Japanese troops were met with little resistance when they landed on the island of Borneo in January 1942. Though British North Borneo had its own police force, there was no navy or army designated to protect it from invasion. Jesselton, present-day Kota Kinabalu, quickly surrendered, and the whole region became the territory of the Empire of Japan. Two large prisoner of war camps were set up on the island to detain British and Australian soldiers captured during the Battle of Singapore. A memorial now stands at Ranau, near the foothills of Kinabalu, where prisoners were forced to march from Sandakan to Kota Kinabalu along the eastern slopes of the mountain, over two hundred kilometres away. I’ve visited the memorial twice, once in the rainy season, once in the dry season. Half hidden at the top of a set of stone steps, a terraced peace garden has been planted with native Australian and English plants and flowers. Pale yellow roses and scarlet bottlebrush trees grow on the hillside overlooking rice paddies and banana trees.
By the time the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the island of Borneo lay in devastation, all major cities and airports bombed. The North Borneo Chartered Company could not afford the cost of rebuilding infrastructure, and in 1946 handed over administration of the region to the British government. North Borneo remained a Crown colony until 1963, with the formation of the Federation of Malaysia. Today, the island is divided between three countries: Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.
Mount Kinabalu had been mapped and traversed by indigenous people for many generations before Hugh Low became the first white man to reach the summit in 1841. European naturalists relied heavily on the local people’s knowledge of the land, but because the mountain was untouched by Western science it was regarded as wild, ‘aboriginal’. Following Hugh Low, a flurry of European scientists and explorers arrived over the next fifty years, including the horticultural collector James Herbert Veitch in 1877, the zoologist John Whitehead in 1887, and insect collector J. Waterstradt in 1908. In 1910, Lilian S. Gibbs became the first European woman and the first botanist recorded to have reached the summit. Two landmark Royal Society expeditions took place in 1961 and 1964; my grandfather was present on one of these missions, collecting and cataloguing samples of freshwater fish from the mountain streams.
I made plans to follow in his footsteps on the mountain, to write about the waterfalls and other small bodies of water that Gong Gong studied, and to bring with me Lilian S. Gibbs’ botanical notes. I booked a climbing permit and reserved a room at the lodge near the summit, where we would stay overnight and rise before dawn to reach Low’s Peak at sunrise. I bought a waterproof parka, thermal leggings, a nylon backpack cover. As the news steadily unravelled, and so did our travel plans, I found myself clinging for as long as I could to the idea of walking up into the mist, spotting orchids, touching the cold granite summit and then, afterwards, sitting at the table with Gong Gong to tell him about the journey.
The news headlines repeat themselves in my head. For months I’ve been collecting them like field notes. 16th March: ‘Malaysia will shut its borders to travellers, restrict internal movement, close schools and universities.’ 9th May: ‘Malaysian borders remain closed to foreigners.’ 11th September: ‘The government has decided to allow permanent residents, as well as foreign spouses of Malaysian citizens, to enter Malaysia, provided it is a one-way journey.’
5. formalin gold
According to MountKinabalu.com, the climb takes a day and a half and is possible for ‘anyone that is reasonably fit and healthy’, even someone without any mountain-climbing experience, like me. I thought that if I could summit the mountain, I might come away with a deeper connection to the place where my mother was born. I couldn’t let go of the mountain, even if I couldn’t fathom how to write about it without being able to set foot on it or touch it. I reached for my copy of The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, a book unique in that it is not about reaching a summit, but instead closely traces the contours and colours of a mountain, its light, its air.
A line from Robert Macfarlane’s introduction leapt out at me: ‘to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain’.
One way to climb a mountain, when travel is not possible, is to enter the archive. At the top of the steps of the Linnean Society of London, I ring a brass bell next to the door and hear its buzzing echo on the other side. The door is so heavy that I have to heave it open with my whole body. I tell the receptionist I have an appointment at the library and she waves me upstairs. Gold-framed portraits of distinguished white men line the walls above the carpeted stairs, along with cabinets displaying old pressed flowers.
I haven’t set foot in a library in six months. Before the pandemic altered the shape of our daily lives, I spent half the week working in a library and archive dedicated to poetry. I breathlessly tell this to the young librarian, who has already set my stack of requested items on the table in front of me. I have just entered the most beautiful library I’ve ever seen, though I don’t say this to the librarian, who probably hears it several times a day. He retreats to his office, leaving me with my shaky hands, my sharpened pencils and my pile of books.
I look around slowly, trying to take it all in. The walls are painted a soothing shade of mossy green, the colour of flax leaves from back home. Rickety ladders are fixed to the bookshelves, both down here and up on the mezzanine floor, where fluted columns with ornately curled tops touch the high ceilings. Soft sunlight filters through the floral-patterned skylights. I am alone in this intricate room, apart from several busts of old men and an enormous python skin coiled inside a glass case behind me. It’s quiet apart from distant sounds of the city outside the arched windows. I can feel my heartbeat thumping in my ears. Titles of books, old and new, catch my eye: Ancient Oaks of the English Landscape; AMERICAN SNAKES; The Flower of Empire.
Earlier, I had waited with a small group of keen gallery visitors outside the gates of the Royal Academy. A woman with wispy white hair had seen me peering impatiently through the iron bars. She told me the gates would open at exactly quarter to eleven, in ten minutes’ time. I’d been about to ask her if she had come for the Gauguin exhibition, when she said: ‘I’ve just seen a bird of prey.’
I followed the line of her gaze through the gates towards the courtyard. ‘It’s gone,’ she murmured. She said she’d seen the large dark-winged bird perch momentarily on the arm of a statue. She straightened her shoulders and held out her arm, mimicking the statue’s pose, gesturing with her other hand to show me just where the bird had been. She laughed in amazement. I laughed with her and we looked up at the clear sky above the ornate rooftops, the blue so brilliant and cloudless we shielded our eyes.
With most of the city inaccessible to me until recently, it’s been so long since I’ve set foot in an institution like this; one established almost solely for the cataloguing and archiving of Empire. In London, as with other European cities, I can feel the weight of a city built on the spoils of slavery and colonial violence. The Linnean Society is housed inside Burlington House, along with the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal Astronomical Society, among other scientific institutions. Burlington House was owned by Lord Burlington, who purchased it in 1667, while he was Lord Treasurer of Ireland. Now, of course, the Linnean Society’s focus has shifted to presenting and collecting important research on conservation and climate change. Libraries and archives may intend to exist outside of politics, with purely academic or research-related aims, but the archive is an institution and is therefore political. As the American writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman writes, when I step into this room, I must confront ‘the authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters’. This room is beautiful, but I feel the weight of its history.
The church bells chime softly to signal eleven o’clock. Noises of Piccadilly Circus fade into the background as I take out my notebook and place it on the desk next to two books pulled from the stack in front of me: The Fresh-Water Fishes of North Borneo by Robert F. Inger and Chin Phui
Kong, my grandfather; and a volume of the Linnean Society Journal from 1914, bound in dark green leather with gold lettering stamped on the spine.
I open the blue book and there he is, sitting front and centre in a photograph of the Borneo Zoological Expedition team, from 1956, the same year my mum was born. I don’t remember seeing this picture before; I’ve never seen him so young. Yet the shape of his face is just the same. I take a picture of the page with my phone and send it to Mum on WeChat. She responds minutes later to say she knows this picture well. She says the man seated next to Gong Gong – Dr Robert Inger, a herpetologist from Chicago – was Uncle Bob.
I’ve always known Gong Gong was an expert on fish in the North Borneo region, but I never knew what this really meant. I didn’t know what he actually did. When I looked at this book when I was a girl, I only looked at the pictures. This time, I read slowly through Gong Gong’s detailed accounts of Sabah’s smallest bodies of water: streams, pools, waterfalls. In the book, each body of water is separated into its composite layers: the surface layer, upper strata, mid-water and low layer. And every fish specimen is described in minute detail, from the tip of the snout to the end of the opercular flap, the depth of the body, the diameter of the eye, the number of scales, the tiny distance between each fin. A series of black-and-white photographs show various riverbanks, pools and streams that served as the scientists’ main collection sites. One photo shows vines and leaves tangled above a stream caught in a ray of sunlight, causing the surface of the water to shimmer. I can almost see the light vibrating.
The Fresh-Water Fishes of North Borneo was originally published in 1964; this printing from 1990 includes a new chapter written by my grandfather, listing further new fish species collected from Kinabalu National Park: ‘A big room in the Department’s head-quarters [. . .] was set aside for storage and display of fish specimens, preserved in formalin, in candy jars.’ I think of the bedroom in the old house where I always slept as a child, with its sets of shelves dotted with golden jars and the tiny pink and silver fish suspended inside.
6. mountain rhododendron red
Alone in the empty library, I am submerged in the flora and waterways of Mount Kinabalu. It’s strange to think that if my trip hadn’t been cancelled, if borders around the world hadn’t been closed, I never would have spent so much time with my grandfather’s book, here in this quiet archive dedicated to science.
I turn next to the dark green book, volume 42 of the Linnean Society Journal. I rest it on the special archival cushion on the desk in front of me, careful not to strain its spine, and use the satin-covered weights to hold the pages open.
Lilian S. Gibbs was born in London in 1870 and was educated at private schools in England and Europe. Described by John H. Beaman as ‘a lady of independent means’, she enrolled in Swanley Horticultural College in 1899 and later studied botany at the Royal College of Science. Employed by the British Museum for most of her life, Gibbs became known for her work on mountain ecosystems. She travelled widely on her plant-collecting missions, to Iceland, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia and South America. In 1905 she was elected as a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, only a year after the society first began admitting women. In 1914, four years after becoming the first botanist and first European woman to summit Mount Kinabalu, she published an account of her observations titled ‘A Contribution to the Flora and Plant Formations of Mount Kinabalu and the Highlands of British North Borneo’ in the Linnean Society Journal.
I long to be able to see the plants and flowers of the rainforest more clearly, and her account gives me exactly this: a detailed catalogue, not a travelogue, listing plant textures, colours, measurements and Latin names of plant species at every stage of the climb. Like my grandfather’s mapping of the different layers within a body of water, Gibbs outlines the composite layers of the mountain’s rich ecosystem: secondary forest, primary high forest, mossy forest, scrub formation, low sheltered forest, sub-summit dwarf forest and the granite core.
In December 1909, Gibbs landed in Kota Kinabalu, then known as Jesselton. Beset by constant heavy rain, Gibbs and her small party of guides, porters and collecting assistants – most of them indigenous Dusun people – did not begin their climb from the foothill villages of Kiau until several weeks later, in January 1910. Her assistants, mostly teenage boys from nearby villages who knew the mountain well, helped her press plant samples and keep them dry as they made their way up through the wet rainforest. Mosses, rhododendrons and pitcher plants lined the trail. Gibbs spied one yellow and one red rhododendron growing side by side, but couldn’t collect samples without the help of her local guide: ‘The position of the Rhododendron was perilous, but Lamat proved equal to the occasion and brought me specimens of both species.’
The trees grew smaller and more sparse as they climbed into colder air. She turned her attention more closely to the mosses and orchids of the undergrowth. Prior to making the ascent to the summit, a sacrificial ritual was required in order to calm the spirits of the mountain – a ritual still practised by the Dusun community today – involving the slaughter of six chickens. On 22nd February, 1909, Gibbs neared the summit, climbing over rocky terrain up into the wind. The party paused to rest below the high forest and used water from pitcher plants for their tea. She kept her eyes low as the vegetation thinned, examining the mosses and tangled shrubs. Powerful winds had swept the dwarfed trees and their branches close against the surface of the rock over time. In a photograph of this part of the trail, the trees resemble the finely sculpted bonsai of Japanese gardens. They stopped near a sheltered stream overnight, where bright pink rhododendrons bloomed between slabs of rock. Leaving the others, Gibbs headed alone upstream to examine two deep pools and a low waterfall, where she collected moss from the rocks.
In the morning, sun broke through the trees and half of the party continued on to Low’s Peak. At the edge of the dwarf forest, moss gave way to granite. The only plants: little yellow orchids growing in a slender chain, Dendrochilum stachyodes. She pocketed her specimen. Taking the hand of one of her guides to help keep her steady on the steep slope, they ran together up to the peak – this being one of the locals’ preferred ways of negotiating difficult terrain. Breathless, they stopped at the point where the track ended. An icy waterfall cut through the rock at shoulder-level. She crouched low to touch the tiny plants growing in the cracks. She found a clump of small white flowers, Drapetes ericoides, and they reminded her suddenly of New Zealand.
In preparation for this trip I thought I would take, I had scrolled through endless pictures of the mountain’s summit. I’d watched multi-part YouTube videos, read travel blogs, followed eco-tourism Instagram accounts. I imagined over and over again what it would be like to reach the summit; I was mostly anxious about whether I’d make it at all, worried my body would be too numb and exhausted, or too nauseous from the altitude. Lilian Gibbs’ photographs of the summit, taken a century earlier, look almost identical to contemporary images: a grey moonscape of dark valleys of rock encircled by cloud. In the library, I lean close to examine all the intricate ridges and striations in the granite, easily visible in the black-and-white image. The curved shape of Low’s Peak rises into the sky like a tidal wave.
Up there, Gibbs found herself alone, the rest of the party taking shelter from the wind further down the path. She stood still, watching clouds roll over ‘the mighty abyss’ below. She examined the granite plateau in intense detail, as if it might have been an orchid or a bed of moss, committing to memory its slopes, its ridges and textures:
Huge peaks, almost all of the same height, align themselves on its surface like the columns of some roofless titanic temple, recalling the dissected plateaus of Skye . . .
One thing many climbers note about Mount Kinabalu’s summit is the wind: icy, biting, whistling. Gibbs felt it, ‘the cold wind whistling through the gap’ between jagged rocks. Along with the others, she wrote her name down on a slip of paper, put it inside a g
lass bottle, nestled the bottle against the slope and built a small cairn of stones to protect it.
Accounts written by colonial botanists and naturalists are both fascinating and uncomfortable. Gibbs makes plain the importance of botanical study in exploiting North Borneo’s ‘natural riches’ to ensure the region’s success as a colony. She repeatedly praises the locals’ ‘industrious’ nature and ‘commercial spirit’, while at the same time observing the destruction wrought by colonial expansion on their livelihoods. But this colonial history is part of what has shaped me. It was the British who encouraged migration from southern China to Borneo in the early 1900s, creating settlements of Hakka labourers in Sabah, where Hakka people now make up the majority of the Chinese community.
These days, no visitor is permitted to leave any item behind on the summit of Mount Kinabalu, or anywhere along the trail. It is sacred land. Though the highest peak was named for the first Englishman to conquer it, the mountain does not belong to him. It never did.
7. butterfly-wing blue
My grandfather and Lilian Gibbs were both scientists, unlike me. I read their descriptions without always understanding the words they use. They went to the mountain to build a catalogue of plants and fishes and streams, and now, reading their work, I begin to build a catalogue of colours.
Red is the colour of mountain rhododendrons and tiny orchids. The ‘reddish in colour and red-veined’ Styphelia learmonthiana is one of Gibbs’ plant specimens held at the Herbarium at Kew Gardens, which has been digitised online. She saw this plant just below the summit of Mount Kinabalu, exposed to the wind, growing up between cracks in the granite. She had never seen it before and took out her pencil and notebook to sketch its intricate shape: bursts of tiny white petals all tightly cupped by the dark pink sepal, the part of the stem that holds the flower head.
Small Bodies of Water Page 14