'Annoying Requests': The Missionary Johann Michael Carl Hupe's Collecting In Borneo (1842-1847)

Sarawak’s first missionary was Johann Michael Carl Hupe (1818–1861), from the German town of Halle. After working in southern Borneo for several months, Hupe eventually travelled overland from the west to the north coast of Borneo, where he tried to establish a mission school in Kuching. It is hardly known that he was collecting cultural artefacts and natural science specimens of various types in the Pulopetak region (at present, the region about fifteen kilometres northeast of Kuala Kapuas, Kalimantan Tengah) and in Sarawak this early. Today, only a signboard at the old Courthouse in Kuching memorializes him and the site of his mission house. This paper attempts to highlight Hupe’s role as a source for European knowledge and images about Borneo drawing on archival material from the Francke Foundations in Halle. The focal point of the paper will be on the objects Hupe collected and dispatched to Halle. Many of them can still be found in the Kunst-und Naturalienkammer or Cabinet of Artefacts and Natural Curiosities, the museum collection of the Francke Foundations. Others were circulated and passed on in different ways within existing networks. By examining the collecting project of Hupe, it will be demonstrated that, even in the first half of the nineteenth century, interest in Borneo and knowledge of this remote island in European circles was substantial, which connected the island to scientific and cultural circuits, and even into Protestant homes, with the traffic of its objects.