The Empire of the Maharaja, King of the Mountains and Lord of the Isles.
By C. O. Blagden.
In the autumn of the year 671 the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim I Tsing[1] sailed from Canton in a Persian ship with the North-East monsoon and in less than twenty days arrived at the country of Fo-she, where he stayed for six months before proceeding to India. Fourteen years later, on his return from India, he stayed there again, this time for four years. All the available evidence points to the conclusion that this Fo-she or Shi-li-fo-she country was Palembang, in Southern Sumatra, and from the 7th century to its conquest by the Javanese of Majapahit about 1377 we get many glimpses of it as a flourishing kingdom of Hindu (and particularly Buddhist) civilization. That much has been common knowledge for a good many years past. Gerini in his Researches on Ptolemy's Geography of Eastern Asia, pp. 619-30, has compiled a useful list of dates forming an outline sketch of Palembang history during the period above mentioned, and Wilkinson in Papers on Malay Subjects: History, Pt. I, pp, 11-4, has also given a brief account of it (omitting, however, any reference to I Tsing and relying on the very doubtfully identified Kingdom of Kandali).
Quite recently, however, the importance of Palembang in relation to the whole coarse of the local history of the Straits before the 14th century has had fresh light thrown upon it. It is no longer as a single kingdom localized in Southern Sumatra that we must regard it, but as an empire which for several centuries had outstations on both sides of the Straits, by means of which it controlled and took toll of the international trade that passed through them. Viewed in that light, the matter becomes vastly more interesting, for it is linked up with the history of Eastern trade-routes in general and in particular with the sea-route between China and the West. In Ptolemy's time (2nd Century A.D.) trade already went through the Straits, though on occasion it availed itself of various land crossings on the isthmus between Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula, in places where that isthmus narrows and there are convenient gaps in the mountain ridge. No doubt, as navigation progressed, the continuous sea-route through the Straits, in spite of the delays involved by its weak and variable winds, became more and more firmly established as the normal one. And so it remained until Vasco da Gama discovered the new route round the Cape of Good Hope, whereupon for a few centuries the trade was diverted to some extent, only to return again into its old channels by reason of the cutting of the Suez Canal.
- ↑ "I-Tsing translated by J. Takakusu," (1896, Clarendon Press, Oxford).
