The Hundred Years of Melaka

Picture yourself standing at the mouth of the Melaka River one morning in 1500.

In front of you: ships. Not two or three — hundreds. Chinese junks with sails spread like fans. Gujarati vessels heavy with cloth. Boats from Java, from Pegu, from the Ryukyus far to the north. The noise in that market is not one language, nor two. A Portuguese apothecary who arrived here not long afterwards wrote that he heard eighty-four languages spoken in this port.^1,2

A hundred years earlier, in the same spot, there was almost nothing.

That is the story we are starting with.

A king on the run

Melaka's story begins with a man who lost a war.

He came from the south — from Palembang, or from Temasek, depending on who is telling it. And here is the first problem an honest storyteller runs into. The Chinese court records call him Parameswara. The Malay court chronicle, the Sejarah Melayu, calls the founder Iskandar Shah. Historians are still arguing over whether those two names belong to the same man, or to a father and a son.^3,4

We are not going to pretend to know. What is certain is this: somebody came ashore at this river mouth in the late 1300s, and within a generation he did something a great deal cleverer than fighting.

He went looking for a protector.

Cover from the north

In the early 1400s the greatest power in the world was not in Europe. It was in China.

The Yongle Emperor sent enormous fleets across the Indian Ocean under Admiral Zheng He. Melaka made the choice that decided its future: it sent tribute to Beijing and accepted formal recognition as a kingdom under Ming protection. Both sides wrote it down — the Chinese court in the Ming Shilu, and Ma Huan, the interpreter who sailed with Zheng He, in his own travel account.^3,5

Think what that meant to a small ruler. Siam to the north wanted Melaka to submit to it. Majapahit to the south had once commanded these waters. But from now on, anyone who wanted to attack Melaka would have to answer to the Emperor of China.

A fishing village had just bought itself a very large umbrella — and it paid not in blood, but in gifts and letters.

Then came Islam

In the same century, Melaka's ruler embraced Islam — and with him the court, then the port, then the region.^4,2

This was not only a change of faith. It was a change of business. The Gujarati and Arab merchants who controlled the spice routes were Muslims. A Muslim port meant law they recognised, judges they trusted, and a mosque to pray in while waiting for the monsoon to turn.

Melaka became a place where people gathered precisely because it did not drive anyone away. Buddhist Chinese, Hindu Tamils, Javanese, Arabs, Persians — all trading in the same harbour.

Eighty-four languages

By the end of the 1400s Melaka was no longer a regional port. It was a junction.

The monsoon blows one way for months, then reverses. Ships from the west have to wait; ships from the east have to wait. Melaka sat exactly where both sides were forced to stop — and whoever owns the place where people must stop, owns the business.

It was here that Tomé Pires heard those eighty-four languages. And he wrote a line that became famous: whoever is lord of Melaka has his hand on the throat of Venice.^1,2

The Portuguese read that line. In 1511 the fleet of Afonso de Albuquerque arrived, and after some weeks of fighting the city fell.^1,2

But the story is not finished. Because when the city fell in 1511, the royal family did not vanish. They withdrew to the south — and what they built there would go on to shape the borders of a country that did not yet exist.