The Rise of Malacca

The sultanate of Malacca, founded about the year 1400 at the mouth of a river on the south-western coast of the Malay peninsula, rose within a few generations from a small harbour settlement to become the greatest trading city of Southeast Asia and the chief centre for the spread of Islam through the Malay world. The Sejarah Melayu, the Malay Annals, the indigenous Muslim chronicle of the dynasty, tells how its founder, a prince named Parameswara who had come from Palembang in Sumatra by way of Singapura, settled at a fishing river-mouth shaded by a melaka tree and there raised his town; and how his line embraced Islam, the faith already carried into the region by the merchants of the Indian Ocean and rooted at Samudra Pasai on the Sumatran coast a century before. The position was everything. Malacca commanded the narrow strait that bears its name, the sea-lane through which all the commerce between the Indian Ocean and the seas of China had to pass, and it became the great entrepôt where the shipping of the whole eastern world met and exchanged its goods. To its roadstead came the junks of China and the dhows of Arabia, Persia and India and the prahus of the islands, bartering cloth, Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain for the pepper of Sumatra and the cloves, nutmeg and mace of the distant Spice Islands. The sultans gave the port an ordered government and a written maritime law, the Undang-Undang Laut, that drew the merchants of all nations under their protection and set four shahbandars, harbour-masters, over the traders of the different quarters; and the wealth that flowed in made the sultan one of the foremost rulers of the region. The Ming Chinese records confirm the city's standing, for the fleets of the admiral Zheng He called there in the early fifteenth century and its rulers sent embassies to the Ming court; and a century later the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, who saw Malacca shortly before its fall in 1511, described in his Suma Oriental a cosmopolitan emporium where some eighty-four languages were spoken, writing that whoever was lord of Malacca had his hand on the throat of Venice. As Malacca grew it became a fountainhead of Islam, its court, its mosque and its scholars carrying the faith together with the Malay language and a Malay-Muslim courtly culture out across the ports of the archipelago, so that its rise is remembered as a decisive chapter in the making of the Muslim Malay world. This scene depicts the harbour-city of Malacca at the height of its trade, the godown jetty heaped with porcelain and spice and the roadstead crowded with junks and dhows below a tiered timber mosque. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.