KUCHING, Malaysia -- It is said that when the British adventurer James Brooke sailed up Borneo's Sarawak River in 1841 he stumbled across an attractive backwater settlement. Impressed by its strategic location, he asked a local man its name and was told "kucing," which means "cat" in Malay. Local lore says that Brooke's informant thought the visiting orang putih (white man) had pointed to a passing feline.
Critics question this charming story because the word for cat in the local Sarawakian language is pusak, not kucing. Some say the city's name comes from Cochin, a colonial city founded by the Portuguese in 1500 in what is now the Indian state of Kerala. Whatever its origin, however, the capital of Malaysia's Sarawak state stands out as Borneo's most attractive urban location, despite its unusual history of rule by Brooke and two descendants, who ran Sarawak as "White Rajahs" from 1841 to 1946.
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