The lost lamp of ‘Lake Kenneth'

The Star

a day ago

ONCE upon a time, there was a lamp.
It was made of thick porcelain, shaped like a flared mushroom cap, perched high on a rusted metal pole in the middle of a lake in Perak's Air Kuning wetlands.
Its bulb and wiring were long gone. During the monsoon, it jutted about a metre above the waterline, visible only to those with boats or kayaks who ventured close enough to study this relic.
Some kayak-fishers started calling it a shrine around 2009 or 2010 – not in a religious sense, but more as a ritual.
Every trip to the lake included a stop by the lamp, even though it was a long paddle and the fishing there wasn't any good. It became almost symbolic, a check-in with the past.
The lamp dated back to the colonial era. Concentric grooves ringed the underside of its thick porcelain shade – a workaround from a time before reflective materials had been invented.
It had once been a streetlamp, which meant that beneath the water lay what used to be a 'permanent' tin-mining site, likely a platform where workers loaded ore into lorries at day's end.
By 2011, the lamp was gone. Maybe it broke off and sank, but the steel bracket that held it to the pole had always seemed solid, if rusted.
Most of us believed someone took it – someone who recognised its antique value.
The pole stayed on for a while, but even that vanished a few years later.
The lake is still there – 180ha, almost perfectly rectangular, a dead giveaway that it was gouged out by a tin dredger, a massive, four-storey floating factory that devoured earth at the front and spat out processed tin ore at the back.
Locals call this place Lombong Kapal 7 (Seventh Dredger). Search it on Google Maps, switch to satellite view, and you'll see the lake from above.
Some jokingly dubbed it Lake Kenneth, after an angler who led friends there in the early 2000s.
A kayak-fisher posing with the porcelain streetlamp, back in 2010.
Tin dredgers carved their own trench as they moved, the bucket chains digging and the platform drifting forward, back and forth, until lakes like this were formed.
Air Kuning is full of these scars. But nature is slowly reclaiming them.
The miners are long gone, and for a while, only that lamp remained to whisper of the 1920s – a piece of Malaysian history half-submerged and forgotten.
In those days, electricity and lamps like that must have been expensive.
Only critical areas – loading bays, floating docks and key operations – would have been lit after dark.
As for the labourers? They likely had to cook and eat before nightfall.
It's said that Malaysia's beloved claypot chicken rice was born in these very tin mines, quite possibly in Kampar.
That town may be small today, but it still boasts seven or eight claypot chicken rice shops along its short main street.
There's no formal record of this origin story – it's just something passed down through the generations.
But it's not hard to imagine exhausted tin mine workers, caked in mud and sweat, tossing everything they had – rice, chicken, soy sauce, salted fish, lap cheong – into a cheap clay pot to cook before daylight ran out.
Our forefathers lived tough, backbreaking lives. We are so soft now, so fat.
So next time you're in Kampar, digging into a bubbling claypot of chicken rice, spare a thought for those miners – too tired to cook anything fancy, sitting in the dark, eating their one-pot meal as they stared at the mine lit by porcelain lamps.