A small, slow journal about one old port city.

Melaka in Three Tenses is a collection of short essays about Melaka, the old trading city on the west coast of Malaysia, facing the Strait of Malacca.

Why three tenses

Most writing about Melaka is in the past tense. That makes sense: few cities in Southeast Asia have packed so much history into so few streets. But Melaka is also a place where people live, work and eat today, and a city with real decisions ahead of it about what to keep and what to change.

So every essay here is filed under one of three tenses. Read them in order, or start wherever you like.

How the essays are written

Each essay is meant to be read in one sitting, in a few minutes. They draw on published histories and on the city’s museums and monuments, and they try to separate what is known from what is merely often repeated. Where the history is uncertain, as it often is in a city whose founding story involves a heroic mouse deer, the essays say so.

Melaka or Malacca?

Both. Melaka is the city’s official name and the one used here. Malacca is the older English spelling, still common in English and still the usual name for the strait. Portuguese writers called it Malaca. They all mean the same place.