Fallen heads named a town: The many origins of Bintulu’s name (Travelogue Day 5)

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By Marlynda Meraw

BINTULU, Feb 22: Most towns grow into their names. Bintulu, it seems, had to live one down. What is today a bustling port city in central Sarawak carries a name rooted in something far darker: the severed heads of the dead that were cast into the river.

History has a way of softening such things, and the few who pass through Bintulu today could hardly guess that the word on every road sign and welcome banner had once described an act of violence.

A vendor at Tamu Bintulu who was too shy to be named shared with the D’Drift team the history of the name. Back when headhunting was still a reality of life, he explained that the collected heads were thrown into a nearby river.

In the Melanau language, this act was known as metu ulau, a phrase meaning the picking or taking of heads.

“Metu ulau. It is the picking of heads, and the history of Bintulu,” he said.

Over time, as languages do, the term shifted. Passed through different mouths and different tongues, metu ulau was gradually worn smooth by pronunciation until it arrived in the form we know today: Bintulu.

Not everyone, however, traced the name to blood. Another vendor, Maxilyna Kuni Oyang, offered an alternate origin behind the nomenclature. To her knowledge, Bintulu was named after a river that once ran beside the old Bintulu hospital.

“There used to be a Kayan longhouse there,” she said, pointing to the general direction of where the old Bintulu hospital was.

There was also a third telling, one documented in historical record: a gazette entry from 1877 that named the Ba Tulau, a phrase from the Punan Bah and Vaie communities meaning rice pounder or rice mortar.

It was a name much tender; born of livelihood and the everyday activities of people feeding themselves and one another.

Bintulu, the town with many origins, yet none reconciled. A town named after the taking of heads, after a river, after the flow of grain meeting stone.

Perhaps that is the nature of places. Their names do not arrive from a single moment, but accumulate layer by layer. Perhaps Bintulu holds all of it: the violent, the geographic, the mundane. And it offers no verdict on which telling is true.

A town that kept growing

Bintulu may have begun as a small fishing village, but it had not stayed small for long. Large reserves of natural gas discovered off its coast set in motion a transformation that reshaped the town.

Today, Bintulu is the centre of Malaysia’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry and is one of the largest LNG production facilities in a single location globally. Its port handles an average of approximately 50 million tonnes of cargo annually and is the busiest in Sarawak, serving as the primary maritime gateway to East Malaysia and an important link to global shipping routes.

The town itself is well-organised and easy to navigate, with a warmth in its people that catches visitors off guard in the best way. Bintulu has long drawn people from across Sarawak and beyond, and many have simply stayed and made it home.

Spanning the Kemena river, the Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud Bridge, also known as the Jepak Bridge, has become something of a daily landmark: a yellow steel and concrete reminder that this town is always in the business of staying connected.

What was once a modest settlement by the river is now a bustling town with ambitions to match its history. The once-industrial port town is now being groomed as a future hub for hydrogen and green energy, aligned with Sarawak’s push to shape its own economic future.

Bintulu, it would seem, is still becoming.

Balingian: A river by any other name

Bintulu was not alone in owing its name to a river. Across Sarawak and beyond, towns had long taken the names of the waterways that gave them life. Kuching has the Sarawak River. Sibu sits at the mouth of Rajang. In Peninsular Malaysia, Klang, Muar and Perak all echo the rivers they were built beside.

Balingian, a small town roughly an hour’s drive from where the D’Drift team’s had departed from Mukah earlier this morning, followed the same idea of naming its town from a river.

Liman, met by the D’Drift team outside one of the shophouses along the Balingian waterfront, put it simply when asked about the town’s origins.

“There is a river further in, its name is Balingian. Naturally, the town was named after it,” he said.

Life along the river tended to take shape around the water, and the small Balingian town was no exception. Teruma Uncat supplemented her income by catching and selling crabs, a practice that fitted neatly into her days rather than defining them entirely.

“I don’t catch the crabs every day. I only do it when I have the time. Other times, no. It’s not a full-time job,” said Teruma.

The crabs were caught over several days and kept until she had enough to sell. Rainy days brought a lighter catch and she used a bubu (traditional fish trap) for the work. On other days, she tended her garden. Sometimes her granddaughter Tudai joined her at the selling table, offering red tilapia she raised herself in a pond by the village.

Between the two of them, the river and the land provided.

In Balingian, as in Bintulu, their names held more than just the waterways. They held the shape of life.

Miles and warmth

The D’Drift team’s day began the way good travel days tend to: without the usual complications. This was the first leg of the journey through the coastal road that spared us a ferry crossing.

The weather was kind and the landscape generous—all cooling green rolling past the windows in a way that asked for nothing of you except to look.

The people we met along the way were kinder still: unhurried, willing to share what they knew, smiling as we passed. There is something lovely about strangers who willingly give you their stories without asking for anything in return. We left each conversation a little fuller than we arrived.

A single day through Balingian and Bintulu is not much by any measure but the warmth of it will stay longer than the miles. – DayakDaily

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