274 
THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE MALAYS* 
DRESS. 
In describing the manners and habits of the Malays, 
occasion so frequently arises to mention articles of dress, 
ornament and food, tha it is necessary to give an account of 
these in the first place. That necessary minuteness and 
accuracy of description, which the changing fashions of some 
countries renders unattainable as applied to these subjects 
without giving volumes to them, may here be satisfied with 
one or two chapters. In giving a faithful account of the 
social and domestic rather than the national manners of 
the Malay of the present day, we exhibit him as he has lived 
for centuries, as he figures in his native poems and roman¬ 
ces, and as he appeared to the eyes of the first European 
navigators who entered the Eastern Archipelago. 
The principal portions of attire are worn by all ranks and 
in all parts of the Archipelago, nor is their use confined to 
the Malays, but is shared by the Bugis, Javanese and most 
of the inferiour races. The principal and most characteris¬ 
tic, perhaps the original, article of dress is the sarong, 
which is common to both sexes. It is probably the simplest, 
most effective and least troublesome garment possessed by any 
nation. It is formed of a piece of cloth generally woven of 
the proper size, or about four yards long and two feet and a 
half broad. This is cut in two and the sides sewed together so 
as to form a cloth half as long and twice as broad as before, 
* We refrained from proceeding with the publication of our translation of 
the Shair Bidasari (see Voi. I. ) when we found that our notes explanatory 
of words and customs would be so numerous as to form a bulky running glos¬ 
sary by which the attention of our readers would ba distracted from the poem. 
There exist neither dictionaries nor descriptive works to which we could have 
referred as safe and full authorities, and it therefore appeared to us that the 
simplest course for ourselves, and the most satisfactory for our readers, would 
be to postpone our promised series of Malayan works, until we had in some 
measure supplied this deficiency, by giving an account of the manners and 
customs of the Malays, in which native terms would be as much as possible 
introduced. We made arrangements for illustrating this bj lithographs, but 
afterwards found ourselves obliged to abandon lithographs altogether until we 
could get them executed at a leas expence. As it does not appear probable 
that we shall soon succeed in this, or be enabled to meet the cost at which they 
can be supplied at present, we will not longer defer our elucidations of Malayan 
manners, although we are quite sensible that we cannot succeed in conveying a 
true picture of this people without the aid of the pencil. The Malayan nations 
are so numerous that is necessary to adopt Borne standard in all works of this 
kind, and after much consideration wa have resolved to assume the Malays of 
Malacca as our type of the language and manners of the race. Our main 
object is to prepare the way for an examination of Malay literature, which received 
