Brought up in India, he had then been sent by his wealthy father to Oxford, where he read Divinity. He had liked his studies, but had stayed in Oxford for only one year before deciding that the darkness of England was killing him by slow degrees. He returned to the subcontinent and joined the Honourable East India Company’s Army, from which he was dragooned out after seven months for ‘repeated and unacceptable acts of gross indecency’.

Unrepentant, his heart still raging with unformed ambition, he fitted out a fine schooner and sailed south-eastwards across the Indian Ocean in search of adventure, power, sexual nirvana and the opportunity to practise philanthropy. With the death of his father, he was now in possession of a baronetcy and a colossal fortune which he believed could help obtain for him a kingdom in the wild romantic East.

To come by this kingdom, he approached the Sultan of Brunei, who claimed distant rule over the whole peninsula. It was known that the Sultan gave out gifts of territory in return for favours and Sir Ralph presented himself as a man who would do anything that was asked of him. This, however, was not entirely true. He believed in the Sixth Commandment. He did not like killing people. When the Sultan ordered him to help put down a local insurrection by Land Dyaks, he felt himself falter. But his dreams of his own fiefdom were stubborn. He could not envisage any other way of being happy than by waking each morning to look out on his own portion of the world. And so he contrived to gather round himself a group of Malays addicted to cock-fighting and pay them to leave aside their cruel sport long enough to subdue the head-hunting insurrectionists and to lay before the Sultan a basket of Dyak heads.

Sir Ralph’s financing of this bloodthirsty episode haunted him for a long while, but the Sultan was pleased to be rid of the Dyaks. He kept the basket of heads strung up in a grove of Mediterranean pines and was interested to record at what terrible pace the flesh became mushy and melted from the bone. This slaughter of his ‘enemies’, together with sexual favours tailored to his imaginative needs impressed the Sultan sufficiently for him to bequeath to Sir Ralph a substantial parcel of land in Sarawak, irrigated by the Sadong River.

Now, the rajah designed a palatial house not far from Kuching. Using both Malay and Chinese labourers, whom he paid with minute grains of silver, he saw it rise – astonishingly white, like an iceberg towering up from the ocean waves – against the impenetrable green of the tropical forest. He chose to see it as a thing of beauty, a temple of civilisation in a chaotic world. He planted the gardens with scarlet Canna lilies, orchids, banana trees, bamboo groves and coconut and date palms, set round with manicured English lawns. He built an aviary and sent the local Malays out into the forest to snare cassowaries, toucans, chestnut-hooded thrushes, and umbrella birds, whose exotic cries and jewelled plumage reassured him that life, here in Sarawak, was designed to capture all that was extraordinary under God’s heaven.