(Station announcements)
Now, I just need to tell you how all this came about.
A nice lady from a television company came to me
and said did I want to go round the world to places called Victoria?
Although my mother warned me against taking sweets from strange men,
she never said anything about taking programme ideas from strange ladies,
so I said, "All right." So, the plan was I would go to places called Victoria,
cos I'm called Victoria and I'd go..."Mm."
Then I thought, "That's not a programme, that's just a holiday."
So then I started to think, "Why are there so many places
"all over the world called Victoria?"
Obviously, I knew they were named after Queen Victoria, which I am,
but there's no time to go into my mother's strange obsessions here.
I thought, "Why was it OK for us to march round the world,
"pointing at lakes and mountains
"and renaming them after this rather grumpy monarch
"who never went further than the Isle of Wight?"
I wanted to know how come we had such a massive empire, who got it for us,
did we get it all at once or in instalments,
how did we lose it, do they miss us now we're gone
and are there any bits of it we're not supposed to feel bad about?
Anyway, don't panic. It's only a television programme.
Now, which platform for Calcutta?
We're starting in India. Well, we have to start somewhere.
(Nonstop horns )
Anyway, I got very friendly with someone in Directory Enquiries.
We're going to Calcutta, once a little village by the banks of the Hooghly river,
once the capital of British India
and now renamed with its correct pronunciation, Kolkata.
It's got everything I thought it would have - tons of taxis and cows and people
and heat and noise and colour and music.
Coming from England, where the streets are just for walking along,
everything happens on the streets here.
If you saw someone having a good scrub in his boxers on our pavement,
you'd swerve to avoid them. You wouldn't crouch down and borrow the soap.
It's really noisy here, but it's not stressful.
It's really crowded, but it's not chaotic.
And it's quite calm, in a bonkers sort of way.
Somehow, the cows and the people getting to work
and the ladies rinsing their smalls and the gents having their hair cut,
it just all happens.
No hairbrush rage, no one winding their car window down, shouting.
They tolerate each other, just like they seem to have tolerated us
coming over here with our clunky old bits of architecture.
Looking out the window, you couldn't really be anywhere but India.
And me coming from 21st-century Britain, where everything is so politically correct
and you can't even have a skipping race unless everybody wins,
it's very hard to imagine that...
(Prolonged horns )
..empire-building mindset
where not only was it OK to reign over a completely different country
with a completely separate culture and history,
but it was perfectly fine to plonk great, ugly, British buildings all over it.
I mean, talk about monumental arrogance.
I don't know if it was arrogance.
I suppose we thought we were just giving them our best buildings.
We liked the Bank of England and Leeds Town Hall
and we thought they would, too.
And actually, when they decided to build a massive memorial to Queen Victoria,
it was a deliberate blend of western and eastern architecture.
It's a bit like the love-child of the National Portrait Gallery and the Taj Mahal.
It's built from the same marble and, like the Taj Mahal,
it took forever to be finished.
It was designed in 1901, the year that Queen Victoria died,
but it wasn't actually completed till 20 years later,
by which time Calcutta wasn't the capital any more - Delhi was.
So they had this massive, grand building in a place that was now only a provincial city.
0ops.
It's really interesting to be in a place
where religion and ritual is just part of everyday life.
It's just woven into the day,
not boxed off into a building and a day of the week.
But to be fair to us, we don't have the weather for it.
You might think the last thing I needed here
as a chunky, white woman amidst all this shiny, wet brownness,
was a chunky, white man strolling alongside me, telling me what was what,
but although Toby looks as out of place as I do,
he has lived here for more than 20 years.
He married an Indian girl, so he does know what he's talking about.
This is the Hooghly river. It's one of the arms of the Ganges. So it's a sacred river.
It'll soon enter the sea. It's flowed 2,000 miles from the Himalaya.
And these people are here on the bathing ghats for three reasons, really.
One is to cleanse themselves spiritually,
another is to cleanse themselves physically, at which you might wonder
because of the filth and detritus that is flowing down with the water.
And thirdly, there's a social gathering.
People from a community come in the morning and meet and chat.
- It's all men, though. - This is all men.
There are ghats which are exclusively for women.
These ghats - "ghat" means a step -
many of them were developed and sponsored by zamindaris,
the landlords who made their wealth in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It's odd how we ended up with India.
We didn't sail up the river with guns blazing.
We only came, really, for the shopping. It was all business.
The East India Company came here to trade in textiles.
It wasn't about making India British.
In fact, it made more sense for us to fit in with them.
And they did, those first merchants.
They wore the clothes, they ate the food, they learnt the language.
They did take Indian mistresses, often referred to as "sleeping dictionaries".
What does that mean?
You learnt the language of the country that you were in...
- By lying down. - ..from the person that you slept with.
- Erm... - That's terrible!
(Laughs ) Very practical. I can vouch for it.
- Oh, can you? - Sorry.
I'm not sure we need to hear that. We're not here to discuss your own problems.
It is amazing what you can learn.
It seems so mad that the East India Company coming here to trade in the 1600s
ends up with the entire continent being run by the British government
and India doesn't get its independence back till 1947.
Did we do any good things, I wonder?
Living in Great Britain now, our culture is really enriched
by all the people who have arrived and lived with us over the last 100 years.
Do you find that living in India now
that the culture and the lifestyle has actually been enhanced
by having that British population for all those years?
Is there a good legacy? is what I'm saying.
Yes. There are many positive legacies of the British in India.
But perhaps the greatest is the English language.
It's the English language that is enabling India to go out into the world,
to dominate the information technology age,
the writing of software, the medical transcriptions -
all the back-office work that the world requires is becoming centred in India.
And that is a direct result of an English-language education.
You can make bits of Calcutta look like Manchester
but when it rains you know you're not in Didsbury, you're in a monsoon.
It was a very difficult climate for Europeans
and the monsoon season was particularly dangerous because of the malaria.
So what the British did was pack up every summer and head for the hills.
Which is where I'm going on this tiny, bonkers steam-train
which somehow, if it doesn't run out of coal,
is going to chuff its way up to Darjeeling,
7,000 feet above the clouds.
It used to take three days
for the memsahibs to get to Darjeeling from Calcutta.
But a brilliant railway engineer, an Englishman called Franklin Prestage,
working in Eastern Bengal,
had the idea for this tiny, two-foot-gauge track.
And in 1881, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Company was in business.
The engine was built in Manchester. Can I just say that?
Unlike British train journeys, where you're looking at
people's back gardens and bizarre choice of conservatory,
on this train you can practically lean out and do your shopping.
Everywhere the train goes past, people are doing this to get all the bits out of their hair.
It's the dirtiest...coal.
It's so weird to go up a train track in the middle of somebody's high street.
(Whistle )
Boiling.
So this train, God willing, will go to Darjeeling,
which is where all the British ladies used to come in the days of the empire,
to get away from the heat.
So although it feels quite warm,
it's nothing compared to what it is down below.
It's really interesting to come through this little town
because it's how I imagine towns in England would have been about 100 years ago,
with people sitting about, people chatting and lots of hustle and bustle and lots of shops.
There's a really nice atmosphere here.
There's a lot of energy and purposefulness.
I might be able to marry somebody here. That would be good.
All the men seem really friendly. They're all waving at me.
I might take one home.
Oh, look, he's running along the train now, the man that just waved at me.
We're above the clouds. We're actually above the clouds.
It's only the second railway in the world to become a world heritage site.
But it isn't just for tourists, it's a proper working railway.
It comes up once a day and everyone seems pleased to see it.
They wave and smile and... brush bits of burning cinder off their heads.
I love it.
The engine is called the Bluebird. Made in Manchester. Can I just say that again?
This has got to count in our favour, hasn't it, this railway?
0ne tiny tick in the Benefits of Empire column?
This must have made their lives a little bit easier.
The gradient is so steep, just nipping to the shop for them
is like us going up a loft-ladder.
They must have the biggest calf muscles in the world.
That may be why they're so keen on the sari.
It's a spectacular ride.
The train never goes through a cutting or into a tunnel
because Franklin Prestage didn't want the passengers to lose sight of the view.
And it is a big old view.
It's a bit stomach-dropping, actually.
I'm glad I'm in the train and not anywhere near the edge.
You wouldn't believe a train could get up here.
It's the most barmy thing.
(Whistle )
Darjeeling wasn't really a place before the British came.
These hill stations are a sort of Victorian invention.
And in those times it wasn't just about escaping the heat,
it was really about trying to forget you lived in India.
You had your nice villas and your churches -
none of those nasty temples.
And the only Indians you'd have to bother with
would be the ones doing your washing or bringing you your gin and tonic.
So, although Darjeeling wasn't home,
with its nice, fresh air and familiar-looking buildings, it was as good as.
If you kept your eyes on your teapot and didn't look too closely at the Himalayas,
you could almost be in Buxton.
Hi. Can I have two of those, please?
When I arrived here, it had taken me about 24 hours -
two planes and three hours in a car - to get up to Darjeeling.
Thank you.
But the first governor general of India and his wife,
it took them two months' travelling to get here.
And when his wife, Lady Canning, arrived here
she said that she couldn't understand any words of the language,
she didn't know anybody and she didn't recognise any of the plants.
And she'd come here to set an example.
She hadn't come here to assimilate, she'd come to set an example
with her silver teapot and her corsets.
And she laid out an English garden and it was all about trying to show India
how life was to be lived in the English way.
And she died of malaria and dysentery.
But she has got a legacy. They've named this sweet after her.
This sweet, which we have in England, as well, is called a ledikeni.
Oh, it's nice, actually. Which I wasn't expecting.
This is all about white is the new black, as far as tea is concerned.
And they're saying that it might be good
if they start harvesting white tea in Darjeeling,
as well as black tea and green tea,
because they think there's going to be a worldwide boom in white tea.
I think it's got some health benefit, a bit like green tea.
I'm not sure cos... I can't be bothered to read it all.
It says it's perfect for a quiet evening.
I'm not sure that's such a fantastic selling point.
(Chatting)
White tea? How will that work?
Everyone knows tea's brown, milk and two sugars. It's our heritage.
We had the sugar first. That was cheap cos it came from Jamaica.
We had nothing to put it into so we invented the cup of tea.
We started to grow tea. Nice, brown, English tea. You know.
Indian tea. From China.
You see, the first governor of Darjeeling, Dr Campbell,
planted some Chinese tea seeds in his garden here
as an experiment in 1835.
And now look. You'll never get the mower through that.
This is Rajah and this is his tea plantation,
which is all organic and has been in his family since 1859.
You know, these plants are from Victorian times.
- These ones? - Yeah.
They were planted out in 1842,
being uprooted from the Chinese tea fields of Huangshan.
- So does tea not come from India, then? - No, not at all, not at all.
This is Camellia sinensis, and it was brought along in the 1840s,
when tea drinking became extremely popular in Victorian England.
- But Darjeeling's not China tea, is it? - Of course it is.
The seeds are all originally China seeds
but what Darjeeling is to tea, champagne is to wine.
So the Chinese lost out and Darjeeling prospered. (Laughs )
Who owned the plantations?
Most of the plantations are all British owned.
And the investment was all from London. They grew very rapidly.
But most of the managers were not English. They were Scottish.
So you see some wonderful names like Glenburn, Maggie's Hope,
Bannockburn and stuff like that, OK?
And these men were quite incredible.
Just imagine there were no roads or communication at all.
They got these huge machines, the driers,
the stokers, withering tats et cetera,
the engines, weighing three or four tons.
And carrying them up the steep mountain hillsides
and then taking them four or five kilometres down.
There was nothing at all. How did they do it?
- I don't think anybody could do it now. - No.
Under those conditions.
- You admire that? - That is amazing.
I wonder where that has gone these days. I wonder. (Laughs )
- And who was working on the plantation? - Nepalese people were brought in
and of course, at that time, everybody says it was very exploitive et cetera,
but it was the only organised farmlands.
And people were treated the best in those times.
They had organised medical health insurance,
regular wages, rations et cetera, which was not to be found anywhere else in the world.
And people conveniently tend to forget all that in retrospect.
- So you don't think it was a bad thing? - It was wonderful.
Well, I wouldn't be here if the British hadn't been here.
They call Darjeeling tea the champagne of teas
and there are three basic varieties.
It's harvested at three different times in the year
but the first flush, harvested in mid March after the spring rains,
has the most delicate flavour.
They bring the green leaves in and they spread them out to get out the moisture.
Then they roll the leaves and that's to bruise them
so the sap is exposed to the oxygen.
The leaves are fermented, dried out and then graded.
A whole-leaf tea would be a top grade.
And the teeny bits that fall through to the bottom end up in tea bags,
which I don't think Rajah would ever serve.
- Victoria. - Thank you.
- Hope you enjoy the world's best tea. - The world's best tea.
Thank you so much.
- So, this is Darjeeling silver tips? - Silver tips.
It has the world-record price of $400...per kilo.
We shall wait for your opinion.
It's very subtle. It's beautiful.
It's an extremely delicate tea and has four layers of flavours, actually.
And as you roll it along and sip it gently, the flavours unfold.
I normally drink it last thing at night, to lull me into celestial slumber, actually.
Let's hope it doesn't have that effect now.
(Chuckling)
How lovely to be sitting at the top of the world,
drinking Indian tea from china cups in an organic garden,
with Rajah and his wife, Srirupa, telling me all about life in the days of the Raj.
So the British planters were complete lords of Darjeeling.
Now, they, of course, they strayed a lot.
So there were a lot of fall-outs, illegitimate children, out of that.
- What, they strayed with local... - Of course.
- Particularly the young... - Especially the men.
No, no, the assistant managers were not allowed to get married for 14 years.
- Why? So they could concentrate on tea? - On their work. Yes.
The ladies would just come up in the summer or in October.
So they were left to themselves. It's quite a lonely and tough life.
That's asking for trouble.
- Can you recognise people now? - Yes.
Can you think, "They must have had white parents"?
- Yes, it's quite apparent. - Looking at them, yes.
We haven't speeded the film up. That's how married people talk.
It's accepted.
It's a funny old place, Darjeeling,
piled up all higgledy-piggledy on the hillside.
With just the odd reminder of the old days here and there.
This looks Victorian. I think it's some remnant of...British occupation.
It does feel completely different from Calcutta.
It's cool and fresh but it's cold at night.
I've got a very scary-looking electric fire in my hotel room.
I think it might have belonged to Gandhi.
They're missing a trick here with their derelict churches.
Have they not heard of the concept of the discount-carpet warehouse?
People come here now for trekking and river-rafting.
There's not much left of the old British Darjeeling.
And what there is needs a bit of a face-lift.
That roof alone is going to take months.
Especially if all you've got is a brush.
While all that lovely tea was headed west,
to a Great Britain where the kettle was always on
and only a nice cuppa would kick-start the day,
an even more addictive and less cosy substance was leaving India and heading east,
to the opium dens of China.
And that's how we got Hong Kong.
0r, as I thought it was called as a child, Made In Hong Kong.
We won this little island in a fight.
And not really a fair fight, either.
You know I said we didn't arrive in India with guns blazing?
Well, in Hong Kong we did. Britain had a problem trying to trade with China
because there was nothing of ours that they wanted.
But the climate that was so good for growing tea was perfect for growing opium
and that was something the Chinese couldn't get enough of.
There were so many addicts, and it's such a socially damaging habit,
that the emperor of China banned trading in opium altogether.
It was illegal. But it was too profitable for the British to give up
and they ignored the ban.
A small stand-off escalated into a war
when Britain sent in the warships that China didn't have.
The navy took Hong Kong and it was given to the British a year later
"to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty."
This was the place to live if you were a British merchant - a taipan -
at the very top of the island, Victoria Peak.
You could stroll out of your palace with its flags flying
and be driven down to your offices on the waterfront.
I've noticed two things, coming straight from Calcutta to Hong Kong.
One is that although Calcutta seems very chaotic and crowded and noisy -
you'd think they'd have repetitive strain injury, honking their horns the whole time -
it's actually a very calm and tolerant atmosphere.
It's actually quite a spiritual city.
Whereas here, first impression is that it's all about money and trade
and acquisition and display and shopping.
The other obvious thing is that in Calcutta everything happens on the street.
They're all living, washing, eating, cooking, doing the laundry on the street.
Whereas here, nothing much goes on at street level.
It's all up, off the street, enclosed in these really, really tall buildings.
I've been lucky enough to spend time
with someone who lives in one of these high buildings.
She's called Lamy. She'll be going round Hong Kong with me.
She's lived here all her life.
I wanted to know what she thought the typical Hong Kong person was like.
- We're very hard-working. - Yes.
- Very material. - Yes.
- Very optimistic. - Yeah.
And we always look forward instead of looking backward.
I can't see any old buildings. Are there no old buildings left in Hong Kong?
Well, in Hong Kong, we're not as sentimental as the west are.
New is good and new is modern. It just mean better.
And is it better to have more? More money?
To have money is like the essential element
to reach happiness in this city.
- It's an essential element? - Yes. It's a very material city.
Yeah. I don't think I've seen one child since I've been here.
- We are too busy to have child. - Yes.
So most of us have none or have only one.
Hong Kong has changed completely in Lamy's lifetime.
From being a British protectorate, it was handed back to communist China in 1997,
which means it's easy now to travel back and forth to the Chinese mainland.
What happen is lately a lot of men would travel to China
and met someone that they like up in mainland,
where the girls are more gentle, more traditional in a way.
- Less threatening. - Exactly!
- And they are more willing to stay home... - Yeah. And shut up.
- ..cook, and raise children. - Yeah.
Because Hong Kong girls are very hard-working,
very looking forward
- and concentrate too much... - On their work.
..in trying to prove that they are strong enough to compete with men.
- Yeah, men don't like that. - Exactly.
What do you think has been the impact of the British here?
This place is very safe and the law is pretty...fair, I would say.
We enjoy a certain level of freedom in this city that has been offered by the Brit.
What do you feel has been the negative impact
of you, as a Chinese person, living under British rule?
I think it's the feeling of being a second-class citizen...in your own town.
I feel a lot better now because I... I can tell who I am.
- Since 1997. - Yeah.
And it doesn't matter how China will be, bad or good.
I feel that...now that I can stand up and say I'm Chinese Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was a tiny fishing village once
and now it's one of the richest places in the world.
It has the highest skyscrapers, the biggest shopping malls,
the wealthiest people.
And it does feel like somewhere that's all about money and trading
and dealing and shopping.
In Calcutta, you were right up against people's lives.
You saw them doing everything - praying, begging, washing.
Here, it's all insulated.
The things are behind glass, the people are on the phone.
You wouldn't dare stop anyone and ask for directions.
It's not somewhere where you would feel comfortable about
bobbing down and having a strip-wash.
Lamy says the Chinese don't look back,
which could explain why we're the only people in this antique shop.
- There's some beautiful things in here. - Yes, wonderful stuff.
This is very lovely, this colour. What is that, do you think?
My favourite. Actually, it's a pillow, believe it or not.
- A pillow? - Yeah.
In the old days, when we all have hair buns,
and in order not to mess it up, this how we slept.
- It looks really uncomfortable. - See? It catch perfectly.
Here.
I see what you mean, you get a bit of a breeze through the holes.
I think I'd rather have short hair and a proper pillow.
- So, this is all Chinese antiques? - It is.
I thought the people of Hong Kong weren't very keen on looking back,
- so who buys all this? - Mostly Westerners. And ex-pats, who...
- British. - Yeah.
Who is more interested in the culture and also who have bigger apartments.
- Where do you get your furniture from? - IKEA, mostly.
Yeah. That's our favourite...kind.
For example, look at this mah jong.
But it cost you a couple of US hundred dollars.
So it's only for rich people, these things.
Yeah, it means nothing for us.
I wanna go for a plastic one, which costs you only about 20 US dollars.
Yes. So you're not sentimental people.
First question is, "How much does it cost us?"
Because it's how we dress, how we try to show off our fortune.
And this is almost the only way to show our wealth.
In Chinese, we say that we respect your outfit before we respect you.
Oh. That's...
The first thing you have to earn somebody's respect, you got to dress well.
- Do you invite people to your homes? - Very seldom.
- It's too small. - You can't fit anybody in.
Yeah. That's why we like to eat out
and that's why the best way to meet people...out there.
- Out there in your best clothes. - Exactly.
Hong Kong's tiny. Space is at a premium.
You can't show off your wealth with a country estate or an infinity pool
so, short of papering your walls with your bank statements,
you just have to go for gold.
I didn't come here to laugh at funny foreigners,
but I was brought up by parents who didn't really like you to run the hot tap
because it was wasteful.
So a shop that sells huge, gold ornaments isn't really my sort of place.
This is the only thing in the shop I'd like to buy -
so handy for visiting any friend with a pale carpet.
Gold wouldn't be my first choice of bathroom material
but in this society the plain white tile wouldn't make much of a statement.
I'm from Lancashire. We don't flaunt. We tut.
It would take a lot of upkeep, a gold bathroom. Finger marks.
If I was one of the Hong Kong elite, I would get a plain toilet
and just write on the seat, "I am really rich. Now wash your hands."
It's not hygienic.
Does that price include a pedestal mat?
This is the surgery of Hermie Lee, who runs this very upmarket vets' practice.
- Hello, Victoria. Nice to meet you. - Hi, Hermie.
Well, it looks upmarket to me, but all I know about vets
is from watching All Creatures Great And Small on satellite.
And this is a world away from Christopher Timothy rolling his sleeves up.
Just popped in for a wax and polish.
I've thought of a good thing, a good legacy we left in Hong Kong.
We passed on our love of animals.
In Hong Kong a dog is for life, not just for dinner.
By the way, if you don't like needles, look away. Look away now.
No, that's not my head.
- Are there lots of pets in Hong Kong? - Lots.
Pets in Hong Kong is different from China because the culture is different.
What sort of things are people buying?
Cats, dogs, rabbits, turtle and mouse.
A very popular brand in Hong Kong
is Pomeranian, Chihuahua,
and maybe Schnauzer, the very small size of dogs and cats.
- People don't eat dogs here, do they? - No.
- But in China they do? - In China they do.
They wouldn't buy them for a pet and then eat them?
- They will. - Will they?
If they have money, they are rich, they will buy a very beautiful dog
and very healthy one, and they will cook them.
But in Hong Kong, not many people will do it.
In Hong Kong, we cannot accept this concept.
- It's not like a chicken or fish. - No.
OK, when the British people, they take care of Hong Kong,
they have their mind that they love pets,
so now people in Hong Kong, they educated in the western style
and they know that the pet is their friend. So they love pets so much.
In China, is it a lot to do with fashion, people buying pets?
Yes. It's a funny thing that when one kind,
like of the dogs, they import into China
and people they willing to pay 10,000 or even $20,000 to buy a dog.
But another new species comes in
and then they will just throw away the old one.
- By "throw away", you mean... - Just throw away.
Just let them walk out the street.
And then they don't worry about whether they be killed by a car or...
So it's like clothes. They go out of fashion you just get rid of them.
So if you have a dog, you have licence,
that means you are very rich. You don't have to wear diamonds.
- Just walk round with a dog. - Exactly.
- And if you don't like it, eat it. - Eat it, yeah. And chop it.
0ne thing the British didn't do when they took possession here
was insist on the Chinese becoming Christian.
They were free to practise any religion they chose.
And when mainland China was in the grip of the cultural revolution,
and religious and academic buildings were being looted and destroyed,
critics of the regime could come to Hong Kong and live freely.
Lamy's consulting the Chinese oracle, Chien Tung.
It's an ancient form of fortune-telling.
You shake those sticks in the box - they're called fortune sticks -
you ask a question and each stick is numbered
and the one that falls out will give you your answer.
0r you can do what I did and you can consult a living oracle.
This is Priscilla, who's a fortune-teller.
You see? Your intelligence line is right across your palm.
- So I'm very intelligent? - Yes.
So that means you are a decision maker. You see?
You see, since you were a little girl, OK, you are a little bit bossy.
So you think that you know everything, something like this.
Good. Keep going.
So, you see? The finger is very straight.
So you cannot bend the finger. You cannot bend the thumb.
So that means you say you trust yourself. You can hold on to what you want to do.
So that's why, OK, you get the very long nose.
Your nose is very long...
All right, you don't have to keep on saying it.
- It's like the ambassador's nose. - Oh, right.
See, the ambassador, OK, they always negotiate for the best.
- Right, yes. - They never bend on you.
You do not get what you want.
What about relationships? I'm not in a relationship.
- OK. What is your year sign? - I was born in the Year of the Snake.
So, we say if the man is six years older than you
- or six years younger than you, not good. - Not good.
Because at that year was the year of the pig.
- So the pig and the snake... - They can never get along well.
OK, so what's my best year?
The snake can be good with the ox and the rooster.
- The rooster's how many years? - Seven years older.
OK. And how many years younger?
I'm not joking.
I suppose if a load of arrogant, British, Victorian drug dealers
hadn't kicked off the 0pium War and if we hadn't had the naval power to win that war
and get possession of Hong Kong,
it might still be a fishing village in a backwater.
We might have won it in a big boys' conker fight,
but at least when the Chinese knocked on the door
and said, "Can we have our island back?" we did hand it over.
Right, I'll just explain. Now, as we know, India belonged to us.
This is India. And we grew opium. This is opium here.
That's an opium pipe. I'm just guessing what they look like.
Sri Lanka, which is neither here nor there.
Erm, we were exporting opium
round here - that's Vietnam or somewhere like that - and that goes up.
We were exporting it up to Hong Kong and thence to China.
And we were importing tea from China.
We wanted tea and we wanted to pay for it with opium, so that's the trade route.
So, that's opium going up, and tea and chinoiserie,
which I'm showing you by drawing a ginger jar, that's coming down here.
Now, this trade route, of course, was very vulnerable to piracy,
which I'm just...showing you.
It looks terrible, but it's supposed to be a skull and crossbones. That's pirates.
But in the middle, luckily, of this trade route, there's a big island
which we wanted, was very necessary to us, to repel pirates,
and that... And it's down there now. That is Borneo.
Borneo is the third largest island in the world.
It's surrounded by the South China Sea to the north
and the Java Sea to the south.
It's the only island in the world containing parts of three different countries.
Two parts belong to Indonesia and Brunei.
We are flying to Sabah, which is Malaysian.
A lot of this part of Borneo has that flattened, uniform look
that we would recognise from places like Plymouth
as somewhere which was heavily bombed in the Second World War.
Borneo was a British protectorate,
but it had no air or sea force to defend itself.
It was invaded and under Japanese rule by 1942.
By the end of the war, all the major towns had been destroyed
either by the Japanese or Allied bombers.
Sandakan, which had been the capital, was too badly damaged to rebuild
so Kota Kinabalu is the capital now.
Even here you'll only find three buildings still standing from before the war.
So that's the jungle that the lads of the British North Borneo Company
had to hack their way through in the 1880s.
It looks impenetrable now - it was worse then.
That's assuming they'd managed to get past the pirates.
They were looking for gold and diamonds and sago.
Personally, I wouldn't reach up to a high cupboard to get sago,
let alone shove my way through virgin jungle.
But these chaps were made of sterner stuff.
But even when they'd seen off the pirates,
it was Borneo and there were still head-hunters.
I know nothing about the head-hunters of Borneo
apart from those three words - Borneo, hunters and head.
But Agil, who is a descendant of a head-hunter,
keeps the story of the Kadazan tribe alive. And that's not all he keeps.
- How many are there? - 42 of them.
42 skull there.
- And they are real?. - Yeah, they are real. Yeah.
And they has been there for 300-over years.
In the olden days they take head
for purposes like expanding their power or their territory.
- They fight to get the head. - They fight to get land,
- kill the chief, then take his head. - Take it then.
Automatically, the people that live there is under the jurisdiction of that village.
So if you have that head, everything that belonged to that head belongs to you.
Yes. Belong to the person.
- Is it like having another spirit? - The more spirit you have, the better.
Because you can now communicate to the next world.
So your generation don't necessarily hold that belief.
No. Now we have religions
and we are all in Christians, some in the other religions,
- so we don't take that any more. - But you've kept them.
We keep them more for the next generation.
- Just to show them? - Yeah, their roots, you know.
We even losing our language already.
Yeah, the new generation, they speak a lot of English now.
Do they?
So Sabah is very much affected or influenced by British, yes.
- Do you think that's been a good thing? - It's very good.
You don't have to say that just cos I'm here.
If you compare with Indonesia, like rule by the Dutch, you know,
we just look at them.
And American in Philippines, you know.
So we are grateful that... No, all of us like the British have came.
There's a lot of addiction underpinning the empire -
the British addiction to tea and the Chinese addiction to opium.
As far as I know, nobody's ever been addicted to sago.
Honestly, there wouldn't be time.
I bet you didn't know you have to hack it out of a tree.
Everything we can use from the palm.
So, for example, this one. This is already cut in half. This is the flesh.
And, actually, we grate it like this, two persons.
And then you get the flesh.
What we do, normally we step onto it.
And then the water will come away.
And then, eventually, we leave with this sediment
and this is the sago, what we call the raw material that we will eat.
- So, eventually, it become like this. - Oh, yeah. Yeah.
You put hot water, you stir it
- and become like glue and we eat like that. - Yeah.
We can also produce sago worm from here.
- Like this. - Let's have a look.
- Aw... - It taste like sago also.
So normally, we eat like this - take hold the head and then we just eat like this.
- You don't eat the head? - No. It's hard.
The idea of a living thing that tastes of sago... (Laughs )
To me, it seems a bit pointless.
It is very lovely, though. I do like it.
Ow! It bit me!
I didn't like it that much before and now I really have fallen out with it.
- He have that beak like... - Yeah. Blooming 'eck.
Well, sago, we can use this for many things.
- The leaf, we can use for... - No, I've lost interest now.
I don't care what you've got to tell me about sago.
Sago bites - that's all people really need to know.
The British government weren't so heavy-handed
as they'd been in places like India.
Hugh Low, who was the resident in charge here in the 1870s,
was an explorer and a botanist.
He'd lived here for 30 years by then.
He loved the landscape, he climbed the mountains,
he studied the plants and he respected the people.
He understood their customs, he'd learnt their dialect.
He found a much more harmonious way to run a colony.
He was a pioneer in the study of orchids.
He was the first European to climb Mount Kinabalu,
one of the world's richest orchid habitats.
And some of the orchids he collected and sent back to Kew
have been named after him.
It's lovely to see them growing like this.
At home we'd just have the one, very expensive, in a pot,
tied to a stick, dead.
It was the British who were the first to clear the land
for rubber plantations and crops like coconuts,
but that was on quite a modest scale compared to today's industrial clearances.
The rainforest is being destroyed at an alarming rate to plant the oil palm.
0il palm gives the vegetable oil that's in a lot of our fast food
and in our biscuits and our cakes.
It's quite hard to avoid
and it's been linked with heart disease, diabetes, and obesity in children.
The rainforest is home to the orang-utan
and in the last 20 years, more than 80% of their habitat has disappeared.
There's a lot of illegal logging here as well as the clearing for oil palm.
And when a tree goes, it's the orang-utan's home
and its source of food.
No, it's not as bad as it looks. They're not reduced to living in wheelbarrows.
The orang-utan rehabilitation centre at Sepilok
is a protected area where orphan babies can be looked after
and returned to the wild once they're big enough.
It was established in 1964 by the forestry department here.
A British woman, Sue Sheward,
set up the appeal to raise money for the orphaned orangs.
- Are they weighed every day? - Every day.
This is to make sure that their body weight is increasing well.
Yeah.
That's one of the parameters to know if they're healthy or not.
But sometimes they're not as co-operative as you would like them to be.
No, it's not quite like the baby clinic, is it?
Illegal hunting for orangs for food, er, bushmeat...
Bushmeat or even for the illegal pet trade.
It's not OK in Sabah.
What's happened to their mothers usually?
You know, when an area is being cleared for agriculture purposes...
Yeah.
Trees need to be felled and sometimes, in the process of clearing land,
- tree is cut... - Yeah.
..mother falls, mother breaks the fall of the young ones...
- And dies. - Mother dies and the baby survives.
And how does it get from there to here?
Sometimes these baby orangs are then kept as pets by...
- The people doing the logging. - Exactly.
- Are people allowed to keep them as pets? - No, they're not.
From tip-offs, we have teams that go into this area
to find orangs which have been kept as pets or which are displayed.
We had a case, an Indonesian couple...
who were childless. They actually had the baby orang-utan for three years.
Like a baby.
- They dressed him like a baby... - Oh, don't.
..fed him like a baby. When the enforcement unit had a tip-off
and we actually went to get it, they didn't want to let it go.
But when we explained that they probably would go to jail, OK, fine.
But this is an example.
Now...
Because the babies have lost their mothers so early on in life,
they have to be taught how to behave like orang-utans.
They have to learn how to climb.
It's like trying to make your children play with educational toys. They don't want to.
In case you think I'm being hard-hearted, not giving them a cuddle,
I've been told absolutely not to touch them in case they get any of my germs.
Go on. Go and do some climbing.
They're grumpy, aren't they? (Laughs )
- (Encouraging noises ) - Don't wanna do it.
- Oop... - Oh, come on, do some climbing.
Go on, get up the bloody post.
Oh no, it's going to escape.
It's made a bid for freedom. Is that OK?
It's hiding. It doesn't want to climb.
Come on, you're supposed to be on this. (Whistles ) Hello.
Post. Rope.
- Like washing on a line. Go on, get on. - Yep.
I just keep getting weed on the whole time.
Ugh.
Hooray.
It's like when you take your children to the park.
See, you can do it.
Sheena, who's over from Scotland working here,
took me to a feeding platform where the bigger ones hang out.
- Ah, this one's Maureen. - Maureen?
- Yeah. (Laughs ) - Do you give them names?
Yeah. Yeah.
What are they doing, trying to rip the roof off?
0h, Maureen, stop pretending you weren't doing anything.
The orang-utans progress to feeding stations further and further away,
until eventually they're completely independent and can live in the wild, in the rainforest.
- (Sheena ) It's lovely, isn't it? - Beautiful.
You have to keep your distance a bit from the older males
just because they're just as inquisitive as the younger ones
and an awful lot stronger.
You do with human males - keep your distance.
Charles Darwin was fascinated by orang-utans
and he visited the first one in London Zoo in 1837.
She was called Jenny and Darwin visited her a few times.
He watched her look at herself in the mirror and he brought her a mouth organ.
When she took it from him and put it to her lips,
it helped him realise how closely linked animals and humans are.
It was later that year that he had his insight into what we now know
as natural selection.
Queen Victoria was not so keen on the orang-utan.
The first one she saw, she described as "painfully, disagreeably human".
So, eventually, they'll stop coming here to be fed?
- Yes. - And then they're fully independent.
- And you've done your job. - Yeah, that's it.
They go off into the forest and it's...
Do they ever pop back, like students getting their washing done?
Some of them do, yeah. They come back for a couple of weeks,
make sure everything's OK and then off they go again.
I'm at the Gomantong caves.
This is where more than a million swiftlets come to roost every evening.
Now, you know what I was saying about Hugh Low,
with his orchids and his love of Borneo
and how he worked with the local chiefs and all his reasonableness and fair play?
Well, when it came to this cave,
that was all forgotten.
Now, this cave holds a commodity so valuable to the British
that fair play went out the window.
And they actually fought and killed a tribal leader to gain possession of it.
Now, you might wonder why they bothered
because it's filthy, it really stinks, it's covered in bat droppings.
I wish I hadn't put my hand on the handrail.
I've just seen something I'm hoping was a guinea pig. I'm sure it was a rat.
This is not exactly Aladdin's cave. But it does hold a treasure
that, in its way, is more precious than gold or diamonds.
Way up at the top of the cave is where the birds roost.
And the precious commodity is in the old nests that the swiftlets have finished with.
This is what they were fighting over. A load of old, solidified bird spit.
Because the bird saliva that sticks these nests together
is the ludicrously expensive component of bird's nest soup.
Is that the Sarawak penitentiary? 0h, no. It's our hotel.
And somewhere down there in the kitchen they are making bird's nest soup
and they're making it for me.
I was brought up on horrible food - tongue salad, oxtail soup, school sausages,
so a bit of old, solidified bird saliva shouldn't bother me,
but I don't like birds, except on a bird table through a window,
and spitting, to me, is an offence on the top deck of a bus, not an ingredient.
I'm sorry, could that look less appealing?
Tulip runs this hotel. She'll probably give me the hard sell.
Bird spit and a stock cube. People are paying God knows how much
for old bird-spit that's been in a filthy cave with a load of old bat pooh.
And they laugh at HP Sauce?
- This is our first course. - Thank you. OK.
It's bamboo paste with bird's nest.
- Which is the bird's nest? - It's stuffed inside the bamboo paste.
I can't even get it with the chopsticks. I'll have to use the spoon.
There's something about...bird saliva
that's just putting me off the whole thing. I don't want to eat it.
Do you know this is a dish for the emperor before? Not for the common people.
That's why it's so expensive, because it's so rare.
What's so good about it, though?
Basically, the Chinese believe
that there's a nutritional and medicinal benefits.
This is great for pick-me-up if you're not feeling well
and feeling under the weather. It's great.
I'll take your word for it.
The bird's nest itself doesn't have any taste at all.
It's basically the sauce that gives it the taste.
Why did it ever occur to anybody to grab a bit of old bird's nest
and make it into a soup? It seems a really odd thing to have ever thought of
that it would be good for you.
Because anything rare is something people sought after just like gold, right?
- And they're really expensive? - Very, very expensive.
- Costs easily about 200 a bowl. - $200?
Yeah. We don't normally serve this on the menu.
- But is on request. - Right.
So that's why, if you go to a wedding and you're served with bird's nest soup,
you know that these people are really very, very rich.
More soup. Any chance of a piece of toast?
Making a documentary isn't quite the same as building an empire,
but it has its own hazards and pitfalls.
Like the hopeful explorers of yore, you tip up in a strange land,
hoping not for gold or sago or orchids, but...
just for something interesting to look at or...
someone fascinating to talk to.
But sometimes there is a misunderstanding.
Things lost in translation.
And that's how I've ended up in the middle of the jungle
after a three-hour drive on bumpy roads...
in this shop, run by a man whose language I can't speak...
selling things of which I have no need.
Like Vim.
Could I have some of those, please?
And if he wonders why I've travelled miles into the jungle
to buy two small bits of chocolate I could have bought in Warrington...
he's not saying.
It's not for me to say whether it's a good thing or a bad thing
that the British should take over places like India and Hong Kong and Borneo.
And I know a lot of posturing went on - all that changing for dinner
and eating roast beef and sweating into their starched shirts on the veranda,
but I think you have to admire the courage and the tenacity
of the people who first arrived - all those public schoolboys
hacking through the jungle, because it is jungle still.
You feel if you sat here long enough, something would grow up your trousers.
So I think you have to say that they were brave.
Bonkers, but brave.