Cheng Ho Teahouse Malacca Kuala Lumpur (2)
Cookie Cutters
A pot of tea, cinnamon cookies and a notebook in the Cheng Ho Teahouse is a fine way of spending a morning in Melaka, or Malacca. I’d escape the rush and roar of nearby Jonker Street, a moving pavement of tourists in search of toys, tat and dubious treasures. I’d come to see a city I knew as a boy from the pictures I formed as a boy as I read the stories of Somerset Maugham.
Cheng Ho Teahouse , Melaka (Chongkian)
I think of Merlaka as a city of competing colours. There is deep colonial red, there is the pristine white of what was the Englishman’s fortress, the old Malacca Club, and there is bright red Chinese lacquer on the walls of the Cheng Ho Teahouse.
Parts of the Teahouse date back hundreds of years, to the Ming era. Admiral Cheng Ho (Zheng He) had his base here when he visited Melaka on his maritime expeditions to Africa. And I made it my base because it was a good place to read and write. Cheng Ho found that Chinese settlers had been there long before him. The names of the ancient streets - Blacksmith Street, Tinsmith Place and Concubine Lane – speak of a thriving quarter of traders, artisans, foundries, workshops and brothels.
The Portuguese, in the 16th Century, were the first European adventurers to colonise Malaysia . The Dutch replaced them a century later and then the British took over in Victorian times. Empire builders liked to pass themselves off as saviours but they were asset-strippers at heart.
All of them over-stayed their welcome in Melaka but they all left their mark and nowhere is that more evident than in Melaka.
Colonial conquest was a competitive business. A vivid title deed was a useful warning, in case the former owners showed up and demanded their colony back. The British painted several important buildings in Melaka in rusty red. Today, these scarlet monuments look like the abandoned sandcastles of children who packed up and went home.
Putting your stamp on Melaka meant the radical remake of churches you thought had got their religion ‘wrong ‘and needed correction. Sometimes, it meant wholesale destruction. The British dynamited the great 17th century Portuguese fort, leaving just one gate, the Porta de Santiago. Nearby, they built a very British stronghold, the Malacca Club. It offered croquet, tennis and illicit love affairs to bored tea planters and it welcomed pukka Europeans only.
When independence came to Malaysia, the nationalist rulers repainted and refurbished the Malacca Club and renamed it Independence Memorial Hall. A lot of nationalist politics seems to be about fresh paintwork and consoling names. What I’ve seen of it in the former Soviet Union and in the new South Africa, makes me suspect there is some immutable principle at work: the more loudly the new regime proclaims radical change, all the faster do its leaders look like those they replaced.
When it came to imperialist ambitions, the Portuguese, Dutch and British were rather late to the party. In the early 15th century, keen on a little empire building of his own, the Ming Emperor dispatched Cheng Ho to explore the Indian Ocean. His immense armada was greater than anything the West had ever assembled. In the museum adjacent to the Cheng Ho Teahouse, the explorer’s voyages are illustrated with model ships, puppets, maps, paintings and reports of marvellous beasts - elephants, giraffes and zebras – he brought back from East Africa.
I remember Mr. Wah Aik, who once made tiny shoes in red silk brocade, destined for women who had their feet bound as children. Just a few inches long, to fit feet compressed to points, like fat little trotters. Some doors away, in the Chin Chin Longevity Shop, stood an enormous ornate coffin, ornamented with swags of buttery brass. The Longevity Shop sold not coffins but kites. The kite maker sat on the floor, splitting canes for box kites, bird kites, dragon and phoenix kites and strung them in the rafters, fluttering against the roof like papery butterflies eager to be up and off.
An unexpected exhibit in the museum to Admiral Cheng was kept in a glass display cabinet. Two small items: a curved knife with a rope handle and an earthenware jar, its lid firmly sealed with wax. A notice told the visitor Cheng Ho has been a eunuch and that the clay pot held his sexual organs. He had been castrated as a boy of about ten and served in the imperial court as a eunuch. When a eunuch died, custom required his vital appendages were buried with him, in hopes of a luckier, more fruitful afterlife.
There was no way of knowing if the clay jar really belonged to the celebrated admiral. Dozens of eunuchs served the Emperor. Some relics must have been fakes. These sealed clay jars were bought and sold by other eunuchs who dared not leave this life without these vital remainders. They were an indispensable passport for the eunuch who wished to arrive in the next life, fully equipped.
The clay jar was solid, the wax seal thick and looking at it told me nothing. It was a relief to go back to the Cheng Ho Teahouse, for green tea and cinnamon cookies.
Christopher Hope