At last! We’ve finally completed all the filming for our documentary on the Old Johor Sultanate and now it is time to piece it all together. We headed off to Desaru and the Lotus Desaru Beach Resort for its beach bar, since we needed a suitable background for the story of the Drunkren Sultan (Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah III, ruled 1597-1615). Sadly, the beach bar is no longer on the beach but we worked around that! Our friend Gary Ow was with us to do the filming on the Johor River, so now you can see some photos of me and Lawrence in action.
The next day turned out to be the crowning glory of the whole enterprise. Earlier in the year when we were during a recee of Johor Lama, we met a couple of local nature guides from Panz Village who approached us because they saw our camera gear and thought we might be interested in bird photography. It turned out that they were also interested in local history and we had a long and fruitful conversation with them. And, they said they would be able to arrange a boat for us when we needed to do some filming on the Johor River. But they did so much more for us by discovering the location of Kota Kara and Kota Sayong, the two earliest forts of the Johor Sultans in the 16th century. We had failed to find these ourselves and it was good to know we had some new locations to film in. So, on the morning of 2nd July we drove north to Kota Tinggi, then off the beaten track, down signpost-less roads, to the very heart of the birth of the Old Johor Sultanate.
Here is Lawrence with Asiyahtul Husna (Una) at our first destination, the site of Kota Kara. Or is it? When we finished filming here, Una said that there was another location a little further up the river which locals said was also Kota Kara. She would have taken us there as well, but we had driven along a very rough road to get this far and decided that what we just shot here was so pretty and we still had more to fit in today. So much of history in Johor seems to have been lost so we settled for this being Kota Kara! The Great Melakan Sultanate ended when Sultan Mahmud Shah 1 was kicked out of Melaka by the Portuguese in 1511. His son Alauddin Riayat Shah II became the first Sultan of Johor and eventually settled here in Kota Kara in 1528-1535.
In 1535, Kota Kara was attacked by the Portuguese and Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah II moved his base upstream to Kota Sayong before finally moving his capital back much further downstream to Johor Lama in 1540. To access Kota Sayong, we drove into a field and into another world. Here there were four tomb sites, each with a modern covering for protection, and each connected by a road system marked out by bricks. It was a proper historical site, but you won’t find it on Google Maps!
It is impossible to give you a sense of the vastness of this site from these photos. It is clearly recognised officially given this standard information plaque, yet there are no directional signs from the road. The tomb sites are known as Makam 7, Makam 12, Makam 1 and Makam 2, and I think the numbers refer to the number of tombs. This must be Makam 12 as it was the largest of the structures here.
Our other guide, Shahrool Anuar (Nuar) took it upon himself to tidy up the grave site a little. I had seen grave stones covered in yellow clothe before, indicative of royal status, but I had not seen yellow-painted grave stones. Nuar informed us that these were Acheh-style grave stones, indeed it is believed that the Achehnese brought Islam to Johor. There is nothing to tell you who is buried here, but the larger and more eleborate the grave stone, the higher status the occupant of the grave.
We resisted shooting our film by these tombs, as much of our other material relates to mausoleums and grave sites! That’s the problem when there is so little physical evidence to match the history of Johor. So, we were guided further into the forest to the banks of the Sayong River for the filming work. Here there were monkeys scampering in the trees and the moaning sound of industrial machinery in the distance.
Our final destination was back in Johor Lama for the boat ride up the Johor River. If you visit the museum at Kota Johor Lama, you will see a map on the wall showing all the forts used by the Johor Sultans as they moved up and down the river, constantly being attacked for the wealth they had developed. Our guides were taking Lawrence to Bukit Seluyut, a location we had failed to reach by land earlier this year.
Bukit Seluyut was the location of a fort from 1564-1573, and is the burial site of Sultan Muzaffar Shah II (ruled 1564-1570) and his unfortunate successor Sultan Abdul Jalil Shah 1 who ruled for just one year and died (was killed???) at the age of 10.
There is also a burial site here for Seri Maharaja Tun Isap Masai, the grandfather of Tun Seri Lanang who is the author of the Malay Annals. Tun Seri Lanang was born in Seluyut in 1565 and became the Bendahara of Johor under the rule of several sultans. His Malay Annals are considered to be part fact, part fiction, but nevertheless provide an important written account of the history of the Sultans of Melaka and Johor.
So, after hacking their way through the jungle to reach Bukit Seluyut, the explorers returned to Johor Lama by boat, thankful to reach another piece of local history before it disappears. And also thankful not to have fallen into the Johor River through the rickety wooden jetties.
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