In the Land of the Hornbills

The chapter is editorially significant for what it argued through siting alone. Osaka had answered the question of whether the cuisine could hold cultural ground on the international stage. Mulu answered a different question, and a more important one: whether the cuisine could return to the land that grew it without the mediation of a venue, a stage, or a city. The answer was the chapter.

Palate Asia carried the chapter on 23 October 2025 under the title In The Land Of The Hornbills: Experiencing Serumpun Sarawak In Mulu — the editorial centre of the chapter, and one of the most considered single pieces in the wider Serumpun archive.

Mulu — The Setting

Gunung Mulu National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of exceptional standing — recognised for its biodiversity, its limestone karst formations, and the cultural heritage of the Penan, Berawan, Tring, and other indigenous communities whose ancestral landscape it remains. The siting of the Serumpun chapter within Mulu was not theatrical. It was structural. The cuisine the wider arc honours — Iban, Bidayuh, Orang Ulu, Penan, and the broader thirty-four — is rainforest cuisine. Returning it to Mulu was the most architecturally honest move the movement could make in the year of its founding.

The hornbill — Sarawak’s state emblem and one of the most culturally resonant species in the Bornean rainforest — gave the chapter its title. In the Land of the Hornbills is the phrase by which Sarawak is known across the region, and Palate Asia’s choice to carry the chapter under it placed the work inside its cultural-geographic register without need of further explanation.

We Are Nature, Nature Is Us

The Mulu chapter ran across 2 – 4 October 2025 at Mulu Marriott Resort & Spa, on the edge of the UNESCO-listed national park. The theme — We Are Nature, Nature Is Us — Everything is Everything — held the chapter at conservation register without surfacing the conservation-and-cuisine relationship as marketing. The kitchen worked alongside indigenous-community partners — The Tuyang Initiative, CHASS, Earthlings Coffee Workshop, Dayak Lore, and Penan artisans — whose presence carried the chapter at the cultural-protocol register the rainforest itself asked for.

Serumpun Sarawak’s return to Mulu is symbolic — it brings the world home to Sarawak’s living heritage.

Sharzede Salleh Askor · Chief Executive Officer, Sarawak Tourism Board

What the Chapter Argued

The Mulu chapter’s editorial argument was, in essence, the inverse of Osaka’s. Osaka had asked whether the cuisine could carry on the world stage. Mulu asked whether the world stage was even the point. The answer — held quietly in the chapter and surfaced in the Palate Asia coverage — was that the world stage and the rainforest are the same conversation, conducted in two registers. The cuisine that travels to Osaka and the cuisine that returns to Mulu are not different cuisines. They are the same cuisine, photographed from different angles.

This is the editorial spine of the wider Serumpun arc, and it is in Mulu that it was made visible. The thirty-four indigenous communities whose food the movement honours are not represented by the cuisine. They are present in it. The Mulu chapter is where that presence became unmistakable.

The Osaka–Mulu Contrast

The contrast between the Osaka chapter (August 2025) and the Mulu chapter (October 2025) is the editorial argument of the wider arc, and it deserves to be surfaced plainly.

In Osaka, the cuisine was staged within a Japanese industrial-creative venue, alongside the World Expo, in a city of the highest gastronomic confidence. In Mulu, the cuisine was staged within the Sarawak rainforest, alongside the limestone caves and the canopy, in the company of the communities whose ancestral land it remains. Two months apart. The same cuisine. Two cultural registers — neither lessened by the other; each deepened by its sibling.

Osaka was the international debut. Mulu was the homecoming. The arc only works because both were attempted in the same year.

What Carried Forward

After Mulu, the Serumpun architecture moved towards its concluding chapter — the Kuching Finale in April 2026, returning the movement to Sarawak’s capital and the institutional heart of its UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy designation. If Osaka was the debut and Mulu was the homecoming, the Kuching Finale is the return — to the city that carries Sarawak’s cultural-administrative weight, in the year that closes the founding cycle.

The Mulu chapter does not lessen the Kuching chapter that follows. It complicates it — and through that complication, deepens it.