Legends of Kuching: in conversation with the craftspeople of Sarawak

Malaysia’s island region of Sarawak is a treasure trove of relics and rarities. Take a stroll down Carpenter Street in Sarawak’s capital city of Kuching and you’ll see stalls selling wood carvings, colourful beadwork, blankets and the woven mats that line the floor of traditional tribal longhouses. Nearby, at the waterfront, a bazaar of handicraft booths in the historic Steamship Building sells jewellery, paintings and scarves created by some of the country’s leading artisans. They’re guardians of Sarawak’s heritage, preserving skills that date back thousands of years and that might otherwise be lost in the rush to embrace 21st-century technology. 

The potter: Nabilah Abdullah

Nabilah Abdullah has been sculpting with clay for nearly 20 years, from one of a dozen workshops in the Sarawak Ceramic Centre, just to the north of Kuching. Nabilah spends each morning making new pieces and each afternoon selling them from her shop, Ally Clay Craft, in Kuching’s Steamship Building. Works in progress fill every shelf of Nabilah’s workshop. There are containers of clay beads, pots waiting to be fired, bowls about to be glazed. I look at a row of elegant leaf-shaped brooches, deep green and highly polished. “They’re made by pressing real leaves into the clay and making a unique imprint,” says Nabilah. “I take inspiration from nature — the rainforest is my supermarket.”

But Nabilah’s consuming passion is a black, amphora-like pot. Evidence of pots like this has been uncovered in the Niah Caves, an archaeological hotspot in the north of the region where a skull was found that dates back around 60,000 years. Nabilah was inspired to create her own following a visit to the Borneo Cultures Museum.  

“It was used to cook rice — the rounded bottom allowed the fire to heat it evenly,” she explains. “I travelled three hours into the rainforest to learn how to make these pots from an old man in a longhouse.” She shows me how it’s done, pushing a smooth, spherical stone down into a cylinder of clay, then beating its outside with a wooden paddle called a pemaluk until it takes on the round shape of the stone. She’s doing this just as her ancestors would’ve done thousands of years ago, following the same process and using the same tools. The only difference is that the pot will be finished in a kiln rather than an open fire, because fire smoke is far too polluting. 

“Tradition is so important, it marks where we are from,” explains Nabilah. “Our ancestors were very clever and we mustn’t lose that wisdom. If I don’t do this and show others how to do it, the art will be lost forever. It’s my mission to preserve these skills for future generations.” 

The songket weaver: Ramtiniwati Ramlee

Ramtiniwati Ramlee is one of Sarawak’s top songket weavers. Her company, Seri Gedong Songket, operates from a pair of wood-slatted buildings in her hometown of Gedong, 90 minutes south east of Kuching. She employs 10 women, all of them playing a key role in preserving this traditional craft. Songket is a fabric woven from cotton and incorporates patterns using gold or silver threads — the name derives from the Malay word meaning ‘to hook’, a reference to the way a weaver hooks a section of the base threads and weaves the gold or silver thread through the gap. It’s a luxurious material that features in important festivals and events, typically in the form of a sarong — or sampin — worn by men. 

Ramtiniwati’s workshop is a hive of activity. There are 10 stages involved in making songket — from dyeing the yarn to picking out the chosen patterns. I watch a woman sitting on the floor at a wooden frame containing rows of spinning bobbins. Another works at a rickety-looking loom the size of a bed, weaving bright yellow floral patterns onto a paler yellow fabric. A third is hunched over a table, connecting pieces of offset thread so they can be reused. 

Ramtiniwati learnt how to make songket in Kuching before returning home to set up her business. “When orders became overwhelming, I got the community to help — and that became this,” she tells me, proudly. None of the workers had any weaving skills before, so Ramtiniwati had to train each of them from scratch. The team includes several members of her own family. “That’s one of my sisters at the loom and my sister-in-law is connecting the threads,” Ramtiniwati explains. 

I browse some of the finished products, hanging on racks around the edge of the workshop. There’s a black sampin with silver thread and a white one with gold. Another contains traditional floral motifs of the Iban tribe, based on ferns and branches. It can take up to five months to create the most intricate of pieces. Ramtiniwati uses her brother as a rather embarrassed-looking model to show me how the sampin is worn, wrapped around the waist and over the shoulder in a complicated series of tucks and folds. 

“Songket was becoming a dying art because most of the remaining weavers were very old,” explains Ramtiniwati. “I thank God I can do this to keep songket alive — and offer a livelihood to the local community.”

The keringkam embroiderer: Danny Zulkifli

From the outside, you’d never guess this house in a residential suburb of Kuching is home to a sought-after embroiderer, tasked with creating pieces for very important people. Go inside, however, and you can well believe it. Danny Zulkifli’s sitting room is uber-elegant, and the man himself is impeccably turned out with a forest-green sarong around his middle and a traditional songkok hat on his head. 

Danny is a master of keringkam, a form of embroidery brought to Sarawak by Indian merchants three centuries ago. Thin gold- or silver-plated ribbons are hand embroidered onto rubia gauze fabric to make elaborately adorned headscarves worn by women to weddings and other special occasions. 

He shows me how it’s done, picking up a flattened needle and working it down and up through a piece of blood-red material stretched across a frame. This is his latest commission, a scarf with motifs of winding tendrils, flowers and a geometric wave pattern at the edges. “I started doing it 15 years ago when I was teaching dance choreography,” explains Danny. “I wanted my students to wear traditional dress with keringkam but I couldn’t find any — so I decided to learn myself.”

Each scarf requires up to 35 spools of expensive plated thread and the most intricate scarves can take a year to create. “I don’t call it embroidery — I call it artwork,” says Danny. Ten years ago, he was one of just 25 keringkam artisans in Sarawak, and most of the others were much older than him. “There was a danger the art would become extinct.” However, four years ago the Sarawak government launched an initiative to train young embroiderers, and Danny was recruited to help.

Innovation has a part to play in the preservation of this centuries-old craft. Danny has incorporated keringkam into fashion items like luxury handbags and shoes, off-the-shelf shirts and dresses; he even recently embroidered Miss Malaysia’s gown for the Miss World competition. But at heart he’s a traditionalist, and all too aware how easily ancient skills can be forgotten.