X Marks the Spot - Our Hunt for Gold
Legendary lost Malaysian gold and other treasure mysteries to captivate us for generations
In the dense heart of the Malaysian jungle, it’s easy to get lost in your imagination. Trees and colours repeat like a bad result from ChatGPT, a wall of green static that obscures the tapestry of life within.
As I stared at what were just the outskirts of the thousands of kilometres that make up the rainforest of Pahang in the east of peninsular Malaysia, my eyes began to adjust. What had been a two-dimensional backdrop of blending trees and foliage began to distinguish themselves. The intricate patterns of light and shade revealed that the burst of colour was in fact a remarkable bird, or a slithering reptile. And yet, I could still see the surface with even just a few metres deeper in seeming impenetrable, there could be anything back there.
My guide, a local friend, told me that many believed there was something hidden in that sea of earth tones: Gold.
He told me the tale of General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Yamashita had been the commander of the Japanese invasion of what was then British Malaya in 1941, conquering the country in just 70 days. By the time his 30,000 troops had reached Singapore, they had captured more than 80,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers while tens of thousands of Malayan and British civilians lay dead. On his way it is said that the Tiger of Malaya, as Yamashita came to be known, had looted huge amounts of gold and valuables worth billions.
Yamashita would later be sent to command the Japanese army in the Philippines, where after Japan’s surrender he was put on trial and executed in 1946 for war crimes due to the atrocities carried out by his forces in the islands1. When he was hanged, with him died the location of his supposed loot. Much of it was thought to be in the Philippines but it was thought the rest could have been stashed throughout Malaysia, to await the war’s end and to allow its safe passage to Japan by sea.
Even today, amateur treasure hunters set out to find Yamashita’s Gold, and every now and again an old Japanese bomb or booby trap will kill them. Despite 80 years passing and countless “maps” changing hands, not a single ingot has been found.
Explanations suggest all sorts of theories, from the US Government secretly removing it, to Imelda Marcos and her husband putting into a Swiss bank account. But when I visited Pahang last year, it didn’t seem entirely absurd that it could still be out there in the jungle somewhere. Pahang is the third-largest state in Malaysia and is full of dense rainforest, almost 2.5 million hectares or so of it. In short, there’s plenty of space to hide it, or so my imagination told me.
For the rest of my time in Pahang, I couldn’t help thinking about the legendary treasure that could be there. But I realised that while it was unlikely to be hidden in some long-lost jungle cache, it was all around me. At the National Tiger Conservation Centre, I saw the real Tiger of Malaya staring back at me with its pair of golden eyes. This was not a long-dead Japanese general back from the grave but an adult female tigress there to be rehabilitated after being injured in a poaching accident, and as she paced back and forth in its enclosure chuffing indignantly at me, I wondered if she had ever come across any of Yamashita’s Gold.
Not much more than a century in the past, the Malayan Tiger roamed the entire peninsula from the border with Thailand and up into Burma and down to the Straits of Johor, but today almost all of their natural habitat has been destroyed by poachers, loggers and palm planters, with their population in the wild being reduced to just a few hundred.
In Pahang there has been significant efforts by the royal family to reverse this trend, with the Save the Malayan Tiger campaign launched by the state’s crown prince, Tengku Hassanal Shah. The campaign has worked to scout out the remaining tigers and find the best ways to protect them through habitat conservation, counter-poacher patrols and getting the Malaysian federal government to contribute by paying for things like the National Tiger Centre.
Driving through Pahang, I saw in the midst of the trees a new concrete canopy emerging high above them. It was the skeleton of the East Coast Rail Link, designed to connect the two coasts of Malaysia on a high-speed electric Chinese-built railway. Perhaps it shall be the workers that lay 1.5km of track a day that will be the first to stumble on Yamashita’s Treasure almost a century on from its supposed loss.
It reminded me that is not just in the southeast Asian jungle that we are hunting for phantom gold bars - the idea of hidden treasure is a human obsession as old as time.
When I lived in India and spent much of my time in Rajasthan, I was told the tale in Jaipur of the treasure of Jaigarh. Jaigarh is a sprawling early 18th Century fort built during the Mughal era that sits in the hills above Jaipur. It was once the city’s strongest defence – with thick walls and views of all the surrounding country. Underneath the fort run miles of tunnels, many still unmapped. It is here that it is said there is a vast store of gold and jewels put there by the city’s ruling family many years ago, or so the old Persian book Haft Tilismat-e-Amberi says.
An obvious myth one would think, but during the Indian Emergency in the 1970s, the country’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took it so seriously that she arrested senior members of Jaipur’s erstwhile royal family and ordered a series of raids and searches of the castle. For three months an entire division of the army searched Jaigarh and Jaipur’s other forts, accompanied by a huge team of archaeological experts armed with metal detectors.
So real was Mrs Gandhi’s obsession with the treasure that her counterpart in Pakistan wrote to stake a claim in any wealth that was found, based on agreements made at the time of India’s partition by Britain regarding any assets discovered after independence. By the end of 1977, Mrs Gandhi had given up, writing to the Pakistani prime minister: “I had asked our legal experts to give careful consideration to the claim you made on behalf of Pakistan. They are of the clear opinion that the claim has no legal basis. Incidentally, the treasure has turned out to be non-existent.”
The most curious footnote to the above story, and one that is still muttered in the liquor stores of Jaipur today, is that after Indira had ended the search she mysteriously ordered the highway between Delhi and Jaipur closed for three whole days. The road was filled with soldiers to keep away onlookers but it was said that trucks rumbled past endlessly and many believe that she had in fact found the gold, and hurried it away to the capital to help out the Indian economy.
Yamashita’s Gold, the Jaigarh Jewels, there are endless other legends just like them. Even today, people search The Wash of eastern England where it is said King John lost his Crown Jewels in 1216 crossing the notoriously untrustworthy waters.
The idea of treasure is understandably fascinating, in an instant one can transform their lives, bypassing the traditional route through which humans are otherwise expected to acquire wealth.
Not many have been able to take the shortcut but in 1762, two British naval ships captured a Spanish frigate that was found to be carrying so much treasure (£500,000 then) in gold, silver and cocoa that in today’s money it would be equivalent to £10 billion2. Each British sailor received 30 years worth of wages as a prize and the two ships captains went from being perfectly ordinary sailors to receiving the equivalent of £150 million in cash overnight.
I am sure the tiger I met has gone back to her habitat from the Conservation Centre and I hope she will see amateur treasure hunters trample through her habitat for many years to come, setting off long-forgotten Japanese hand grenades in the process. But the real tragedy is that in this obsessive quest for hidden gold, we risk losing sight of the invaluable natural treasures that are rapidly disappearing before our very eyes.
The Malayan Tiger, like so many other endangered species, is a living treasure far more precious than any legendary hoard. Its value lies not in its potential to enrich a lucky few, but in its role as a keystone of a complex and interconnected ecosystem, and in the awe and wonder it inspires in all who are fortunate enough to glimpse its majesty.
What I’ve been reading:
Japanese Detective Stories: If you have an interest in Japan, detective fiction, and trains then I think you will probably enjoy Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto. It’s a tiny book and I read it in two nights, but is an entirely gripping crime novel set in late 1950s Japan amidst major disquiet over government corruption. Amusingly, every single train mentioned in the book is accurate to the timetable of the year it was written.
30 Years of Identity Theft: In what could be total nightmare fuel for most of us, this remarkable article tells the story of a man in Iowa in the US that has been indicted for living with the identity of someone else for three decades, getting married and having children in the process. His victim was even thought to be a fantasist and initially placed in a mental hospital after kicking up a fuss.
Ones and Twos: For months now I have been captivated by the efforts of Russ Cook, a ginger man from West Sussex who calls himself “The Hardest Geezer” and has been running from Africa’s southernmost point to its northernmost – the first person to do so. Along the way he has run more than 16,000 kilometres and dodged bandits, disease, and being deported from Angola. By the time this newsletter is out, he will have finally reached the finish line in Tunisia and raised more than £500,000 towards charity.
As an aside, his conviction led to the establishment in the Geneva Convention of something called the Command Principle, or the Yamashita Standard - it states that an army’s commander can be held accountable for illegal actions by his troops even if he did not order them. It was used extensively in trials relating to the Yugoslavian conflicts.
Thanks for that. When I saw the headline about jungle gold, I thought it would be about the Bre-X mining scandal, though I’ve since checked and saw it was based in Indonesia. Well worth a read if you don’t know about it.
Yamashita’s Gold, the Jaigarh Jewels and the Malayan Tiger a beautifully and brilliantly written article with a handful of grenades to boot!