Malacca, Malaysia – 17 February 1978
Malacca felt like a different country. Kuala Lumpur was concrete and traffic and the muezzin’s call; Malacca was crumbling laterite and Dutch gravestones going soft in the rain.
I found St Paul’s first – walls without a roof, the sea showing clean through empty window frames where glass had never been replaced. Inside, Dutch tombstones lay flat against the walls, their lettering worn but legible if you crouched close: Dutch names, Dutch dates, a life and a death recorded three centuries before mine in a language I couldn’t fully read.
Near the altar end was an older grave, open and empty, caged over with wire – Francis Xavier had been buried there for a time in 1553, his body brought back from an island off China where he’d died reaching for a country he never entered, before the Portuguese shipped him on again to his permanent rest in Goa. Even in death the man hadn’t stopped travelling.
A weathervane still turned on the gable, faithfully pointing at wind that had outlasted the empire that put it there. Of the Dutch themselves nothing remained but the stone – no one in Malacca spoke their language anymore. English was what people reached for instead, the leftover of a third empire, worn in as easily as the others had worn away.
Down in the town, Cheng Hoon Teng was the opposite of all that ruin – gilt and lacquer, incense coiling up past red lanterns, an old temple still very much in business. Two women moved between the offering tables, unhurried, while I stood at the edge feeling like exactly what I was: a visitor.
I ended up at the river, where a line of men in sarongs and singlets carried sacks of chicken feed across planks laid boat to boat, balancing the load on their shoulders and heads, barefoot on wood that must have been slick from years of the same crossing. Nobody looked up at me. It was just the day’s work.
Standing at the water afterward, looking out past the godowns to the Straits, I understood for the first time how much history had simply passed through this narrow stretch of sea – Portuguese, Dutch, British, and now me, one more person passing through, taking pictures of what was left behind.
