Malayu in History
The name Malayu first appeared in a Chinese record of 644-645 as a country which sent a diplomatic mission. Yijing in 671 stopped in the zhou or geographical region of Malayu on his way to India.
On his return in 685 he said that Malayu zhou had become part of Srivijaya guo. The oldest written source in Jambi is a stone inscription set up in 686 at Karang Berahi, probably as a token of subordination to Srivijaya. Karang Berahi is several hundred kilometers from the Straits of Melaka, and thus not a seaport, but near this location tributaries of the Batang Hari and the Musi are only 15 kilometers apart. This may explain why the maharaja of Srivijaya chose this site to stage a ceremony in which local chiefs took an oath of loyalty to his newly formed kingdom: he wished to attract or compel the people who controlled highland commodities to ship them to his port instead of Malayu.Between 680 and 840, the people living along the Batang Hari may have been subordinate to Srivijaya and unable to send missions to China. In 840 Jambi appeared in a Chinese source. Jambi's rise ended 160 years of diplomatic isolation for the people of the Batang Hari; missions from Jambi reached China in 852/853 and 871. In addition to official histories, two other Chinese sources of the ninth century also mention Jambi.[1146] Was the ninth-century kingdom of Jambi the same place as seventh-century Malayu? Evidence suggests that they were near-synonymous terms for the same ethno-geographic unit.
Jambi was the only Malay kingdom to maintain diplomatic relations with China during the late Tang dynasty. Archaeologists have found artifacts of the late Tang period in the Palembang region, but not in the Batang Hari Valley, suggesting that Srivijaya maintained commercial, if not diplomatic, relations with China during the eighth and ninth centuries.
San foqi sent tribute to China in 905, one year before the Tang collapsed. The ruler was said to have the title “Jambi”;[1147] the Chinese may have found the relationship between Jambi and Palembang confusing. Where was San foqi’s capital between 905 and 1017: in Palembang or Jambi? How united was the empire during this period? What was the relationship between Palembang, Jambi, Barus, Kedah, and southern Thailand?
The Song dynasty was founded in 960. The arrival of an embassy from San foqi in the same year was seen as a sign of heaven's favor, and Song China showed San foqi special favor for many years thereafter. Between 961 and 992 San foqi sent 10 embassies, a particularly active relationship. A Chinese monk returned from India via San foqi in 983,[1148] indicating that contact between Sumatra and China occurred outside of the framework of diplomatic relations. Monks usually traveled on merchant ships. More missions came from San foqi in 1004, 1008, and 1014.[1149]
In 1017 an ambassador came from the “chief” (haji) of Sumatrabhumi, bringing a large quantity of commodities of Arab origin.[1150] The use of a title less grandiose than maharaja and the vague reference to the ambassador's origin (Sumatra rather than San foqi) pose unanswerable riddles. Around the same time, another Chinese monk returning from India stopped off at San foqi, where he met an Indian priest.[1151]
The early eleventh century seems to have been a good time in southeast Sumatra. Not only was San foqi highly regarded in China, it attracted the well-known intellectual Atisa from India, who resided there for 12 or 13 years. Atisa’s references to the geopolitical situation in Sumatra are vague. He described his home as Srivijaya Nagara in Malayagiri in Suvarnadvipa. This could be interpreted as meaning that Srivijaya’ s capital (nagara) was now located in the kingdom of Malayu.
In 1025 Srivijaya was attacked and conquered by the Chola kingdom.
All its major ports were defeated, its ruler captured and taken to India, never to be heard from again. Tamils ruled the northern end of the straits for the next century before the Chola kingdom fell into decline. Even if Srivijaya’s mandala continued to exist during the San foqi period, after 1025 the ports which comprised the thalassocracy became increasingly autonomous. Wolters was willing to concede that Jambi overtook Palembang as the center of the southeast Sumatra mandala by 1080.[1152]The Chinese used San foqi for several centuries after 1080 to refer to a tributebringing country in southeast Sumatra. The “History of the Song Dynasty,” composed in 1342-1345,[1153] uses San foqi to refer to a kingdom “situated between Cambodia and Java.” The Chinese first mentioned Palembang in the mid-fourteenth century. They equated it with “Old Harbor,” to which few vestiges of earlier glory still adhered.
Wolters questioned the idea that Srivijaya was the type of empire which “rose and fell.”[1154] He never defined other types of empires, but Srivijaya may have been his model for the mandala concept,[1155] a loosely integrated system of polities with identities which persisted for centuries, linked by constantly shifting balances of power.
The Tanjor Inscription of 1027 claimed that the Chola king conquered both Srivijaya and Malaiyur in 1025. Inscriptions prove that Tamil trading groups set up trading centers in at least four locations at the north end of the Straits of Melaka. However, a mission from San foqi reached China in 1028, demonstrating that southeast Sumatra was not occupied by Tamils. The Chinese emperor gave the envoy a belt made of gold rather than the silver customarily reserved for foreign emissaries.[1156]
Important events occurred in 1079, but their significance is lost on us. The Song hui yao qi gao says the mission came from “Srivijaya-Jambi country.” Wolters thought that both San foqi (Palembang) and Jambi sent missions,[1157] but could a joint mission have included different sets of envoys who received tokens of differing esteem? No precedent for this practice is known.
In 1178 Zhou Qufei, a minor official posted to Guangxi, stated that in 1079 San foqi sent an envoy from the kingdom of Zhanbei. Pelliot concluded that both the Song Shi and Zhou Qufei perceived Jambi as a polity in San foqi, a geographical area.[1158]One possible inference is that in 1079 southeast Sumatra witnessed a contest for overlordship, and that a compromise involved a joint mission to China. In 1082 the Trade Superintendent in Canton received two letters written in Chinese from “the ruler of San foqi-Jambi,” implying that Jambi was now the dominant partner in this relationship. Jambi sent four more missions between 1084 and 1095. The lower Batang Hari is rich in Chinese ceramics of the late eleventh century.
In 1157, a mission from San foqi arrived in China. The ruler now styled himself Sri Maharaja, and was installed by China as a “king” rather than “chief.” Twenty-one years later, Zhou Qufei described San foqi as the third wealthiest foreign land, after Arabia and Java, “an important thoroughfare on the sea-routes of the Foreigners on the way to and from (China)” and “the most important port-of-call on the searoutes of the foreigners from the countries of Java in the east and from the countries of the Arabs and Quilon in the west; they all pass through it on their way to China.”[1159] In 1178, a new ruler obtained similar recognition.[1160] At the same time, San foqi was told that its future missions should be content with visiting the port of Quanzhou, rather than coming to the capital. Thereafter we have no further records of missions from Jambi. They may have come, but since they did not visit the capital, they were not recorded.
San foqi’s prosperity continued in the thirteenth century. In 1225 Quanzhou’s harbormaster reported that San foqi had 15 vassals, from Palembang to west Java, the Malay Peninsula, north Sumatra, and even Si-lan (Sri Lanka?).
During the Yuan dynasty, the old name Malayu reappeared.
Both Mongols and Javanese demanded Malayu’s submission. In 1275 an expedition from Java may have established Javanese suzerainty over Malayu for a brief period. Malayu sent ambassadors to China in 1280. In 1281 the Yuan sent two envoys to Malayu. More Malayu envoys arrived in China in 1293, 1299, and 1301, suggesting that Malayu was not under Javanese rule. Marco Polo visited Malaiyur in 1292. He applied the name to an island, and also “a large and splendid city... which plies a flourishing trade especially in spices.”[1161] “Malayu and other small kingdoms” sent their sons or brothers to declare fealty to the Mongol court in response to an order issued in 1293.[1162]The name San foqi was still used by Wang Dayuan, a Chinese merchant, in 1349, probably in reference to Jambi. He described the country as densely populated and fertile. The people lived on pile-dwellings and gathered oysters. He also said that Gugang (“Old Harbor,” Palembang) yielded local forest products, and “cotton superior to that of any other foreign country.”[1163]
By the mid-fourteenth century, the Javanese empire of Majapahit probably regained dominance over southeast Sumatra. Majapahits vassals, according to the Desawarnana (“Description of the Country,” also known as the Nagarakrtagama), written in 1365, included 24 “Malay lands” of which the most important were Jambi and Palembang.[1164] The Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, a text from Aceh, adds that Majapahit troops sent to Sumatra disembarked at Priangan in Jambi.[1165] The system by which southeast Sumatra was governed by Srivijaya and/or Malayu had come to a definitive end after 750 years.