One of our favorite songs of this season is, “My Rickshaw” (“Abang Beca”) a traditional song about the rickshaw drivers in the tourist-friendly parts of Melacca, a port city on the southwestern coast of the Malay Peninsula.
Founded as a port town in the early 1400’s, Melacca had became a strategic pan-Asian trading hub long before the Portuguese conquered it in 1511. The Dutch ruled from 1641 to 1798, then the British until World War II, then the Japanese during the War…eventually Melacca became part of independent Malaya. Today it is a tourist-friendly part of Malaysia — a Portuguese-oriented port town, and a UNESCO-registered World Heritage site. We sing in class about the town’s uniquely colorful, musical three-wheeled pedicabs, like the ones we see in this video.
