Mat Salleh
Mat Salleh fought the British North Borneo Chartered Company for five years with a few hundred men, sacked one of its stations, burned another, obtained a treaty from its managing director, and was shot in his own fort at Tambunan in January 1900. He was a chief of the Sugut river on the east coast of what is now Sabah, of mixed Bajau and Suluk descent, married to a relative of the Sultan of Sulu, and had the standing of a datu among people who had never been governed by anybody with a tax register. The Company had been running the territory since 1881 under a charter, and by the 1890s its district officers were collecting a poll tax, licensing boats and trade, and treating the river chiefs as subjects. In 1895 he went to Sandakan to put his grievances to the governor, was told to wait, and left; a warrant for the killing of two Iban traders followed him, and an expedition burned his village. In July 1897 he answered by taking Pulau Gaya, the Company's station on the island off the site of the present Kota Kinabalu, looting it and burning the buildings, and in November he burned the station at Ambong. The Company burned Ranau in reply and could not catch him. William Cowie, the managing director, then met him in person in April 1898 and agreed that he could settle in the Tambunan valley in the interior under his own authority, a treaty the Company's officers on the spot thought a surrender and did not intend to keep. It broke down within the year over whether Tambunan was his or the Company's, and he built a fort there with earth walls and bamboo stockades. A Company force under Richard Harington besieged it in January 1900, and on the 31st a bullet through the wall killed him. His followers fought on in the interior until 1905. The Company called it a rebellion; the state of Sabah, which put a memorial on the site, calls him its first nationalist, and the North Borneo page names him for what he stood against.
- Nationality: Sabahan
- Roles: chief, rebel
