Neither Pussy nor Well:

ORIGINS OF THE NAME KUCHING

“I remain surprised, however, that one of the most debated, and contentious, issues in the history of Kuching is, perhaps, the most trivial issue of all – the origins of its name.”

Until his retirement, ‘Ang Mo Kiah Lor’ taught Political Culture and Southeast Asian Politics in an Australian university. He has written extensively on the history of Sarawak, with a focus on exploring the nature of Brooke rule.  Since moving to live in Kuching, his life has been devoted entirely to pleasure.

During the past 27 years I have visited Kuching more than 30 times. Initially, my research into Sarawak’s political history drew me. Since my retirement, it has been the city’s own charms, and the friendship of many of its inhabitants, which draw me here. Finally, I succumbed – I am moving to live here. In more ways than one, I am coming home.

I well remember my first, anxious, trip at the beginning of my PhD research, in 1991. The then director of the Sarawak Museum, Peter Kedit, had offered to meet me at the airport. “How did you know who I was?” I asked following his confident interception of me at the exit. “You’re the only European on the flight”, he smiled.

As he drove me down Jalan Tun Haji Openg past the (old) Museum, where I would be doing my research, and towards the Astana, the seat of those very Rajahs (kings) whose power I hoped to understand, my project in all its elegant, abstract complexity suddenly seemed alarmingly concrete.

All scholars hope to contribute to the total knowledge that people have about our subjects and I hope that I have done so. I remain surprised, however, that one of the most debated, and contentious, issues in the history of Kuching is, perhaps, the most trivial issue of all – the origins of its name.

In much of the mid-nineteenth century European writing about Sarawak, Kuching is referred to as Sarawak, just as the capitals of the Brunei, Sambas and Pontianak sultanates were the towns of Brunei, Sambas and Pontianak, respectively. Although there is no direct evidence about how this came about, it appears to have been at James Brooke’s own instigation. It is clear from Brooke’s diaries that, when he arrived in 1839, the settlement was called ‘Kuching’. As he recorded on 21 August, 1839, “Our fleet were in readiness before daylight, and by five o’clock we left Kuching and dropped down the river.” By 1846, when this account was published, with James’s support, it was accompanied by a footnote which reports that ‘Kuching’ was the “old name for the town of Sarawak.” Similarly, when Hugh Low published his account of Sarawak in 1848 (referring in its sub-title to “H. H. the Rajah Brooke”!) he recorded that the “town is situated on the river of the same name, and was called by the natives Kuching; but the name of the river [Sarawak] is now universally employed also to designate the town.” The Anglican missionary, Mrs McDougall, wrote to her son, Charley, of her arrival in the town in 1847, “The town of Sarawak is so called after the main river on which it stands: but its proper name is Kuching, from a streamlet or feeder, which enters the Sarawak just below the fort, and bears this name Kuching, which in Malay means a cat …”

Let us look first at the source and meaning of the name ‘Kuching’, before we consider why Rajah James wanted ‘Kuching’ to be abandoned for in favour of ‘Sarawak’.

As Mrs McDougall told young Charley, ‘kuching’ in the Bahasa Melayu (Malay Language) of the Malay Peninsula and, subsequently, of the Federation of Malaysia means ‘cat’. Following the creation of Malaysia in 1963, therefore, Kuching became increasingly known as ‘Cat City’. The problem with assuming that Kuching city is named after cats is that the word for cat in the local dialect of Malay, Basa Sarawak, is pusak or pusa’.

Other language groups in modern Sarawak have also made claims to the name ‘Kuching’. Sarawak and the adjacent areas of Kalimantan have long been settled by Chinese people. The ancestors of the Hakka Chinese community, who dominated the small-scale mining and farming sectors prior to federation, were invited into Sambas, adjacent to Sarawak, in 1710. A Hakka community had settled in upper Sarawak prior to James Brooke arrival in 1839, while the original temple dedicated to Tua Pek Kong at the end of Main Bazaar and Temple Street is also reported to pre-date Brooke’s arrival. The river at the site of Kuching, notwithstanding its distance from the sea, is still affected by the tide. Surely any population settling the area would have needed a source of potable water. No coincidence then, surely, that ‘ku ching’ means, in Chinese, “old well”. Of course it does! It stands to reason that those early Chinese would have named their settlement after such an essential resource, after their ku ching.

One problem with the ‘old well’ explanation is that Kuching was originally settled in the 1820s by the Pengiran Indera Makhota (a high-ranking official of the Brunei sultanate) and his followers. The small Chinese population in the town that predated Brooke post-dated the Bruneis. The story draws currency, however, from the fact that, were a Chinese settled at Kuching to write of his where-a-bouts to a compatriot, the Mandarin characters which represent the sound, kuching, mean in Chinese, ‘old well’: the tyranny of coincidence!

“The story draws currency, however, from the fact that, were a
Chinese settled at Kuching to write of his where-a-bouts to a compatriot, the
Mandarin characters which represent the sound, kuching, mean in Chinese,
‘old well’: the tyranny of coincidence!”

On my last visit to Kuching I fell into conversation with an Indian man who was very well-informed about the (still under-researched) history of the Sikh community in Sarawak. As our conversation, fuelled by tiger beer, spilled into the more general history of Sarawak, my new friend was surprised that I did not know that James Brooke had been born in Kochi, the city in Kerala, India, that had been known to European colonialists as Cochin. Notwithstanding my insistence that James Brooke’s birth and early career in India were well documented by historians and did not include reference to Cochin, my interlocutor could not be swayed. We were dealing, I realised more slowly than I ought (the effect of all those beers) with a case of reverse-engineered logic: my friend explained that, just as many Europeans, in exploring the ‘new world’, had brought familiar names from the ‘old world’ – New York, for example, New Amsterdam, New Caledonia – so James Brooke had named his little capital after his birthplace, Cochin.

In some ways, perhaps, these three different explanations represent important truths: first, the increasing importance of the Peninsula to Sarawak following 1963, and the subsequent extension of Peninsula Malay language into the State; and, further, the understandable importance to the Chinese and Indian communities of representing their own lengthy and highly significant associations with the city. The origins of the name, Kuching, lie, however, in the long-enduring Malay and Dayak settlement patterns of the pre-European era, and in Mrs McDougall’s identification of a now-vanished geographical feature, Sungei Kuching.

Traditionally, Malays in Borneo, as elsewhere in the archipelago, preferred to settle on rivers at the mouths of tributaries (as did many of their Dayak relatives). This settlement pattern facilitated the Malays taxing trade and other river traffic on both water-ways, and provided alternative flight paths in the event of overwhelming attack. Since there would, obviously, have been many settlements on the main river, many towns and villages took their names from the tributaries on which they were located. Only when a settlement was the most important on the river, would it be given the same name as the river – for example, the towns/rivers/kingdoms of Brunei and Sambas.

Kuching was settled on the confluence of the Sarawak River and its now-vanished tributary, Sungei Kuching. Subsequently filled in, Sungei Kuching’s name is recalled still by that of the hill that rises above the temple, Bukit Mata Kuching (Cat’s Eye Hill). The name of the hill provides the clue to that the creek was not named for cats. Mata Kuching is a Malay name for the fruit now known as longan, groves of which were to be found growing in the area. (And the free-flowing Sungei Kuching, with its origins up the hill, was a source of potable water which precluded the need for anyone to have a ching, whether ku or new.)

Of course all things, in this post-modern age, are equal, and so the origins of Kuching’s name might derive from any one of these coincidences: that Kuching means cat in Bahasa Melayu; that it reads as ‘old well’ in Mandarin; that it sounds like Cochin in India; or that the original settlement was, indubitably, located at the foot of Bukit Mata Kuching and on the banks of Sungei Kuching, where could be found groves of Mata Kuching trees. You choose.

The question remains as to why Rajah James wanted to change the settlement’s name from Kuching to Sarawak, with all the potential for confusion between town, river and country which that change created. ‘Kuching’ in 1839 was just one small settlement among many on the Sarawak River. By identifying the seat of his residence with the country that he ruled after 1841, however, the Rajah was proclaiming the pre-eminence both of the capital of his kingdom and of his status as its ruler. In this he was emulating his royal neighbours (and rivals). To the northeast his territories abutted those of the Sultan of Brunei, who lived in his capital, Brunei, on the Brunei River, while to the southwest his boundary ran along that of the Sultan of Sambas, who lived in his capital, Sambas, on the Sambas River.

Typically impatient with such arcane concerns, Rajah Charles was having none of it, declaring in 1872 the name of Sarawak’s capital to be, unambiguously, Kuching – Cat City.