At the top of the hill, on the eastern side of Jln Tun Abang Haji Openg, the Ethnology Museum (the Old Building) – guarded by two colonial cannons – spotlights Borneo’s incredibly rich indigenous cultures. Upstairs the superb exhibits include a full-sized Iban longhouse, masks and spears; downstairs is an old-fashioned natural-history museum.
At research time, there were plans to renovate the more than 100-year-old building, starting early 2016. During the renovations sections of the museum may be closed.
The museum was established in 1891 by Charles Brooke as a place to exhibit indigenous handicrafts and wildlife specimens, many of them collected by the naturalist Russell Wallace in the 1850s. The rajah's French aide designed the building, modelling it on Normandy town hall.
The upstairs gallery is decorated with Kayan and Kenyah murals painted by local artists, forming the backdrop to exhibits that include basketry, musical instruments and a Bidayuh door charm for keeping evil spirits at bay, as well as information on native customs such as tattooing and the infamous palang penis piercing.
Downstairs in the natural history gallery the highlight – remembered with horror by generations of Kuching children – is a hairball taken from the stomach of a man-eating crocodile, accompanied by the following explanation: ‘human dental plate found attached to the hairball’. And if this isn’t enough to put you off taking a dip in a muddy estuary, the ‘watch found inside stomach’ (the croc’s stomach, of course) surely will – unless you’d like your smartphone to feature in some future exhibit.
