Deadwood

Finished watching the entire first season of HBO’s “Deadwood” during the May holidays, but only have time to write about it now. It’s a gritty, realistic western based on the gold-prospecting town of Deadwood in the 1870s. I’d thought it was a fictional town, entirely fabricated in the minds of the awesome scriptwriters until the episode where Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed. I scrambled on the net and read all I could on the subject. Not only was the town real, some of the other characters were based on real-life counterparts too, albeit fictionalized for effect.

The town itself is dirty, dusty and muddy in a raw savage state. The overlord of the town is a brothel and bar owner, Al Swearengen. Even the name sounds foul, but there was actually someone like that in history. Played by Ian McShane, the character shimmers with menace. The language is consistently foul, but grammatically typical of the period. The writer said it’s a dog-eat-dog world in a mining camp, and swearing was a means of chest-thumping needed to protect your turf. Women were a rarity, and limited to prostitutes and the coarse frontier-woman, exemplified by Calamity Jane.

But the show’s greatest star is the town itself- its lawless beginnings, its mixed of noble and shady characters, its vulnerability to plagues and cut-throat violence. It was easy for me to imagine this transplanted and in my mind, I imagined this was exactly what Kuala Lumpur was like in the 1860s. Half a world away, a town was started at about the same time on the basis of tin mining. It was actually begun in a plague. In 1857, 87 Chinese were sent upriver by a Malay Sultan to check for tin. Of these, 61 died of Malaria contracted from this expedition. And later, when the town was more established (they found the tin that would compete with Perak), the town was lorded over by a Chinese owner of brothels and gambling dens, a Hakka named Yap Ah Loy. The streets must have been as muddy as Deadwood too, since the town is named after mud. (Kuala Lumpur stands for “muddy confluence.”) Yap Ah Loy was made Kapitan Cina in 1868, KL’s third, when he was only 31. In younger days, he had been a street fighter from the state of Malacca. In 1871, 79% of the population of KL was Chinese, and the exact sex ratio was 72,000 males to 14,000 females. So in a lawless town, the most influential and respected figure was a tough fighter who provided girls, games and liquor. So it seemed in Deadwood, so it seemed in Kuala Lumpur.

Chup