A history of Santubong, an island off the coast of Sarawak
J.W. Cushman and A.C. Milner published this article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1979, presenting English translations of three Chinese geographical texts covering the Malay peninsula from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. The authors argue that these Chinese sources, long neglected by Malayan historians in favour of European accounts, offer a distinctive and complementary perspective on the region’s commerce, society, and political relationships during the century before British colonial consolidation.
Summary
The article translates and contextualizes excerpts from three Chinese works: the Hai-kuo wen-chien lu (1730) by Ch’en Lun-ch’iung, a scholar-official writing to aid coastal defence; the Hai-lu (c. 1842) based on the narrated journeys of merchant Hsieh Ch’ing-kao, who travelled overseas for fourteen years between 1782 and 1795; and the Hai-kuo t’u-chih (1842) by Wei Yuan, the reformist historian preoccupied with British expansion in Asia. The authors situate each text within its authorial context, drawing a sharp distinction between the eyewitness merchant account and the two scholar-official compilations drawn from secondary sources and earlier Chinese gazetteers.
The core analytical contribution lies in comparing what these Chinese texts reveal about the peninsula that European sources do not, or do differently. The authors highlight several themes: the commercial orientation of Chinese interest (products, port charges, trade mechanics); the social organization of Chinese communities in Malaya (occupational division by province of origin, headman systems, marriage prohibitions); the political relationships between Malay states and Siam, which the Chinese texts render inconsistently, reflecting genuine uncertainty about the nature of Siamese suzerainty; and the developing concept of “Malay” identity as a broad regional designation. The texts also provide rare information on legal customs such as the ordeal by water and ordeal by oil in Kelantan, interior gold-mining routes connecting the Kelantan and Pahang river systems, and the natural history of the region including the harvesting of camphor and sago.
The authors are careful to note the limitations of these sources: they present a static, descriptive picture rather than a narrative of events; they rarely name individual rulers; and the precise dating of descriptions is sometimes uncertain due to later editorial interpolation. The Hai-lu’s description of Singapore, for instance, must derive from reports received after Hsieh’s return to China, and the Hai-kuo wen-chien lu’s discussion of Malacca cannot reflect the eighteenth-century situation. Nevertheless, the translations fill a gap in the historiography by demonstrating that Chinese perspectives on Malaya were not merely tributary or political but deeply commercial and ethnographic in character.
Key Findings
- The Hai-lu records that several hundred Chinese came to Kelantan every year, with Fukien people settling in the port to trade and cultivate pepper, while Kwangtung people lived on hilltops to wash for gold dust (p. 21).
- Port charges in Kelantan were levied at five to six hundred foreign silver dollars for large vessels and two to three hundred for small ones; a per-person annual tax (ya-hsieh) of one silver dollar applied to residents, and a departure tax of one liang of gold was paid by miners returning to China (pp. 21–22).
- Pinang (Penang) is described as having more than ten thousand Fukien and Kwangtung settlers planting pepper, with annual taxes on spirit brewing, opium trading, and gambling houses exceeding one hundred thousand liang (p. 31).
- Kelantan and Patani each paid yearly tribute of thirty chin (catties) of gold to Siam; Trengganu additionally paid tribute to Annam and Holland (pp. 15, 24).
- The Hai-kuo wen-chien lu (1730) records that Johor’s trade could support only three or four ocean-going junks annually, a figure reflecting the recent lifting of the Chinese trade prohibition in 1729 (p. 11).
- Wei Yuan’s Hai-kuo t’u-chih (1842) describes Singapore after the British occupation as having “several tens of thousands” of Chinese and other foreigners gathered there, with an Anglo-Chinese college established to teach Chinese literature and print the classics (pp. 41–42).
Conclusion
Cushman and Milner conclude that while these Chinese accounts provide little information on specific individuals or political events, they present a fresh and complementary account of conditions on the Malay peninsula in the century before British rule, revealing the commercial priorities, social organization, and ethnographic observations of Chinese visitors and residents that European sources either overlooked or framed in fundamentally different terms.
Context
- The translations draw on the Hai-kuo wen-chien lu (Taipei, 1958 edition), the Hai-lu chu annotated edition (Shanghai, 1955), and the Hai-kuo t’u-chih (Yangchou, 1852; 1875 reprint), with the Hai-lu text consulted in an unpublished romanized version of MS. Cod. Or. 7304 at Leiden University Library, prepared by Dr R.R. Roolvink.
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in redirecting attention from the well-trodden European source base to Chinese-language materials, demonstrating their value for understanding the commercial and social dimensions of pre-colonial Malaya and for tracing the emergence of a pan-peninsular “Malay” identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.