Past Historic

I have basically dropped the ball on following up on our visit to the historic tin town of Ipoh with a post on this blog but in self defense I have been thinking, well a bit anyway, about how I should couch the blog.

If you fancy following the moment by moment stuff, then I would urge you to take a look at my Track My Tour, wonderful app, thanks Chris as usual, which I have attached here. Viv and I really enjoyed our short visit but it wasn't quite what we thought and why we thought it may have been as enjoyable as it was. If you see what I mean (and rereading that last bit, I'm afraid I don't quite know what I was trying to say). Take it as being the things we thought would be good were either absent or underwhelming, those that we hadn't considered or felt were of lesser importance really stepped up and more than filled the gap.

It is the history that I am referring to.

So brief back up again: we wanted to visit Ipoh because it was an important historic town in Malaysia's development and was pretty close to Penang, in fact about an hour and a half on the motorway. Also we had been advised the food was really good there as was the famous Old Town White Coffee (it was).

So history: Ipoh was pretty much nothing more than a collection of huts before tin mining and the devastating series of Tin Wars (see Wikipedia link to the four different but rapidly consecutive wars collectively called the Larut War here) prompted the protagonists, initially competing Chinese regional tin miners but later also the Malay rulers who fell into a civil war in the state of Perak, to call in the British to restore order as they could not. These wars fell between 1861 and 1874 when the final Treaty of Pangkor was signed and this pretty much signaled the start of Ipoh as a place of significance. It also signaled the arrival of the British who to that point in the development of the country had held themselves only in the Straits Settlements -- Penang, Singapore and Malacca.... but also Pangkor, which was the port town for the Perak River, the means by which most tin made its way to the outside world.

The little blue bits are the tin lakes that now dot the area. Imagine 100 years ago these were mostly open cast mines.

Say what you will about the good and bad of British imperialism and Pax Britannica but this treaty brought peace to the area again and a new level of organisation and infrastructure that had previously never existed. It also forced the British to redefine their relationship with Malay states and set the starting point for closer cooperation, then the colonial era which followed. In a nutshell, the British took administration, foreign policy and defense. The Malay sultans kept religion (Islam) and cultural matters. Of course this meant almost total British control. However it wasn't as though the non-British parties didn't go into this eyes open. Probably though they may not have thought through the exact level of control they would be giving up by inviting the British in. Or for how long it would last.

In Ipoh, we went to two Chinese tin mining museums. One outside Ipoh and one in the old town. Both of these were private museums funded by in the first case a wealthy Chinese tin mine owner and in the second case by the Haka Tin Miner's Association. So both I knew would be as politically incorrect as could be imagined... and they were, all with the perfectly acceptable intention of providing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (Jack Nicholson speech in "A Few Good Men" springs to mind here).

Pre-1800 tin mining was pretty much a fringe thing conducted by local Malays. It wasn't until global demand picked up during the Industrial Revolution along with prices that the Chinese became interested. That also coincided with numerous rebellions and civil unrest in the fin de siecle period of the Ming dynasty, so people left China in droves for peace and an economic uptick.

Open cast mining was not eco-friendly and was very labour intensive. It also required massive volumes of water to be diverted from the Perak River and pumped through hoses to wash away soil and other detritus from the underlying tin ore.

This is wonderfully documented by the first museum as the owner has all the industry statistics you could possibly want for this industry and dutifully and relentlessly published the lot of them on frame boards in the museum along with dioramas 'interpreting' those statistics.

Data going back to 1800!

Mostly they were statues of Chinese workers 'coolies' holding some sort of tool connected with mining. In this time tens of thousands of mainly men came each year for the next 60 years. In all about just over 1 million. Most came for the mining which was centred around this area. I haven't read anything that talks about the demographic impact of having this many new immigrants in a specific location, in a specific industry, and in such a short period of time. But it must have been overwhelming for the indigenous population and obviously contributed in no small measure to the Larut Wars, which were essentially inter-Chinese turf wars squabbling over resources. No wonder the sultan lost control of things. (Malaya's population in 1950 was still just 6 million!).

We had a guide for both days we were in Ipoh who was very informative and in his non PC way told us: "The Chinese miners were only here for the money. They didn't care about who controlled what or how they got the tin. They just knew that tin was worth money and that was it." He was more direct than that on a wider variety of subjects too but I just restrict myself to this.

So there you have Malaya in a nutshell (and still pretty much modern day Malaysia too, from what I have seen). The Chinese just want to do business and don't care about how they go about it, whose toes they trample on, who is the 'ruler' and that other stuff like personal freedoms, rights, rules about intellectual property, all of that. So for them in 1874, getting the British in was a no brainer. Obviously the Malays may have had different priorities.

One downside to this is heritage. Living in a UNESCO world heritage site (Penang) it is almost ironic that this should be the case for this UNESCO accreditation comes with specific rules and regulations governing what you can and cannot do to 'heritage' buildings and other artifacts. The practical downside in Penang is the almost endless number of colonial era mansions that are derelict and left to rot. Conflicting reasons for this. One is that the UNESCO rules make it very expensive to renovate (ironically McDonalds and KFC have taken over and renovated mansions for their purposes) and the other main one being that they are owned by old time trusts (Chinese clans presumably) with many different strands of ownership meaning that nobody can agree on anything, so nothing happens.

Specific to Ipoh and the reason that I have taken the path in this post are the railway station together with the city administrative building right opposite. Both are WWI constructs in the Imperial fashion -- massive long white buildings -- the railway station is in use but much changed to accommodate modern traffic whilst the city council building has been abandoned and is being left to rot whilst the current city employees work in their new blinged up glass and concrete high rise just down the road. So from a 'heritage' position ... and this is something that Ipoh Tourism really focuses on (that is if you read their website blurb and visit the Tourist Information office) and if you have followed my trail to this point, you will remember that prior to 1874 Ipoh did not exist so anything 'old' from then will perforce have had to be .... Imperial era construction, which sad to say is being ignored probably to ruin at some point. You can already see green plants growing out of the walls of the old city building. As Ipoh virtually burned down in 1892 it had to almost entirely be rebuilt. This is where the town's grid layout dates from.... again here heritage = Imperial era construction.

The magnificent railway station in Ipoh. Its derelict brother lies just across the road... in fact I took this picture standing right in front of it

Heritage wise, this visit for us really didn't work out as we thought but then again it did. For those parts that did elevate our time here were those specific private museums and the energy and dedication put into those. So all of what I said about the general attitude completely falls apart when you consider just how conscious these private benefactors (who were outside the norm) are in preserving the history of the tin miners of Ipoh. They did a great job. Other heritage, not so much. You can see it being ignored on a daily basis as younger people in the modern times presumably simply don't care about the past so much. I think it's a shame but then again I just turned 65 so am what is now considered 'past historic'.

PH definitely looking past it on the left hand side in front of some Ipoh street art that our guide rather amusingly dismissed out of hand. He was right though, most of it was just graffiti masquerading as something else

Looking at it a different way, heritage is expensive and a question of priorities. As a lover of Italy, I am continually amazed by the almost total disregard by the population of the old ruins of this and that that lie around everywhere. To restore everything to its former glory (and define that if you can) would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming. In the US by contrast, a country with virtually no similar heritage or history, every speck of rock that can be deemed 'heritage' of some sort or other has its own national park surrounding it with display panels, interpretive films and tourist centers. Last year we visited the site where the 1850's go west homesteaders covered wagon tracks can still be seen. You can't see anything. The site is a huge..... prairie covered in grass.

I will leave this post with some comments from a magazine that I just read whose editorial reported that even though 2020 has been designated Visit Malaysia Year, Tourism Malaysia is cutting funding for marketing purposes. One should remember that the country is up to its ears in debt from past corruption scandals and over spending on infrastructure that nobody needs or uses, so the new government is presumably doing its best in prioritizing what it can without continuing the damaging debt trend. This said it could also up its game a bit for as this same magazine says "it does suffer a bit from the all too common local hallmarks of subpar service and mediocre maintenance."

Ipoh was great fun though. And the food.... well who wouldn't love to find a fantastic tandoori restaurant laid out just like a high end steakhouse in the US? Visit the Tandoori Grill!!!