Children Have Various Games
Peculiar To Themselves, Which Are Abandoned As Childish Things At A
Given Age.
Riddles and enigmas occupy a good deal of time among the
higher classes.
Chess also occupies much time, but it is much to be
feared that the vice of gambling stimulated by the Chinese, who have
introduced both cards and dice, is taking the place of more innocent
pastimes.
The Malays, like other Mohammedans, practice polygamy. They are very
jealous, and their women are veiled and to a certain extent secluded;
but they are affectionate, and among the lower classes there is a good
deal of domesticity. Their houses are described in the following
letters. The food of the poorer classes consists mainly of rice and
salt-fish, curries of both, maize, sugar-cane, bananas, and jungle
fruits, cocoa-nut milk being used in the preparation of food as well as
for a beverage. As luxuries they chew betelnut and smoke tobacco, and
although intoxicants are forbidden, they tap the toddy palm and drink
of its easily fermented juice. Where metal finds its way into domestic
utensils it is usually in the form of tin water-bottles and ewers.
Every native possesses a sweeping broom, sleeping mats, coarse or fine,
and bamboo or grass baskets. Most families use an iron pan for cooking,
with a half cocoa-nut shell for a ladle. A large nut shell filled with
palm-oil, and containing a pith wick, is the ordinary Malay lamp. Among
the poor, fresh leaves serve as plates and dishes, but the chiefs
possess china.
The Malay weapons consist of the celebrated kris, with its flame-shaped
wavy blade; the sword, regarded, however, more as an ornament; the
parang, which is both knife and weapon; the steel-headed spear, which
cost us so many lives in the Perak war; matchlocks, blunderbusses, and
lelahs, long heavy brass guns used for the defense of the stockades
behind which the Malays usually fight. They make their own gunpowder,
and use cartridges made of cane.
The Malays, like the Japanese, have a most rigid epistolary etiquette,
and set forms for letter writing. Letters must consist of six parts,
and are so highly elaborate that the scribes who indite them are almost
looked upon as litterateurs. There is an etiquette of envelopes and
wafers, the number and color of which vary with the relative positions
of the correspondents, and any error in these details is regarded as an
insult. Etiquette in general is elaborate and rigid, and ignorant
breaches of it on the part of Europeans have occasionally cost them
their lives.
The systems of government in the Malay States vary in detail, but on
the whole may be regarded as absolute despotisms, modified by certain
rights, of which no rulers in a Mohammedan country can absolutely
deprive the ruled, and by the assertion of the individual rights of
chiefs. Sultans, rajahs, maharajahs, datus, etc., under ordinary
circumstances have been and still are in most of the unprotected States
unable to control the chiefs under them, who have independently levied
taxes and blackmail till the harassed cultivators came scarcely to care
to possess property which might at any time be seized.
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