Sibu

The Rajang was the highway of central Sarawak long before there was a town here, carrying Iban, Kayan and Kenyah communities and the trade of the interior. The Brooke government built a fort on the site in 1862, and in 1873 Sibu became the seat of the newly created third division of Sarawak; it grew as a collecting point for jungle produce, and its position at the head of the delta made it the natural transfer point between seagoing ships and river craft.

The town's character was set in 1901, when Wong Nai Siong led more than a thousand Foochow Chinese from Fujian to settle at Sungai Merah under an agreement with Rajah Charles Brooke. They came as farmers, planting rice and then rubber, and their descendants came to dominate the town's commerce; the settlement was known as New Fuzhou. A great fire destroyed much of the wooden town in 1928, after which it was rebuilt in concrete shophouses.

Sibu was occupied by Japanese forces from 1941 to 1945. In December 1949, during the campaign against the cession of Sarawak to Britain, the colonial governor Duncan Stewart was fatally wounded on a visit to the town by members of the anti-cession movement, who were later convicted and hanged. From the 1960s the timber boom of the Rajang basin made Sibu rich: logs were floated downriver in vast rafts, shipping and shipyards followed, and several of Malaysia's largest timber companies were founded here. As accessible forest thinned and roads replaced boats, the town settled into a steadier role as the commercial centre of the middle Rajang.

Sibu's identity is Foochow above all. The dialect is spoken in the coffee shops and markets, clan associations run schools and temples, and the town keeps a strong Chinese-school tradition alongside English and Malay education. Christianity is unusually prominent for a Chinese-majority town — Methodist missions arrived with the settlers and their churches and schools are among the oldest institutions here — while Chinese temples, above all Tua Pek Kong on the waterfront, mark the older religious life.

The town is also a meeting point. Iban families come downriver from the longhouses of the Rajang for shopping, schooling and hospital visits, Melanau from the coast and Malays from the kampungs share the same streets, and the calendar reflects all of them: Chinese New Year closes the shops, Gawai Dayak in June empties the town towards the longhouses, and Hari Raya brings open houses. The swan is Sibu's emblem, and swan statues stand at several points around town.

Manners are informal and business-minded. Bargaining is normal in the market but gentle; hospitality is expressed through food, and refusing an offer of coffee or a bowl of noodles is unusual. Visitors invited to a longhouse are expected to bring a small gift, greet the headman, remove their shoes on the ruai and accept what is offered.

About 163,000 people lived in the town itself at the 2010 census, with more again in the surrounding district, which makes Sibu one of Sarawak's main urban centres after Kuching and Miri. The population is majority Chinese, with substantial Iban, Malay and Melanau communities, and many families keep ties to villages and longhouses upriver.

Timber, shipbuilding and river transport built the modern economy, and although logging has declined, shipyards along the Rajang still turn out tugs, barges and express boats, and palm oil, pepper and food processing have taken up some of the slack. The town works as the service centre for the middle Rajang: its hospital, schools, wholesale trade and markets serve a large rural hinterland, and government offices and retail employ many residents.

The day starts very early. Coffee shops are busy with kampua mee before seven, the central market is at its fullest soon after dawn, and the express boats leave for the interior in the morning. Afternoons are hot and quiet, and evenings belong to the night market, the esplanade and the food courts. Young people leaving for Kuching, the peninsula or abroad, flooding after heavy rain, and the long-running work on the Pan Borneo Highway are the issues residents talk about.

Sibu eats Foochow. Kampua mee is the town's emblem: thin egg noodles blanched, drained and tossed in lard and shallot oil with a little light soy, topped with slices of char siu and spring onion, and served dry with a separate bowl of soup or wonton. Kompia, a small round bun with sesame seeds baked against the inside wall of a clay oven, is eaten plain at breakfast or split and stuffed with braised minced pork. Dian mian hu, sometimes called ding bian hu, is a soup of rice batter scraped from the side of a hot pan into broth with anchovies, vegetables and pork.

Foochow red wine — the lees of home-brewed glutinous rice wine — flavours much of the cooking, most famously in red wine chicken with mee sua, fine wheat noodles, eaten by women after childbirth and by everyone at the new year. Other local staples include kaoyuk, belly pork braised with fermented bean curd and taro, and bian nyuk, thin dumplings whose wrappers are made from pounded pork.

The market supplies the wider Sarawak repertoire as well: midin, a crisp jungle fern stir-fried with garlic or belacan; terung Dayak, a sour orange aubergine cooked in soup; river fish such as empurau, the most expensive freshwater fish in the country, and semah; and manok pansoh, chicken cooked in bamboo, from the longhouses. Sarawak laksa and kolo mee are on every coffee-shop menu, and layered kek lapis cakes are sold for festivals.