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Administrative jurisdictions of the Bendahara and the Temenggong in Melaka

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English laws, apparently, love fairness. Which sounds nice in theory, but in practice is a bit silly: Everyone gets treated the same, whether you are a duke, a baker, or someone who just fell over a chicken. No priority lounges, no special privileges. Just the cold, relentless hand of the law, judging you like a very serious referee who does not like fun. In Melaka, things were a bit different. The rules were quite straightforward and unhypocritical: If you were in kahyangan or held a high office, you got one set of treatments. If you were just a normal person, you got another. Which, frankly, is how most of us already experience life anyway. The non-overlapping domains were clearly outlined in the Undang-undang Melaka. For instance, the Bendahara, the Type A Judge, is basically in charge of anyone who holds an office, a minister, a knight, a baron, a viscount, an earl, a marquess, a court officer, or the children ...
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Investing capital in people

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Those of you reading this book all have one marketable asset in common, a knowledge of the English language. If you are earning a living this asset probably adds at least $300 a year to your income. Most of you did not acquire this source of income in the ordinary process of growing up. It was the result of an investment by your father and probably a larger investment by the Government. You probably have other assets of this kind too, built up by an investment in your hands or brain. Of course this knowledge is more than an asset enabling you to earn more money. But I am going to concentrate on education and training as an asset, which enables people to do more valuable work. Let us consider, say, a doctor as an investment. A doctor is worth more than a new born baby, though neither of them are normally sold. We can work out the difference that the doctor's skill makes to his earning power in comparison with the baby, and this difference de...
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Udumbara: Polyflowers packaged as a fruit

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By misreading the Lotus Sutra, Chen De'an 陳德安 (b. 538, d. 597), a Tiantai 天台 patriarch, became the first Buddhist scholar-priest to assign a numerical measure (3,000 years) to the rarity of the blooming of udumbara flower 優曇華 , though this figure was probably intended to be rhetorical rather than literal. Chen was apparently no Chakravartin, and, unsurprisingly, no biologist. If we assume that the authors of the Lotus Sutra was aware of the fact that the Udumbaras are actually enclosed within a fruity shell, then perhaps their lament was less about the rarity of the flower itself and more about the difficulty of finding someone sufficiently knowledgeable in botany to recognize that the Udumbara is a hypanthium 内華, and therefore technically distinct from ordinary flowers. Many years ago, C. N. Parkinson, the first Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya, warned ...
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The first few weeks of Penang (1786)

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Spanning 1,723 days between 11 August 1786 and 1 May 1791, Light navigated a delicate path. He did not actively try to con the Sultan, though he could easily have bluffed his way through and closed the negotiation on that faithful Monday 1 , during his first audience with the king. He did not do that. Sultan Abdullah, ever cautious and meticulous, insisted on having Macpherson’s reply translated three times independently, using the versions to cross-check a point he had misread in his initial reading. On 8 July 1786, Sultan Abdullah read the Malay translation to Light and pressed him to sign on the document. The king advised him to set aside the plan of settling in Penang, in order to avoid unnecessary expenses should the project fail to materialize. 2 When the Dato Laksamana pressed Light to confirm the annual payment of tiga laksa rials (or some fixed figure he could commit to) and to explain whether a Plan B...
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