Melaka, Trishaws and a little Castration

It was in Quebec City that the UN declared Melaka a world heritage site, and -- once again boosting Canadian pride -- this fact is billboarded on the side of a building as you jolt into the historic center of this quite remarkable town in a diesel-belching bus with a suspension the same age as the brick-red, 300-year-old Dutch Stadthuys under which you disembark.  If you are fool enough to show up in the choking heat of a Saturday afternoon without a reservation, you deserve to sweat, hump your luggage from hotel to hotel, and listen to the chorus of “Solly. All full.”

Not knowing anyone like that, we are finally staying in the Cheng Ho Guesthouse (at $23 a night, we are once again pushing our budget above the $20 range: I didn’t realize I married a Princess who would want our OWN bathroom).  It is located in the heart of Chinatown where history reaches back 600 years effortlessly.   We are located directly across from the first mosque built in Melaka, only a few doors down from a Buddhist temple, and around the block from a Daoist Temple, where we have already made friends.

One of the cultural variables that seems to mark Malaysia is the trishaw.  Varying by community, these expensively arcane works of art demonstrate either the endless imaginative ingenuity of the human spirit or the sick obsession with gadgets of the average male: one or the other.   

One rider gave us a tour of his cycle. Of course, all trishaws are required by local ordinance to be entirely covered by a riotous peacock flourish of plastic flowers lit by tiny Christmas-tree LEDs.  With a gesture of pride, our driver showed how his exceeded this minimum standard with coins glued to every surface that would hold glue, a brass civil-war-looking bugle strapped to a handlebar, and six brass, thumb-activated bicycle bells strung under his crossbar.  You might think that six bicycle bells and the glaring gleam of brass would be perfectly adequate to alert pedestrians, but that would be neglecting the culture of trishaw.

A sound system is the true piece de resistance of a Malakan trishaw.  This one featured seat-mounted speakers -- two mid-range and a subwoofer -- powered by a car battery and capable of filling the entire length of the street with classic rock.  That, however, only gets a trishaw rider (not driver – on this they are clear) into the game.  To really compete, the electronic control box by his handlebars must hold an array of switches that trigger ambulance sirens, truck horns and other bits of auditory camouflage.  In cost, a full-decker trishaw runs about the same as a small car, and the competition for outrageous display would make bowerbirds droop their feathers.

A quiet, almost closed chapter in history came wonderfully alive for us with a visit to the Cheng Ho Museum and learned what  a prominent role Mekaka played in the Chinese hegemony over the seas in the 15^th century.

Cheng Ho was a eunuch who rose to become the admiral of the largest fleet ever to sail the seas: in fact, at the end of Cheng Ho’s explorations, it would not be for another 500 years that such an armada was assembled.

From his lavishly appointed stateroom on his immense treasure ship (140 meters long, 60 meters wide), Ho led 28,000 sailors in more than 200 ships on seven voyages of diplomacy and exploration through much of the 15^th century.  Some of these ships carried treasure to be distributed to the potentates of the new countries they met; hospital ships carried 400 doctors; provisioning ships grew fresh vegetables to prevent scurvy; fighting ships protected the armada. 

However, Cheng Ho paid a price for his eminence.  And he paid it with his testicles.

In order to rise in the hierarchy of the Ming dynasty, a man could not threaten the Emperor’s dominance over his 2,000 concubines.  Being a wary sort, the Emperor suspected that the mere possession of working male parts might seem attractive to at least a few of the 1,999 women he was not satisfying on any one day.  The price of admission into the halls of power was a man’s “precious,” his penis and his testicles.

This might seem like punishment, but in fact it was very costly to be castrated and only wealthy families could offer their 13-year-old sons to the ranks of the Eunuchs.  The operation was done with a relatively small (but hopefully sharp) knife, cutting all evidence of maleness smoothly from the body.  The remaining urinary hole was filled with a metal plug while the young lad spent a very painful three days of fasting.  After three days, the plug was pulled: if he could urinate, he would live.  If no urine passed, he would die.  Two of three died.

It’s interesting to note that the eunuchs would have their “precious” hermetically sealed into a jar they carried with them throughout life to be presented at appropriate occasions and buried with them at death.  A man buried without his precious could not hope to fool the gods into believing he was a complete man, and risked being re-incarnated as a “she-mule” whose lot in life can only be surmised.

The Melaka River runs right through the city.  

Where it meets the sea the great empires 

of the east and west have met for centuries.