If you mocked animals, it would cause the wrath of spirits which would seek revenge by turning the longhouses of the guilty parties into stone during hail storms. The only way to avoid this would be to place large Chinese jars at longhouse doors. Jars are regarded as being impervious to these spells.
– Lun Bawang belief
“You are the ‘singa raja’; it is because of you that we have to part with the jar,” my dad said two weeks after letting go of the Ming Dynasty jar, that we called ‘singa raja’ circa April, 1973
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Yes I did agree. It was a hard decision to let go but somehow it was finally done in view of the possibilities of the jar getting stolen and cracked further – a small crack was starting upon close scrutiny but yet to be obvious. And for the price of RM15,200 it was considered a good selling price.
On the possibility of it being stolen, the answer was a yes when two days prior to the sale, a box containing old plates and bowls (china porcelain) was stolen. This was possible as our backdoor was easily opened and insecure.
I was then started studying Lower Sixth in Methodist Secondary School, Sibu. And by 1990, such a type of jar that my maternal grandma bought from an Indonesian vendor for 100 dollars (Brooke currency) circa 1950, was up for sale in Singapore for $S2 million while its replica was priced $S20,000 each, according to a source.
Besides needing cash to finance my studies in Sibu that year, my father had dreamt that the jar needed to be put in the middle of the room, and not to be put in its usual place – on the corner. In other words, the jar needed a special space.
In my father’s interpretation, it needed to go to a new ambience. By letting go of the jar, it was like getting rid of a heavy burden on one’s shoulder, dad told us weeks after the sale, still thinking about the small crack that might have worsened.
I remember the special jar well, with figures of Chinese deities and figures of the dragon etched around the shoulders in three dimensional fashions. Its main top was broken and replaced by a china porcelain. Most of the time, it was empty but at certain times my brother Jon and I would put our rubber bands – won in card games – inside the jar as little did we know of the jar’s value.
Apart from the ‘singa raja’, there were other jars in our possessions but were left untouched. But none of these have stories to tell. However, my eldest brother Edward Jelani who married a Bawang Assan beauty in Sibu, found out that the family owned two very big and special jars, one of which was still ‘growing’ in size.
I remember looking at the jars but did not sample its content – the water. My last trip to the Bawang Assan longhouse was in 1983 but forgot to look inside the jar that had a smaller one inside, meaning a two-in-one case. Stories had it that the jar was found on a shore in Sumatra.
On the fact that it has double inside could be attributed to an unproven happening that it was transformed into a jar from a pregnant woman. This notion of transformation from an expecting mother into a jar could have happened when the woman was about to be attacked by an enemy while bathing at the shoreline; it was conceived by imaginative storytellers.
But on how it landed in Bawang Assan, that myth goes way back to long time ago. On the water content in the smaller double jar, those drinking it will grow to be big. This is true as my two nephews are both big and strong looking after taking a drink from it when they were teenagers.
Now unlike in the past where the deceased were likely given to bring jars to their graves, the Saribas and Krian Ibans need not allocate jars to their departed family members anymore. This is good news to the bereaved families but bad news for grave robbers.
In 1966 and the next few years after the launching of the Kuching-Sibu trunk road, these grave robbers were busily making extra bucks by stealing the ‘baiya’ (items brought by the deceased) in the forms of jars and other items from Pendam Burui, an Iban cemetery just across our roadside rubber garden at Nanga Burui, along the Melupa River in Saratok.
In the same cemetery my maternal granddad Narang Jeluka’s baiya, including an expensive jar and a tea set that was worth over a few hundred bucks, remained intact by early 1967. That year a special ceremony was held to erect a proper burial home for him (who died in 1949).
During the event, the base of the jar was merged and cemented, thereby making it impossible to remove. The tea set was also submerged into a concrete base, rendering all items unmoveable.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
