During our school days, we were feed with so much of Malacca history that it was difficult to differentiate fact from fiction. Malacca was portrayed as the place where history began. There was this unknown prince from Palembang (Sumatra) who had a tiff with his relative, ran off to Singapore and after killing his host in Singapore, fled to a small village in the mainland. He saw its potential and settled there. Eventually he developed the place to a great entre'port and from then on, there was no turning back. Malacca became a great empire under several 'great and visionary rulers'.
However, the Dutch, the Portuguese came and wanted a piece of the flourishing business. After some bloody battles, Malacca fell to these foreign invaders. An interesting 'information' I got when attending a refresher History course a couple of years back was that Malacca was attacked 19 times but the Portuguese failed to take the city. Malacca had 20,000 mercenary soldiers (Javanese and Parsi), 150,000 local soldiers, 400 cannons and 20 elephants (impenetrable) whereas the Portuguese only had 800 soldiers, 600 Gujerati soldiers, 19 ships and 40 cannons. Yet, Malacca fell - due to betrayal. The 'lecturer' based his lesson from the book "Sejarah Melayu". The lecturer surmised that the Portuguese sacked Malacca and used the stones from the great palaces and homes of people to build the A' Fomosa. How accurate these statistics are is yet to be ascertained. "Sejarah Melayu" made no mention of stone palaces nor great stone buildings. Buildings then were mostly timber.
(The Portuguese Fort A' Fomosa)
(Part of Dutch buildings - the Stadhuys)
The British too wanted a piece of the economic pie, and ousted the other two.Thus what remained today are the Stadhuys or Dutch buildings and the fort known as the A' Fomosa built by the Portuguese. When the children were very young, we made an education tour of the town. However, I doubt it made much impression on their young minds.
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