By Marlynda Meraw
MUKAH, Feb 21: Places oftentimes inherit their names from landscapes or circumstances. Others draw meaning from stories that have drifted across generations and place. Mukah, on the other hand, stands somewhere in between; its name rooted in a telling that remained open to interpretation.
Mukah—a word that sounds close to the Malay word muka (face), is said to have come from precisely that: the moment when those first arrivals pushed through dense jungle and encountered something inexplicable staring back at them.
Whether it was shadows and bark conspiring into the shape of a countenance, or something else entirely, no one could say with certainty. But the name held, and Mukah, tucked along the quiet meander of its river in the heart of Sarawak’s central coast, had carried the weight of that first encounter ever since.
Jerunai: Where death found its final form
Mukah was not a town that announced itself loudly. Yet stepping inside Sapan Puloh—a modest, lovingly assembled mini museum whose name simply translated as ‘small house island’, the silence began to hum with history.
Tommy Black Mark Lang, Sapan Puloh’s owner and curator was a soft-spoken man with the considered manner of someone who had spent a great deal of time in the company of objects that remembered.
The Melanau, as Tommy had told the D’Drift team, were not people who took death lightly. Nor did they take rank lightly. These two facts, for a long time, had been inextricable.
According to Tommy, the Melanau community had been once organised into four distinct strata: the sembilan pikul, the highest, followed by tujuh pikul, then tujuh pikul bertirih, and the slaves: the dipen or ulun. These gradations were not merely social abstractions. They were inscribed in the very rituals of life: what sort of jewellery one wore, how one was married, and how one was buried.
For the Melanau aristocracy, death was not a single event. It was to happen twice.
“In the first funeral (of the Melanau aristocrats), the body would be placed in a hanging coffin. A few years later, what remained would be collected and placed on a blue celadon porcelain plate,” explained Tommy.
That plate was then to be lifted to the summit of a burial pole which the Melanau Mukah called the jerunai whereas their cousins in Oya and Dalat knew it as kilirieng. Whatever its name, the pole stood as the final and permanent house of the departed aristocrats.
But a jerunai could not be raised without a cost. And the cost was devastating.
“When they wanted to erect a jerunai, they had to sacrifice two people,” said Tommy.
A man would be buried alive in the hole where the pole was to be erected while a woman would be bound to the back of the pole. The celadon plate, with its precious cargo of bones would be placed at the very top.
“Seeing that the Melanau were sacrificing their own people, the Brunei Sultanate forbade it,” said Tommy. The sight of people sacrificing their own had been too much to sanction, even if they were slaves, the lowest in the Melanau caste.
Of the jerunai that once stood in Mukah, only four remained upright. Three had fallen. Each carried a different history, Tommy noted; some with willing sacrifices while others were forced. The Jerunai Tuan Puteri (princess burial pole) was one that had voluntary sacrifices.
The departed, raised
The Melanau’s hanging coffins too, carry layered meanings. Three reasons governed their use. One was simply generational whereby certain families had always buried their dead this way.
Another was preparatory: the hanging coffin served as a temporary vessel for the aristocratic dead, the first stage before the eventual jerunai. Meanwhile, the third emerged during times of widespread diseases.
“When there was an unusual sickness such as cholera, and the bodies could not be buried, they were placed in hanging coffins,” said Tommy. Villagers would then leave the settlement and move into the forest to avoid the spreading illness.
The coffins often carried carved motifs rich with symbolism. Dragon imagery reflected Chinese cultural influence and was associated with protection and good fortune.
“We believed in the spirit of the dragon,” Tommy said, adding that dragon designs also appeared in healing ceremonies and traditional weddings.
The second design, the crocodile motif carried a warning. The crocodile spirit was believed to demand respect. Killing or consuming one risked misfortune upon a family. Missing belongings were sometimes attributed to crocodile spirits, prompting visits to shamans. During such times, people avoided rivers and forests for fear of being hunted by the crocodile.
The rooster motif represented fate and sacrifice. In cockfighting traditions, a rooster’s strength was judged by its tail and feet, reflecting the Malay proverb tuah ayam nampak di kaki, tuah manusia tiada siapa yang tahu. Roosters were also sacrificed during funerals to appease spirits or to seek knowledge about the condition of the departed in the afterlife.
In these suspended coffins, the Melanau did not simply lay their dead to rest; they held them in between worlds. Tradition, necessity and belief converged in a practice shaped as much by circumstance as by faith.
Each carving told a story beyond ornamentation, revealing how the living understood protection, danger and destiny itself. The dragon guarded, the crocodile warned, and the rooster spoke of fate—symbols that bridged the seen and unseen.
Tugau the fearsome
Not all of Mukah’s stories were about death. Some were simply enormous.
The legend of Tugau belonged to the land itself—not to any one people, though the Melanau claimed him most fiercely. Two versions described his origin, both beginning with an egg. In one, a couple long unable to conceive had found an egg; the wife ate it, and Tugau was born of that mystery. In another, a large egg was simply discovered; cracked open and from it emerged Tugau.
Despite the distinction, both versions agreed on what came next: a man on such staggering proportions that his existence reshaped the landscape of those who encountered him.
Tommy’s descriptions of Tugau emphasised extraordinary strength. When Tugau coughed, the sound carried for miles. When he walked, the ground shuddered beneath him. When he urinated, the force of the stream was enough to shred leaves from their branches. It is the sort of mythology that does not simply describe a large man, but described the terror and awe of forces that exceed human scale.
The legend crossed ethnic boundaries with ease. The Iban, too, knew of Tugau and, by all accounts, feared him. He was said to have been drawn into the great conflicts along the Rajang River.
In Mukah, Tugau existed somewhere between history and myth, the way the best stories always do.
Where the journey turns again
By mid-afternoon, the light in Mukah has shifted. Heavier, with a light pattering of rain. Tommy had been generous with his hours and his knowledge, and the museum hummed with the particular warmth of a place that is genuinely, stubbornly loved.
There is more of Mukah to encounter for those who strives to look. The town extends beyond Tommy’s mini museum, beyond its burial poles and coffin carvings. There lies the peaceful commerce of the waterfront, the rhythms of a Melanau town that had navigated Sultanates and modernities and remained, somehow, itself.
Tomorrow, the D’Drift team would carry on for another day. Another stretch of road, another turn in the river, another name that carried a story older than the naming. – DayakDaily
