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SETIU: A 74-year-old Malaysian man’s quest to remove washed glass from the country’s beaches resulted in a collection of thousands of bottles, now on display in a colorful seaside museum.
For the past 15 years, Tengku Mohamad Ali Mansor has been on a mission to collect bottles washed ashore on the rugged coastline of Malaysia’s South China Sea.
He has collected around 9,000 of them, which he now exhibits in a traditional wooden house that he has turned into a museum.
They come in various shapes and sizes, from around the world, stacked on the shelves and on the floor, with an igloo-shaped mound of bottles outside.
He even found messages on two of the bottles, one with the image of a heart and some faded Chinese characters, and a second that has been broken and is no longer legible.
“I did this in the beginning to keep the sea clean,” he told AFP from his village of Kampung Penarik, near here, where the wooden museum is located next to his home.
“I want to prevent people from being injured by broken glass and save the world from being full of glass.”
On a recent morning patrol on the beach, the lithe 20-year-old grandpa prayed as he bent to pick up an empty bottle with a white cap.
The ex-soldier cleaned it up before putting it in his backpack, another for his collection.
Tengku Ali’s obsession began in 2005, when he saw children inflate empty bottles with fireworks.
Concerned that the broken glass could hurt people, he said he would pay them for any bottle they found, and they returned with more than 500.
Then he began collecting bottles on the beaches. Only later, as his collection grew, did he decide to open a museum.
The site attracts a regular stream of visitors who have read it on its Facebook page.
During a Covid-19 shutdown earlier this year, he was kept busy gluing glass shards to make bottle shapes in a style similar to Japanese “kintsugi,” where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold powder.
Tengku Ali promises to continue his search for as long as he lives.
“People think I’m crazy, but I don’t care,” he said.
“Allah knows what I am doing. I do this because I love this world. “
