Bisaya Fables

OlD Borneo Names

Place Names in 16th and 17th Borneo by Jan O.R. Beck in Imago Mundi vol. 16, 1962 The coast of Borneo served as anchorage for ships going to and from China. However, the area had its resources. Suvarnahumi  (Land of Gold) an Indian term, may have included Borneo and other parts of the western archipelago. […]

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Circumcision

Circumcision We were riding a bus in the eighth month of pregnancy from Kuching to Sibu. The ride was uneventful and we arrived at our hotel ready for a shower and sleep. The next day we would go exploring. At about 8 p.m. my wife went into labour. I called the front desk and asked

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Portuguese Borneo

Durate Barbosa This small essay describes Borneo before 1518 from the point of view of the Portuguese. This was after the Brunei incursion into Santubong in ~1512. The Isles of Borneo “Further on towards China, from the Island of Solor (Sulu) there is another island as well furnished with victuals, inhabited by heathen with a

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The Hakka of Borneo

This article was extracted from The Hakkas of Malaysia to 1970 by Phin-Keong Voon from Malaysian Journal of Chinese Studies 2024 (13)137-59. © 2024 Reprinted with permission. The entire article may be found at http://doi.org/10.6993/MJCS.202406_13(1).0003 The Hakka of Borneo The ancestral homeland of the Hakkas was the uplands of the Guangdong-Fujian-Jiangxi border region. Hence the

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