Malacca Heritage Walk Blog

Most people’s Malacca is flat. It is the riverbank, the red square, the shophouses of Jonker Street and the temples of Harmony Street. Walk about fifteen minutes east of Dutch Square, past the traffic on Jalan Temenggong, and the ground rises into a green hill. Joggers go up it at dawn. Families come on weekends with incense and oranges. The slopes are covered in horseshoe-shaped tombs, many older than anything else in the city.

This is Bukit China (Bukit Cina in Malay, 三宝山 Sanbao Shan in Chinese). About 25 hectares and more than 12,000 graves, it is often described as the largest traditional Chinese cemetery outside China. It is also the best place in Malaysia to understand how Malacca and Ming China became tied together, because every layer of that story, from the treasure fleets to the 1980s, has left something on or around this hill.

The Ming Connection: Why China Backed a New Port

Malacca was founded around 1400 by Parameswara, a Malay prince who had been driven out of Palembang and then Temasek (today’s Singapore). The new port had one big problem: it lay inside the sphere of the kingdom of Ayutthaya (Siam), which expected tribute from the peninsula. Malacca needed a protector bigger than Siam. There was only one.

The new Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty was actively looking for allies in the southern seas. In 1403 he sent an envoy, the eunuch Yin Qing, to Malacca. Within a few years the Ming court had recognised Parameswara as a king under Chinese protection, and Siam was told to leave him alone. In 1411 Parameswara sailed to China himself with a retinue that the Ming records put at more than 540 people, and was received at court. For a small, young port, that recognition was worth more than an army. It told every trader in Asia that Malacca was safe.

The link was made real by Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho), who led seven treasure fleet voyages between 1405 and 1433. Malacca became one of the fleets’ main bases. His interpreter Ma Huan described a stockade with gates and watchtowers where the fleet stored its cargo while waiting for the monsoon to change. For the river-port side of that story, see our Malacca River history. The Cheng Ho Cultural Museum on Lorong Hang Jebat covers the voyages with maps and ship models.

The hill’s Chinese name comes from this period. Sanbao (“Three Treasures”), pronounced Sam Po in Hokkien, was Zheng He’s title. Across Southeast Asia, places linked to him, by history or by legend, carry the name. Bukit China is Sam Po’s Hill.

Hang Li Po: The Princess in the Malay Annals

Ask anyone in Malacca why the hill is Chinese and you will hear about Hang Li Po. According to the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), the Chinese emperor sent his daughter to marry Sultan Mansur Shah, who ruled Malacca in the mid-fifteenth century. She arrived with a large retinue (the Annals say five hundred young attendants), and the sultan gave the hill to her and her followers as their home. Their descendants, the story goes, were the first of Malacca’s Chinese.

It is a good story, and you should hear it, but it is a legend. No Ming source mentions a princess being sent to Malacca, and Ming emperors did not marry their daughters to foreign rulers. Historians read the episode as the Annals’ way of describing a real diplomatic relationship in the language of a royal marriage. It may also remember a real noblewoman or envoy whose rank grew in the retelling. The legend matters anyway. Hang Li Po is a beloved figure in Malaysia, she has a street named after her at the foot of the hill (Jalan Puteri Hang Li Poh), and she is often claimed as the symbolic ancestor of the Baba Nyonya.

The honest version is still remarkable. Malacca’s Chinese community began with traders, sailors and craftsmen who came with the junks and the fleets and stayed. Many married local women. Over generations they became the Peranakan Chinese, whose houses you can visit at the Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum and along Heeren Street.

Hang Li Poh’s Well: The Water Every Army Wanted

At the foot of the hill, behind a low wall, is a square well. Locals call it Hang Li Poh’s Well or the Perigi Raja (King’s Well). Tradition says it was dug for the princess’s people in the fifteenth century. It is said never to have run dry, even in drought.

In a city surrounded by salt water, a reliable spring was a military target. Every power that fought for Malacca knew it. The well is said to have been poisoned more than once during sieges. The Dutch, after taking the city in 1641, built a fortified wall around it in 1677 to keep it under guard, and that enclosure is the ancestor of what you see now.

The modern legend is gentler: throw a coin into the well and you will one day return to Malacca. The water is now covered by a grille and is not for drinking. The coins collected are given to charity.

Poh San Teng: A Temple Built for the Dead

Next to the well stands Poh San Teng (宝山亭), the temple listed on our map as the Sam Po Kong Temple. It was built in 1795 by Kapitan China Chua Su Cheong, the leader of the Chinese community at the time. Its main deity is Tua Pek Kong (Fu De Zheng Shen), the earth god of the Chinese diaspora. Locals call it the Sam Po Kong temple because of the hill’s link to Zheng He.

The reason it was built is the most human detail on the hill. Families climbing up to honour their ancestors had nowhere to pray when it rained, and the steep, muddy slopes made the old graves hard to reach. A temple at the bottom gave them a dry place to make offerings to the dead and to the god who watches over the land the dead lie in. It is small and quiet, with a heritage gallery on the Chinese community’s history. Go inside before you climb. It explains what you are about to see.

The Cemetery: Kapitans, Feng Shui and a 1622 Grave

Burials on the hill began long before it was formally a cemetery. The oldest dated tomb usually cited belongs to Huang Weihuang and his wife and is dated 1622, in the reign of the Ming Tianqi Emperor. That was while Malacca was still Portuguese. Many graves carry Ming or Qing reign dates instead of Western years, so you can read Chinese dynastic history on the headstones as you climb.

During the Dutch period the land passed through several hands. In 1685 the Kapitan China Lee Wei King bought the hill and gave it to the Chinese community as a burial ground. Its trustee ever since has been the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, Malaysia’s oldest functioning Chinese temple, which still manages the hill today. Several of the city’s Kapitans, the community heads who answered to the Portuguese, Dutch and British, are buried here.

Look at how the graves are arranged. Traditional Chinese tombs are built on slopes according to feng shui. The grave sits with a hill behind it and an open view in front, and the curved horseshoe wall opens downhill like an armchair. A hill with views over the sea was close to ideal ground. That is one reason it filled up over three centuries instead of moving elsewhere.

The hill also carries more recent history. Near the foot is a memorial to the Chinese civilians killed during the Japanese occupation of 1942–45. Every year at Qingming (early April) the slopes fill with families sweeping graves, burning paper offerings and sharing food with their ancestors.

1984: The Year Malacca Saved Its Hill

By the early 1980s Bukit China sat on valuable land at the edge of a growing city. In 1984 the state government proposed levelling much of the hill for development. To Malacca’s Chinese community it was like proposing to demolish a family temple. The graves were not just old. Families still visited them.

What followed became one of the best-known heritage campaigns in Malaysian history. Led by the Cheng Hoon Teng trustees and Chinese associations across the country, it gathered petitions, raised funds and drew national attention. The plan was dropped. The hill was kept as a cemetery and a green space, and it now sits in the buffer zone of the UNESCO-listed historic city. The campaign is a large part of why the hill is there for you to climb, and why it still feels like a place that belongs to living families rather than a museum.

The Ming Trail in Town

Bukit China is the end of a trail that starts in Chinatown. On the way there you pass:

• Cheng Hoon Teng Temple (founded 1645) on Jalan Tokong, which built and still manages the community’s institutions, including this hill. Our Harmony Street guide covers it in detail.
• Xiang Lin Si Temple opposite, a modern Buddhist temple that shows the community is still building.
• Cheng Ho Cultural Museum, which argues that Zheng He’s depot stood on its own site. That claim is disputed, but it is the best introduction to the voyages.
• Melaka Sultanate Palace Museum, a replica of the court that received the Ming envoys and, according to the Annals, Hang Li Po.

A Two-and-a-Half-Hour Ming Walk

Start early. The hill has little shade, and by 10 am it is hot.

1. 7:30 AM — Cheng Hoon Teng Temple (20 min). The temple is busy with morning prayers, and it is the institution behind everything you will see on the hill.
2. 7:50 AM — Cheng Ho Cultural Museum from the outside (it usually opens mid-morning; come back later if you want to go in). Then cross the river and walk east past Dutch Square along Jalan Temenggong (about 15–20 min).
3. 8:15 AM — Poh San Teng and Hang Li Poh’s Well (25 min). Read the gallery panels, toss your coin.
4. 8:40 AM — Climb Bukit China (60 min). Take the paved path to the top (about 20 minutes at a steady pace), then loop down a different side. The summit has views over the old town to the Strait.
5. 9:45 AM — Back to town for breakfast in Chinatown, or continue to St. Paul’s Hill, the other hill of old Malacca, where the sultans’ palace once stood.

Practical Tips

• Entry is free. The hill is open to walkers at all hours, but go in daylight. Early morning and late afternoon are best.
• Bring water and mosquito repellent. The paths are paved but steep in places, and the long grass between the graves holds mosquitoes.
• Be respectful. This is a working cemetery. Stay on the paths, do not sit or stand on tombs, and do not photograph families at their ancestors’ graves without asking.
• Check the calendar. Around Qingming (early April) the hill is crowded with families. It is moving to see, but give them space. The seventh lunar month (Hungry Ghost Festival, roughly August–September) is also a busy time for offerings.
• Getting there: about 1 km east of Dutch Square, on foot or by a short Grab ride. The temple and well are on Jalan Puteri Hang Li Poh at the foot of the hill.

Beyond Malacca

The Ming connection did not stop at Malacca. In Penang, the Hokkien clans who arrived three centuries later built the grand kongsi clan houses. In Macao, the Chinese temples grew up around the same maritime trade that Zheng He’s fleets opened. Bukit China is the oldest piece of that story in the region, and the one you can still walk through.