Tajau and tuak jar

A traded jar made part of longhouse life

The tajau described in Sarawak sources is a large ceramic storage jar with overlapping practical, social and ceremonial roles. Lucas Chin's Penn Museum account records imported jars in Sarawak and describes an example collected there in 1897. The same account says large jars were displayed in longhouse family rooms as valued possessions, but also used for water and food storage; it specifically records rice wine, tuak, being fermented in them.

The jar’s place in the household was not reducible to brewing. The Penn account describes Iban classifications with distinct names and relative values, and notes that jars could be inherited, displayed, used in exchanges and reserved for funerary purposes. It even records an upside-down jar kept from wine-making for its owner’s funeral. Such examples warn against reading every heirloom vessel as a working fermenter.

In a 2026 report, Iban informants described tajau as continuing to mark kinship and customary life. A longhouse chief in Katibas said his community still ferments tuak in tajau, while acknowledging that lighter plastic containers are increasingly convenient. These accounts describe particular households and practices, not a single rule for all Iban communities.

Glazed stoneware, with forms that vary

Museum records and photographs show substantial jars with a broad rounded body, narrowing neck, and small shoulder handles or lugs. Some are brown-glazed and carry relief decoration. The University of Malaya Museum of Asian Art describes one Sarawak tajau as a stoneware jar with a running brown glaze and applied dragons and clouds; its record says potters from Guangdong who settled in Borneo copied this kind of jar in the early twentieth century. That is one documented example, not a pattern to expect on every vessel.

A photograph of Marcathy Gindau’s collection in Bawang Assan shows several inherited jars together, with varying necks, shoulders, glazes and decoration. The variety matters: tajau is not a single standardized model, and individual jars may have different social identities and uses. The sources give no shared capacity or standard dimensions for the class.

Available accounts give no comparative temperature measurements or establish one universal fermentation closure. A specific jar’s glaze condition and food-contact suitability cannot be inferred from age, appearance or cultural importance.

Fermentation is one use among several

Chin’s account explicitly names tuak as a rice wine fermented in large jars. Contemporary reporting also shows how practice differs by maker: in 2025, a Bidayuh brewer from Bau said her sugarcane tuak fermented in a tajau or a glass bottle. That report concerns her sugarcane preparation and does not make it interchangeable with Iban rice tuak.

The jar’s size, ceramic body and ability to be moved make it different from a fermentation pit or room built in place. Yet this equipment page cannot supply a universal brewing method: the accounts do not establish one recipe, capacity, closure or cleaning routine for all tajau. The practical lesson is to treat a named jar as a particular vessel within a local practice, rather than assume every large decorated jar was used for food.