The Hidden Engineering System That Transformed Johor’s Coast
SUMMARY:
- Those countless canals along Johor’s coastline are anything but ordinary rivers. Known as parit, they were dug by hand to drain vast expanses of waterlogged peat forest and turn previously unsuitable land into productive agricultural plantations.
- The system was part of Johor’s ambitious modernization in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Sultan Abu Bakar and his predecessor encouraged settlers to reclaim land in exchange for ownership, creating an agricultural economy that could generate revenue for the state.
- Much of the backbreaking work was done by Javanese migrants. They brought the skills needed to drain the swamps, established plantations, and laid the foundations for communities whose descendants still trace their roots to Java.
- An ordinary bike ride became a journey through history. From ingenious tide-operated water gates to fishing harbors, mangrove conservation, and Johor’s political independence, following the clues on Google Maps revealed a story hiding in plain sight.
Following a Curious Pattern Along Johor’s Coast
Sometimes the most interesting discoveries begin with something you almost overlook.
After cycling from Melaka to Muar, I settled into a homestay and began planning my next journey south along the coast of Johor. I was looking at small towns, fishing jetties, and the network of minor roads that run parallel to the Melaka Strait when I started noticing something unusual.
The word parit appeared everywhere. Parit Jawa, Parit Amat, Parit Amal, Parit Bakar. At the same time, Google Maps revealed a remarkably regular pattern of straight lines running inland from the coast, spaced at almost predictable intervals.
There was also a striking boundary between the thick strip of coastal mangrove and the agricultural land beyond it.
These weren’t random features of the landscape. The more I looked, the more it seemed that they were connected.
I began researching the history behind these canals, and one question led to another. Before long, what had started as an interest in fishing villages had turned into an investigation of Johor’s history, its agricultural development, the migration of Javanese settlers, and the engineering that transformed an entire coastal region.
The best part was that I hadn’t yet gone out to see any of it properly. I had all this information in my head, but I still needed to understand what it looked like on the ground.
So I set off from Muar on a day trip to investigate.
What Exactly Is a Parit?
The first important discovery was that parit means a ditch or canal. Those countless straight waterways crossing Johor’s coastal landscape weren’t simply natural streams. Many were part of an extensive, human-made drainage system developed more than a century ago.
To understand why anyone would undertake such an enormous project, you first have to understand the original landscape.
Along the coast was a band of mangrove forest, followed inland by extensive peat swamp forest. Mangroves thrive in salty coastal conditions and help protect the shoreline from erosion. Beyond them, the peat forest was a waterlogged environment where accumulated plant material formed deep, acidic, spongy ground.
Neither environment was particularly suitable for conventional plantation agriculture.
The challenge was to drain the waterlogged land without allowing seawater to flood it again.
The solution involved three essential components:
- Parit: Artificial canals dug through the coastal mangrove to carry water from inland areas out toward the Melaka Strait.
- Bund: Raised earthen embankments, or dykes, that contained the water and prevented the surrounding land from simply flooding back into the drainage system.
- Pintu air: Water gates that controlled the flow, allowing water to escape while restricting the entry of seawater.
Once I understood how these three elements worked together, the landscape began to make much more sense. The regular lines on the map weren’t just a curiosity. They were the visible remains of a vast engineering project.
An Ingenious System Driven by the Tides
One of the most fascinating parts of this story was the original design of the pintu air.
The older gates were ingeniously simple. A heavy wooden gate was installed at the outlet of a canal, where the changing tides could operate it without requiring a motor or an external power source.
As the tide rose in the Melaka Strait, seawater pressed against the gate and forced it shut. This prevented saltwater from flowing inland into the agricultural areas. Meanwhile, water accumulated on the landward side of the embankment.
When the tide fell, the pressure on the gate decreased, allowing the water to flow outward again.
Repeated throughout the day, this process helped flush water from the peat swamp and drain the land behind the bunds.
It was a practical solution to a difficult environmental problem, relying on the natural movement of the tides to do much of the work.
The gate I found at Parit Amat had since been replaced by more modern equipment, complete with mechanisms for controlling water levels. I couldn’t explain exactly how the newer system operated, but the underlying purpose remained the same.
Standing beside the canal, it was difficult to appreciate the full scale of the operation. The system only really came into focus when I returned to Google Maps satellite view.
There, I could trace one canal for approximately 6.6 kilometres inland. Then I found another, and another, running in the same general direction.
I also measured the distances between neighboring canals. They appeared at remarkably regular intervals, often around three-quarters of a kilometer apart.
Suddenly, the entire coastline looked less like a natural landscape and more like an enormous piece of planned infrastructure.
The Land Grants That Changed Johor
The canals weren’t dug simply because someone thought drainage would be useful. They were part of a much larger economic and political project.
During the late nineteenth century, Johor was pursuing an ambitious program of modernization under its rulers, particularly Sultan Abu Bakar and his predecessor, the Temenggong.
One of the strategies associated with this development was a land-grant system. Settlers willing to clear and drain the difficult coastal terrain could eventually receive ownership of the land they made suitable for agriculture.
The arrangement created an incentive for people to undertake work that would otherwise have been extraordinarily difficult to justify. They invested their labor in clearing the forest, digging canals, building embankments, and preparing the ground. In return, they could establish plantations and gain a permanent stake in the land.
The state benefited, too. Productive plantations meant commercial activity and a source of tax revenue to support Johor’s development.
Crops such as gambier were particularly important. Gambier extracts were used in tanning leather, among other applications, and demand for tanning materials was connected to the expanding industrial economy overseas.
As opportunities grew, so did the incentive to bring more land into production.
The regular arrangement of the canals reflected this system. Land could be divided into sections associated with individual drainage projects, with settlers receiving plots on either side of the canals they helped establish.
What I had initially mistaken for a curious geographical pattern was, in effect, a record of how land was organized, developed, and allocated.
The Javanese Pioneers Who Did the Hard Work
Understanding the engineering raised another question: who was willing to do it?
It is one thing to look at a canal from the comfort of a bicycle path. It is quite another to imagine digging it by hand through dense mangrove and waterlogged peat forest.
There were no convenient roads through the landscape I was exploring. The workers would have faced thick vegetation, deep mud, standing water, and punishing physical labor. They had to clear the vegetation, excavate the canals, and build the embankments before they could even begin developing the land for crops.
According to the historical accounts I consulted, many of these pioneers came from Java.
Conditions under Dutch colonial rule, including land scarcity and heavy taxation, encouraged some Javanese men to seek opportunities elsewhere. Johor’s promise of land ownership offered a compelling alternative: undertake the difficult work of reclaiming land, and the reward could be a farm of their own.
The expeditions were often organized around a leader who assembled a group of workers, arranged transport, and supplied the tools and provisions they needed to get started. The leader could receive a larger or more desirable portion of the land, while other members of the group worked toward securing their own holdings.
These weren’t people arriving in a developed agricultural district with ready-made farms waiting for them. They were helping create the conditions that would make those farms possible.
Over time, as the land became productive and settlements grew, families joined the pioneers. Communities developed along the coast, and many local families continue to trace their ancestry to Java.
Even the names of the canals preserve something of this history. Names such as Parit Amal and Parit Amat reflect the personal connections associated with the canal system, while Parit Jawa points toward the wider Javanese story.
The landscape is not just a monument to engineering. It also tells a story of migration, ambition, hardship, and the formation of communities.
Johor’s Independence and Its Modernization
Another historical thread led me to a broader question: why was Johor able to pursue such an ambitious development program on its own terms?
The answer, at least in part, lies in its political position during the British colonial period.
Melaka, which I had recently left, was a British-administered Straits Settlement. Johor, by contrast, was an unfederated Malay state, retaining considerably more internal autonomy than territories under direct British administration.
Sultan Abu Bakar pursued administrative and political reforms that helped strengthen Johor’s position. The state adopted a written constitution in 1895, establishing a constitutional monarchy, and its rulers worked to modernize government while maintaining a degree of independence from British interference.
The agricultural land-grant system fitted into this wider strategy. Developing the coast meant expanding the state’s productive economy and creating revenue without simply surrendering control to outside powers.
I found this especially interesting because the story of the canals wasn’t just about farming. It connected environmental engineering to economic policy, migration, taxation, and the survival of Johor’s political independence.
One small canal could lead to an unexpectedly large historical story.
When Drainage Canals Become Fishing Harbors
Of course, the canals didn’t stop being useful once the land had been drained.
As I cycled farther along the coast, I began finding places where the waterways had developed into busy fishing harbors. Some were little more than narrow channels bordered by mangroves. Others had wider, deeper waterways, docks, fishing boats, and small buildings serving the local fishing industry.
The original purpose of the canals had been drainage, but once they existed, they also provided convenient access to the Melaka Strait.
Local communities could moor their boats along the channels and use them to reach the fishing grounds offshore. A system created to make agriculture possible had acquired another role in the coastal economy.
I stopped at one of the fishing areas for an iced coffee, watching the activity around the boats and the people moving between the waterfront and the surrounding vegetation.
These places offered a very different perspective on the same infrastructure. The canals weren’t merely relics of a nineteenth-century land-development scheme. They remained part of everyday life, serving farmers, fishers, and the towns that had grown around them.
And along the way, there were macaques, monitor lizards, and mudskippers darting across the mud and water. The landscape was still full of life, even where human engineering had profoundly changed it.
The Environmental Cost of Changing the Coast
The story also has a less straightforward side.
Mangrove forests are valuable ecosystems. They help protect shorelines from erosion and provide habitat for wildlife and organisms that support coastal fisheries.
As agricultural development expanded, some plantations encroached farther toward the sea, removing more of the mangrove forest. In places where the protective vegetation disappeared, the consequences included increased coastal erosion and damage to the ecosystems supporting local fisheries.
The realization that the mangroves were not simply unused land changed the way people viewed them.
In more recent decades, mangrove restoration has become an important part of coastal conservation efforts. Replanting helps rebuild the natural barrier along the shore and restore habitat that supports the wider coastal environment.
This creates an interesting contrast. More than a century ago, engineering was used to open up the coastal landscape for agriculture. Today, conservation efforts recognize that the natural landscape also performs essential functions that human infrastructure cannot entirely replace.
The challenge is not simply to choose between development and nature. It’s to understand how both shape the long-term health of the coast.
A Landscape That Only Makes Sense When You Look Closer
As I made my way back toward Muar, I continued crossing canal after canal. Inside the city, many of them had been lined with concrete and incorporated into the developed urban landscape. They looked so ordinary that it would be easy to forget their origins.
But the more I thought about the system, the more significant it seemed.
The land around Muar is naturally wet. Much of it would be prone to flooding without drainage. These canals continue to move water through the landscape, supporting agriculture, settlements, and the wider local economy.
The next time you drive along the coast of Johor and cross bridge after bridge over what looks like another ordinary river, it’s worth asking whether you’re looking at a natural waterway or something people built.
The answer might completely change how you see the countryside.
For me, this was the pleasure of following a historical thread. I started with a place name on Google Maps and a pattern of lines I couldn’t explain. That led me to a drainage system, then to a land-grant policy, then to the Javanese settlers who reclaimed the land, and finally to questions about Johor’s independence and the environmental consequences of development.
One discovery kept opening the door to another.
And all of it was waiting just a short bicycle ride from my homestay.
Notable Quotes & Insights
“It is one of those historical threads that when you pull on it, you realize it’s not a single thread at all. It’s actually just one strand of a web.”
That captures the spirit of this investigation: the most rewarding discoveries often happen when a seemingly small question leads into a much larger network of connected stories.
“What I had initially mistaken for a curious geographical pattern was, in effect, a record of how land was organized, developed, and allocated.”
The straight lines on a map became evidence of human decisions, engineering, and migration. Sometimes, understanding a landscape means learning to recognize the history hidden inside its ordinary features.
Until Next Time
This was one of those days when I set out on my bicycle with a head full of research and came back with a completely different understanding of the place I’d been exploring.
I didn’t need to travel hundreds of miles to find an interesting story. I just needed to look more closely at the landscape around me.
And after a day spent thinking about the men who dug these canals by hand more than a century ago, I couldn’t help appreciating the little conveniences of modern life a bit more. My own expedition ended with a stop at 7-Eleven for ice, milk, and cold drinks. Those early pioneers, after a hard day’s work in the swamp, had rather more basic comforts to look forward to.
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I am currently located right here where you see that Google Maps pin. That is the homestay Muar Longstay. And of course that is in the town of Muar which you can see up here where my mouse cursor is pointing. So this is where I am right now. And I got here along the coast of Malaysia by bicycle. To the north you can see the city of Melaka. And a few days ago I set off from Melaka by bicycle. And then I cycled along the coast trying to stick as closely to the coastline as I can going down the smaller streets rather than down the highway. And I cycled from Melaka down to Muar. And an interesting thing about this 2-day journey, it was only 2 days on the bicycle, is this river and this line right here. Do you see that dotted line? That is the border between Melaka and Johor. You can see the names up here. On one side, it’s Melaka and on the other is Johor. So I crossed into Johor and I rode into the city of Muar. Found myself a home for a few nights and then I started planning my route by bicycle farther down the coast. I was looking at these little towns, anything interesting along the way and I started to pick up on something really fascinating. It all started when I zoomed in on this town right here, Parit Jawa. Let me get rid of my homestay there and let me turn on Google Maps satellite view because I’ve recently gotten fascinated by the jetties of the west coast of Malaysia. So, if you zoom in on Parit Jawa, you’ll see that there is an amazing jetty down here filled with fishing boats. So, I instantly focused on this town like I’m going to go there next and I’m going to spend some time getting to know this very interesting town of Parit Jawa. So, I noticed that and I noticed the name in particular, Parit. Parit Jawa. And then I noticed up here there’s the word again parit down here parit over there it is again parit kandong over and over again this word parit kept appearing and I noticed a almost gridlike pattern of lines going from the interior to the coast. Finally, I noticed a distinct line between the coastal mangrove along the coast and then the plantations and agriculture inland. Let me zoom in somewhere where I can show this very clearly. Here is a very good spot to show you what fascinated me so much. And this leads into the story that I want to tell today. The history that I want to investigate. So right here on the coast, this is mangrove, mangrove forest. And then you get to this road and suddenly on the other side you see plantation. These are probably palm oil or could be coconut palm. I’m not sure. But here we’ve got mangrove. Here we’ve got agriculture. And on either side of this chunk of mangrove, Parit Parit Raja Parit Amal Parit Rabi. So what is going on here? What is this? Is it natural or man-made these parit? And why is there such a strong dividing line right here? Again, you can see it between mangrove and agriculture. Over here, mangrove and agriculture. Do you see this thick line of mangrove all down the coast with human settlement and agriculture on the other side? And all along there is a parit, there’s another parit, another one, another one all down the coast. And I thought, okay, there is something here worth investigating. And I started pulling on that historical thread. And I found an amazing story about the history of Johor, the history of the mangrove coastal district, the agriculture, and in particular this tantalizing word parit. What does it mean and where did it come from? So now I’m going to hop on my bicycle and I’m going to head down the coast here heading out of Muar and I’m going to try to investigate this piece of Johor history.
Just cycling away from my homestay here in Muar at that spot that I pointed out on the map. Yeah. So, what I want to do now is actually go out into the countryside. I haven’t been there at all. Like all this stuff that I’ve been talking about, I haven’t seen any of it for myself. Like, I may have seen it since, you know, riding when I rode across the border from Melaka into Johor. You know, I probably saw some of those things that I mentioned, but I didn’t know what I was looking at. So, this is the first time that I’ll be seeing any of these things. And I want to take you with me. I’ve been doing all kinds of investigation and research online and I’ve got a ton of information packed into my brain because I find this topic to be so fascinating. It is one of those historical threads that when you pull on it, you realize it’s not a single thread at all. It’s actually just one strand of a web. And then if you follow that web strand to the rest of the web, it just leads in so many other directions. So many interesting ideas, topics, places, people. It’s really quite something. I don’t want to talk about it here while I’m just cycling. I want to get to one of these places and be standing there and show things to you and see them for myself as I talk about them. And I’m hoping I can find a couple of spots right here inside Muar itself.
You don’t have to go very far to find things related to that mysterious word parit. I can tell you right now, I guess that parit basically means canal and that gives you a clue as to what is going on. That all of that coastline that I was looking at, the wide strip of mangrove and then a border between the mangrove and the agricultural and urban districts, the canal that is all part of a extensive engineering project going back 100 years something like that. And to tell this story completely, you’d need a lot of dates. You need a lot of names. I may not have all of that at my fingertips. So, I’ll probably be talking in more broad terms. My original idea was to leave Muar permanently, like to pack up all of my bags, load up my bike, and then start riding south along the coast and then talk about it as I rode along. But I thought I had to go way out into the countryside to do this little investigation. But then I realized there’s evidence of it very, very near to the city. So, I changed my mind and I decided to just go out on a day trip, which is what I’m doing right now. In fact, I’m heading towards the Melaka Strait, heading to the shore on a street that’s right beside my hotel. So, I’m still right in the heart of Muar, just heading down towards the Melaka Strait, and I’m cycling. Very exciting. I am cycling right alongside my very first parit. There it is on my left. So, there’s some specific vocabulary about this whole history that I’ll bring up over time and I’m hoping I can bring the story out in a logical way that kind of makes sense. But there’s a lot going on like I said. So yeah, we’ll see how it goes.
Hello.
There is one of the parit behind me. This may not be the perfect location to develop these ideas and this history, but it’s the first one that I came across. So, let’s start here and then I can fill in the blanks later on. So, the key to this whole idea is that we’ve got the mangrove, the original mangrove forest all along the coastline. And what I’ve learned recently, I didn’t I wasn’t aware of this, is that the mangrove actually serves a very important purpose. It’s like a coat of armor for the land that if you get the ocean swells, beating against a coast. Of course, it erodes the shoreline. And this mangrove acts like a suit of armor protecting the land from the ocean swells and erosion. So, the mangrove performs a very important task that way. And then you’ve got the mangrove. Of course, it’s a very unique ecosystem where these trees can thrive in salt water. I guess that’s the whole key thing about a mangrove. But of course, once you go inland now, you’ve got agricultural land. And if you’re planting crops, well, yeah, crops don’t grow in salt water. So you’ve got the ocean out there, salt water, you’ve got the mangrove, and here in Johor all along the coast was a massive peat forest, a peat bog essentially. And that confused me for a long time when I came across those words because as soon as I heard peat and bog, I was picturing, you know, like peat bogs in Scotland that I’ve seen in movies. The moors kind of thing and I thought oh that’s what it looked like but no here it was more like a peat forest. So you’ve got originally you had layers. You’ve got the Melaka Strait, the seawater, the mangrove, you know, 100-20 m thick, this suit of mangrove armor around the coastline. Then that gradually transitioned into a peat forest and this area was acidic. It was not suitable for growing crops. It was very, very wet. It’s essentially a flooded forest and then all like over you know millennia over tens of thousands of years you know the the jungle trees or branches leaves breaking off falling into the water and because of the nature of the acidic area it wasn’t quickly degrading it would basically pile up and you get peat basically this soft spongy area flooded with water and that’s basically the situation. So right here even inside the city of Muar I’m on the edge you can see my bicycle over there and that is the parit running in this direction and you can see I’m right at the edge of the mangrove and you basically got this thick ring of mangrove going all the way around Muar and then it gradually transitions into more of a peat forest off in this direction and then somewhere in the 1800s like the late 1800s under Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor and his predecessor the Temenggong I believe he started the process and Abu Bakar continued it. They were modernizing Johor in many different ways. And they came up with this idea to offer land grants to people who would come here to this peat forest, this peat swamp, drain the land and convert it into rich fertile agricultural land. And the key to doing that was these parit and this raised land that you see this muddy raised that is like a dyke essentially. They call it like a bund right. So you’ve got the bund you’ve got the parit these were all dug by hand. So these were long straight canals all dug by manual labor. But the key to this whole operation is what we’re looking at right here. This one I don’t think is I don’t think it’s operational anymore. But this would have been what you call a pintu air or water gate, water door, something like that. And the idea is that the workers would dig a canal through the mangrove. So everything you see in front of me here, this canal is completely artificial. Originally this would have been thick mangrove all the way to the Melaka Strait. So what they did was clear out the mangrove. They had to cut down all the mangrove trees and then dig by hand a canal in a straight line from the Melaka Strait going inland. And then once they had the canal dug, they put in place a series of gates that were automatic driven by the tides. So it’s essentially like a valve that was run by the tide. So they built like an artificial like narrow channel in the canal and then they put in place at the end of the culvert a heavy piece of wood, a gate essentially. And then when the tide would rise out in the Melaka Strait at high tide, the seawater would flow inland and then it would reach one of these pintu air and it would press against the gate. So it’s essentially this piece of wood would be swinging loosely kind of on a hinge, but the rising tide would slam it shut like slamming a door. And then with the tide water pressing against the door, it would create a seal. Meanwhile, you’ve got all the water coming out of the peat forest flowing in this direction. But now all of this water has got nowhere to go because the high tide has closed the valve. It shut the gate. So back here, all of this like fresh water, but like acidic water coming out of the peat forest was building up and building up and rising and rising. And then along comes low tide. And at low tide, of course, the water level over here drops. The pressure against the door decreases and it essentially opens the valve and then all of this water which had been building up which is why you have the bund to keep it all inside. Suddenly that water floods out. And this happens all day, every day, 365 days of the year, driven entirely by the tides, where the tide comes in, shuts the valve. Over here, all the water starts to build up, the tide goes out, the the gate, the valve opens, and then all of this water floods out again. And this constant rising and flooding was forcing out sort of the acidic water is basically flushing the peat forest and draining the water and making it suitable for agriculture. So does that make sense? I hope it does. You’ve essentially got three pieces to this massive engineering project that went on all up and down the coast of Johor. You’ve got these artificial canals that were dug through the mangrove. They are called parit and then you have the bund the dikes essentially because without the dyke the pintu air it wouldn’t work because if the tide is coming in and it closes the gate it doesn’t matter the water would just flow around it and and continue in that direction but they built up these bund like a dyke system all along the coast to contain the water so that the pintu air can do its job. So parit bund pintu air the three pieces and this old style pintu air that I’ve been talking about just basically just a piece of wood that slams shut with the rising tide in modern times I think that’s been largely replaced by automated sluice gates. I have no idea how they work, you know, monitoring the tides, monitoring the water levels, but it’s all it’s all more automated now. And there’s a big, I assume, government department in Johor that monitors probably hundreds of these pintu air all up and down the Johor coast. So with that knowledge alone, you know, looking at the coast, looking at all of the canals that you pass over, looking at the mangrove, it it makes a lot more sense and and is a lot more interesting. So let’s cycle on to another location. I’ve ridden about six kilometers outside of Muar and I think I’ve reached the Parit Amat. I think it’s called Amat. I picked this one out on Google Maps because it’s out in the countryside. That’s it there. And it had a very interesting intersection with the Melaka Strait that might illustrate some key points about this whole canal system. So yeah, I think I turned down this road.
Ah, there’s a nice paved laneway going right beside the canal here. And on the way here, the last six kilometers from Muar, I must have gone over 20 different canals. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. I think most people who go traveling around Malaysia, if they go up and down Johor, go over all of these canals, they probably don’t think anything about them at all. It’s like, “Oh, there’s another river, another river, another river, a stream, a river.” And unless you notice on Google Maps how many of them are and that they’re all in a straight line and they’re all nicely spaced. You know, unless you notice that, you probably wouldn’t start investigating. But once you do, you uncover this fascinating history that I’ve been talking about. And when I passed by those 20 plus canals, the parit yeah, the fact that they were so evenly spaced that is connected with the land grant, the land claim system that yeah, I’ll be talking about in a minute. Big troop of macaques up ahead. Well, big I count six of them. Maybe seven.
Sorry guys, I didn’t mean to chase you away from whatever you’re doing here.
I’m glad they’re running away and not getting together in a group to attack me because if they knew what they could do as a group, yeah, they wouldn’t be so quick to run away. I would be prey to them. They could overpower me pretty easily. It’s fascinating. And they all jumped to the shore like all the thick brush at the edge of the canal. The parit. Oh, this is so exciting. Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted to show. And this is as far as I planned on going today. Anyway, this is this was going to be my turnaround point. I was going to work my way to here,
you know, stopping at all kinds of places and then here I was going to turn around and go back. But I thought, well, why don’t I just go straight to my turn around point and then I can start here and maybe I can tell my whole story right here and then from here I can start working my way back to Muar. But right here, this is perfect. This is a perfect spot. Right here at this point, I think it would be useful to switch over to Google Maps satellite view. So, that’s what I’m going to do. Turn on my screen recorder on my laptop and show you exactly where I’m standing and what makes this spot so interesting in terms of the parit system here in Johor. Here is my location on Google Maps satellite view right where you see this red pin. That’s exactly where I’m standing. The pintu air Parit Amat. So it is a parit a canal Amat Parit Amat and the pintu air is that gate that I that I was just showing you. And here of course is the city of Muar my homestay. You can see the blue dot because I’m actually recording this at my homestay. So the blue dot is me right there. And then I essentially rode my bicycle through Muar through this area and then I went all the way down to here. And I’m going to be working my way back. So I’m going to be cycling along trying to stay as close to the coast as I can and checking out all of these lines. Like those are the lines that started this whole investigation. It was the combination of seeing the word parit over and over like here Parit Bakar Parit Amal Parit Amat Parit Unas Parit Pong. You see that word everywhere. And then I noticed all of these lines and it turned out that every one of these lines was a parit a canal that was dug by hand along the coast cutting directly through the mangrove. And when it came to this video, I was trying to figure out how to show all of this, how to explain it without it getting too confusing. And then when I zoomed in on this particular spot, it seemed like an ideal place to illustrate what I’ve been trying to talk about. And from ground level, it’s still pretty confusing. I think you don’t quite get it. But when you zoom out to here at Google Maps satellite view, then the light bulb really goes off and it’s like, ah, now I get it. To show this better, let’s get rid of all of the labels first. Turn off the labels. And now we get a nice clean image. And we can zoom in on exactly where I’m standing. Google satellite view is the most amazing thing ever. So, right here is the the road that I traveled in on, and this is also the dyke. So this was all built by hand. The bund as a barrier for the water for the seawater. And this of course is the parit and another parit and another one going in this direction. All of these are the parit the canals that were all dug by hand. And then if you zoom in there is the pintu air that is controlling the water flow. So if we zoom back out, you can really see the dividing line that I was talking about. All of this along the coast, that’s mangrove. So that is natural wild mangrove forest. And then as you come in from the Melaka Strait, you go through the mangrove and boom, right here you hit the bund. So this line, the white line is the road going on top of the dyke. So this is a barrier. The seawater flows through the mangrove swamp and then it hits the dyke right here. And now on the other side of the dyke, you see the parit and this is draining all the water out of this peat forest. So the water is being drained from these plantations into this parit and it flows in this direction and then depending on whether the gate is open or closed all the water is being drained out of that area through this gate into this parit and then the water flows down into the Melaka Strait and when the tide comes up the water flows in the other direction seawater. Salt water is flowing upwards as the tide increases and then this gate can be closed because the water level goes up here and then if you don’t do anything about it, the water is going to flow backwards and all the seawater is going to flow into this plantation area which they don’t want. So if the tide comes up and the water is going to flood the plantation, they can close the gate and the seawater doesn’t flow in and the water level rises on this parit, but it also can’t flow into that area because it runs into this raised dyke. And zooming out once again to this level, you can see again that clear dividing line, wild mangrove right here on the coast. Then you’ve got the bund and the parit. And right here, all of the reclaimed land essentially all of this would have been mangrove and peat forest, flooded land that was no good for agriculture. But because these canals drained all the water out of this area, it has now been turned into a plantation. And you can zoom in and see all of the plantation trees. So that’s why I came out to this spot because it shows so well mangrove on one side, the canal, and then agriculture and human settlement on the other side. And all of this was made possible by the hand digging of all of these canals. And yeah, Google satellite view is amazing too. Like I can zoom in. You can see the parit that was all dug by hand. And we can see exactly how far it goes inland because its influence extends far beyond this point. You might think that all of this was done just for this little square of agriculture right here, but that is far from the truth. It extends far more inland than you would think. So let’s zoom in and we can see the parit here. All of this a hand-dug ditch, a hand-dug canal. And then you can follow it. Let’s just keep clicking and clicking. It disappears a little bit here from view, but you keep going. Here’s a bridge going over it and it reappears here and we can just follow it and follow it and follow it. There it is. You can still see the water in the in the parit. And when you get to these plantations, they have openings. So the water is flowing from the inside of the plantation into the parit from both sides and then the water is flowing down into the Melaka Strait. So it is essentially a giant drainage canal and it goes underneath the road here, pops out on the other side and it just continues. Can you imagine the amount of work that went into digging this canal by hand back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So seeing this completely transformed how I was viewing the landscape of Johor. Here it goes. It’s continuing. Still going. Still going. Still going. We can just see it here going underneath this road.
Getting smaller, getting a little bit narrower perhaps, but still going.
And here I think it kind of disappears and it’s hard to tell what happens to it after this point but it feels like this might be the end of the parit or perhaps it picks up again over here. It’s not sure I’m not it’s not completely clear but it looks like we could say this is roughly the end of the parit. So what what we can do with Google Maps, this is really fascinating. I’m going to drop a measurement pin right here. Measure distance. And now so that’s the point we traced the parit all the way to this point. And you can see there’s another one over here, another one over here. All kind of converging. And now let’s zoom out again. You can see the parit came from here all the way down to the coast. And let’s drop a pin over here and see just how long it is. Check that out. Almost 7 km 6.6 km long hand-dug canal all the way to this point. And every line that you see beside it is another one. So here is another parit another one another one another one each one extending six 7 kilometers inland to this point. So all of this land all of this rich fertile agricultural land that you see all along the shore of Johor. All of this was created by this parit system. Just endless canals being dug between the Melaka Strait, the mangrove, and then extending 7 kilometers inland. Something else we can do while we’re here in a Google satellite view is get another sense of how all of this is an artificial hydraulic engineering project. Because we can measure how far it goes inland but we can also measure the distance from parit to parit to parit. So if we start here at Parit Amat drop a distance marker right here and let’s go to the next one. I believe this is Parit Bakar. I haven’t reached there in the video yet, but we can drop a pin there. And it’s about 3/4 of a kilometer, 750 m. And we can extend it to the next canal. And now we’re at 1 1/2 km. Go to the next one. 2.25 km. To the next one 3 kilometers. So you get the sense that these are regular distances that were measured. So when the land land grant system was developed telling people come to the shore of Johor dig these canals develop the land and then we will give you land ownership. They divided up the land into these sections and then when people dug the canals, they were granted land on either side of the canal that they dug. So the whole grid was developed in advance that the land was divided up so that it could be divided up between all the work groups, all the teams, all the people who dug the canals and reclaimed all of this land for agriculture.
So, let’s zoom all the way back down to remind you that when we leave Google satellite view and you’ll see me where I’m standing. In fact, I’m standing down here for some crazy reason. I walked out into the mud. So, I went out into the mud and then I was talking from down here. So, let’s go back to poor Doug out here on his bicycle in the hot hazy hot hazy day talking about the parit system of Johor. Now that you’ve seen what it looks like from the air, you can probably understand this quite a bit better. So, here I’m looking in the direction of the Melaka Strait. So this is the original parit that was dug by hand and I cannot emphasize enough how tough that would have been. Can you imagine this was all a mixture of mangrove and peat forest swamp. They had to cut through all of this undergrowth, cut down whatever trees were here, mangrove trees, whatever other trees there were. And then dig out this canal by hand all the way from the Melaka Strait all the way up here and then the Yeah, I’m walking in the mud here for some reason. I didn’t need to come all the way down here, but that’s what I do. And then the canal continues off in that direction. Not only did they dig the canals, they had to dig they had to create an entire system of dikes or earthen bund. And these bund Oh, look at that big mud skipper. They are so cool when they’re like swimming on the water as well. You can see just exactly how they adapt from water to land. See, there he goes. Yeah, he’s just like he can skip along the land and on the water. Anyway, we’re not here to look at mud skippers. So, the bund goes along the side of the canal of the parit as you can see here. So, they had to dig the canal and then build up this dyke essentially all along but not and these follow like they’re perpendicular to the Melaka Strait. So they built a bund there. But that’s not all. Look at that. This bund, the dyke, goes all the way parallel to the coast. So you think of countries like the Netherlands having a major dyke system to keep out the sea. I didn’t know, but Malaysia has a similar system down here in Johor. So they have this massive dyke system. These bund going all the way up and down the coast of Johor so that this brackish salt water from the Melaka Strait hits the dyke and then doesn’t carry over to the other side and then they have these artificial canals that they’ve dug and they are flowing water out of that land through this the pintu air and of course this is a more modern one unfortunately. I was hoping it would be an old-fashioned one that would have a an automatic gate system where on this side there would be a an opening like a culvert over here and then it would have a piece of wood that swings shut like a door when the tide water comes up. That’s what would have been here originally, but they’ve replaced it with a more automated system. I don’t know how it works to be honest. I don’t know how they time it, but you can see there is a manual gate right here. So, somebody somewhere is monitoring the water depth. You can see over there. And then there’s a drain on this side. I heard the drain operating. You can see there’s a bit some water swirling around there. So, water is flowing through some sort of a mechanism there. And then they can control what’s going on with this gate here. So, they can raise and lower it with this. And I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s the the gate down there controlling the flow of water based on the tides. I hope that made a little bit of sense without me repeating myself too many times. Yeah, it just seems like such an incredible idea. I just sort of keep hammering away at it. So that’s kind of the how and the why of it. Why? Because the sultan of Johor Abu Bakar and I believe his father the previous ruler he wasn’t technically his title wasn’t sultan I don’t think it was Temenggong but basically the leader of Johor they wanted to modernize Johor and that’s quite an interesting thread to pull on as well because Johor was one of the most fiercely independent of the Malay kingdoms, of the Malay sultanates, and they maintained a strong independence from the British all the way up until the end. And one of the reasons they managed to do that is because the Sultan was so active in modernizing Johor. From what I read, Abu Bakar, he was very westernized and he traveled to Europe. I think he was the first Malay sultan to travel to Europe. Don’t quote me on that. Look it up in case you want to fact check me, but I think I read that he was friends with Queen Victoria, I believe. And he made so many solid he was very he was an excellent diplomat and made relationships with the British maintaining the independence of Johor. And again, according to what I read, the British would often start encroaching on the the Malay states, claiming that they were being poorly run, that they were they didn’t have modern government systems and things. So, they would force their way in and basically take over. And then here in Johor Abu Bakar and the man before him decided to get ahead of that and says no we are going to follow some we’re going to adopt these western models for government and administration. We’re going to modernize Johor and that will keep the British out and we can maintain our independence and they were successful at that. And part of that program was all of this giant engineer hydraulic engineering program all up and down the coast where they took all this land basically sitting useless and turned it into highly productive, highly fertile land for cash crops. Originally I think gambier was a very very popular crop and then they moved into all kinds of other ones. I think coffee I read coconut oil palm on and on and on but gambier was a particularly interesting one. Gambier is one of these crops that I have to keep looking up on the internet. I always forget what it is and then I come across it again relating to Malaysia or Indonesia and then I have to look it up again. Oh yeah, yeah, that’s what it is. But yeah, gambier is this crop where one usage for it is in like betel nut, you know, the the paan that people make with a leaf betel nut. And they also put in this extract of gambier into this paan to eat, not eat, but suck on. You know, they’re spitting out the red juice, that sort of thing. But more important to my story is the other more important use of gambier which is when you boil the leaves and and extract the juice and concentrate it. That liquid is used for tanning tanning leather. And why that’s important is because when all of the land reclamation was going on here when the parit were being dug that was lining up with the industrial revolution in the UK and they were in desperate need of leather like for all the machinery they needed things like leather belts high quality strong leather belts to run all the machinery of the industrial revolution. And to do that, of course, you need tanning compounds from gambier. And that turned gambier into a very valuable cash crop. And that led to a kind of land rush to open up new ground for planting new cash crops.
And the Johor Sultanate, you know, Sultan Abu Bakar as part of his modernization efforts. Yeah. He wanted he needed money. They needed products that they could tax, right? And what he came up with along with his father I think was this idea of offering land grants so that if somebody came and cleared out this peat forest, drained it, made it suitable for planting a cash crop like gambier. If they did all that work, then the local government would send out an inspector, check up on it. Okay, you’ve dug the parit, you’re draining the land. I guess they check the salinity of the water, the acidity, is it good for agriculture. Okay, you’re finished your work. Then they give them a deed to the land. They basically whatever land they can prepare for farming for plantation farming once they get the land ready now they get land ownership from the Sultan and that created kind of a land rush just like there was a tin mining rush going on up around KL. As I’ve been talking, I just finished cycling parallel to the Melaka Strait. Started way over on the other end of this road right here. And the pintu air that I showed you was at the other end of this road. And just to hammer at this point, this road is actually the top of a dyke, a bund, which is key to this whole system. Without this barrier, none of this would work because the seawater would just flow in through the mangrove and then just flood this whole area leading up into the plantation areas further inland. So yeah, this is the key. The road I’m on is actually the flattened top part of the the bund and at this end there’s another parit and a pintu air right here. This is another modern one and it has a a lever there you spin to raise and lower the gate based on the the water depth of the parit and the tides. And over here, I’m assuming it’s part of the system, more automated over there. It’s got some sort of measuring equipment. Yeah, I think I see something there that looks like a a bucket for measuring rainfall, things like that. It looks like it’s solar powered to gather information, part of the maintenance program for running this massive canal drainage system. So there’s some more of the the modern infrastructure right there. It’s very cool. And I believe this is Parit Bakar. The the road that I cycled along to come out here is over there, the main road. And I crossed over it on a bridge and it said, you know, Parit Bakar over there. So that’s how I know the name of it. And right there, you can see how close we are to the Melaka Strait. I think that opening right there, but I tried to go down there already, but I can’t get down there. Maybe I can go down a little bit of this road, but I can’t get to the end. Yeah, I just came down here to see how far I could get. There’s actually a break in the bund here, so I can’t make it down to the shore. If it was a matter of life and death, yeah, I could wade across, but that’s not what I’m here to do. So, yeah, I was just thinking the word pintu air is kind of an interesting one for anybody traveling around Malaysia because everybody knows that word whether you realize it or not. Think about every shopping mall you’ve gone into, every restaurant you’ve gone into. You go to leave the building. You look for a door to get out. What is that door called? Pintu, right? The sign says pintu, which means basically exit. So these are water exits. Pintu air. So every time you see a pintu an exit at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, you can go, “Ah, I learned that on Planet Doug.” Pintu air. Makes you think of the canal system here in Johor. Because this whole system is designed to let water out, let water exit, but not let any sea water back in. So, it’s a water exit, but not a water entrance. It’s the key to the whole system.
So, that’s a little bit about the how and the why. But just as interesting for me was the question of who. Because we’re not talking about easy work here. I came down here in just a few minutes on my bicycle because there’s a road system. All of the peat swamp has already been drained and I can ride on top of the perfectly dry bund. It’s very easy for me. But back in those days, this would have been brutal terrain. Absolutely brutal. Can you imagine like you’ve all everybody has seen mangrove swamp. Imagine you show up for work and your boss drops you off in the middle of a mangrove swamp and just says, “Okay, now I want you to clear this swamp and dig a canal.” I mean, like, what are you going to pay me $10 million? Well, if not, I’m not interested cuz that would be backbreaking. Hello. Difficult, difficult work, right? So, who was willing to do that kind of work? Backbreaking pioneer type work. Well, the answer, as it turned out, was the Javanese. And that’s another thread you can pull on, another strand of this web that leads you down another you know, another strand of history. Because for according to what I read, it was mainly people from Java who came over here to the peninsula to the Malay Peninsula to do this work, dig the canals, drain the peat forest and start up all these plantations. And again, I don’t know all of the history here, but apparently in Java under the Dutch at that time, there was severe land pressure where there there was overpopulation. There was land scarcity and heavy taxation by the Dutch, heavy control by the Dutch. Again, this is all based on just casual reading. If you want to know more in depth, you’re you’re on your own. Go track down all the relevant online documents. But because of that, there were large populations in Java who had no chance of land ownership or finding paid work. So they started hearing about this land grant system from Johor. Sultan Abu Bakar basically sent out word come here, clear the land and then we will give you ownership of that land. So yeah, the people of Java, the men of Java, were very interested in doing that work. I’m just coming up on the the road that I was following.
And yeah, if you are driving your car down this road out of Muar or coming up from down south on your way to Melaka. I know a lot of YouTubers recently, I’ve watched their videos. They drove their motorcycles up this coast road heading towards Melaka and they would have been cycling down this very road, this road right here. And they would have been going over bridges, dozens and dozens and dozens of bridges going over these. And I would have had the same thought myself. Oh, look at all the rivers. Here’s another river and after one kilometer another river, another river, another one just over and over and over again. But the reason there are so many of them and that they are all so straight perpendicular to the Melaka Strait and that they are all so in a grid pattern. It all comes down to this land grant system where according to the system, they designated places for these canals to be dug. And I don’t I don’t know what measuring units they used back then, but they would measure it out and then every set distance another canal would go there. And then if you were part of the work crew that dug that canal, you were then given a specific amount of land on either side of that canal. So if your canal stretches four or five kilometers inland, all the land on the left and the right side of that canal would be divided up and given to the men who dug the canal and started draining the water. So that’s where you get this very rigorous steady grid pattern and land ownership lines all through here. Yeah, it’s fascinating stuff. And something else that’s interesting once you again pull on the the Javanese strand of this history is that people all up and down this coast of Johor, they trace their ancestry back to Java to the original pioneer settlers who came here from Java and dug the canals that made all of this possible. And according to again what I read, I keep wanting to make that disclaimer over and over again because there are very few primary sources for this history. Like if you just go to Wikipedia and do a casual search, you’re not going to find much information like I’ve been telling you. You’ve got to do some hard searching. So I could easily have gotten some of the details wrong. But the way this migration worked many times was that there would be like a leader on Java like a sen a man of seniority in the village, one of the wealthier men, maybe a headman of the village. He would put together his own crew. So he would be the leader basically of one of these canal digging crews and then he would send out word in Java to his local community to get a crew together and he owns the boat. He pays for the boat, pays for the tools and when they get here there’s nothing here, right? There’s no food. There’s nothing being grown here yet. There’s no 7-Eleven giving them cold drinks. So while the work is being done, they had to bring their own food, things like that. So the leader of this group would pay for all of that in advance, make sure he has all the tools needed, bringing over all the food, put together a crew of men who are looking for adventure, desperate for land, and they would come over in that leader’s boat, come here, set up a very rudimentary camp. I’m at another parit. Which one is this? Parit. I want to see if there’s a name here. Ah, awesome. Parit Amal. So, as you go up and down this road in Johor, look for these signs. Parit Amal. So, it’s Canal Amal or the Amal Canal.
So I’m going to turn down Parit Amal just to see if there’s anything interesting down here. So yeah, these men coming over from Java, tough, tough men because they would be standing in up to their knees, up to their waist in this water, this flooded mangrove, flooded peat forest, and just started cutting down the trees and digging by hand all of these canals. Oo, huge monitor lizard over there. And the mud skippers, the big mud skippers, they’ve been a real pleasure today so far. I’ve seen lots of mud skippers, but they tend to be in mud. I see them sort of wriggling around on mud. But here, I’m seeing much larger ones, adult ones, and they’re actually skipping along on top of the water. So that they look more like water skippers. So yeah, still following along beside the Parit Amal. So yeah, they come over here with the leader and the leader who funded the whole expedition, he of course would get first pick of the land. He would get prime land ownership and it was usually where like closest to the shore and that’s where the community would start to grow and that would belong to the leader. And key to understanding all of this is that the canal was named after the leader. So that’s why all up and down this coast you see Parit Amal, Parit Amat. These were the names of the men from Java who were the leaders of these canal digging expeditions. So that’s fascinating. That’s why you see all these personal names. And that town that I started with this morning, Parit Jawa again, there’s a connection because that means like Jawa means Java, right? So that is the Java canal. A nod again to the Javanese workers who dug these canals and drained all this land, you know, 100 years ago.
I think this is as far as I can go easily along the Parit Amal and then goes around the corner there and then empties out into the Melaka Strait and it’s separated from the land on that side by this bund. You can see another raised dyke. Again, that’s not natural land there. This is an artificially dug canal and an artificially built dyke system. The bund as well.
When I was thinking about how difficult this work would have been and how I never could have done it, boss, you know, okay, boss, you put me on your boat and you took me over to took me across the strait and you said I can go there and now I can own the land. You didn’t tell me just how brutal the work was going to be. I’m like, “Nah, forget it. I I can’t do this.” So, these these Javanese workers, yeah, they were tough tough men. But when I started thinking about how difficult the work would be, that led to another train of thought was, well, if it’s that brutal, they’re not going to do it just as an experiment, are they? It’s not like they’re just going to show up here and think, “You know what? Maybe if we dig this canal, put in all of these exit gates for the water, the pintu air, and we spend years clearing the land and draining the water. Maybe if we do all that now, the land will be good for planting crops and we can make some money.” They’re not going to do it on a whim. They must have known beforehand that it would work, right? Why else would they do it? So I started looking into that and the answer I got was that yeah, these were experts in this kind of work because they had been doing that kind of work in Java and Sumatra forever. So they had the same like a similar mangrove coastline barrier, you know, protecting the shore and then they had the the bog, the peat bog afterwards. They had a very similar land mass over there and for many many generations they were doing that kind of work there. So they already had the skills and the knowledge to do it here. So, that kind of answered one of the questions for me, one of those web strands that I pulled on. And the other thing I was thinking about was, well, what’s in it for the Sultan? He’s giving away land. Like, okay, you drain the land, you dig the canals, you start planting crops, you start making money, and we’ll give you the ownership for free. And like, well, how does the Sultan benefit? And again, well, the answer I got there was, well, they benefited by developing a taxation base for the government. I mean, they’re a government. They need revenue to build infrastructure to develop Johor. So by giving by promising all these men free land in exchange for developing it, they were creating a big agricultural industry for gambier, coconut, palm oil, on and on and on. And then Johor would tax all of those products when they are being grown and sold. At least that is my yeah that is my understanding. Anyway,
I went over a bridge back at the main road with a sign on it for the Uhoh. This is a fresh tarmac. Hope it’s not too fresh. It’s the worst thing for a bicycle or a scooter to go down a freshly tarmaced road if it’s not set yet. That sticky tar gets on your tires and your bike and never ever comes off. But I think I’m okay. Yeah, this is Parit Raja
and I decided to yeah on a whim just sort of turn down see what I find. And here is another aspect to these canal that I haven’t mentioned yet because I haven’t really come across it is that the canals were dug mainly as a drainage to drain water into the Melaka Strait. But they had to cut the canal through the mangrove. But once they did that, of course, now that raised the possibility of go of using it for fishing boats.
Hello.
Okay.
So, this wasn’t the original purpose of digging all these canals, but a lot of them did double duty as drainage and fishing harbors. So, here as I’m getting closer to Muar, the canals are getting a little bit more developed, a bit wider, bit deeper, and they’ve built docks here. So, now they use them as a dock for their fishing boats. You see? So again, this is an artificial waterway, a canal dug by hand. But once they had it, I was like, “Hey, you know what? Now it’s very accessible to boats.” And then people started using it as a way to fish and park their boats here at night and then take the canals out into the Melaka Strait. It’s another part of the story.
And like many of the the fishing jetties that I’ve seen, it has a little kopi, a little restaurant right here. So, I decided to pop into the shade for a few minutes and have a kopi ice. This is number two already. I’ve already had one. And I’m on my on my second one. When I rode my bike down here originally, there was a group of like five or six men sitting around a table over there. And then they all climbed into their fishing boats and took off. And I saw a group of men coming out of the the bush on either side carrying buckets and packages and all kinds of things. So this very rich, lush land has a lot of uses for the local people. And I guess that’s one thing about the the mangrove and the the bog forest that I haven’t mentioned yet is that like mangrove trees themselves are can be quite valuable. Can be turned into high quality charcoal I think. And there were hardwood trees here. And when they built the pintu air with the wooden gates, you know, that block that sealed the water flow, they used the local trees here that were made out of a hardwood so that it wouldn’t rot in the water for a long time. So as they were cutting down the the mangrove trees and the other trees, they could sell it or process it, turn it into products for a sale as well. And one other historical strand of that web that I ended up pulling on was this idea of how independent Johor was. In fact, the only reason this parit system, the land grant system could develop was because Johor was so independent from the British. And that came from Johor’s status at that time as an unfederated Malay state under the British. And I did a little Google search just so I could pull together some ideas surrounding that because it’s quite interesting if you’re traveling from Melaka as I did. Well, Melaka was under direct British control. It was a crown colony of Britain, a Straits Settlement, right? So it was basically governed by the British. Had British courts, British rule, British law, all that kind of thing because it was a crown colony, a Straits Settlement. You cross the border from Melaka into Johor. Now you’re in a in a state that was an unfederated Malay state. So because of that that independence Sultan Abu Bakar he modernized the administration and enacted its own written state constitution in 1895 and that made it the first Malay state with a constitutional monarchy system. So it had much more autonomy. I left from that kopitiam and that Parit a very short time ago and I’ve been trying to follow the small roads going right along the coast connecting these Parit together and a very short distance after it I came across this one Parit Basar and so I just cycled along it down here. When I stopped here, I am telling you, Godzilla jumped off the land here into the canal and then booted it off into the jungle over there, sending out like a tidal wave practically from when it hit the water. And then it ran straight into another giant monitor lizard that felt like that one was encroaching on its territory. It got driven off and it came roaring back, leaped back into the canal. Was coming straight at me. I’m telling you, man. These canals are like a wildlife sanctuary.
Macaques birds. Oh yeah. I remember reading somewhere along here maybe south of Parit Jawa maybe there’s quite a large sanctuary. There’s a specific breed of stork. I think an endangered bird that uses that sanctuary. But I guess it’s very popular with birders to come Yeah. Find various species, including that rare stork. Yeah, this whole coastal area with the the mangrove is a very valuable land for wildlife. And something else I read, another strand to pull on is the environmental one where originally all they did was cut a canal through the mangrove and then they started developing this peat forest for agriculture. But then after all of that was settled, there were some places along the coast where the plantations wanted to grow and they kept encroaching more and more and more on the mangrove until the plantation reached all the way to the shore of the Melaka Strait. So it basically chewed up the entire mangrove. And then they discovered now that the mangrove was gone, how much they actually needed it. Because with the mangrove gone, the coastline started to erode and the fisheries fell apart because the fisheries, you know, the fish populations depended on all of the wildlife, all of the all of the organisms that, you know, needed the mangrove to survive. So, the whole area just started to fall apart. I stopped here because the road stops here. I can’t go any further. So then in recent decades there’s been a push towards replanting the mangrove realizing how important it is to the local ecology and there’s tons of organizations in Johor up and down the coast where you know you can pay to plant a mangrove kind of thing and they’re rebuilding the mangrove the suit of armor along the coast because you yeah you really need that mangrove. It served a very important purpose. So in modern times, yeah, they’re rebuilding it.
And then again, not very far along the coast, another big canal. This one is the Parit Keroma Laut, something like that. And this one is also big enough that it’s developed into quite a thriving fishing boat harbor. So, I think I’m going to follow the road along here just to see what’s down at the end. It narrows quite a bit on the other side of this bridge. Yeah, down there.
Yeah, you really get the sense of being in the deep jungle. Hello. Hello. How are you? Hello. Where are you from? I’m from Canada.
Yeah, one of the more well-developed canals. A lot of little fisheries related buildings built along the shore here.
Lots of fishing boats. Yeah, a lot of activity.
Little bit of a rough trail going alongside the parit.
I keep wondering if one of these trails is going to take us all the way back to the Melaka Strait. So far, I haven’t been able to get that far.
I can see the opening up ahead. It’s not too far away, but I’ll bet the the mangrove is going to get way too thick up here. The road won’t continue all the way to the shore. This is probably the dead end right up here, I’m guessing.
So, the trail does continue. I’m probably going to go as far as I can, but I hopped off the bike just for a second because there’s an interesting spot right here.
Again, anytime I’m cycling on a trail or a road, that is actually the top of the the bund basically part of the dyke system. And I noticed right here just how much water is flowing. There’s a a mud skipper. Big one. But yeah, look how much water is flowing out of there.
Just a tiny stream. But imagine hundreds of these. Look at all those mud skippers going straight up up the water. That is so cool. But yeah, this water is all being drained out of this dense mangrove. Again, I keep hammering away at that point, but it deserves hammering. Look at that. I can’t even walk over there. Like, I’ve stopped because, oh, I don’t want to deal with all that mud. But imagine you were part of a work crew and it was your job to dig a canal 10 ft deep right through there through all that mud water off in that direction. No thanks. What a job. But yeah, you can see how much water is flowing out of here through this pipe. It isn’t a a gate. There doesn’t seem to be any controls here. It’s just an automatic drainage. Goes underneath and then seems to yeah emerge underwater over here taking it out into the Melaka Strait.
And this as well is part of the bund. I think this would be a barrier between the seawater and then the interior. But that looks heavily like a mangrove to me still over on that side. But yeah, look at this. Look at the amount of water in there.
Looks looks impenetrable to me. I’m certainly not eager to get in there, wade up to my hip with a shovel, and start digging a canal. Somebody was probably fishing here. They built a little seat to sit on at some point.
Incredible landscape all along the coast here.
Just walking my bike along for a minute. Another thread that I pulled on another strand of the web is sort of the social side because I asked the question who dug these canals and it turned out to be mainly men from Java, the Javanese. But more to the point, they were single men, young single men in search of their fortune in the form of land. And of course, they came over on their own because it was a lot of hardship here. I assume some married men also came, but at the beginning, they would have left their wives and family behind in Java. And then I don’t know how long it took to like dig a canal, start draining the land, develop some plantations, planting crops. I I don’t know at what point, but then these men would send for their families after it became sustainable. Then their families would come here and join them from Java. And then once the women and children showed up, then of course a normal community would start to build and all the young men who were single and unmarried of course once they had land and were earning money. Well, you know what they say in Victorian literature? Don’t they say that a a young man with a fortune is in need of a wife? That’s the way it goes. Needs help managing his household, wants to start a family, and then the young men would get married, start a family, and then communities would grow here with the with its origins back in Java. So, yeah, this is as far as I can go down this parit. I’m almost at the mouth of the
of the canal at the Melaka Strait. I can see it, but I I can’t go any farther than this. This is as far as I can go.
I’ve left the countryside moving back into the city limits of Muar and I’m still but I’m still crossing parit after parit after parit like they’re all the way through the entire city. It’s just that you may not recognize them because now they look like this. They look much more developed. You know, they put they line them with cement. Originally, of course, they would have been dirt and mud canals just like the other ones that we’ve seen, but over time with the development of the city, they line them with cement. This one, if you don’t believe me, has a sign. There it is there. Parit [ __ ] Baki. So,
This is another one of the canals part of the the land grant system.
I often wonder if even the local people that live here have any idea what these canals are doing for them. Like what I mean is technically all of this should be swamp either mangrove swamp or peat bog this whole area. And the only reason it isn’t is all these canals are constantly draining the groundwater.
And if you could snap your fingers and block all of these canals all at once, this entire area, all of Muar probably would become flooded once more. Yeah, these parit very important to the city and all the farmers around here, to the whole economy in fact.
Well, that’s about it for my little investigation into Johor history and my bike ride. I’m back in my neighborhood. I just stopped off at the 7-Eleven, so I’ve got a a 2 kilogram bag of ice in my pannier bag, a liter of milk, cold drinks. Oh, and all I did was ride my bike around and shoot a little bit of video. I keep thinking about the guys who dug those canals back in the late 1800s into the early 1900s. You know, when their workday was over, they weren’t popping over to the nearest 7-Eleven. They were just lying down in their makeshift shelter. Maybe they’ve got a fire going. Heat up some rice. That’s about it until they start working the next day. I can’t even can’t even imagine it. But we see the results today.
I’ve been mentally going over my notes about the Parit Land Grant System and I can’t think of anything else I want to talk about. So yeah, that’s the end of my story. Just a couple of blocks left to get back to my homestay.
Yeah, if you’re still here, still hanging in there with me on this video all the way to the end, shout out to you guys, the Crunch Club,
across the street here. Time it very carefully with my U-turn.
Yeah, shout out to everybody out there living on Planet Doug with me and helping out from time to time with a Planet Doug video productions with the yeah, Malaysian Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, which yeah, it’s kind of the foundation of my life here in Malaysia. I tried to use the e-wallet to pay for my iced coffee there, but for some reason it wouldn’t scan their QR code, but it worked at 7-Eleven. And yeah, keeping this planet in orbit is the Planet Doug Patreon. All the members there and the members of the Planet Doug buy me a coffee community. Thank you to everybody out there. So that is it. Shutting down here in the royal city of Johor. Muar. Yeah, great city. Great place to hang out. See you next time.