Original subtitles

VOICEOVER: Malaysia, known to ancient mariners

as "the land where the winds meet,"

has lured sailors, traders and navigators

to her shores for centuries.

Here, kingdoms rose and fell,

players in the flow of global commerce, power and faith

leaving their stamp on the extraordinary mix

of cultures and people that make up the nation.

It's a land linked by water, seas and rivers to lush heartlands

and remote and forbidding interiors.

Today, Malaysia is undergoing a massive transformation.

Join us on an epic journey from the air,

as we reveal one of the most modern states of 21st century Asia.

Once, Malaysia was almost completely covered in rainforest.

Its jungle, more than 130 million years old,

is among the most ancient forests in the world.

Archaeological evidence suggests human habitation

for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Orang Asli, Malaysia's first known inhabitants,

arrived in successive waves from Africa

more than 25,000 years ago.

They made the forbidding rainforest their domain.

At the end of the first millennium, they were followed by people

from elsewhere in the Malay Archipelago.

The new arrivals settled along the coast of the Malayan Peninsula.

The villages of these farmers and fishermen

were often at the mouths of rivers that fed into the Strait of Malacca -

then and now, the key maritime route between India and China.

It's still the thriving route that it was all those centuries ago.

And at the heart of this shipping mecca was Malacca,

founded by a Malay prince around the 1400s.

Malacca soon attracted traders from as far away as China,

India and the Arab world to become the emporium of the East.

The lure was spices.

Chinese traders brought porcelain and silk.

Indian ships arrived laden with paper and cloth.

Arab traders brought exotic fragrances

to make perfumes and medicines.

By the early 1500s, the Sultan of Malacca

presided from his palace

over the most important port of the region.

But the city's fame also brought dangers.

In 1511, Portuguese invaders

overthrew the Sultan

and imposed their political control on the city.

The Porta de Santiago gate

is one of the few reminders today

of that Portuguese presence in Malacca.

It wasn't just political control that the invaders imposed.

They also brought their faith, Catholicism.

The ruins of St Paul's Church, built in 1521,

are a reminder of that Portuguese domination.

Just as St Paul's Church decayed over time,

so too did Portuguese rule in Malacca.

As Lisbon tightened its purse strings,

its distant colony became vulnerable to new threats.

The Dutch had designs on Malacca.

In 1640 they began a siege of the city

that was to cost them 1,000 men.

Weakened by the prolonged assault,

the Portuguese surrendered the city in January, 1641.

The Dutch proceeded to rebuild Malacca in their own image.

This is the Stadthuys -

the oldest remaining Dutch structure in the East.

Completed in 1660, it served as the Governor's residence.

The Dutch carried out an extensive building program,

establishing a planned city along the river.

Shop-houses and townhouses sprang up along the banks.

The Dutch were intolerant of the Catholic faith in the new colony

and built a grand Protestant shrine,

on the site of an earlier Portuguese church.

A new master had arrived in town.

This little Holland in far-off Malacca thrived as a Dutch outpost

for more than a century-and-a-half,

but the increasingly high taxes of the new colonial ruler

forced many European merchants

to seek out other ports of opportunity.

A third colonial power, Britain,

was determined to get a foothold in the region.

It negotiated an agreement with the Sultan of Kedah,

in the north of the peninsula,

to establish a base on the island of Penang in 1786.

The capital, George Town,

has the largest collection of traditional shop-houses

in all of South-east Asia.

The British stamped their architectural presence on Penang

with a flourish.

The makeover and the free-port trade energising Penang

attracted a multitude of races to descend on George Town.

Each community was assigned an enclave,

with Malay settlers placed in one of the oldest precincts, Acheh Street.

The area was dominated by the mosque,

built in the early 19th century

by a spice-trading Achenese prince of Arab descent.

Chinese immigrants who flooded onto the island

formed clan communities,

drawn together by common ancestry and dialect.

They were wild times.

Secret societies proliferated,

fighting for control of the island's gambling, opium and labour markets.

The Chinese clans built their own strongholds,

with magnificent temples marking their territory.

The most imposing is the Khoo Kongsi,

which stands in the granite-paved compound

of Cannon Square.

The square gets its name from the nine-day street battle

that raged in its vicinity during the Penang Riots of 1867,

when rival clans fought for control of the city.

As with most Chinese temples,

the roof is the dominant architectural feature.

Thousands of porcelain shards from broken bowls

are used in decorative three-dimensional motifs.

The most splendid of the roof guardians is the dragon -

a potent symbol of good fortune and power.

A large Indian community was also drawn to George Town.

Once a year, the Hindu thanksgiving festival of Thaipusam

is celebrated in the city.

The centrepiece of the event is a procession by a silver chariot.

It travels 7km across the town

bearing a statue of Lord Muruga,

the Hindu god of war and vanquisher of evil.

Throughout the day, the chariot stops

to allow thousands of devotees to present offerings,

including trays of flowers, fruit, incense and betel leaves.

Before the chariot arrives,

thousands of coconuts are smashed on the ground

in an act of purification.

The smashing of the coconuts

symbolises the breaking of one's ego,

while the coconut water inside represents purity

and a cleansing of the soul.

The procession has been held annually in George Town

for more than 150 years.

As the chariot approaches its final destination,

it passes through streets lined with stalls

overflowing with Indian snacks

and curries for the hordes of devotees.

After more than 16 hours, the chariot completes its journey

at the Waterfall Hill Temple.

Followers then climb the 513 steps

to the hilltop temple

to offer their prayers for a better life to Lord Subramaniam,

one of the many names of Lord Muruga.

It was here in the State of Perak

that the British extended their control

to the Malayan Peninsula in 1875.

The Straits Settlements governor

signed a treaty with the local Sultan

that placed Perak under British protection.

The Sultan accepted a British resident

whose advice had to be sought and acted upon

for all matters other than Malay religion and customs.

The Perak sultans resided here, in the royal town of Kuala Kangsar.

Their lineage descended from the old ruling house of Melaka

from the early 1600s.

The palace is a wondrous mix of Islamic and Art Deco styles

and is still the official residence of the Head of State,

the Sultan of Perak.

The Ubudiah mosque is Perak's most famous landmark.

It was completed in 1917, but construction didn't go smoothly.

A couple of rogue elephants ran amok,

ruining the Italian marble floor.

The outbreak of the First World War also caused delays.

Generations of sultans are buried here,

looking down from the hilltop

on the rice paddy fields.

Rice is a staple food in Malaysia,

and an integral part of Malaysian culture and beliefs.

Many rites and ceremonies are devoted

to appeasing the spirit that inhabits the rice.

Once tended and cropped by hand,

the rice fields are now harvested by machine.

Perak once possessed the richest tin deposits in the world.

With the invention of the tin can in 1810,

tin production in Malaya exploded.

The evidence of that tin boom is still seen today

in the disused mining ponds that dot the landscape.

Initially, thousands of Chinese speculators descended on Perak

to plunder the lucrative deposits.

By the early 20th century, European mining companies

had seized the opportunity to dominate the industry.

The British introduced the tin dredge -

a large floating steel factory supported on pontoons.

This dredge, known as TT5, started mining in 1938.

It was then one of the biggest in the world.

Run on diesel, the dredge could dig

as deep as the height of a ten-storey building

and extract up to 90% of the tin in the soil.

Buckets on a chain scooped earth from the depths of the pond

up to a revolving extraction drum

that separated the tin deposits from the soil.

The dredge ceased operating in 1982,

when the tin finally ran out.

Tin wasn't the only resource that changed the Perak landscape.

In the 1870s, seed stock smuggled out of Brazil

to London's Kew Gardens

was to change the face of the nation forever.

Rubber had arrived.

Inspired by the invention of the motor car,

rubber was suddenly in demand.

Plantations sprang up all over Perak.

By the 1930s, Malaya was producing half of the world's rubber.

British planters made Malaya

Britain's richest colony of the time.

As they also did in India, the hills offered the British

a refuge from the tropical heat.

Little pockets of England emerged on the hilltops,

like this one at Fraser's Hill.

The Cameron Highlands also attracted British settlers.

Discovered by William Cameron on a mapping expedition in 1885,

the plateau was soon claimed by tea planters.

The tea plants, mainly Darjeeling, came from India.

Many of them are still productive today.

Plucking tea is a perilous pursuit.

The workers must brave slopes steeper than 45 degrees.

Tea-pluckers need to know when the leaves are ready

and pick them when they are tender and full of flavour.

Just as industry developed Perak,

the city of Kuala Lumpur came out of a resource boom in the 1870s.

It was tin especially that attracted Chinese miners and traders

to where the Klang and Gombak rivers converged.

They set up camp there and called it Kuala Lumpur -

Malay for "muddy confluence".

The township soon began to grow.

In 1880, the British Resident, Sir Frank Swettenham,

made Kuala Lumpur the administrative capital of the State of Selangor.

He immediately set about demolishing the ramshackle shanties

and rebuilding the town.

In 1894, construction began on the Government Offices.

As a time capsule, the governor placed some tin coins

and a copy of the Selangor Journal beneath the foundation stone.

The magnificent structure required the founding of a new factory

to supply its four million bricks.

It was completed in 1897.

The Government Offices faced the Tudor gables

of the Selangor Club.

Between them was the Padang - Malay for 'field' -

which served as the club's cricket ground.

Today, the Padang is called Dataran Merdeka -

Independence Square. (BELLS RING)

It was here, on the 31 August, 1957,

that the sun set on British Malaya.

At midnight, the Union Flag was lowered

and the Federation of Malaya was born.

This was also where the new nation of Malaysia was founded

on the 16th of September, 1963.

On that day, the former Crown Colonies of Singapore,

North Borneo, and Sarawak all joined the Federation.

But the union with Singapore was short-lived.

Following political differences, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia

in 1965 and became an independent city-state.

This is not an umbrella or a fan.

It's the roof of the Masjid Negara, the National Mosque.

It was built as a national symbol

when Kuala Lumpur embarked on a building boom after independence.

The roof, shaped like an open umbrella,

replaced the traditional dome.

Its 16-pointed star shape protects the grand prayer hall below.

Rising from a rectangular pool of water,

the minaret resembles a closed umbrella.

Five times a day, the Muslim call to prayer

resonates throughout the area.

Muslims account for more than 60% of Malaysia's 31 million people,

and Islam is the official religion.

Religious freedom is guaranteed for all other beliefs,

with certain restrictions.

By the early 1990s, an unprecedented economic boom

encouraged the country to believe that it could do anything.

It became one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia.

Under the enthusiastic leadership of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad,

the catchphrase "Malaysia Can Do It" took hold.

Even the sky wasn't the limit.

Breaking records was all the rage,

with the KL Tower becoming

the tallest communications facility in South-east Asia.

But the completion of the Petronas Towers in 1998

put that in the shade.

The 88-storey towers

were the world's tallest building until 2004.

The Petronas Towers are still

the tallest identical structures in the world.

The towers are linked by a double-decker skybridge

on the 41st and 42nd floors.

It is one of the highest two-storey bridges in the world.

Mahathir Mohamad promised that the building

would symbolise the nation's determination,

confidence, optimism and energy.

The economic boom of the early 1990s

gave Malaysia a new-found confidence.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad seized the moment.

He committed his government to building a brand-new city,

that would not only relieve congestion

and overcrowding in Kuala Lumpur,

but would also be the new seat of government and administration.

Putrajaya is 50 minutes south of the centre of Kuala Lumpur.

Construction began in 1995.

An urban planning showcase,

Putrajaya was designed as a garden city.

The Islamic influence is everywhere.

The Putra Mosque took inspiration from the Middle East.

Its 116-metre minaret

is influenced by the design of the Sheikh Omar mosque in Baghdad,

while its basement wall resembles that

of the King Hassan Mosque in Casablanca, Morocco.

Made of rose-tinted granite,

the mosque can accommodate more than 15,000 people.

The Prime Minister's building faces a grand boulevard

modelled on the Champs-Elysees but three times as long.

At the southern end, 6km away,

is a convention centre -

an innovative modern structure

shaped like the eye of a traditional royal belt.

Putrajaya was largely funded by revenue from Petronas,

the state oil and gas corporation.

A Fortune 500 company,

Petronas dominates Malaysia's economic landscape.

It has the sole right

to develop the country's rich oil and gas fields.

Kerteh, in the State of Terengganu,

is the company's base

for its petrochemical production and refineries.

The east coast of Malaysia remains something of a backwater.

Known for its long, sandy shorelines,

the east coast might be on a different planet

from the populous, hectic and industrialised west coast.

The locals here have fished these waters for generations.

The South China Sea provides them with a bountiful living.

The monsoonal seasons dictate the work cycle.

When the weather allows, the men head to sea

while the women dry and salt the catch.

But from November to February,

fierce monsoonal winds and rains bring huge waves,

forcing the fishermen to repair their boats and nets

in the sheltered lagoons.

The monsoon also wears away precious habitats

and changes the landscape of the coastline.

Over 800km to the east lies Asia's biggest island -

Borneo, home to the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak.

Borneo was once part of the Asian mainland.

But as sea levels rose at the end of the ice age,

much of this landmass was drowned,

leaving behind a new world of islands.

This dynamic world, scarred by volcanic eruptions

and earthquakes, shaped people's lives for thousands of years.

Between islands, trade networks were born.

Bukit Tengkorak - "Skull Hill" in Sabah -

was a thriving community of merchants and craftsmen

3,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have uncovered a remarkable relic from those times -

the once-precious mineral, obsidian.

This volcanic glass was used in cutting-tools

by the early inhabitants of Sabah.

Remarkably, the find is believed to have come

from 3,500 kilometres away in Papua New Guinea,

suggesting that people travelled from the Pacific to Borneo

during the Neolithic Period.

Bukit Tengkorak may have been one of the biggest

pottery and ceramic manufacturing sites

in the Asian world.

Tens of thousands of pottery fragments

are scattered across the site.

This traditional technology is still used today by the Bajau Laut,

or sea gypsies,

many of whom live in stilt villages

in the fishing town of Semporna and the seas beyond.

In this island world, it is the ocean and its riches

that shape the sea gypsies' lives.

In the early 20th century,

the British North Borneo Company

attempted to control the mobility of these sea nomads

by forcing them to register their boats so they were traceable.

Since then, more and more of the Bajau Laut

have begun to live on the land,

but many maintain their nomadic way of life even today.

They are often stateless,

and so have no right to public amenities or schools.

Their children learn to swim at the same time

as they learn to walk.

The sea gypsies eke out an existence by fishing with spears and driftnets

in the lush coral gardens that abound in the region.

The reefs here are some of the most diverse in the world

and are an important breeding ground for fish.

To protect these rich waters, the Tun Sakaran Marine Park

was gazetted in 2004,

protecting an area half the size of Singapore.

Some parts of the park have a total fishing ban

to protect the fish stock.

To ensure that the sea gypsy community has an alternative income,

seaweed farming has been introduced.

It's an ideal match for the sea gypsies' way of life,

providing an efficient way to battle food shortages and poverty

while not destroying their lifeline -

the unpolluted marine environment surrounding the communities.

Once a year, the town of Semporna

transforms into one huge carnival

to celebrate the heritage of the seafaring Bajau people.

The Lepa Regatta has been celebrated every year since 1994

to commemorate the Bajau tradition of building these single-masted boats.

The highlight of the festival is a competition

to find the most beautiful Bajau boat,

known as the Lepa-Lepa.

A flotilla of boats adorned with colourful flags

from the different villages and islands

descends on the waterfront to be judged.

The judges are looking for the best-designed boats

and how decorative the flags and sails are

that have been passed down through the generations.

Music and dancing are also on the menu.

With more than 400 boats vying for cash prizes

and coveted boat engines, the two-day extravaganza

draws people from all over the archipelago

to unwind in a fiesta of fun and colour.

Much of the State of Sabah in East Malaysia

was unknown and undiscovered

until just after the Second World War.

The existence of this mysterious land

was only revealed by accident

when a British pilot flew into thick fog.

As the plane emerged from the clouds,

the pilot was confronted by a wall of forbidding granite cliffs.

He just avoided death by flying up and over the jagged cliffs.

In his miraculous escape,

the pilot made a remarkable discovery -

the lost world of Sabah, the Maliau Basin.

The basin's forbidding cliffs protected the area for so long

because they make it virtually inaccessible.

From the 1960s on, explorers made three attempts

to scale the escarpments and discover the treasures within.

Each time, this fortress defeated them.

The only way in is where the Maliau River exits the basin.

Even this is guarded by a series of majestic gorges and waterfalls.

The most spectacular is the seven-tiered Maliau Falls.

It is known to the local people

as the home of the mythical water dragon.

The Maliau Basin's inaccessibility

has meant that its natural secrets

have been hidden for millions of years.

In 1981, a survey party from the Sabah Foundation

managed to land in a helicopter and cut a trail.

This enabled a 43-member expedition

to spend three weeks in the region in 1988.

Over 100 scientific expeditions

have since entered this land of the unknown.

What they discovered is a living laboratory untamed by man.

The forest has over 1,800 rare plant species,

some found nowhere else on Earth.

Within these jungles are some of

the tallest tropical trees ever recorded,

with heights reaching over 80 metres -

higher than a 25-storey building.

Every few years, the forest explodes into a mosaic of colours

as synchronised flowering and fruiting occur on a large scale.

The trigger for this is still unknown

but it's thought that the bounty available

becomes too much for the local animal life to consume.

It's nature's way of ensuring the survival of the forest.

In Borneo, jungles are not only made from timber but from stone.

This astonishing stone forest belongs to Gunung Api,

or Fire Mountain, at Mulu National Park in Sarawak.

Its rock cover has eroded on the outside

to form this jungle of stone pinnacles.

The razor-sharp limestone points

reach up to 50 metres above the surrounding vegetation.

They have been chiselled out over the centuries by heavy rainfall

cascading down from a rock plateau above them.

It was not until 1978 that Gunung Api was finally conquered

by a climbing party organised by the Royal Geographic Society

and the Sarawak Government.

Tragedy was narrowly avoided

when a moving boulder threatened to crush the climbers.

This massive survey of the Gunung Mulu National Park

also sent 115 scientists into this amazing lost land

to unearth its secrets and survey its features.

What they found was an extraordinary network of caves

that stretched for 150km.

Early European visitors were warned away from the Mulu Caves

by locals who cautioned that they were the home of dwarves and ghosts

and a place to be avoided.

Perhaps Borneo's most impressive geological feature of all

is the massive outcrop of granite that is Mount Kinabalu.

Rising skywards at about five millimetres a year,

it is the world's youngest non-volcanic mountain.

Standing over 4,000 metres high,

the mountain is revered by the locals

who attribute special qualities to the peak,

regarding it as the sacred place of the dead whose spirits rest here.

This icon of rugged beauty can turn against its visitors.

5 June, 2015, dawned sunny with clear blue skies.

187 climbers were already on the mountain slopes.

A group of schoolchildren were climbing down the via ferrata -

Italian for "the iron way" -

a mountain route equipped with steel cables, ladders

and other fixed anchors.

At 7:15am, all hell broke loose.

(MOUNTAIN RUMBLES)

A violent earthquake struck, measuring six on the Richter scale,

with an epicentre close to the mountain

and only 10km beneath the ground.

When the terrible shaking stopped, 18 people lay dead.

But the earthquake hasn't deterred climbers.

Over 50,000 of them

continue to climb Borneo's highest mountain every year.

The last 90 metres to the summit, Low's Peak,

is a scramble up over almost vertical jagged and loose rocks.

This is the reward.

a breathtaking vista of granite peaks

reaching for the sky as far as the eye can see.

As climbers leave, the majestic Mount Kinabalu casts its shadow

over the surrounding plains.

Malaysia -

a land of stunning beauty and diversity.

A rich tapestry of peoples, cultures and faiths.

But this intricate pattern can be disrupted

by the unpredictable forces of nature and by human strife.

As Malaysia strides into the future,

it must continue to revere its rich heritage

and protect one of the most remarkable landscapes in the world.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2019