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When was Melaka founded and was it known earlier by another name? Exploring the debate between Gabriel Ferrand and Gerret Pieter Rouffaer, 1918−21, and its long echo in historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2020

Peter Borschberg
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Abstract

A century ago, research on the Malay world was experiencing major breakthroughs on several fronts, but the greatest achievement at the time was without doubt George Coedès’ ‘rediscovery’, based on Asian sources, of a forgotten kingdom named Srivijaya. His book, published in 1918, saw a wave of publications follow in its wake. Sources were trawled in the hope of finding answers to unresolved issues and unidentified place names. Attention invariably also fell on Melaka. In a long article published by the French academic and diplomat Gabriel Ferrand in the same year, the question of Melaka's founding date came under the spotlight. What do the different surviving sources tell us? What about Gaspar Correia's claim that Melaka was a thriving port city for centuries before the arrival of the Portuguese? Was the city — just as in the case of Temasek (Singapore) — known by a different name in earlier times? Ferrand's publication provoked a response from the Dutch academic Gerret Pieter Rouffaer, director of the KITLV. What he planned to be a 20-odd page response to Ferrand swelled into a multifaceted argument running into hundreds of pages. The debate between Ferrand and Rouffaer that touched on Melaka and Temasek-Singapura's early history probably eluded most of their academic contemporaries who were not proficient in both Dutch and French, especially in the English-speaking world. The present article reconstructs the main points of this debate together with their echo in historiography. It makes a contribution to the ongoing discourses, especially in Malaysia, concerning the founding date of Melaka.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1-2 , June 2020 , pp. 175 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2020

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37 Laufer, ‘Malaka’, p. 309.

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43 Krom, ‘Herdenking’, p. 278.

44 Rouffaer's exposé on the Singapore Stone arguably remains the most comprehensive and authoritative to date. It can be found in RWME, I, pp. 34−67. This is followed by a discussion on whether Singapore existed and was known by another name before the year 900 AD, ibid., pp. 67−72, and between 900−1200 AD, pp. 72−5.

45 Krom, ‘Herdenking’, p. 278.

46 RWME, I, at p. 2.

47 Ibid., p. 2.

48 Ibid., pp. 4−5.

49 FMMM, esp. pp. 131 et seq.

50 RWME, I, pp. 11, 16. See also ibid., pp. 71−2. See also Rouffaer's additional discussion of the Tanjore inscription, ibid., pp. 76−86.

51 FMMM, p. 95; RWME, I, p. 3.

52 FMMM, p. 140; RWME, I, p. 8. Concerning the identification of Pentam, see Hinton, Colin Jack, ‘Marco Polo in Southeast Asia: A preliminary essay in reconstruction’, JSEAH 5, 2 (1964): 84−5Google Scholar; see also his discussion of Malaiur, ibid., pp. 86−7.

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54 FMMM, pp. 52−6, 155; RWME, I, pp. 4−5, 7.

55 FMMM, pp. 142, 147. The identification of Marco Polo's Pentan or Pentam as Bintan was common since at least the seventeenth century. See the dictionary and glossary entries in d'Avity, Pierre, Le monde, ou la description générale de ses quatre parties (Paris: Chez Denys Bechet et Louis Billaine, 1660), p. 886Google Scholar; de la Martinière, Antoine-Augustin Bruzen, Le Grand Dictionnaire Géographique et Critique, 6 vols. (The Hague: Chez P. Gosse, R.C. Alberts, P. de Hondt, 1726−39), II, p. 291Google Scholar; Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses, Vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, 64 vols., Leipzig and Halle 1732–54, vol. III, col. 1265−6.

56 FMMM, pp. 153, 159.

57 Ibid., pp. 25−38, 149−50.

58 Ibid., pp. 53, 139−63, esp. 153; RWME, I, p. 11.

59 FMMM, pp. 153−4.

60 RWME, I, pp. 8−9.

61 RWME, I, p. 16.

62 Ibid., p. 17.

63 Ibid., p. 10.

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74 RWME, I, pp. 26ff.

75 Ibid., pp. 27−9.

76 Ibid., pp. 35−67.

77 Winstedt, ‘The early history of Singapore, Johore and Melaka’.

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85 Ibid., p. 37.

86 Ibid., p. 37.

87 Ibid., pp. 37−8.

88 Ibid., p. 38.

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90 KBSS, p. 5.

91 Ibid., p. 6.

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101 Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese, pp. 306−7.

102 Wheatley, Impressions, p. 120.

103 See Blagden, ‘Medieval chronology of Malacca’; and von Stein Callenfels, P.V., ‘The founder of Malacca’; JMBRAS 15, 2 (1937): 160−66Google Scholar. Callenfels claims that Parameswara had founded Melaka slightly before 1403 (ibid., p. 164). See also Winstedt, ‘The Malay founder of medieval Malacca’, pp. 726−9.

104 Sandhu, Kernial Singh and Wheatley, Paul, eds., Melaka: The transformation of a Malay capital, c.1400−1980, 2 vols. (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

105 Wang Gungwu, ‘The first three rulers of Malacca’; Wolters, The fall of Srivijaya, pp. 108−13. This position arguably echoes the thrust of the Sejarah Melayu, said to be based on a ‘family hikayat’ (‘king list’) and thus focuses on the genealogy of Singapore's and Melaka's royal line. On this point see also the partial translation of Rouffaer's article, ‘Was Melaka …’ in KBSS, p. 108.

106 Meilink-Roelofsz, M.A.P., Asian trade and European influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 28−32Google Scholar.

107 C.H. Wake, ‘Malay historical tradition and the politics of Islamisation’, in Sandhu and Wheatley, Melaka, I, pp. 126−61. Ferrand's book is referenced in this chapter (pp. 156 n28, 157 nn37−8, 159 n82).

108 Jessy, Joginder Singh, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, 1400−1965 (Kuala Lumpur: Longman, 1972), pp. 24−5Google Scholar. Concerning the significance of Joginder Singh Jessy in Malaysian historiography, see Milner, ‘Historians writing nations’, pp. 139−41.

109 Jessy, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, pp. 25−6.

110 Milner, ‘Historians writing nations’, p. 130.

111 Lean, Huang Chai, History of Malaysia and Singapore, 1400−1964 (Singapore: Pan Pacific, 1982), p. 13Google Scholar. The discourses by Chen Dasheng (alias Tan Ta Seng), Muhammad Yusoff Hashim, Pierre-Yves Manguin and Geoff Wade, for example, belong to a later reception and discussion of the Chinese source materials. Suffice it to acknowledge their existence here, and to remind that they fall outside the time frame covered by this article.

112 Borschberg, P., ‘Singapura in early modern cartography: A sea of challenges’, Visualising Space: Maps of Singapore and the region. Collections from the National Archives and National Library of Singapore (Singapore: National Library Board, 2015), pp. 6−33Google Scholar; Borschberg, P. and Khoo, Benjamin J.Q., ‘Singapore as a port city, c.1290−1819: Evidence, frameworks and challenges’, JMBRAS 91, 1 (2018): 1−27Google Scholar.

113 With reference to the so-called ‘Zheng He navigational chart’, an overview of some of the serious challenges facing scholars can be found in the recent article by Ptak, Roderich, ‘Selected problems concerning the “Zheng He Map”: Questions without answers’, Journal of Asian History 53, 2 (2019): 179−220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.