Akar Nusa
A Saturday market in a small Sarawak town. A shopkeeper speaks Hakka to one customer and Iban to the next. Someone at the next stall might have a Chinese surname and an Iban grandmother.
The story
Sarawak's story is shaped by contact between peoples. The Iban, Bidayuh and other Dayak communities (the indigenous peoples of the interior) lived here for centuries. In the 1800s, Chinese miners and farmers came too.
At Bau, near Kuching, Hakka Chinese began gold mining in the 1800s. More came from Dutch Borneo after 1841, when James Brooke became Rajah. Their mining company-communities, called kongsi, ran the area for a time. Today the Bidayuh are the largest group in Bau, followed by Chinese, Malays and Iban.
Chinese farmers were also invited. In 1876 Rajah Charles Brooke brought pepper growers from Singapore to Kuching. In the early 1900s Fuzhou migrants arrived in Sibu, which became known as "New Fuzhou". The wider Chinese migration to Sarawak was largely in mining and farming.
As families lived side by side in small towns and along the rivers, some joined through marriage. Writers note that Chinese men who settled in Borneo married Dayak women as far back as the 1700s. Chinese in inland Sarawak and Sabah often have closer ties to local peoples than Chinese in big cities. Mixed families are sometimes called Sino-Iban or Sino-Bidayuh (half Chinese and half Dayak). In Sabah, similar families are called Sino-Native, such as Sino-Kadazan and Sino-Dusun.
Each family keeps its own mix of language and custom.
This frontier history is not the same as the history of Peninsular Malaysia. In Sarawak, Rajah Charles Brooke encouraged Chinese and Dayak people to move into the interior to develop farming. Over time, shopkeepers, pepper farmers and longhouse families became neighbours, customers and relatives. The pattern is closer to Sabah's, where Sino-Native families have a long recorded history that goes back to the 1700s.
Where you can still see it today
- Bau and its mining history, with Hakka, Bidayuh and Iban families living together.
- Sibu, with its Fuzhou heritage, and the mixed towns of the Rajang River.
- Small Sarawak towns, where Chinese and indigenous communities live closely together.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
A Sino-Dayak family may carry lines from both sides, for example a Chinese-side father line and a Dayak-side mother line, or the reverse. Each family differs. A study of mitochondrial DNA (the mother line) in Bidayuh people and other indigenous Malaysian groups points to roots on mainland Asia from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago, so Dayak roots in DNA are deep and old.
DNA cannot tell if someone is "Sino-Iban". That is a family and community identity. DNA does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status.
