500 years on, ‘descendants’ of Tun Teja seek family history

HISTORY has it that Tun Teja was the consort of Sultan Mahmud Shah before the Malacca Empire fell to the Portuguese in 1511.

After 500 years, two siblings from Masai, Johor, have come out to claim they are the descendants of the princess from Pahang, Kosmo! reported.

Bitah Matlip, 68, and her brother, Mahmud Matlip, 60, long to hear from others who could shed more light on the family history.

The two learned of their luminous past from their late grandfather, Abdul Mahmud, who died at the age of 111 in 1986.

He had two wives and the younger one, identified only as Tok Esah, is said to be still living and was somewhere in Batu Pahat.

The siblings claimed that their grandfather, when he was alive, would visit Tun Teja's burial place every time he made a trip to Malacca and would read the Yassin verses and cry over her grave, which is located in the village of Serkam.

“We don't exactly know what his actual ties were with Tun Teja. But he used to tell our father that the grave was that of his ancestor,” Mahmud told the paper.

Bitah said they were now coming out to talk about the matter to fulfil the wish of their late grandfather to trace the descendants of the princess.

Showing a faded 1910 black-and-white photograph of her grandfather, in a dark coat and white pants and flanked by a uniformed police sergeant and a gentleman in a white suit identified as Tok Puasa, she said:

“All this while, we have kept quiet about the matter as we feared people would think we have some ulterior motive.

“But we only want to look for other descendants.”

She added that she and Mahmud started their search about 10 years ago.

Asked if their father had known about the ancestry, she said: “He used to tell us that grandfather had several siblings and among those that our father remembered were Tok Ismail, Tok Limbing and Tok Majid.”

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/11/3/nation/19367039&sec=nation