Caves of Wealth: Commercial Capital, Natural History, and Governance of the Subterranean

Edible bird’s nests—crafted from the hardened saliva of cave-nesting swiftlets native to Southeast Asia—have long stood among the most coveted luxuries in the Chinese culinary tradition. Prior to the advent of purpose-built “nesting houses” in urban areas during the 20th century, these nests were harvested exclusively from remote limestone grottoes scattered across littoral Southeast Asia, including the coasts of Malaysia and Vietnam, as well as Java, Borneo, and the Sulu Archipelago. The sheer inaccessibility of these caves fostered the development of a highly specialized—and often perilous—tradition of nest harvesting among local communities at least since the seventeenth century. The immense profits derived from selling bird’s nests to the Chinese market attracted commercial capital and encouraged various local powers to extract revenue from these semi-hidden subterranean sites through diverse mechanisms: by enslaved laborers, by bonded corvée laborers serving indigenous nobility, and by specially registered local communities heavily taxed by imperial administrations. Colonial regimes, particularly Dutch and British, followed similar logics of appropriation—declaring the most productive caves as state property and auctioning exclusive leases to merchant bidders. Meanwhile, studies in natural history and investigations into the biological composition of the nests emerged to guide and rationalize commercial exploitation. This paper first surveys the varied systems of bird’s nest cave management in Vietnam, Myanmar, and Java from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, before turning to a detailed case study of the Gomantong Caves in northern Borneo (modern-day Sabah, Malaysia). Through this lens, I trace the evolution of governance over this subterranean resource—from the Sultan of Sulu to the British North Borneo Company—revealing how competing modes of sovereignty were enacted through control of this unique site of wealth.