Largely because of their pivotal position on maritime trade routes between the Middle East, India and China, the present-day countries of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei have always been a cultural melting pot. During the first millennium AD, Malays arrived from Sumatra and Indians from India and Sri Lanka, while later the Chinese migrated from mainland China and Hainan Island. All these traders and settlers arrived to find that the region already held a gamut of indigenous tribes, thought to have migrated around 50,000 years ago from the Philippines, then connected by a land bridge to Borneo and Southeast Asia. The indigenous tribes who still live on the Peninsula are known as the Orang Asli, Malay for “the original people”.
Original people they may have been, but their descendants now form a minority of the overall populations of the three countries. Over the last 150 years a massive influx of Chinese and Indian immigrants, escaping poverty, war and revolution, has swelled the population of Malaysia, which now stands at over 25 million. Just over half are Malays, while the Chinese make up nearly a quarter of the population, the Indians eight percent, and the various indigenous groups just over a tenth.
Brunei’s population of around 380,000 is heavily dominated by Malays, with minorities of Chinese, Indians and indigenous peoples. In Singapore, only tiny numbers of indigenes were left on the island when Raffles arrived. They have no modern-day presence in the state, where around three-quarters of the 4.6-million-strong population are of Chinese extraction, around fourteen percent are Malay, and nearly nine percent Indian.
The Malays are believed to have originated from the meeting of Mainland Southeast Asian, Taiwanese and even Papuan groups over the last 5000 years. Also known as Orang Laut (sea people), they sustained an economy built around fishing, boat-building and, in some communities, piracy. The growth in power of the Malay sultanates from the fifteenth century onwards – coinciding with the arrival of Islam – established Malays as a force to be reckoned with in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. They developed an aristocratic tradition, courtly rituals and a social hierarchy that have a continued influence today. The rulers of Malaysia’s states still wield great influence, reflected in the fact that they elect one of their number to hold the post of Yang di-Pertuan Agong, a pre-eminent sultan who holds the title for a five-year term. Although a purely ceremonial position, the agong is seen as the ultimate guardian of Malay Muslim culture and, despite recent legislation to reduce his powers, is still considered to be above the law. The situation is even more pronounced in Brunei, to which many Muslim Malay traders fled after the fall of Melaka to the Portuguese in 1511. There, the sultan remains the supreme ruler (as his descendants have been, on and off, for over five hundred years).
Even though Malays have been Muslims since the fifteenth century, the region as a whole is not fundamentalist in character. Only in Brunei is alcohol banned, for instance. Perhaps the most significant recent development affecting Malays in Malaysia has been the introduction of the bumiputra policy.
The Baba-Nyonyas are a Chinese subgroup with deep roots in the Malay Peninsula and a distinctive hybrid culture. It’s often glibly said that they are the product of Chinese/Malay intermarriage, though this ignores the practical difficulties of marrying into a Muslim family without converting to Islam. What’s more likely is that male migrants, arriving from China from at least the sixteenth century onwards, married local women, some Malay, others from the region’s various communities such as Orang Asli or ethnic Thais. Eventually their descendants became a community in their own right – the menfolk known as Babas, the women Nyonyas – although confusingly the terms Straits Chinese and Peranakan are also used for them as a whole (Peranakan can also refer to other mixed-race groups, such as the Chitties of Melaka).
The Baba-Nyonyas clung on to some aspects of Chinese culture while absorbing influences from the Peninsula, most notably in terms of their dress – Nyonyas wore beautiful Malay-style batik-print clothes – and food, but also in their language: many spoke Chinese dialects, notably Hokkien, but they also had their own Malay dialect. With the arrival of the British, they mastered English too, and this was to prove the foundation for a golden era when many Baba-Nyonyas became immensely wealthy. They were the bridge between the Western world and the sinkeh, the newly arrived Chinese migrants, who were eager to succeed. Many sinkeh married Nyonyas and the resulting family businesses flourished; choice residential areas such as Singapore’s Katong were packed with Peranakan mansions.
It wasn’t to last. In the interwar years, the British loosened the immigration rules to allow migrants to bring their wives with them, and some members of an older generation of migrants were, by then, giving their children a Western education. The Baba-Nyonyas became far less useful to the new blood from China and were simply outnumbered by them. They were also viewed with disdain by the mainstream community as being not properly Chinese. The Baba-Nyonya identity has now been largely subsumed into a wider Chinese one, though in recent decades their culture has at least been showcased in museums and their culinary heritage, at least, shows no signs of going away.
Although Chinese traders began visiting the region in the seventh century, the first significant community established itself in Melaka in the fifteenth century. However, the ancestors of most of the Chinese now living in Malaysia – ethnic Hakka, and migrants from Teochew (Chaozhou) and Hokkien (Fujian) – emigrated from southeastern China during the nineteenth century to work in the burgeoning tin-mining industry and, later, rubber and oil plantations. A large number came as labourers, but they swiftly graduated to shopkeeping and business ventures, both in established towns like Melaka and fast-expanding centres like KL, Penang and Kuching. Chinatowns developed throughout the region, even in Malay strongholds like Kota Bharu and Kuala Terengganu, while Chinese traditions, religious festivities, theatre and music became an integral part of a wider multiracial culture. On the political level, the Malaysian Chinese are well represented in parliament and occupy around a quarter of current ministerial positions. By way of contrast, Chinese Bruneians are not automatically classed as citizens and suffer significant discrimination at the hands of the majority Malay population. Singapore’s nineteenth-century trade boom drew many Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien and Hakka traders and labourers, who established a Chinatown on the south bank of the Singapore River. Today, the Chinese are the most economically successful racial group in Singapore.
One physical reminder of the Chinese presence in major cities is the presence of kongsi (literally “company”) or clan halls (also called clan houses or associations). Each once functioned like a clan or regional club, providing help and protection for newly arrived migrants, who naturally tended to band together with others from the same part of China. At times they could also be a focus for community rivalry, as in the case of the Penang riots. Many clan halls are excellent examples of traditional southern Chinese architecture, incorporating courtyards, shrines and sometimes living quarters.
The second largest non-bumiputra group in Malaysia, the Indians, first arrived as traders more than two thousand years ago, although few settled; only in the early fifteenth century did a small community of Indians (from present-day Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka) become based in Melaka. Like the majority of Chinese, however, the first large wave of Indians – Tamil labourers – arrived as indentured workers in the nineteenth century, to build the roads and rail lines and work on the European-run rubber estates. An embryonic entrepreneurial class from North India soon followed, and set up businesses in Penang and Singapore; mostly Muslim, these merchants and traders found it easier to assimilate themselves within the existing Malay community than did the Hindu Tamils.
Although Indians comprise under a tenth of the populations of Malaysia and Singapore, their impact is widely felt. The Hindu festival of Thaipusam is celebrated annually at KL’s Batu Caves by upwards of a million people (with smaller but still significant celebrations in Singapore and Penang); the festival of Deepavali is a national holiday; and Indians dominate certain professional areas like medicine and law. And then, of course, there’s the food – very few Malaysians these days could do without a daily dose of roti canai, so much so that this Indian snack has been virtually appropriated by Malay and Chinese cafés and hawkers.
Most of the Orang Asli – the indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia – belong to three distinct groups, within which various tribes are related by geography, language or physiological features. It’s difficult to witness much of Orang Asli life as they largely live off the beaten track, though touristed communities at Taman Negara and the Cameron Highlands can be visited. To learn more about the disappearing Asli culture, the best stop is KL’s Orang Asli Museum.
The largest group, the Senoi (the Asli word for “person”), number about forty thousand. They live in the large, still predominantly forested interior, within the states of Perak, Pahang and Kelantan, and divide into two main tribes, the Semiar and the Temiar. These still adhere to a traditional lifestyle, following animist customs in marriage ceremonies and burial rites. On the whole they follow the practice of shifting cultivation (a regular rotation of jungle clearance and crop planting), although government resettlement drives have persuaded many to settle and farm just one area.
The two thousand or so Semang live in the northern areas of the Peninsula. They comprise six distinct, if small, tribes, related to each other in appearance – most are dark-skinned and curly-haired – and traditionally shared a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. However, most Semang nowadays live in settled communities and work within the cash economy, either as labourers or selling jungle produce in markets. Perhaps the most frequently seen Semang tribe are the Batek, who live in and around Taman Negara.
The third group, the so-called Aboriginal Malays, live in an area roughly south of the Kuala Lumpur–Kuantan road. Some tribes in this category, like the Jakun and the Semelais who live around the lakes of the southern interior, vigorously retain their animist religion and artistic traditions despite living in permanent villages near Malay communities, and working within the regular economy.
One of Malaysia’s other Orang Asli tribes, the Lanoh in Perak are sometimes regarded as Semang, their language is closer to that of the Temiar. Another group, the semi-nomadic Che Wong, of whom just a few hundred survive on the slopes of Gunung Benom in central Pahang, still depend on foraging to survive, and live in temporary huts made from bamboo and rattan. Two more groups, the Jah Hut of Pahang and the Mah Meri of Selangor, are particularly fine carvers, and it’s possible to buy their sculptures at regional craft shops.
In direct contrast to the Peninsula, indigenous groups make up a larger chunk of the population in Sarawak, which stands at 2.8 million. Although the Chinese comprise 29 percent of the state’s population and the Malays and Indians around 24 percent together, the remaining 47 percent are made up of various indigenous Dyak groups – a word derived from the Malay for “upcountry”. Certain general aspects of their culture – for instance, the importance of bronze drums and reburial ceremonies – might indicate that the Dyak arrived in the region from mainland Southeast Asia around 2000 years ago.
The largest Dyak groups are the Iban, Bidayuh, Melanau, Kayan, Kenyah, Kelabit and Penan tribes. They have very distinct cultures as well as a few commonalities. Many live in longhouses along the rivers or on hillsides in the mountainous interior, and maintain a proud cultural legacy that draws on animist religion, arts and crafts production and jungle skills.
The Iban make up nearly thirty percent of Sarawak’s population. Originating hundreds of miles south of present-day Sarawak, in the Kapuas Valley in Kalimantan, the Iban migrated north in the sixteenth century, and came into conflict over the next two hundred years with the Kayan and Kenyah tribes and, later, the British. Nowadays, Iban longhouse communities are found in the Batang Ai river system in the southwest and along Batang Rajang and tributaries. These communities are quite accessible, their inhabitants always hospitable and keen to demonstrate such aspects of their culture as traditional dance and textile weaving. In their time, the Iban were infamous head-hunters – some longhouses are still decorated with heads taken in battle long ago.
Unlike most Dyak groups, the Bidayuh traditionally lived away from the rivers, building their longhouse on the sides of hills. Culturally, the most southerly of Sarawak’s indigenous groups are similar to the Iban, although in temperament they are much milder and less gregarious, keeping themselves to themselves in their inaccessible homes on Sarawak’s mountainous southern border with Kalimantan.
The Melanau are a coastal people, living north of Kuching in a region dominated by mangrove swamps. Many Melanau, however, now live in towns, preferring the kampung-style houses of the Malays to the elegant longhouses of the past. They are expert fishermen and cultivate sago as an alternative to rice. The Kelabit people live on the highland plateau separating north Sarawak from Kalimantan. Like the Iban, they live in longhouses and maintain a traditional lifestyle, but differ from some other groups in being Christian.
The semi-nomadic Penan traditionally live in temporary lean-tos or small huts in the upper Rejang and Limbang areas of Sarawak. They rely, like some Orang Asli groups in the Peninsula, on hunting and gathering and collecting jungle produce for sale in local markets. In recent years, however, the state government has tried to resettle the Penan in small villages – a controversial policy not entirely unconnected with the advance of logging in traditional Penan land.
Most of the other groups in Sarawak fall into the all-embracing ethnic classification of Orang Ulu (people of the interior), who inhabit remote inland areas, further north than the Iban, along the upper Rajang, Balui and Linau rivers. The most numerous, the Kayan and the Kenyah, are closely related and in the past often teamed up to defend their lands from the invading Iban. But they also have much in common with their traditional enemy, since they are longhouse-dwellers, animists and shifting cultivators.
Sabah’s population of around 3.8 million encompasses remarkable diversity, with forty-plus ethnic groups, some of which are interrelated; between them, they speak over eighty different languages and dialects. The Kadazan/Dusun and their various subgroups account for around a third of the population. Traditionally agriculturists (the word Dusun means “orchard”, while the “Kadazan” part of the name was originally preferred by those from the Penampang area), they inhabit the western coastal plains and parts of the interior. Other Kadazan/Dusun branches include the Lotud of Tuaran and the Rungus of the Kudat Peninsula, whose longhouses – some characterized by walls that bulge outwards – are all that remain of the group’s longhouse-building tradition. Although most Kadazan/Dusun are now Christians, remnants of their animist past are still evident, most obviously in the harvest festival, or Kaamatan, when their bobohizans (priestesses) perform rituals to honour the bambaazon, or rice spirit.
The mainly Muslim Bajau tribe, who drifted over from the southern Philippines some two hundred years ago, has overtaken the Chinese as Sabah’s second largest ethnic group, accounting for around a tenth of the population. Their penchant for piracy once earned them the sobriquet “sea gypsies”, though nowadays they are either fisher-folk or agriculturalists noted for their horsemanship and buffalo rearing. The Bajau live in the northwest of Sabah, where they annually appear on horseback at Kota Belud’s market, as well as in Semporna and the islands offshore.
Sabah’s third sizeable indigenous tribe, the Murut, inhabit the area south of Keningau. Their name means “hill people”, though some prefer to be known by their individual tribal names, such as Timugon, Tagal and Nabai. The Murut traditionally farm rice and cassava by a system of shifting cultivation. Their head-hunting days are over, but they retain other cultural traditions, such as constructing brightly adorned huts to house the graves and belongings of the dead.