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The Tongkang Pechah Adventure 

By unknown 
I was bornt in Tongkang Pechah, a small village near Batu Pahat in Johore, Malaysia; about 120 km north of Singapore. It is located by the north bank of Sungai Simpang Kiri, a tributary of the Batu Pahat River. It is now famous for the many biscuit factories like Hup Seng (Cream Cracker) and Munchy (Bite Me).

Tongkang Pechah in Malay means a broken barge.

In the early days, the villagers could only go to Batu Pahat by boat. Off their boat jetty laid a broken barge half buried in mud by the river bank. On their upstream return trip, the villagers would tell the boatmen "drop me at the jetty with a Tongkang Pechah"; hence the village earned its name.

The old folks said the jetty with the broken barge was located upstream from the current Tongkang Pechah Bridge. It was believed to be one of the Sri Medan iron ore barges that sunk. However it was never seen in recent years, siltation and water weed had taken over the once navigable river.

Sri Medan is located about 10 miles upstream from Tongkang Pechah. It was the first iron ore mine of Malaya, started in 1919 by a Japanese rubber planter Sato Ishihara. His company Nanyo Kogyo Koshi mined iron ore from a small hill at Sri Medan, the product was carried by 70ton barges towed by launches down the Sungai Simpang Kiri to transfer to ore carrier ship anchored just off the river mouth of Batu Pahat.

During the Second World War Ishihara became one of the feared lieutenants of the Japanese occupying forces based in Batu Pahat. His iron mine at Sri Medan continued operation throughout the war, supplying precious iron ore requirement for Japan.

In early 2009 my company was awarded a contract by the Drainage and Irrigation Department of Johore to clear the Sungai Simpang Kiri as part of the State flood mitigation program. We used a dragline to remove waterweed from the river bank, and remove excessive clay that had clogged up the river channel.

In April 2009, while doing site inspection, Oro my trustworthy Camel Trophy Discovery was bogged down by soft mud about 400 m upstream from the Tongkang Pechah Bridge. The excavator that dug out Oro from the deep bog hit some pieces of wook that looked like coming out from the broken hull of a vessel. Recalling my elders story I thought I had probably hit the old Tongkang Pechah!

I engaged BRGM geophysics of Shah Alam to scan the site by using georadar, within hours we found her keeled on her side buried under about 8 m of river mud. She must have been shifted during one of the earlier annual floods, and subsequently buried and overgrown!

Without alarming the authorities, I selected a few trusted workers and went about careful excavation of the old Tongkang Pechah. The thought of uncovering a major part of the villages history got me really excited.

We cordoned off the area with claddings, made the site looked like one of our storage yards, and then carefully shifted the 8 m thick river mud.

We found the old Tongkang Pechah as an unremarkable wooden barge, similar to the motorized barges that you see now taking tourists cruising the Singapore river. She lay on her side, with a big hole on her starboard hull, in the hold there were loads of iron ore, which were high grade magnetite.

We shifted carefully through the cargo hold, hoping to discover a clue on the date of the unfortunate sinking.

Buried under the iron ore lumps we found a wooden compartment, in it we found a set of human skeletal remain among some wooden boxes. In the boxes we found an envelope with Kanji ink writing Yama...(the rest of the envelope had since decayed) together with quantities of Sovereign silver coins, Old Straits Dollars, jewelleries, watches, and about 180 kg of crudely melted gold bars.

Piecing the information together, we believed that the old Tongkang Pechah must have been ferrying a senior Japanese officer (probably Lieutenant Ishihara) hidden inside a secret compartment at the end of the War, together with his war loots, camouflaged under a pile of iron ore, and hoping to escape the reoccupying forces by slipping away to the ore carrier. The letter must have been addressed to General Yamashita, the tiger of Malaya. This would place the date of the sinking to sometime around August 1945.

Hence I can say with authority that the village of Tongkang Pechah got its name post August 1945, an important piece of historical information for Prof. Emeritus K K Khoo of Universiti Malaya.

Satisfied with the historic find, we carefully documented the artifacts, placed the skeletal remain back into the wooden compartment, and gave him the honour of a proper burier together with his failed vessel and the iron ore cargo.

As it is a Chinese taboo to bury the dead with precious metals, we made sure that his soul was at peace by not including any metallic finds in the boxes.

The site can now be visited about 400 m upstream from the Tongkang Pechah Bridge, we had erected on the site a simple stone with the word Tongkang Pechah.

Historic adventures can really be exciting and rewarding! Anybody wants a ride in a brand new H3?