Repository

A dusty place for old things, uncomfortably outdated in its gallery of cloudy-eyed stuffed animals, and the skulls of creatures hunted to the far edge of the critically endangered list. The Muzium Sabah is just what you might expect in a downtrodden outpost of an ex-colony. Helpful signs such as "Kereci - Chair" and "Dressing Table" tell you precisely what you don't need to know about exhibits. Other signs are only in Malay - "Teapots" above a collection of bronze, yes, teapots - each one different in their intricacy and beauty, their story veiled by the simplicity of the sign.

There are English mistranslations, like the horribly insensitive "All except six Australian soldiers survived the terrible [Death March]" - the exact reverse is true. And there's a small-minded and meanly racist video from the early 20th century showing ladies in hats directing porters in the rainforest, calling the native tribes lazy and stupid, with not an explanatory sign in sight to put the plummy Oxford accent into context.

In one small room, an odd film is showing on repeat, telling the history of Sabah - made some time in the late sixties, I'd say, with gloating accolades (it was all in Malay, of course, so I have to guess at specifics) to progress and development and deforestation and young college students dressed as perfect mimicries of Princess Margaret - all white gloves and coiffed hair in the tropical heat of Borneo.

And yet, and yet... beautiful ceramics from the 11th century wreck of a Chinese trading ship, dredged from the depths and lovingly displayed in a dry aquarium, the barnacles still clinging to a thousand-year-old jug, broken plates stacked on their sides to hide the shattered sides... The ceramics gallery is a vivid picture of the cultural crossroads that Borneo has forever been - Qing ginger jars, Murut burial vases, uncomfortable ceramic pillows, ritual Ming dynasty porcelain, a mysterious Mediterranean amphora, Thai bowls, intricate Japanese kendi from the 1600s, Vietnamese dragons competing with traditional Chinese depictions, a Laotian ewer, and then at the end of the gallery the more familiar designs of the 19th century Dutch factories. There's a Thai water jar used by the Dusun in the 16th century, and when I compare its glazed beauty and gentle symmetry with the garish blue plastic tanks that store my water, well, there really isn't a comparison to be made. How have we rejected this kind of beauty from our lives in favour of such ugly practicality?

In pride of place, of course, is the entire, jawdropping skeleton of a Bryde's Whale, which died just off the Kota Kinabalu coast in 2006, and which is the biggest in existence today.

It caused a small commotion when some anglers found it in the shallows off one of the islands across the K.K. bay (Pulau Gaya); tourists and fishermen spent the night pouring water over it to keep it alive and the following day it was towed out to deeper waters. Relief all round. Until it appeared again a few days later, this time dead. It's a little sad that you aren't allowed to take any photos inside the museum (for absolutely no apparent reason than that they think that's a rule a museum should have...), but no photo I could have taken would have conveyed the amazingness of this being - and the thought of it living and breathing far beneath the boat I took out to the islands last year is one of the wonders of my world.

I probably wouldn't go so far as Sabah Museum staff, though, who suggest that you might "Come and Romance it"...