Heritage Snippets of Sarawak
By LIM Tze Tshen
IN SARAWAK, dragons exist not only in local stories and legends, such as those fascinating accounts told by Dr Monica Janowski lately in this special column of DayakDaily. For many years, they also found their ways into certain shops along the Carpenter and Padungan Streets in downtown Kuching. These are known collectively as the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) shops.
Many of the old shops were adorned with an imposing wooden medicinal cabinet known as ‘bai-zi-gui’ (literally, hundreds little drawers). With patience, you will find among the drawers, one with the label signifying that it was the place where the ‘long-gu’ (dragon bones) and ‘long-ya’ (dragon teeth, or ‘long-chi’) were kept.
According to Ben-cao-gang-mu (literally, Herbs Catalogue), a 16th century Chinese pharmacopoeia, ‘dragon bones’ and ‘teeth’ were harvested from the ground soils and caves along cliffs and valleys in China.
Their harvest and uses in medicine have a long history since at least the later period of the Han dynasty—that is, around 220 AD.
Over the years, numerous sophisticated preparation methods had been developed for these bones and teeth from the ‘dragons’ to be used as effective cures for a variety of ailments. As medicine, they were believed to be a remedy for some skin diseases and superficial wounds. They can also be used as a panacea for mental illnesses and the many physical disorders thought to be caused by a disturbed mind.
Late 19th century scientific investigations revealed that the ‘dragon bones’ and ‘teeth’ sold in TCM shops were in fact the fossilised remains of prehistoric animals, mostly large mammals, and the places of origin of these fossils were invariably from China. Such investigations also led to the discovery of important prehistoric human and animal sites in northern China, most notably the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian in the 1920s.
One of the TCM shop bone collections brought to Europe from China by early naturalist-explorers found its way to a university in Munich, and it left an undeletable influence in the life of a young PhD student there in the 1920s—the protagonist of this article, Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald (1902–1982).
Von Koenigswald’s Sarawak visit and museum records
After Munich, employed by the Dutch East Indies Geological Survey in Bandung, he went on to Java. In due course, he made his name known through the discoveries on that island of a series of spectacular human fossils in the 1930s–40s, especially from the Sangiran area. He became an authority on prehistoric human and animal fossils in the region through years of systematic studies of the ancient faunas. Mainly because of this, Tom Harrisson (1911–1976), in his capacity as curator of Sarawak Museum, invited him to visit some of the sites the museum teams were working on in Sarawak.
Von Koenigswald’s fateful visit to Sarawak in February 1958 was co-incidentally a significant year in the annal for Bornean prehistoric human and animal studies.
Immediately before his visit, the ‘Deep Skull’ (the oldest known modern human Homo sapiens skeletal remains known in Borneo and in Malaysia—and now on display at the Borneo Cultures Museum) was found by a Sarawak Museum field excavation team in the West Mouth of Niah Cave under the ever-watchful eyes of their field leader, Barbara Harrisson (1922–2015). Visiting the archaeological sites in Niah was von Koenigswald’s raison d’etre for coming to Sarawak. So, after a brief stay in Segu Bungalow in Kuching, he went to Niah together with his Sarawak host, Tom Harrisson.
With the partially excavated ‘Deep Skull’ in front of them, surrounded by the ever-present chirpings emitting from the huge colonies of cave swiftlets inside the cave, whose sound was much amplified by a spacious cave chamber filled with humid air hyper-saturated with the characteristic smell of guano —as any modern visitor to the cave would justify—one can only imagine what lively discussion and counterargument von Koenigswald would have had with the Harrissons on the scientific importance and potential of Niah archaeological sites.
To many cave palaeontologists, of which the present author is one, there is arguably no better setting to fire the imagination of a curious mind.
A second important finding, not far from the find spot of the ‘Deep Skull’, followed close on the heels of his departure. This time it was a fragment of an elephant tooth—the first (and, so far, the only) evidence of prehistoric elephant known in any controlled excavation sites in Borneo. Alas, this second finding went unnoticed and unrecognised for its scientific significance for almost six long decades until its re-discovery in 2018 by the present author (Two Late Pleistocene Specimens of Asian Elephant, and other Fossil Proboscidea Found in Borneo; Malayan Nature Journal).
Von Koenigswald missed no opportunity to investigate the TCM shop ‘dragon bones’ wherever his globe-trotting research trips led him, from the Chinatown in San Franciso to the bustling streets in Manila. And what good luck he had had—he found the first evidence of prehistoric orangutans from China, and described a previously unknown extinct giant ape (Gigantopithecus) while looking through the bones and teeth in shops in Hong Kong. These interesting stories (and many others related to his fossil research works ranging from China to Africa) were vividly told in his 1956 memoir.
During his brief 1958 stay in Sarawak of less than ten days, he visited some shops in Kuching, Sibu, and Miri. A short article (Fossils from Chinese Drugstores in Borneo) about his findings was published in the December 1958 issue of the Sarawak Museum Journal. He found no evidence that any of the animal fossils on sale were originally from Borneo. The article reiterates the conclusion reached by previous scholars, that the sources of these TCM shop fossils are from China. His note to Tom Harrisson (dated 6th February 1958, the first day of his arrival in Sarawak) was carefully kept in the museum in Kuching, and some of the fossils he bought had even been on display at the museum in the past.
The fossils he left behind for the museum, according to the typescript of his note, included some representative species as remarkable as the giant panda, three-toed horse, giant rhinoceros, and a kind of primitive elephant.
Surprising 2018 discoveries
This rather unusual way of fossil-hunting à la von Koenigswald and some of his academic predecessors fascinated me very much since the time when I knew about the true nature of the ‘dragon bones’ that occasionally appeared in some traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions. With the help of a few like-minded Sarawakian friends, I was able to try out my luck with a number of TCM shops in Kuching and Miri during my year-long stint as a research fellow with the Sarawak Museum Campus project in 2018.
As we found out, many shops no longer keep large stocks of the ‘dragon bones’ and ‘teeth’ since they are seldom prescribed nowadays—it is, therefore, not surprising to find that some younger practitioners do not seem to know about these items.
With good fortune, our fossicking did produce some findings almost as exciting as those made by von Koenigswald 60 years ago at the TCM shops in Sarawak. The shop owners must have thought that my friends and I were in so bad a medical condition that such large quantities of the bones and teeth were needed!
We were so lucky that most of the teeth offered in these shops were relatively complete. And, since teeth are frequently very useful for accurately identifying what mammals are represented, we were able to know the kinds of fossil animals we had bought from the shops. One such treasure we netted included a cheek tooth from an extinct long-limbed, giant hornless relative of the rhinoceros, known generally as paraceratheres.
These animals lived in northern, central, and southern Asia from around 47-23 million years ago. Some paraceratheres, such as Paraceratherium, can reach over 4.5 metres tall at shoulders, and they were among some of the largest land mammals known to have lived on earth.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Puan Nancy Jolhi, director of the Sarawak Museum Department for kindly granting permission to reproduce the images used in this article; Norraha Abdul Rahim, Sitty Nurhamiza Mohd Hamdan, Natasha Nur Amarina Mohamad Kaie, Bonnie Anak Umpi, Nur Faiqah Mohammad, and Mohammad Addery Abdullah of the same museum for facilitating the application and research process.
LIM Tze Tshen is the honorary secretary of the Friends of Sarawak Museum, is a vertebrate palaeontologist and zooarchaeologist. He is reachable through limtzetshenyahoocom.
“Heritage Snippets of Sarawak” is a fortnightly column.
