desperate attempts to demolish it with gunpowder.
- What began as a search for Munshi Abdullah turned into one of those very Planet Doug walks where history keeps appearing around every corner: fortress ruins, St. Francis Xavier Church, Dutch Square, the Literature Museum, and finally the surprisingly well-done gallery at his childhood home.
The Accidental Discovery of a New Historical Hero
I didn’t set out to make a video about Munshi Abdullah.
I discovered his name while researching something else, and the more I learned, the more I wondered how I’d managed to spend so much time in Melaka without encountering him before.
Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir—better known as Munshi Abdullah—was a writer, scholar, copyist and language teacher who lived from 1796 to 1854. He became known as the father of modern Malay literature, largely because of the unusual nature of his autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah.
What makes the book so interesting to me is how ordinary and personal it feels. Instead of another grand story about legendary heroes, kings and extraordinary adventures, Abdullah simply tells the story of his own life. Reading it feels surprisingly like listening to a very old man sitting down and writing a long letter to a friend.
And because he lived through the period when the British were taking control of Melaka from the Dutch, his memories overlap with some of the most important changes in the city’s history.
A Book That Can Teach You About Melaka
I’m only partway through Hikayat Abdullah, but I’ve already found myself thinking that it could be an excellent companion for anyone trying to understand Melaka.
The trick is that you don’t necessarily need to understand everything the first time you encounter it.
Abdullah might mention something like Jawi, for example, and if you don’t know what that means, you stop and look it up. Then you discover another piece of Malaysian history and culture. The next unfamiliar word leads somewhere else.
In that sense, the book becomes almost a self-guided course in Melaka.
Read a little. Encounter something unfamiliar. Investigate it. Go back to the book. Repeat.
That’s very much the way I like learning about history myself.
The Childhood That Created a Reformer
The most unexpected part of Abdullah’s story for me was his childhood education.
According to his autobiography, education at the time could involve extraordinarily severe physical discipline. Children were expected to memorize and recite religious texts with great precision, while Malay itself wasn’t formally taught in the way we might expect a person’s native language to be taught in school today.
Abdullah describes an environment of relentless study and punishment. He writes about being beaten, about children being subjected to frightening physical punishments, and about his own misery as a young boy who wanted nothing more than to fly kites and play with his friends.
He even describes crying to his mother and wishing he could die rather than continue living that way.
It’s difficult to read those passages without seeing how they might have shaped the man he eventually became.
Abdullah developed a strong interest in reforming education, promoting the Malay language, and challenging what he regarded as outdated traditions and superstitions.
But there’s another side to the story: eventually, learning became something he pursued because he wanted to learn.
As a teenager, he began seeking out teachers on his own. If one teacher couldn’t explain a particular Malay word, he would walk to another teacher’s house and ask them. He became fascinated by languages, manuscripts, calligraphy and literature.
The boy who had once been forced to study eventually became the scholar who couldn’t stop studying.
The Day an Eleven-Year-Old Watched Melaka’s Fortress Die
This was probably the part of the autobiography that interested me most personally.
Abdullah was only about eleven years old when he witnessed the British destruction of Melaka’s old Portuguese-Dutch fortress.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time myself trying to reconstruct the history of that fortress, so suddenly having the account of a child who actually stood there while it was being demolished was extraordinary.
The British initially tried to dismantle the fortress manually, using laborers with picks and shovels. According to Abdullah, they spent months getting nowhere.
Eventually they resorted to explosives.
They would dig beneath sections of the fortress, pack the cavities with gunpowder, and then evacuate everyone from the surrounding area before lighting long fuses.
Abdullah describes explosions sending enormous pieces of masonry flying through the air. He even recounts an incident in which people who remained nearby were caught when an explosion brought part of a building down.
But this is also where the autobiography needs to be treated carefully.
Abdullah was remembering events he witnessed as a child, decades later. His descriptions of the dimensions of the fortress appear to contain serious exaggerations. His claim that the walls were sixty feet hight and extended sixty feet below ground, for example, simply doesn’t fit the physical realities of the site.
So his account isn’t necessarily a perfect technical record.
But that’s not what makes it valuable.
It’s a human eyewitness account of something that otherwise survives mostly through dry historical descriptions.
You can imagine an eleven-year-old boy watching the fortress that had dominated his city for generations being blown apart.
History Everywhere You Look
While talking about Abdullah, I wandered through some of my familiar parts of Melaka and found myself seeing them slightly differently.
The excavated fortress foundations near the river are a good example. What is now an archaeological display was once covered by a parking lot. The remains of the fortress had literally been paved over.
Nearby is St. Francis Xavier Church, built in 1849—the same year Hikayat Abdullah was published.
Across the road is the famous mural depicting the legendary battle between Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat, a perfect visual representation of the older style of Malay literature that existed before Abdullah’s more realistic, personal writing.
That contrast became increasingly interesting as I walked around:
legendary heroes on one side, and an ordinary man’s attempt to document real life on the other.
And then there are all the little historical details that make walking around Melaka so much more fun: the old fire station that now houses the Golf Gallery, the confusing signage, the remains of the fortress, the Dutch buildings around Red Square, the clock tower and Queen Victoria fountain.
You don’t have to be following a grand historical itinerary. Sometimes you just need to notice what’s around you.
The Literature Museum: Useful, But Not Quite What I Expected
Eventually I made my way into the Stadthuys and went looking for the Literature Museum.
Finding it turned out to be considerably harder than expected—which is very Melaka.
Once inside, I was hoping for a substantial exhibit about Munshi Abdullah. Instead, there was only a relatively small display among exhibits dedicated to many other Malaysian writers.
Still, it provided some useful context.
The museum describes Abdullah as an important figure in the Renaissance of Malay literature, highlighting his progressive and critical approach and his influence on modern Malay writing.
But I also came away with the feeling that a visitor who knows nothing about Malaysian literary history might have trouble making sense of the exhibits. The names, books and cultural references assume a tremendous amount of background knowledge.
In my particular case, I had already spent days reading about Abdullah, so the small display suddenly had a context that it probably wouldn’t have had otherwise.
And Then I Found His House
I thought the museum was going to be the end of the story.
Then I remembered that Google Maps showed a location associated with Munshi Abdullah’s childhood home.
So I walked over toward Harmony Street, past Kampung Kling Mosque and the Chinese temples, expecting to find nothing more than a historical marker.
Instead, I found a Munshi Abdullah gallery.
That turned out to be the real surprise of the day.
The gallery contained much more information about Abdullah than the Literature Museum had, including his Indian Muslim and Arab Yemeni ancestry, his language education, his work with British scholars and administrators, and his importance as a pioneer of progressive and critical Malay literature.
And suddenly the man I’d been reading about all day wasn’t just a name in a book.
I was standing at the place where he had actually lived.
The original childhood house is gone and the present building is a replacement, although Abdullah also lived in this building later in life. But being there still made the story feel much more tangible.
I could stand inside and imagine the young Abdullah listening through a doorway as his father praised him for the first time after he successfully wrote a legal bond for a visiting sea captain.
That moment seems almost like a turning point in his life.
After years of criticism and relentless discipline, he finally heard his father say that he’d done something perfectly.
And from there, Abdullah began working alongside his father as a professional scribe before eventually becoming a teacher, linguist and writer in his own right.
The Best Kind of Historical Discovery
This turned into one of those accidental Planet Doug adventures that I enjoy most.
I started with a name I’d only just discovered. I walked through Melaka talking about him, mixed in a few unrelated historical factoids, wandered into a museum, struggled to find another museum, and then unexpectedly discovered a gallery in the neighborhood where Abdullah himself had grown up.
And along the way, the city itself became part of the story.
That’s what I like about learning history. You don’t necessarily start with the complete story. You start with one interesting thread and follow it wherever it leads.
In this case, that thread led from a book, to a childhood, to the destruction of a fortress, to the history of Malay literature—and finally to the doorway of the man’s childhood home.
One Last Thought
The quote I found on the wall at Munshi Abdullah’s gallery seemed like the perfect way to finish the journey:
“Sell the gemstones to purchase knowledge.”
Whatever else we make of Munshi Abdullah, that seems to capture the spirit of the man I’ve been getting to know through his autobiography: knowledge wasn’t simply something he possessed. It was something he spent his entire life pursuing.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning and welcome back to Planet Doug and welcome back to the historic city of Melaka, Malaysia. And today I have two ideas for a video, a big idea and a small idea. And I’m going to try to combine them. So it’s kind of a new thing I’m doing here on Planet Doug. And my main idea, the thing I really want to talk about is a Malaysian man that I just recently discovered that I become fascinated with. And I’ll tell you how I stumbled across this man, how I how I learned about him. And I’m kind of astonished that it has taken me this long to come across his name. So, I’m going to talk about this man as best I can. He’s going to be very, very well known to Malaysians, I think. So have pity on me if I say things that are wrong or inaccurate. And I say that because I’m just at the beginning of learning about him. I haven’t done a deep dive into him and his life. I’ve just sort of discovered him myself and I thought he was so interesting I just had to talk about him right away. And then if you are Malaysian or you know who this man is and you know a lot more about him, yeah, sound off in the comments. I’d really love to learn a lot more.
So this man’s name, he’s known as Munshi Abdullah. That’s not his official full name. His official name is Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, but he became known in his life as Munshi Abdullah. As far as I understand it, Munshi means teacher. He was a scholar, a writer and a teacher of languages. He taught Malay and he was very much a writer and that’s where I become really interested in him because he published a book that was so unusual in Malaysia that he became known as the father of Malaysian literature. And that book I’m busy reading it right now. It’s an autobiography. He was encouraged in fact I believe by Stamford Raffles to write this book because he led such an interesting life. Raffles encouraged him. Yeah. You you got to write down the story of your life. So Munshi Abdullah he wrote his autobiography. He called it the Hikayat Abdullah. This book was very special because previous to that the literature in Malaysia was sort of like court-sponsored legendary stories, myths and fables, grand adventures, legends and Munshi Abdullah when he sat down to write his autobiography he just wrote it in simple prose. I started reading his book, The Hikayat Abdullah. It’s about 300 pages long. I think I’m up to about page 70 or 80, so I’m right at the very beginning. But I’m enjoying it immensely because it reads like a letter to a friend. You can picture Munshi Abdullah sitting down at a desk starting to write and he’s just telling a friend the story of his life. and it is absolutely fascinating. I just can’t get enough of it to place him in terms of Melaka’s history. He was born in 1796 and he died in 1854 at the age of 58. And if you know your dates, 1796 to 1854, that puts him right in the heart of the period when the British were taking over Melaka from the Dutch. So he was a personal witness to that part of history. And as far as I understand him, he was something of a reformer. He was somewhat critical of the old ways of doing things in Malaysia and he wanted the society to move towards more modern way of thinking, modern way of living and a lot of that came from his personal direct connections with men like the British resident of Melaka at that time William Farquhar and his personal connection with Stamford Raffles.
Because Munshi Abdullah, he he made a living as a as a copyist, as a writer. Back in those days, everything was handwritten. And if anybody needed like a contract written up, some sort of a formal letter or document, they had to find somebody who was literate, who had really excellent handwriting, knew all the proper, you know, legal vocabulary, the titles, how to write these things. And people would pay these copyists, these scribes to write out these documents and then they could sign them and bring them to the bank or to the merchant, whatever the contract is about. And then when men like Stamford Raffles showed up, they were busy documenting the Malay language, Malay culture, anything they could get their hands on. They were buying up manuscripts, old books, all of them handwritten. And they would hire scribes like Munshi Abdullah to copy all of this material. All the material they could find, they needed copies of it. and then scribes like Munshi Abdullah he was paid to do that work. So because of that work he had connections with the British administrators and he got a personal insight into like the British culture the way things work there and this sort of sparked some reformist attitudes in his mind and that kind of a thumbnail sketch and like I said I just started learning about him so I don’t know everything. I don’t have all the facts and figures, things like that. And what I want to do is talk about him and then at the end I’m going to go into the history and ethnography museum because it turns out there is a literature museum inside. It’s part of the complex and they have an exhibit on Munshi Abdullah. So, I want to go in there and see this exhibit for myself, find out what they say about this man, the father of Malay literature. So that’s where the video is going to end, more or less. But what I want to do is start here near my hostel in Melaka and just walk through this part of the city and do a little bit of a tour. So while I’m talking about Munshi Abdullah, I’m just going to be looking at things around me and chatting about them as well. Try to mix in these two videos into one. And my idea with this second part of the video is again I’m thinking of someone who would be coming to Melaka in the future, a foreign visitor. You’ll probably walk all around this area just as just as I have done dozens of times. And then I’m going to just mention a few things about this about this about this. Just little little factoids that I’ve picked up in my time here so that when you come to Melaka and you walk around you can think back to this video and go, “Oh, oh, Doug told me something about this. Something interesting about that.”
Anyway, the starting point is right here. This is the big mural Hang Tuah fighting with Hang Jebat and has the welcome to Melaka sign on it. And some of the fortress walls, the fortress ruins are on display right here in this excavated area. And my very first interesting factoid is that this parking lot, it used to extend all the way to that building. So all of that history was covered up by asphalt. The ruins of the fortress walls were just forgotten and turned into a parking lot. You know, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. And then there was this period of time where they were uncovering a lot of these ruins and they dug it up. And now you can actually see some of the fortress foundations, the fortress walls foundations on display there. And the key thing about it is you can see how the fortress walls would run right alongside the river. The fortress ran down the riverside, the Melaka Strait and then came around in a circle all the way here and then returned back to the river. And then the Dutch also added moats and other barriers out here as well. So that’s kind of the in terms of the geography, that’s where we’re starting. My hostel is over here just down this street. And I recently learned that this street I think is called Jalan Bunga which is the name of the Malaysian National Flower. And this street is actually fascinating from a historical point of view and be a great street for a visitor just to walk up and down. There’s so much in the buildings, the historic nature of the buildings here and in all the little alleyways, all the little hidden spots all through this area is quite cool to explore. Restaurants like modern restaurants and cafes that were designed with foreign visitors in mind are all up and down this street as well. So that’s Bunga Raya and this park, the pigeon park. I love this. I walk by it every morning. I get to see the the pigeons, you know, having the time of their life in that fountain. That’s pretty much how I live in my hostel right now because there’s no air conditioning. My room is unbelievably hot and every hour I go down to the bathroom and I do just what they’re doing. I dump water on my head. Then I go back to my room hour later. If I had this fountain in my room, I’d probably lie in it and never get out. But you can see there’s a sign here covered in pigeons for Little India because this street over here is the gateway to Little India. So you’ve got Bunga Street over here and this again it has a lot of history because this was a main thoroughfare for Melaka connecting the fortress like the downtown core of Melaka the heart of Melaka. This street led from this fortress area out into the countryside and it developed a lot of businesses. It was like a a bustling commercial district in the history of Melaka. So you pick up on a lot a real strong historical vibe walking down that street along the river and then running almost parallel to it is this street, Little India Street. So if you need a taste of good Indian food, this is where you come. So, the other day I was walking around and I was coming up this street over here and I came across a little hidden gem. It may not be a gem for everyone, but it could be a gem for you. And I’ll tell you why in a minute once the traffic slows down and I get a chance to cross the street.
I was going to say finally there was a break in the traffic. Takes a long time. It’s a surprisingly busy street and it it leads into the historic district. And right up ahead you can see pink bus M100. So that’s the city bus that actually on weekdays like Monday to Thursday goes right through the heart of of the historic core. and you can hop on that bus and it takes you out to Melaka Central, the main bus station. So, that’s something that’s pretty handy to know. But the hidden gem maybe for you is around this corner and just a little bit up this street. So, I’m going to walk this way and then when we get there, I will point it out to you. Something about Munshi Abdullah I should mention right here at the top is that he went to Singapore with Stamford Raffles and that is a whole part of history that I don’t know much about so I can’t really talk about it but of course Stamford Raffles was deeply involved in creating you know what became modern Singapore turning it into a trading port And by that point Munshi Abdullah was working directly with Raffles and went with him to Singapore. So he was also a direct witness to the rise of Singapore. But I haven’t gotten that far in his autobiography yet. I’ve only read about his childhood and then a little bit into the British period. I haven’t reached the Singapore years, the Stamford Raffles years, so I can’t really talk about that yet. That’s coming later in the autobiography. So, yeah, when I started reading this autobiography, I didn’t know what to expect and I was so pleased when I realized the writing style was very, very familiar to someone from our age. Like I said, it reads like a letter and he he has this long introductory section where he sort of apologizes for his own deficiencies, you know, being very humble and he’s talking about how, well, I’m not the smartest man in the world. I’m not the most skilled, so please forgive my humble efforts as I tell you about my life. And I was like, oh yeah, that’s very sweet. That’s very nice of him. And then he dove into something that really kind of shocked me and opened my eyes. And this is it strikes me that if you are going to come to Melaka as a visitor and you want to come to grips with the history and the culture and and understand what you’re looking at, you could do worse than just read this book. like start reading the Hikayat Abdullah you won’t understand a lot of what you’re reading because you haven’t been here yet but as you’re reading like every time he says something that you don’t understand you can stop and go oh what the heck is that so if you read his autobiography and then learn about everything he’s talking about that will give you a really strong primer in Melaka. So for example, just just a random idea, he might mention because he’s a writer, he would mention Jawi. And then if you’ve never been to Melaka before, never been to Malaysia, you might think, “What the heck is Jawi?” You look that up and you realize it was the Arabic script that was used to write Malay. And again, I could be getting this wrong, but I believe the Arabic script has 28 letters to write Arabic. And then they added six more to cover some sounds that are in Malay but not in Arabic. So in fact, Jawi is like a form of Arabic. It’s the Arabic alphabet but modified to write Malay. Right. And that’s a it’s really important to know that when you come to Malaysia, you know, like if you don’t know that, you’re missing out on a huge part of the culture and the country. So, you read his book and he says, “Oh, Jawi.” And you’re like, “What the heck is that?” Then you look it up. Oh, that’s what Jawi is. Then you go back to the book, the next sentence will have a concept or a word you don’t know. Look that up. And then you can learn about Malaysia as you read his autobiography like a letter to a to a friend. And what really surprised me even shocked me in reading this autobiography was the section at the beginning where Munshi Abdullah was describing his early childhood and education. I don’t know exactly all the specifics of the school he went to, this sort of thing, the years. He doesn’t put in a lot of dates and figures and names. He’s sort of writing off the top of his head, like I said, like a letter to a friend, but it sounds like his his father was also a writer and a teacher, an academic, a scribe, very educated man writing Arabic. And at that time, as far as I can make out, formal education was all about learning how to write and recite the Quran and do it precisely and do it perfectly. It was like again according to what Munshi Abdullah wrote it was like rote memorization that the children would have to learn the Quran by heart but they don’t even know what the words mean because they speak Malay in their day-to-day language not Arabic but they would still memorize entire passages and the teachers at that time again according to what I read were quite the disciplinarian in there’s a section in his book where he describes the beatings of the children and I’m not exaggerating when I say when I read through that passage I thought I was reading descriptions of torture that might have been used in a government black site or something like that. There were even photographs of all of these implements like a device designed to crush the fingers of the children if they make a mistake. There was a punishment where they were hung from their wrists with their feet off the ground if they made a mistake. There was a punishment where they had to stand over a fire and they built a fire with peppers and things and the smoke would be like burning their eyes and their throats and yeah the teachers were very strict disciplinarians and this was all brand new to me. I was like what what am I reading here? It came like completely out of left field. I was not expecting what I wasn’t expecting these stories. And then he talked about how he was beaten over the head with the chalkboards like the personal I don’t have the name in front of me in my head right now that the the slates he would have a slate and he can’t even count the number of slates that were shattered over his head by his teacher or by his father and it just sounded absolutely brutal. And he wrote about how when a child was brought to a school, there was this formula where the parents would speak to the teacher and give them a kind of permission for this physical abuse because they knew it would eventually be good for the child to instill discipline and knowledge. So the parent says to the teacher, you know, you may do this and do this and do this, but don’t blind them and don’t break their bones, but other than that, do what you need to do. I hand my child over to you. So I think this might have be might have been the beginning of the reformist mindset of Abdullah of Munshi Abdullah where yeah, he was miserable the entire time. He also had a very difficult life because he had all of his siblings, his mother’s other children, I believe they all died and Munshi Abdullah was the one child who survived. He was very sickly, very ill all the time and tremendous family pressure was put on him and according to his autobiography, his father being such a strict disciplinarian was not very nice to him. constantly criticizing him, never giving him any support or praise. And all he did was study, study, study, study, like day in day out. And he wrote in his autobiography that oh, you know, I wanted to fly kites. He loved kites. I wanted to go out play with my friends. And he would be he wrote about having these conversations with his mother where he would just be weeping and weeping uncontrollably and saying that he wished he could die. He would rather die than live this life. While I’ve been telling this story about his childhood education, I’ve actually been standing in the parking lot of this hidden gem that I’ve been referring to. And I hope I didn’t build it up too much. It will be a hidden gem just for a certain type of person, the golfer in your life. And there it is. It is a museum dedicated to golf. And I haven’t been inside the museum myself, but I did speak to the people that work there and they led me to believe that it is all about golfing in Malaysia. So, it’s not like the history of golf worldwide. It focuses on golf in Malaysia. And anyway, I just thought it was kind of fascinating because I I’m very interested in museums. I visit a lot of them. And at one point, I saw a listing for the golf gallery. I was like, what in the world is that? And then one day, right here in my neighborhood, I just happened to come walking down this street, there’s actually the Francis Xavier Church, which is right on the river basically. So very very near the downtown core and probably nobody knows about it is the humble golf gallery. And maybe I don’t know you’re part of a family who came to Melaka. You’re the dad and you love to golf. Your children and your wife and everyone else can go off do what they want to do. You the golf fanatic, you have something here just for you. The gallery golf. I’m not going to go in today, but what I thought was really fascinating about it, too, is the building. It’s a historic building. And this is actually an old fire station, an old firehouse. And you can see that in the tower there, used as a tower to keep an eye on the city. And if they saw smoke rising from anywhere, of course, the bells would ring and they would all go fight the fire. So, you got a golf museum and a heritage building all in one. Just love that tower. It’s worth coming here since it’s so close to downtown, you know, just to take a look at this tower and take a look at the old heritage building. And then you can go inside and check out the history of golf in Malaysia.
I mentioned in that earlier section that this style of education that Munshi Abdullah lived through with such strict discipline and like rote memorization that fed into his reformist ideas later on about the school system, about education. But even more than that, in his autobiography, he talks about this crazy thing that the Malay language isn’t taught in schools. And when he when he wrote that, it took me a long time to figure out what he’s talking about. But when you think about it, like when I went to school in Canada, elementary school and high school, we study English, English vocabulary, English grammar, syntax, writing, we read books in English, we learn the English language. And to me, that just seems so natural. Like, how could it be any other way? But in the school system that Abdullah grew up in, Malay wasn’t taught. They used Malay today. It was the lingua franca of this whole area, not just the Malay peninsula, but it was used by all like people from all the different countries would speak to each other in Malay. They used it in the markets, in day-to-day life, talking to their friends and family. But then when they went to school, they learned Arabic. They didn’t actually study Malay. And again, it took me a while to figure out, okay, what is that? Cuz they’re speaking Malay. But the thing is, they’re not learning about the Malay language. There’s no like we go to English class. There was no Malay class where you learn new Malay words where you study Malay vocabulary, grammar, syntax, these sorts of things. So that’s another idea that was dominant in Munshi Abdullah’s life. This idea that Malay should be taught in schools and that became part of his yeah reformist attitudes. And I find that really fascinating because like I said, it took me a while to understand even what he was talking about. It’s like what do you mean you don’t study Malay in school? But that’s the way it was.
I’m back on the main street. Jalan Bunga Raya right there. The pigeon park right there. The gate entrance to Little India right there. And this is the little road. Right around the corner is the golf gallery and the old fire station. So, you can see just how close we are because here’s downtown. And here are some of the the remnants of the fortress walls, the foundations that they uncovered. Oh, there isn’t very much on this side. To get a better look, we have to go over there.
So yeah, right here you can see some of the foundations of the original fortress walls and you can see just how thick it was from the outer edge all the way into here. And this this comes into play later on in the story of Abdullah of Munshi Abdullah. And I came over here for two reasons. One is this is a very common site. I see a lot of visitors taking selfies in front of this church, the church of St. Francis Xavier. But there there’s two interesting things about this church. One is if you look at the date, 1849. I never noticed that before. So it was built in 1849 and that is the same year that Munshi Abdullah published his autobiography. It also came out in 1849. So he was a contemporary of the construction of this church. And the other day I met this man from Belgium, another tourist here in town and we were chatting for a while. We were exchanging stories about our experiences in Melaka. He actually knew a lot about the city, the history, the names, things like that. And then he was telling me about a church he saw. And at first I I couldn’t quite understand which church he was talking about because he kept saying it was, you know, that big church that’s tilted, that’s leaning over. And I’m like, I I have no idea what you’re talking about. You know, I I’ve never heard of a church like that. Turns out he was talking about this church. And it turns out it is absolutely true. Look at it. It’s leaning to the right. The whole church or maybe just the left tower. I’m not sure. But it actually looks like the whole church has got a really severe lean to the right. And it’s not just the wide angle lens of the GoPro. With your naked eye, you can see it. The church is actually leaning way over. You know, it’s Melaka’s own leaning tower of Pisa. It’s the leaning tower of the church of St. Francis Xavier. And I never noticed it before, but now that someone told me about it, now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it. And you can see that the whole tower and maybe the whole church is at is leaning over. And I have no idea how true this story is. I don’t think there’s any clear evidence to support it, but the story is that a bomb from World War II went off beside the tower. So, this bomb exploded either from World War II or during World War II. It was hard to nail down the details. And because of that bomb going off, that’s why the tower is leaning. But it also led into like the foundations being a little bit soft because we’re right beside the river and the the ground here is not very firm. So the foundations of the church were settling already. So the tower was already starting to lean. But then the bomb went off and it you know, increased the the process by which it was happening. So now we have the the leaning tower of Melaka. As I said, I I don’t even think the bomb story is actually true, but it is a story that you read and you come across all the time once you start looking for it. But the fact that the church is leaning, as far as I can tell, yeah, there’s no argument about that. There it is leaning very much to one side. And this mural also ties in very well with the story I’m trying to tell about Munshi Abdullah because this mural represents the legendary battle between two of Malaysia’s great warriors, Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat. And this story is told in the Hikayat Hang Tuah. So when I talk about Munshi Abdullah’s autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah being the father of modern Malay literature. What that means is before him the literature was more like this legendary stories the great exploits of heroes from the past and Munshi Abdullah’s book his writing was done in simple modern prose telling real stories from real life rather than this glorified past of legendary heroes things like that a couple other Planet Doug factoids I can throw into this moment is that I believe both of them are performing a traditional Malaysian martial art. They were highly skilled in a specific form of fighting known in Malaysia I believe as silat. So they were skilled fighters masters of the silat martial art and that’s what they’re using here. And finally, as far as I understand the story, they were actually fighting with daggers. In particular, a very famous dagger, a keris called the Taming Sari. And the Taming Sari was like a powerful dagger that conveyed to the man who was using it incredible powers and he could not be harmed or injured. So the whole story of these two men, they’re they were the best of friends and yet through tragic circumstances, they ended up fighting each other to the death. And that’s the heart and soul of that story of that Hikayat. I have so much trouble saying words like that properly. But after walking by this mural dozens of times, I finally realized the main point of the story, the Taming Sari, this legendary keris with magical powers is absent as far as I understand it. They were fighting using this keris, using daggers, but in this mural you see they they have empty hands. They’re not actually holding on to any keris at all. And there’s no Taming Sari in the mural. Yeah, took me a long time to notice that. So right there, church of St. Francis Xavier, built in 1849, the same year that Munshi Abdullah’s autobiography was published. Right across the road, the famous mural of this legendary battle. And the road right here takes us through some of historic Melaka to Dutch Square to Red Square just down there. And one of my favorite stories from Munshi Abdullah’s autobiography came up next and that had to do with him at 11 years old being a witness to the destruction of the fortress of Melaka. And of course that fascinated me in particular because I spent so much time looking into the history of the fort. And quite recently I did a deep dive into the role of Stamford Raffles because every visitor that comes to Melaka they’re encouraged to go see A Famosa which is the Porta de Santiago which is like the the last remaining piece of the fortress that is still standing. And the story goes of course that Raffles intervened. In fact, he wrote a report detailing why destroying the fortress and dismantling the city of Melaka was bad for business. And he he submitted that report to the East India Company. And then because of his report, they stopped the demolition, they cancelled their plan and that saved the that last remaining gate, the what they call A Famosa today. So I did this deep dive into that whole story and it’s while I was reading about Stamford Raffles in connection to stopping the destruction of Melaka that’s when I first came across the name of Munshi Abdullah and then it turned out that when Raffles was here as a junior clerk in the East India Company investigating what was going on Munshi Abdullah was here, though he wasn’t Munshi yet. He was only a boy of 11 years old, and he witnessed the actual destruction of the fortress. And he gives detailed descriptions of it. It’s just amazing to read where he describes all kinds of fascinating things. the British resident William Farquhar, he was the one put in charge of the demolition and they started off, again, he writes about this in his autobiography, doing it by hand. The idea was to just hire a ton of laborers and all of these men would use pickaxes and shovels to break down the fortress and then tear it out of the ground. basically destroy the fortress by hand. And that went on for 3 months. And they got absolutely nowhere, which was yeah, understandable. And it became very clear that yeah, they can’t really do it by hand. It would take them a century to finish the job. And interestingly enough, and this this gets back to the idea of Munshi Abdullah’s role as a reformer, he talked about how the local laborers were really reluctant to do it. Not only because they wanted to keep this piece of Melaka’s history, but because they’d lived their entire lives with this huge fortress around them, and it became associated with spirits and ghosts, demons and jinn. So the local people were really reluctant to hammer at the at the fortress walls with a pickaxe, tear down the wall because it would disturb the ghosts, the jinn, the demons. And yeah, they didn’t want they didn’t want any ghosts entering their lives. And then again, according to what he wrote in his autobiography, a lot of these workers that were tearing down the walls actually did fall sick. But he argues that it was just sort of a psychosomatic thing. Their intense fear of the ghosts, the demons that lived in the fortress walls, it was so intense that the fear itself caused the illness that they fell into. All right? And then Abdullah mentions things like this quite often and then he always follows it up with, but of course this was all nonsense. So he was arguing that these deep-seated traditions and superstitions amongst the local people, we’ve got to get rid of those. Like I mean, let’s move on into the age of reason and science. And I noticed in his book, he couldn’t help himself, but every time he mentioned one of these superstitions, one of these ideas, he would end the paragraph with, “But that was all nonsense.” So I could feel his reformist state of mind coming through. But yeah, he described actual scenes where the men under Farquhar’s command would dig a hole underneath the bastion, like a 6ft by 6 ft cave essentially, pack it with as much gunpowder as they could, pack it with rock and like really pack it in there tightly. And then they had like a 50 foot long fuse. Farquhar himself would light the fuse and then the, you know, the gunpowder charge would go off. And before this took place, a warning would go out to all the people living near where the explosion was going to happen, telling them move way back. Like everybody, get out of your homes. move as far away as you can because this was not in the days of precise demolition. Like all they did was pack in as much gunpowder as they could pack in and they’re just like guessing like I think that’s enough. And they had no idea what was really going to happen. So all the people had to be cleared out in all directions before they set off the charge. And Munshi Abdullah writes about one time when some people that he knew did not evacuate the area and they stayed nearby. They were sort of underneath an overhanging roof of some sort of a building hiding there so they could watch the explosion and apparently rocks flew through the air, collapsed the building, landed on top of them. One of them was killed and two of them their legs were crushed and they were maimed for the rest of their life. And I don’t know whether Munshi Abdullah can be absolutely trusted when it comes to his numbers, things like that because yeah, he was an 11-year-old child at the time and he’s drawing on memory. So he would say things like the wall was 60 feet high and that they originally tried to dig down into the foundations and they dug 45 ft into the ground and they never reached the bottom of the walls foundations. And based on everything else I’ve read that’s that’s there’s nowhere near true. The Portuguese did have a fortress tower, the keep that was 60 feet high, probably even higher. It was their main fortress tower that was five stories high by the time Munshi Abdullah was alive. It it had been destroyed long ago in the battle with the Dutch. But there was this idea of this 60-foot tower and somehow that 60-foot height got conflated with the height of the fortress. So he did write in his autobiography the walls were 60 ft high and probably 60 ft below the ground which was equally impossible because even 45 ft would take you way below sea level below the water table and it would just be a giant flood down there. Anyway, you can’t really believe his facts and figures, I don’t think, looking back into childhood. And he said that when these gunpowder charges went off, chunks of the fortress as big as elephants went flying through the air, as big as houses went flying through the air and landed in the Melaka Strait, landed in the river, landed on top of houses, things like that. But anyway, it’s an amazing story to read, particularly because he was a firsthand witness, and you can think of him as an 11-year-old boy having that kind of adventure in his life. Really quite something. I’m right at Dutch Square at Red Square right now, and there is the Stadthuys right over there. The museum, the literature museum that I want to end this video with is inside that building. And I just thought I would treat you to a couple of Planet Doug factoids to do with Dutch Square. I recently, for example, shot a video about Christ Church, Melaka. And the interesting thing about that church for me is the date on the front. You can see it says 1753. And that is the date that the church was completed when it was opened. But the more significant date is actually 1741. That is when they came up with the idea to build the church in 1741. And that date is important because it marks 100 years of Dutch rule of Melaka. The Dutch defeated the Portuguese and took over Melaka back in 1641. So in 1741 they decided to build this church to commemorate 100 years of Dutch rule. And the original name for this church when the Dutch built it was kind of like lower church but also St. Paul’s church but then it was renamed by the British. It was changed to an Anglican church and the British gave it the name Christ Church Melaka, but its original name was St. Paul’s under the Dutch. And here in the park in the center of Dutch Square, we also have this fountain. I don’t know a lot about the fountain other than what I’ve read briefly. And you can see on that on that plaque that this fountain is dedicated to Queen Victoria and it celebrates her life. It was erected in 1904 in memory of the great queen as they say there. Her life from 1837 to 1901. And they built this fountain in her memory.
Right beside it is the famous clock tower. And they do have a sign over here that gives the history of the tower. I’m just coming over here to confirm the name of the man who donated it to the city. Should be right here at the top. It all began in 1873 when a wealthy merchant Tan Beng Swee donated a large clock to the town of Melaka. I’ve always been a little bit confused about this, but it basically says he donated the clock, but then it says to house the clock a special tower was built. So, I don’t know if the if the tower was part of his gift or he only paid for the clock. And then a clock keeper was appointed with a monthly salary of $4.50 to maintain the clock. But that’s not the factoid. The main factoid is originally there was only one clock face. So this merchant, he donated a single clock and then later on as it aged and couldn’t be used anymore, they replaced it with a clock with four faces, one on each side. And then when that one wore out, they replaced it with a modern Japanese Seiko. So in fact, when you’re looking up at this historic clock tower, you can think about what’s inside it. And what’s inside it is a Seiko a Seiko clock from Japan. And that is just one of those stories I read randomly on the internet. Maybe it’s only a rumor and someone started it and everybody just ran with it. But that is the story that I read that up there is a Seiko clock. And I also read that when the Seiko was installed, there were a number of local people were protesting it because nobody here has very good feelings about the Japanese dating back to the Japanese occupation. So here we have, you know, the heart of Melaka. We don’t want a Japanese Seiko clock in our beloved clock tower. But that’s yeah, that’s the story that I’ve heard. I have one more story about Munshi Abdullah that I want to tell. As far as I’ve gotten in his autobiography before I take a look at the museum exhibit, I’m taking a chance by doing it out here in Dutch Square. Every 2 or 3 minutes, one of the trishaws goes by with Baby Shark blasting or some other crazy pop song and I have to stop recording, but we’ll see how far I can get. So the thing is that I was talking about his young childhood and how much the school system and all of the endless study really made him unhappy. But I’m very glad to say that he eventually got out of that stage of his life. one of the key points of his life that he writes about in his autobiography is a day when he was at home and some kind of a sea captain came to the house. He has his name in the book, but I can’t remember his name. And the captain came there because he wanted Munshi Abdullah’s father to write a bond. Like I guess a bond was like a a contract with his with a Chinese merchant because he owed the merchant money and they had to establish the debt that was owed and a schedule for repayment, this kind of thing. And they called that document a bond. So the sea captain came to the house, you know, knock knock. Oh, is your father home? And he he said he would write this bond for me. And they were waiting and waiting and waiting for his father to come home, but he didn’t for a long time. So Abdullah, a young boy of maybe 12 years old, he says to the captain, “Well, you know what? I’ve been studying. I think I can do it.” And the captain said, “Well, yeah, if you can, you know, you give it a try.” And Abdullah himself as a 12 or 13 year old boy sat down at his desk using all of the correct titles, the legal framework, the language, perfect calligraphy, he wrote out the bond, presented it to the captain and the captain gave him a dollar or some amount of money and he was quite pleased with his work and then later on Abdullah’s father came home, heard the story, talked to the sea captain, I believe, examined the bond that Abdullah had written, and in speaking to his mother in private, basically said it was perfect. Absolutely perfect. His son Abdullah did a perfect job. He was so proud of him, was so amazed by his ability. But Abdullah was listening through the doorway, like through the wall, heard his father praising him and the work that he had done. And he had never gotten that kind of praise from his father before. And then from that point on, his father trusted him to work alongside him. and Abdullah became part of the family business. A paid professional scribe writing documents, contracts, bonds, letters, all those sorts of things. And then we move on to the next stage of his life when he was a full-on teenager like 14, 15, 16, 17 years old and he became passionate about the Malay language himself. He wasn’t being beaten by the teachers to study. He wasn’t being forced to stay in his room and study. He became a scholar in his own right. And he had a whole range of private teachers, teachers that he even paid like $5 a year to teach him. And he would be reading all of these documents. any book, any manuscript he could get his hands on, he would anytime he came across a Malay word that he didn’t understand, he would go to his teachers like, “What does this word mean?” and he would learn on his own behalf. And he he describes times when he would bring some kind of a phrase or a word in Malay to one of his teachers. And if that teacher didn’t know the answer, he would walk to his next teacher to the next to the next, walking long distances going from house to house to house until he could finally find one of his teachers that could teach him what that word meant. And it became a passion of his that continued for the rest of his life. And he became such a master of the Malay language, of calligraphy, of Jawi, of Arabic. He even studied Hindustani and became fluent in Hindustani. He became a linguist. And then when the British arrived, he had a career as an English teacher. So he was teaching Malay to the British administrators of of Melaka at that time and then he became known as Munshi Munshi Abdullah. And I think that be that brings me to the end of as far as I’ve gotten in his autobiography. But I think that’s enough to understand a bit about the boy, the teenager, and the man that he grew into. And now let’s head into the Stadthuys, the History and Ethnography Museum. Inside that museum is the literature museum. Fingers crossed that it’s open because when I was here before, the literature museum was closed for renovations. So, I’m taking a chance here. But let’s go see if we can see the museum exhibit about Munshi Abdullah. Here’s the entrance to the Stadthuys, the ticket counter for the museum. Oh, here’s the sign for the place. History and ethnography museum. They don’t list the other museums in the complex separately for some reason, but as far as I’m aware, the literature museum is also inside here. So, let’s looks like the ticket counter is open. And let’s get a ticket. I got my ticket. It was a 10 ringgit because I qualify for the senior citizens. It’s 20 ringgit normally, 10 ringgit if you’re 60 or older. And I’m now inside the museum itself. Yeah, I never examine this very carefully before, but they’ve exposed a section of the underground water system in the original building. So, this would be like the water drainage pipes or ditches under under the floor.
And if you’re going through the regular museum, you start there. But I am going to spare you all of that today. We are going to zero in on the literature museum. And if I remember right, it is back here somewhere. Another little factoid, by the way, is there’s another gallery over here. Most people miss it, but that up there is the Zheng He Gallery. There’s a statue, the legendary Chinese admiral of the treasure fleet, 300 ships, as many as 30,000 people who would come to Melaka on his journeys. And the Zheng He exhibit is up there in that building. So, it’s sort of separate from the main museum, but a lot of people walk right by it.
And then if you come all the way back to the rear of the museum, the bathrooms are back there. And then out this door is another exhibit, but I don’t think it’s the literature museum. Galeri Roti Belanda. I don’t think so. I think the literature museum is over there. So,
okay. I’m having trouble finding it. There’s They call that the education museum. The gate appears to be closed. Where is the literature museum? I I thought I knew where it was. That might be it up there. But how do you get up there? I have one more idea. I think I’m on to the the solution to this mystery now. I’m willing to bet that all the way back here, I pointed out the stairs to go up to the Zheng He Museum. I think if you go up these stairs and go left, that should take you to the literature museum. If not, we will have climbed up these stairs for nothing. Yeah, check that out. A nice well. No water down there right now, but yeah, an old well, part of the Stadthuys. Very cool. Yeah, this museum is worth the price of admission just to take in the building to be honest. Beautiful building. So much history here just in the construction of the building.
And as I talked about in my previous video, when people credit Stamford Raffles for saving the A Famosa, like the gate, he he’s managed to stop the demolition before they destroyed the entire fortress. That’s only part of the story because this whole complex, all the government buildings, they were also going to be torn down by the East India Company. So this entire complex, the Stadthuys, all of this was also technically saved by Stamford Raffles because he wrote that report. If the Brit if the British in the form of the East India Company had carried through carried out their entire plan, all of this would have been gone too. This was part of their plan to completely gut Melaka and destroy all the government buildings. So yeah, and I was right. Yeah, most of the places here in Melaka are very poorly signposted. You really have to work hard to find your way sometimes. So there is a sign here saying Melaka Literature Museum, but that is the very very first sign. any indication that it even exists is this one little sign right here. And if you don’t know to look for it, you will never find it. And there it is up here. Yeah, I’ve never been here before.
The Museum of Literature. And let us hope it is open. I do have a habit. I have a talent for going everywhere at the wrong time at the exact time that they are closed. Let’s see about today.
It was open and I’m inside the literature museum now. Beautiful building. Wooden floors, nice wooden ceiling. So, it’s a beautiful building to come see as well. A lot of information here about the literary figures of Malaysia, but like 99% of it doesn’t mean anything to me because I don’t know these people. I I don’t know what they’ve written. But there’s a little bit here about my current obsession, Munshi Abdullah. And right here in the entrance way, I I kind of like this display, this diorama, a family scene showing someone, a scholar reading, studying. And I like to think of Munshi Abdullah himself, you know, looking like this as he’s working, as he’s studying. Plate of snacks by his side. family, children over there. And this was interesting for me as well because the very first display you come across is what I was talking about as what came before Munshi Abdullah. And this is a display about the Hikayat Hang Tuah. I remember that big mural of Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat showing the the two men fighting. And this is I’m assuming this is Hang Tuah himself. And I like how even here they have his hand looking like he’s holding the Taming Sari, like he’s holding a keris, but there’s actually nothing in his hands. But on the other side, we can see a copy of the classic literature of Malaysia right there. Like the Hikayat Hang Tuah. And this sort of work was what came before Munshi Abdullah. And I like this poster right here. connects with what I’ve been talking about because you can this is again the battle the final battle between Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat and it took place inside a a building inside a home inside a kitchen and a lot of people looking at this me included when I first saw it had no idea what was going on but if you look carefully down at the floor you can see spears sticking up from down below because soldiers were below the house and plunging their spears through the floor. But you can see that because of all these spears coming up through the floor, the two men fighting were jumping from serving tray to serving tray and that was protecting them from the spears coming up through the floor. And now you see this illustration of the battle is more realistic because it shows clearly that he has a dagger in his hand and that could be the famous Taming Sari keris. So you actually do see the weapon here and you don’t see it in the mural down by the river.
This is the other major work of writing of literature in Malaysia that I’m familiar with, the Malay Annals. And that also kind of falls into the same category as the Hikayat Hang Tuah. And the display about Munshi Abdullah is not very big. I was hoping it would be more elaborate, but you have all these displays of all these different writers. And there’s only one dedicated here to Munshi Abdullah. And there he is there. I’ve seen that that painting of him before. So I think that is more or less what he looked like. And the story that I was gleaning from his autobiography isn’t entirely mirrored here mirrored here. But there is some additional information. So it says at the very top Abdullah Munshi was a famous figure in the Renaissance of Malay literature. he was of Indian ancestry which is true. I think he had mixed parentage, but I I was I’m not really clear in my mind right now where his mother was from, where his father, grandmother, grandfather, that sort of thing. But he was born in Kampung Pali in Melaka 1796. But it does say here he did not speak Malay until the age of seven. And I wasn’t aware of that. I don’t know if that’s technically true or not. But then he went on to learn Arabic, Hindustani, English and then Malay as well. And he was given the honorific Munshi a language teacher when he taught Malay to Indian soldiers in the British army. And it points out in particular the Hikayat Abdullah from 1849 about how much that book has been studied not just as an autobiography but as a work of history showing the you know the development of of Malay culture and society over the years. And it does go on to talk a little bit about how he was criticized for his liberal and like reformist attitudes like going against the old guard to an extent and then he did come you know under some criticism for that in his lifetime. So there you have it the Munshi Abdullah display. But of course, if you came into this museum on your own, if you know nothing about any of these people, I think it would be very difficult to really understand any of what you’re looking at. The the historical cultural context is so specific that even when I read one of these accounts of who this person is and who this person is, what they wrote, it’s way above my pay grade. I can’t put it together. I can’t really put it in context and understand Malaysian literature, who these men were, what they wrote. The only one the only ones that I know anything about is Munshi Abdullah and then of course Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat. The the story as told over here. That’s as far as my knowledge goes.
I’m back out in the the bustling Red Square outside the museum. Yeah, that was interesting for me though if you’re a casual visitor and you want to learn about Munshi Abdullah. Yeah, you don’t really need to go to the museum. And there was one sign there giving a short summary of his life and who he is. So, you might as well read the Wikipedia entry. You’ll get just as much information. But I guess if you wanted a deeper dive into Malaysian literature as a whole, then going to the I mean your ticket if you go into the history and ethnography museum, you pay your 20 ringgit, you get the main museum, spend most of your time there, but you also have access to the literature museum, the Zheng He Museum, various other museums in there. So yeah, you can go check it out. And I was going to wind up my video with that, but then I remembered that his childhood home is marked on Google Maps. I don’t think it’s been turned into a museum. I don’t even think it’s the original building. It I think it’s the site where his childhood home sat and now there’s like a new building there. I don’t know, but on Google Maps it says Munshi Abdullah’s home with a pin. So, I’m going to walk there, check the place out, and at least that will drive home the fact that he is very much a resident of Melaka and a part of Melakan history. His childhood home is about half a kilometer, 500 m from the Stadthuys, so it’s not very far. Just walk down Jonker Street. Jonker Walk here and then turning right towards I believe what they call Harmony Street with all of the church the temples and mosques on it altogether and Munshi Abdullah’s house is right near there right off of Harmony Street. It feels rather fitting that his childhood home is right in this neighborhood. As you can see, I’m standing right beside Kampung Kling Mosque.
And I believe one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Hindu temple is just down the street there. And the oldest Chinese temple is up here, I think, Cheng Hoon Teng Temple. And according to Google Maps, Munshi Abdullah’s house is just right across the road down one of these little alleyways. And I remember seeing this street and being intrigued by it. It seemed to have some sort of historical significance. The buildings look like traditional Malay kampung houses. All right. Just right in here. So somewhere in there is supposed to be the childhood home.
And let’s see if there’s any kind of a sign or a plaque or a marker down there. So there’s the Chinese temple. I think Cheng Hoon is the name of it. There’s the mosque. And right here is a street sign Rumah Munshi Abdullah. So the Munshi Abdullah house is down here. And I think there’s a distinction on Google Maps between this road and this one. I think it’s down. It’s not really a road, but like an alleyway. I think it’s down here. Where is Ohh. Oh, look at that. It actually it’s it’s a gallery. I had no idea at all. Huh. I was reading that it was just a location. I I didn’t think there was anything there at all. Wow, what a great ending to my video. A discovery, another hidden gem, the gallery, Munshi Abdullah. And I’m sure you recognize his portrait from the museum.
Well, had I known, I would have saved some energy for this place. But I got to tell you, I’m really running out of energy right now. Outside of the museum, I ran into a guy, a European of some kind, and he had just taken the ferry from Dumai to Melaka. And we were chatting all about Indonesia and Java, Sumatra, Aceh, Melaka, talking about all the museums we’d visited. Had a really nice long conversation, so I used up all of my remaining energy talking with him. I don’t have anything left, but I’m going to go inside the gallery anyway. There’s the operating hours. 9 to 5 open daily except Monday 1 to 2 there’s a break so I’m lucky I got here before 5 free entrance
I just read through this summary here and it’s very well written the people who put this place together really knew what they were talking about so right out of the gate highly recommended. And I can see from here that there were a few things that I got wrong or left out. So for one thing, it does specify here he was Indian Muslim and Arab Yemeni descent. I can’t remember whether his mother was Indian. I think it was his father. Maybe his mother was Arab Yemeni. I’m not sure. Or the other way around. And I think I also said something about how he was teaching Malay to Raffles, but they don’t talk about that here. And I think this is the correct version that he learned English from Reverend William Milne. Again, I don’t know how to pronounce that to be honest. And he was teaching Malay to Reverend Milne and other Englishmen, Reverend Thompson, and then to soldiers. So I had the idea that he was teaching Stamford Raffles Malay and he may have done it informally. I don’t really know but I think formally these were the men he was teaching and he was just a he was working with Raffles as a clerk and a copyist things like that. Yeah, they have some really nice displays here talking about his actual significance. Really nice job. So here they mention that he was a pioneer of progressive and critical Malay literature. So he was recognized for his progressive views compared to other writers of his era. And he had bold critiques of Malay society and culture. aiming to awaken the community to the need for reforms. Yeah. In like social, economic, political and cultural dimensions. and talking about the strengthening of Islamic and Malay identity, a reformist as far as the Malay monarchical system was concerned, the rulers, pioneer of modern Malay language and literature, the style of writing that he introduced. Yeah, very simple prose, kind of a touch of realism and a touch of journalism in his writing. And this I I haven’t gotten to this part of his life yet. Apparently, he highlighted the dangers of opium use, opium usage, and maybe that comes up later in his biography. But this is a really nice display. It really conveys his significance in the literary world of Malaysia. It’s a lot better than just that one brief poster at the literature museum and examples of his books over there, the various books that he wrote that he wrote.
And a typewriter. I was just thinking about typewriters and whether he learned how to use one or not. This definitely looks like a unique model. It has a regular row of keys and then a special set here down at the bottom, but I don’t know what that means, what it’s for. It’s also very cool that this memorial is in I guess this is the actual house that he grew up in, but I’m not 100% sure about that. But it’d be very similar, I guess. Very steep staircase going upstairs.
When I was reading his autobiography, I was certainly picturing a larger house. Like I cannot imagine an entire family living in this small space. Like where would his bedroom have been, his parents’ bedroom, things like that? The kitchen, living area.
It’s quite something to be here and imagine that this is where his parents lived their lives and that fateful day when his father was praising Abdullah to his mother about what a good job he did writing that bond for the sea captain. It could have been taking place in this room with the door closed and Abdullah was on the other side of that door. His ear pressed to the gap and he heard his father praising his abilities for the first time. And here are some words of advice and wisdom from Munshi Abdullah.
Well, what a pleasant surprise. I had no idea I could end my video with a visit to the site of his actual childhood home. So, I was talking to the young man at the front and he said like this is where he was born and grew up and lived, but the original house, you know, where he had his childhood was located here, but it was torn down and this one was built as a replacement. but he also lived in this house as well when he was older, you know, when he was a grown man. So, it really is the home of my new hero, Munshi Abdullah. And I was thinking the perfect way to end this video is with a quote from the man himself. I took a picture of his famous quotations on the wall and he wrote, “When you earn money, buy gold. Sell the gold to purchase diamonds. Sell the diamonds to acquire gemstones. Sell the gemstones to purchase knowledge. Such is the greatness and eternal loyalty of knowledge to its possessor.” So I think that sums up the philosophy of the man in a very succinct way.
Walking away. I think I have just enough energy left in these bones to get me back to my hotel, a nice cold shower, and to lie down. But yeah, as always, shout out to the Crunch Club. You know who you are. Shout out to everybody supporting Planet Doug Video Productions, whether through Malaysia’s Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, all of the members of the Planet Doug Patreon, you guys are special. Thank you very much. And of course all the members of the coffee posse supporting me through the buy me a coffee platform. Shout out to all of you guys. Links to the Planet Doug PayPal account in the video description. Well, hope you enjoyed that as much as I did and I’ll see you in the next video.