place Sri Bhoja, San-bo-tsai, Sarbaza, etc., as it is variously called, has been identified with almost absolute certainty as being situ- ated on the Palembang river in South-eastern Sumatra; and the Mo-lo-yu country can therefore be confidently regarded as placed immediately to the west or north-west, that is to say about the middle of Sumatra. I Tsing, who stayed in the Mo-lo-yu country for two months on his way to India, says that it was fifteen days' sail from Bhoja, the capital of Sri Bhoja; and it must have been situated approximately under the Equator, for in the middle of the eighth month and in the middle of spring the sun cast no shadow there at noon. Moreover it was balf-way on the route between Bhoja and Ka-cha (a place in or near Achin or Kedah, more probably the former, as it was south of the country of the Naked Feople, ie, the Nicobar and Andaman islands). From Ka-cha ships sailed in thirty days to Nagapatana (Negapatam), and I Tsing himself took ship there for Tamralipti (Tamluk), a port near the mouth of the Hooghly.
It seems therefore that the Mo-lo-yu country was not at this time a purely inland State, but had a coast line on the Straits more or less opposite to where Malacca now stands.
The language of the Mo-lo-yu country was that which served as a lingua franca in the Archipelago generally, and was known to I Tsing and other Chinese authors as the K‘un-lun language. This term was derived, apparently, from the Chinese name of Pulau Condor, on the same principle on which slaves from these regions are often mentioned in Chinese chronicles as K‘un-lun slaves, from whatever part of the Archipelago they might have actually been imported. The reason seems to have been that the Pulau Condor people were the first of the Southern island- ers to come into contact with the Chinese, who afterwards loose- ly extended the term to the inhabitants of the Archipelago generally. This appears to be the meaning of the explanation I Tsing gives when, speaking of the Archipelago as a whole and after enumerating some of the principal islands, he goes on to say, "They were generally known by the general name of 'Country of K‘un-lun' since (the people of) K‘un-lun first visit- ed Kochin and Kwangtung."
That the language was really Malay appears from the fact that the "pin-lang fruit" is mentioned by I Tsing as being used
