Tall tales from Trengganu. I
Noel Rees, a British resident in Terengganu, published this second installment of his “Tall Tales” series in 1990 in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Written in a warm, conversational register, the piece offers a series of personal anecdotes drawn from his post-war years living in a Malay fishing village on the east coast, capturing the rhythms of rural Terengganu life through its pastimes, wildlife, and the author’s own close encounters with the local community.
Summary
The article is structured as a sequence of loosely connected vignettes rather than a single argument. Rees opens with a reading of a colonial-era government proclamation (No. 17, translated by British Adviser J. L. Humphreys) forbidding kite flying in Kuala Terengganu, then uses this as a springboard into a vivid description of the kite-flying competitions that were a major social event during the monsoon season after padi planting. He moves on to top spinning, centring on his friend Wan Hawan, a celebrated spinner whose top could turn for an hour and a half, and whose reputation for “wizardry” and betting manipulation made him a local legend. The narrative then shifts to the leather-backed turtles that came ashore on the sand dunes south of the capital to nest, describing the communal auction system by which locals bid for rights to collect eggs, and the commercial trade in those eggs to Singapore.
The longest and most dramatic section is Rees’s first-person account of a tiger encounter. After a villager reports that a tiger has taken his cow, Rees accompanies the man to set a trap, only to discover the cow has already been carried off. He and the game hunter Locke spend the night perched in a low tree while tigers growl and scratch directly beneath them; Rees eventually drops down and retreats to the car, where he hears Locke fire two shots. The next morning, Locke’s reading of the pad marks reveals the “tiger” was actually a family of four — a male, female, and two near-grown cubs — which explains how an entire cow was consumed in a single night. The piece closes without explicit commentary, leaving the reader with the impression of a place where the boundary between the human and the wild was far more permeable than in the author’s native England.
Key Findings
- Kite-flying competitions in Terengganu involved kites so large that two persons were needed to launch them, with strings exceeding half a mile in length and cut glass fitted to the tails to sever opponents’ lines; the events took place during the monsoon season after padi planting (p. 69).
- Wan Hawan’s top, a flat wooden disc with a steel band and polished brass head, could spin for an hour and forty minutes on a pewter plate; Rees witnessed this directly (pp. 69–70).
- Wan Hawan claimed a “wizardry” range of 80 miles for influencing a spinning top at a distance, and used a staged betting scheme in Kelantan to profit 590 dollars by having an accomplice publicly back the losing top (p. 70).
- The leather-backed turtles nested on a 25-mile stretch of sand dunes approximately 25 miles south of Kuala Terengganu, laying between 40 and 100 eggs per clutch; hatching took 41 days, and the eggs were sold at high prices in Singapore (pp. 71–72).
- The coastline of Terengganu is 160 miles of golden sand, largely flat, with the dune formation attributed to a storm around 1880 (p. 71).
- The tiger that took the villager’s cow was identified by pad marks as a family group of four (male, female, and two three-quarter-grown cubs), which accounts for the near-total consumption of the animal in one night (p. 75).
Conclusion
Rees’s definitive takeaway is implicit rather than stated: living in the East Coast of Malaya exposed him to a world of customs, superstitions, and natural dangers that were entirely alien to his English upbringing, and his willingness to participate in and witness these events — from top-spinning to a night in a tree above tigers — is what gave him the material for these “tall tales.” The piece functions as an affectionate, if unselfconsciously colonial, portrait of a community whose internal logic he came to accept.
Context
- Rees was a British expatriate resident in Terengganu in the post-war period; his position as the “father of the village” and his access to a dispensary, a car, and a rifle mark him as a figure of colonial authority, even if his tone is informal and admiring (p. 72).
- The article draws on no archival collections; it is a purely personal memoir. Its historiographical value lies in providing a ground-level, sensory account of rural Terengganu social life, wildlife, and the residual presence of the British advisory system in the 1940s–50s.