Sandakan

Sandakan grew from a natural harbour that Sulu traders had long used to export beeswax, birds' nests, camphor and rattan from the forests behind it. An earlier settlement in the bay, founded in the 1870s by the Scottish arms smuggler William Clark Cowie, burned down in 1879, and that June William Pryer moved the administration to a new site near Buli Sim Sim, which the British North Borneo Company built up as a town. It became the capital of British North Borneo, and for decades the hinterland's timber and tobacco made it one of the busiest small ports in the region.

The war ended that town. Japanese forces occupied Sandakan in 1942 and built an airfield with prisoner labour, holding Australian and British prisoners at a camp outside the town. In 1945 those prisoners were forced to march inland to Ranau, across some 260 kilometres of mountain country. In all 2,434 Allied prisoners died at Sandakan, on the marches or at Ranau, and of the men held at the two camps only six Australians survived, all of them escapers. Allied bombing left the town in ruins, and when North Borneo became a British crown colony in 1946 the capital moved west to Jesselton, now Kota Kinabalu.

Sandakan was rebuilt in plain concrete shophouses and returned to the export trade, first timber, then palm oil, cocoa and fish. The felling of the lowland forests that made its fortune also cost it the resource, and wildlife tourism grew as a second economy. The town today is Sabah's second city, a working port that most visitors treat as a gateway to the forest and the coast.

Sandakan's population is an east-coast mixture. Chinese families, many of Cantonese and Hakka descent, run much of the commerce and maintain temples, clan associations and Chinese-medium schools; Malay, Bajau and Suluk communities live around the bay and in the water villages; Kadazan-Dusun and other Indigenous Sabahans have moved in from the interior; and long-established Filipino and Indonesian communities give the town a strong link to the Sulu Sea beyond the border. Mosques, churches and Chinese temples stand within a short distance of one another, and the calendar carries Ramadan and Hari Raya, Christmas, Chinese New Year and the Kaamatan harvest festival in May.

The war is part of local identity in a way it is not elsewhere in Malaysia. Australian visitors come to the Memorial Park each year, and the story of the marches is taught and commemorated rather than left to history books. Agnes Newton Keith's books, written from the same hillside, keep the pre-war town in print.

Manners are Sabahan: informal, unhurried, and conducted in a mix of Sabah Malay, Hakka, Cantonese, Suluk and English. Conversation and business alike happen over coffee in a kopitiam, and the morning market is as much a social round as a shopping trip. Conservation work has given the town a local vocabulary of its own, and many families have a member employed at a reserve, a lodge or a plantation.

About 440,000 people lived in the Sandakan municipal area at the 2020 census, with the town itself holding a good share of them along the bay and out past the mile markers. The port handles palm oil, timber products and fish; oil-palm estates cover much of the countryside inland; and tourism, government offices, schools and hospitals provide the rest of the work. Fishing remains a large employer, and the fleet unloads in front of the market at first light.

Housing runs from the shophouses and flats of the centre to suburban estates along the road west and the stilt villages over the water at Buli Sim Sim and Sim Sim, where walkways rather than streets connect the houses. Life in those villages is closely tied to the sea, and questions of documentation and statelessness among families with roots in the southern Philippines are a long-running local issue, as they are across eastern Sabah.

The day begins early — the market before dawn, school runs and offices by half past seven — and slows in the heat of the afternoon, picking up again in the evening when the seafood restaurants and coffee shops at Mile 4 fill. Rain shapes plans in the last months of the year, when flooding along the Kinabatangan can cut roads. Palm-oil prices, the state of the port and the future of the surrounding forest are the recurring subjects of local debate.

Sandakan is a seafood town. Boats land fish, prawns, squid, crab and shellfish daily, and the standard meal is steamed fish with ginger and spring onion, butter prawns, or crab cooked with chilli or salted egg, eaten in a noisy open-fronted restaurant with rice and stir-fried vegetables. Sayur manis, the sweet leaf that grows all over Sabah, is fried with garlic on almost every table. The stilt restaurants at Sim Sim and the shophouse rows at Bandar Indah are where most of this eating happens.

Chinese cooking dominates the everyday menu. Breakfast is kopi and kaya toast, or a bowl of noodles: wonton or beef noodles, Sabah's own ngiu chap of sliced beef, tripe and meatballs in a clear broth, or Tuaran mee, fried egg noodles from the west coast. Sandakan is also known across Sabah for its egg tarts, sold from bakeries and coffee shops in the centre, and for cakes and biscuits made for Chinese New Year.

Malay, Bajau and Suluk kitchens add grilled fish with sambal, rice cooked in coconut milk, and cassava eaten with seafood in the coastal villages. Kadazan-Dusun dishes reach the town as well — hinava, raw fish cured in lime juice with ginger, chilli and shallot, and pinasakan, fish braised with a sour fruit and turmeric. Tropical fruit from the interior is sold at the central market: durian, langsat, rambutan and the sour wild mango called bambangan, which is pickled and eaten as a relish.