Possibly the most popular tourist attraction in Malacca is the ruins of the oldest European building east of India, Our Lady of the Annunciation, built by the Portuguese in 1566. Annunciation was a rebrand that didn’t stick. St. Paul’s, as it is now called, was the name of the 1521 chapel demolished to build the current ruined church; the name of the church school founded there in 1548; and the name the Dutch kept when consecrating the building as a Dutch Reform church in 1641. The Bovenkerk (church at the top of the hill, ie. St. Paul’s) was deconsecrated when the Benedenkerk (church at the bottom of the hill, ie. Christ Church) was completed in 1753.

Needless to say, Malaysians don’t visit for religious or cultural reasons. They’re there to take pictures of and against panoramic views of the city and straits beyond, always posing at the top of the stairs and in the windowless brick arches.

The more ridiculous among them pose among the propped up gravestones as well; there’s absolutely no sensitivity that this is a religious place of rest. They’d never permit behavior like this in a mosque or any type of Chinese or Indian temple, but persist in it here.

St. Francis Xavier, a founder of the Jesuits and the greatest Catholic missionary in the East since St. Thomas, took his vows at Montmarte in 1534, and received the title deeds for St. Paul’s chapel in 1548. Having spent a decade establishing Christianity in Portuguese India, he used this church as his home base between missionary trips to Japan, the Maluku islands, and Borneo; he was the very first Christian missionary in each of these places.

He died on Shangchuan island in 1552, on a mission to Ming China. His body did not decompose much in its temporary grave there, and that was taken as a sign he was a saint. He was temporarily reburied for the second time at St. Paul’s, before being sent to Goa for permanent burial.

The open, caged-over burial vault is considered the one used for Francis Xavier, though there’s no archaeological or historical evidence to support the claim. People throw coins, flowers and money down through the grate, a rather Buddhist/Hindu way of honoring a Catholic saint; one is reminded that almost all converts of later Christian missions were Chinese and Indian, not Malay.

Francis Xavier actually never received permanent burial; most of his body still rests in a crystal urn at the basilica at Old Goa; the rest was broken up into relics and sent to the churches he founded.

In 1614 (five years before he was beatified and eight before he was canonized), his entire right arm was detached. The upper arm was divided into two pieces, each sent to a Jesuit college; the hand and forearm were sent to the Church of the Gesù in Rome, where they remain (though they do go on tour)!

According to the Kristang (a local creole people also known as the Malaccan Portuguese), the right forearm of the Francis Xavier statue (installed in 1952 to honor the 400th anniversary of his final trip to Malacca) was immediately severed by a bolt of lightning, paralleling the removal of his real arm, surely an act of divine intervention . . .

Directly in front of the church is an 1814 lighthouse built by the British. It’s siting, though logical, must have seemed almost disrespectfully incongruous, even at the time.

The church as we now see it is in worse shape than if it had been left untouched. In 1930, Major CE Bone, the first president of the Malacca Historical Society, doubtless overwhelmed by boredom and curiosity, made several amateur, idiotic changes, including deleteriously repairing and rebuilding the old laterite brick structure with concrete, removing the dais and altar, unnecessarily excavating clearly marked tombs, removing all the tombstones and propping the prettiest against the walls, and repaving the floor. Looking at photos of the church from the 1920s and earlier, one wonders how he imagined his work was an improvement. Where is the large tomb to the right of the arch today, for example?

Most of the tombstones are of Dutch East India company employees and their relatives. Life feels so short now, and whenever I read these I’m reminded of how much shorter it was then, particularly for women and children. I found it interesting that many of the names weren’t quite Dutch, French rather: Huguenots or their descendants who had fled to the Netherlands as anti-Protestant hysteria swept France in the 17th century.

I do not speak Dutch, and most of the translations of the tombstone inscriptions in this post come from the 1905 book Historical Tombstones of Malacca, by Robert Norman Bland, available HERE FOR FREE from the Cornell University Library.

An invaluable record dating to before Major Bone ripped the place up, the book records the position of the tombstones in the church floor, provides translations (though somewhat flawed) of each and photographs of some, and a few additional photos of important nearby buildings (including À Famosa and Christ Church) as they stood at the time. I only photographed the tombstones I found the most aesthetically appealing, but there are many more.

There is a more modern and complete guidebook reflecting the finds and changes of the last hundred years, the 2013 Historical Tombstones and Graves at St. Paul’s Hill Malacca by Dennis De Witt, a local Eurasian descended from the original Dutch and Portuguese families. It’s certainly not prohibitively expensive at rm 18, but I could not find it for sale in person at any of the hawker tables, or available from the publisher in eBook format. If I ever do come across it I’ll likely buy it, but presently cannot stay in one place long enough to arrange its delivery. I was able to read some helpful pages on google books preview.

Coming up against incomplete information, I found myself using google lens to translate some of the gravestones I had photographed. Interestingly, if set to ‘detect language’, they were not recognized as Dutch, but as Afrikaans. I suppose this is because Afrikaans derives from 17th c. Dutch dialects, while modern Dutch has standardized differently and evolved faster.

Maria de la Queillerie, wife of founder of the Cape Colony Jan van Riebeeck, was one of the aforementioned Huguenot descendants, the daughter of a traveling minister in fact, brought up in the Pays-Bas speaking both Dutch and French at home. Maria always sailed with Jan on his constant journeys between VOC outposts. She died of smallpox in Malacca in 1664, aged 35. Considered the ancestral mother of the Afrikaaners, a woman of inspirational piety and intelligence, her tombstone (though not her remains) was removed to Cape Town in 1915. A plaque on the floor currently marks her tomb, an odd exception to the rule at St. Paul’s.

There are also several Portuguese tombs and their stones here. Most obviously predate the Dutch graves, though there was eventually some intermarriage between the Dutch and local descendants of the Portuguese.

According to Bland, Major Bone was not the first to move tombstones away from the earthly remains they were intended to mark; he writes regarding St. Paul’s: “It is probable that this became a favourite burial place with the Dutch when they had built their own church by the river, and that some of the earlier Portuguese stones were displaced by them. In one case it is clear that a Portuguese inscription has been obliterated and a Dutch inscription placed on the same stone. At a later date some of the early Dutch tombstones were displaced to make room for the burial vaults of a later generation . . . Most of the Portuguese stones have been moved to the church built by the Dutch and now used for the services of the Church of England [Christ Church].”

Around the back of the church outside, trailing down the hill, are 19th century British graves. It’s more than a bit horrifying how hawkers cling to them.

There’s an outdoor stair leading down to the Dutch cemetery, past a continuous complex of abandoned British colonial buildings, including what was once the Resident’s house (and then Governor’s Museum) and its outhouses to the left, and to the right Kampung Tetek, Malay houses backing onto neglected British tombs. The Residency seems to have been a functioning museum as recently as 2 years ago, but is now closed.

The stair should open onto Jalan Mahkamah, between Dutch shopfronts to the left and the Dutch cemetery to the right. Unfortunately, it’s been closed off for no discernible reason, so you actually have to walk all the way down and around the hill in one direction or the other to visit the Dutch cemetery. A plaque on the Dutch shopfronts commemorates their gazetting as landmarks in 1988, but they seem to have been abandoned for a minimum of 15 years.

The Dutch graveyard was used for Dutch burials between 1670–1682 and British 1818–1838. There are only 5 Dutch monuments and 33 British; it is believed that the British moved Dutch tombstones up to the ruined St. Paul’s, though I’ve found no evidence or testimony of that.

The obelisk is for White and Harding, two mid-twenties naval officers who died in the short-lived War of Naning (August 1831 - June 1832). It was less a war than an uprising led by Dol Said, the hereditary chief of Naning, who didn't want to pay the 10% flat tax on produce imposed by the British on all Malaccan vassal states. Needless to say, the British won.

This tomb sparked my curiosity about the Millers of Monk Castle. Monkcastle was first attested in 1536 as the administrative centre for the north-west portion of the extensive estates held by the monks of Kilwinning Abbey. The estates passed in the mid-1550s from Church to commendator, at that time a Hamilton. The building was recorded as a “pretty fair building, well planted” in the first years of the 17th century, but a ruin by the end.

The ruin first came into the Miller family in 1723, and Alexander William Miller, the father mentioned on Janette’s gravestone, built the extant and occupied Monkcastle House nearby circa 1820, so halfway through her short life. It was probably designed by the architect David Hamilton, a descendant of the original commendators now best known for Nelson’s monument and the Royal Exchange.

Said father was not a member of the EIC, and predeceased this daughter by three years, so I find it interesting that only he is mentioned on her tombstone, not the intended husband or perhaps other relative(s) she must have travelled to Malacca for, or older brother/family scion who must have paid for it.

This one just seemed so sad because he was so young. No matter what happened, passing on a wooden boat between Bengal to China is a hard way to go for a very young British person.

Walking around, I often wondered about the clusters of people who died within a month or so of each other, throughout the centuries. Were they on the same plague-ridden boat? In the same jungle battle? Victims of the same local malarial outbreak? All the flesh is grass, indeed.