The Daily Brunei Resources

I bought recently a magazine article entitled 'The Last of a Great Sultan' written by Poultney Bigelow. The article was about Sultan Hashim which makes the article about 100 years old as Sultan Hashim died in 1906. The article was pulled out of Harper's Monthly Magazine. I was clueless about Harper's. Recently I did a quick check on the net and found that Wikipedia has an entry on it: "Harper's Magazine (or simply Harper's) is a monthly general-interest magazine covering literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts from a progressive, left perspective. It is the second oldest continuously-published monthly magazine (the oldest magazine being Scientific American) in the United States, with a current circulation of slightly more than 220,000." Apparently Harper's Magazine began publication as Harper's New Monthly Magazine with the June 1850 issue. It changed its name to Harper's Monthly Magazine for the Christmas 1900 issue, and to Ha...

For my article this Sunday on Brunei Times, I wrote about the history of Brunei during the Second World War. I sent a number of photographs to Brunei Times but I think only one or two are usually selected. So in case you are still wondering how the other photos look like, here they are in full:- These are Australian soldiers along Jalan Muara. They landed in December 1944 and marched from Muara to recapture Brunei Town. Brunei Bay was used by the Japanese Naval Forces. These are Warships Yamato, Musashi and Nagato. Allied Forces capturing a Japanese soldier. Brunei Town was virtually flattened by the British and Allied Forces. I personally disagreed why this has to be done. We virtually had to restart Brunei Town in the 1950s. This is a scene I hope will no longer be repeated in Brunei. Our own countrymen running away from Seria. You can see Seria burning in the background smoke. Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin did not have anything to do with the Japanese. The Japanese treated him still as the ...

In this football fever season, I thought I will check up on what's going in with Brunei. So in FIFA.com, a new FIFA ranking was in place. Brunei is currently 188 and apparently we went up 2 higher in June. The next ranking will take place on 2 July and that will be interesting as most of the Europeans and South American teams played during the summer. Brunei apparently got 42.5 extra points for drawing 1-1 with Bhutan (rank 196). Apparently Bhutan too got 42.5 extra points for drawing with Brunei and went up 2 places higher. So I guess we should have more games with teams more to our standards. Perhaps that would boost up our positioning a bit. Losing a game gets us 0 points so it does not matter. But if the winner is below us, that might give them a boost and overtake us. According to FIFA charts, we have been on a downward spiral since 1993. Then we were ranked as high as 140 in December 1992. Our lowest have been 199.

Last week, I was accompanying my Minister for a Hari Gawai celebration at Bang Toang located at Mukim Sukang, Belait. I am not really sure how far Bang Toang is but I would say it is a good 150+ km from Bandar. You have to drive left at the Sungai Liang simpang. Then drive until you see the Sungai Mau/Merangking simpang and then drive through there all the way to the southern end of the Belait District. First the road will be like what you and I used to see before turning into a rock covered road and finally a sand covered road and by then you can forget about sleeping in the car. The road bumps gets one's bums off the chair every few seconds and at places you can see that the road has eroded away that you wonder how the 4 wheel driver can actually drive through it. In the rain, you can forget about driving as the roads will turn into liquid mud. Why has not the government improved the roads? It will be. It is part of the next RKN. Other than the Bang Taong longhouse and another lo...

I saw Reuters picked up on our Ministry of Finance's press release on the latest issuance of sukuk:- KUALA LUMPUR, June 23 (Reuters) - Brunei has sold B$28 million ($20.5 million) of 91-day Islamic bonds at a yield of 0.88 percent, the government said. The issue, which matures on Sept 18, is the 14th sale of short-term Islamic securities based on the "ijarah" or leasing arrangement. With this issue, Brunei has so far sold B$1.1 billion worth of short-term Islamic bonds since its maiden offering in April 2006, the government said in a statement sent out on Monday. Oil-rich Brunei is flush with cash but is issuing debt to build a market to become a regional hub in Islamic finance. Islamic bonds do not pay interest, which is banned as usury under Islamic law, and are structured as profit-sharing or rental agreements underpinned by physical asset. ($1 = 1.36 Brunei dollars) (Reporting by Soo Ai Peng; Editing by Lincoln Feast) If some of you are going "huh??!" why th...

[Note: This was my article that appeared in Brunei Times yesterday.] NOT that many nations' capital cities have a field in the middle of them. Tourists often wonder why Brunei's capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan has a nice big field situated in the middle of it. Not many realised the historic role of that field. If that field could talk, the stories it could tell would astound many. The Padang Besar as it used to be known or simply translated as the "Big Field" is now officially known as "Taman Sultan Haji Omar Ali Saifuddien" named after His Majesty's late father who was the 28th Sultan of Brunei Darussalam. The Padang has been in existence for at least a hundred years. In his book, "The City of Many Waters" published in 1922 but talking about Brunei at the end of the 19th century, Peter Blundell described the following "At the back of the town behind the Sultan's palace was a large plain known locally as the Padang, an ideal site f...

[Note: I found this article on our national food 'Ambuyat' written for Denver Post by John Henderson and syndicated on the The Times of South Africa (of all place!). Ambyuat indeed is an acquired taste.] If Bruneians want to expand tourism, they’ll need to hide their national speciality. I saw the sultan of Brunei the other day. He walked right by me as he entered a national Qur’an reading contest. I wanted to ask the sultan a key question about his country’s cuisine: Hey, sultan, why can’t a man worth 22-billion, whose 400-million palace has a 110-car garage and 257 bathrooms, afford a better national dish? It’s called ambuyat. Don’t look for it at an ethnic restaurant near you soon. It’s not going anywhere, and it’s here for reasons only historians and the streets’ starving cats can appreciate. After four days in Brunei, I’d describe ambuyat (pronounced om-BOO-yacht) as a big pile of gelatinous, transparent goo dipped in coagulating blood. First, a little background. During ...