Kinakuta
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Kinakuta is a fictional country featured in the books Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. It is a tiny island sultanate located in the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Borneo (centered between Palawan and North Borneo, explains Cryptonomicon). It has the (equally fictional) ccTLD ".kk".
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[edit] History
Kinakuta has always been a "meeting-place of cultures." Its original inhabitants were Malays. In the 17th and 18th centuries, under the name Queenah-Kootah, it was home to a dynasty of white sultans, beginning with one Mr. Foote, an ex-privateer. It was at this time that the capital, Kinakuta City, was constructed.
Following the white sultanate, Kinakuta became a German colony for a while. (Borneo at that time was part of the Dutch East Indies, and Palawan part of the Spanish empire.) The Germans ceded it to the Japanese following World War I as part of the South Pacific Mandate; but both imperial powers maintained the sultan as a figurehead ruler.
During World War II (as depicted in Cryptonomicon), the island was home to a Japanese Naval Air Force garrison. The Japanese put the islanders to work building an airstrip, a command center, and other such amenities (see Japanese war crimes). The entire garrison was massacred by vengeful islanders on August 23, 1945, following the garrison's surrender to American forces.
[edit] Kinakuta today
Today (as depicted in Cryptonomicon), the island is "Muslim around the edges and animist in the middle" This is due to the island's topography: While the coast is generally flat, the interior is mountainous and hilly.
In recent years ([as of the time depicted in Cryptonomicon), the sultan has expanded and modernized Kinakuta City, dynamiting the nearby Mount Eliza both to create new flat land where the mountain once stood, and in order that the resulting rubble might be used to create new, valuable oceanfront real estate (see Land reclamation) — most of which was immediately claimed for the new airport.
Most of the country's wealth comes from its sizable oil reserves; the current sultan of Kinakuta (who is incidentally the Sultan of Brunei's second cousin) made a small fortune in oil following the 1973 oil crisis.
[edit] Possible inspirations
The fictional nation of Kinakuta may be based partly on the historical sultanate of Sarawak, in northwest Borneo, which was ruled by "White Rajahs" from 1841 to 1946.
Other possibility - the offshore banking island Labuan just near the point, given by Stephenson as Kinakuta. Labuan is placed between Brunei, Sabah and Philippines, it belongs to Malaysia as a federal territory.
Stephenson himself has remarked[1] that he "figured it was more akin to ... Sri Lanka or Serendip.... Others contend it was a fictionalized Tuvalu with a dash of Tonga."
[edit] See also
- Qwghlm, another fictional location from Stephenson's work
- Eliza (Stephenson character), after whom Mount Eliza was named
[edit] External link
- Kinakuta page at The Metaweb
