Bau

Bau is a gold mining town in Sarawak, Malaysia, and the capital of Bau District in the Kuching Division, about 29 km from Batu Kawah and 70 km from Serian. Hakka Chinese began mining gold here in the 1800s, and the settlements around Bau, then called Upper Sarawak, were run by a kongsi independent of James Brooke until the Bau uprising of 19 February 1857, when about 600 gold miners seized Kuching before being driven off. The Borneo Company later took over the mines, introduced the cyanide process in 1898 and closed them in 1921; they reopened in the late 1970s and shut again in 1996. Bidayuh people are the largest group at 50.1 percent of the population, followed by Chinese, Malays and Iban.