Article

Geographical names

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Geographical names

The study of geographical names in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo constitutes one of the most persistent and methodologically diverse strands of historical scholarship in the region, spanning from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The toponymic record of the Strait of Malacca and the surrounding archipelago is characterised by a remarkable density of multilingual layers—Chinese, Portuguese, Malay, Javanese, Sanskrit, and English—each preserving different moments of contact, trade, and political change. Scholars working within the Society’s journal have addressed this material from at least four distinct angles: the philological identification of ancient Chinese and Ptolemaic names with modern locations; the etymological analysis of Malay and indigenous names; the documentation of names threatened by colonial renaming and linguistic erosion; and the reconstruction of ancient political geography through the positional clues embedded in foreign itineraries. Together these studies reveal that the landscape of the Malay world has been continuously re-named, re-identified, and re-interpreted across more than a millennium of recorded history.

The Philological Identification of Ancient Toponyms

The most sustained programme of toponymic identification in the Society’s literature concerns the matching of names recorded in Chinese dynastic histories, Ptolemy’s Geography, and other foreign sources with their modern geographical referents. This line of inquiry was inaugurated in the late nineteenth century and reached its most ambitious expression in the work of Roland Braddell, whose multi-volume essay on the ancient times of the Malay Peninsula and the Straits of Malacca, published in instalments from 1931 onwards, attempted to relocate the entire corpus of early Indianised polities in the archipelago from Java to Borneo [1]. Braddell’s method was to set aside phonetic reasoning and test each name against the hard evidence of geography, mineralogy, and navigation. He argued that Ptolemy’s Iabadiou was placed well to the east of the Golden Chersonese, a position incompatible with either Java or Sumatra but consistent with the western coast of Borneo from Cape Api to its northern promontory [1, pp. 32–33]. He further demonstrated that the Sunda Strait was not used as a sea-route between India and China until the Portuguese era, making the Straits of Malacca the only viable passage and rendering any identification of these toponyms with Java geographically implausible [1, p. 53].

W. Linehan’s 1951 article on Ptolemy’s place-names in the Golden Chersonese extended this programme with a combined method of archaeological evidence, historical geography, and etymological analysis, rather than relying on the purely mathematical reconstruction of Ptolemy’s coordinates [2]. Linehan identified the Khrysoanas not as a single river but as the combined Perak-Bernam system, whose lower reaches may have formed a single waterway in Ptolemy’s day, and supported this by documenting two ancient land-river routes linking Perak and north Pahang that provided access to gold-working sites [2, pp. 89–91]. He identified Sabara with ancient Klang, citing the Dongsonian bronze drum, three bronze elephant bells, and iron-age implements recovered there, together with the Cham etymology of “Klang” (from klo’ng or galang, meaning storehouse or market) which matched Ptolemy’s designation of Sabara as an emporium [2, p. 94]. A brief correction by Dato F. W. Douglas in 1953 challenged Linehan’s placement of Sabana, arguing that the name should be located on the east side of the southern tip of the Peninsula, at the mouth of the Johore River opposite Pulau Tekong Besar, and citing local testimony that a small river and hill there were still known as Sabana or Sebena [3].

Paul Wheatley’s 1957 article on the Ch’ien han shu passage representing one of the earliest substantiated references to the Malay Peninsula in any language shifted the analytical framework from philological place-name matching to geographical probability, using time, distance, and monsoon constraints as the primary tools of identification [4]. Wheatley argued that the trans-peninsular portage described in the earlier itinerary (from the reign of Wu-ti, c. 141–87 B.C.) saved nearly four months on the total journey compared to the all-sea return route, and that a ten-day overland march implied a distance of roughly 150–200 miles, placing the crossing some distance north or south of the Kra Isthmus [4, pp. 119]. He identified the Three Pagodas Pass and the Three Cedars Pass as the most probable routes, supported by archaeological evidence from P’ong Tuk excavated by Coedes [4, p. 119]. In a companion article of the same year, Wheatley addressed the long-standing problem of locating the Southeast Asian kingdom known to Chinese sources as the “Red Land” (Ch’ih-t’u), arguing that the weight of textual evidence placed it in the northern half of the Malay Peninsula rather than in Siam [5]. The decisive geographical anchor was the identification of Lang-ya-hsu with Patani, which fixed the Lion Rock Archipelago in the waters off the Bay of Bandon and placed Ch’ih-t’u’s eastern frontier in the vicinity of the Kelantan coast [5, p. 133].

Hsu Yun-ts’iao’s 1947 study of Tan-tan applied a similar process of elimination to locate the ancient state first recorded in the Liang Shu (530 A.D.) in the Kelantan region [6]. By identifying the surrounding states with confidence—P’an-p’an as Pranpuri, Ch’ih-t’u as Singora, Lo-yueh as Johore, and To-lo-mo as Talubin on the east coast—Hsu showed that Tan-tan could not be Pattani, Pahang, or any location on the west coast, leaving only Kelantan or Trengganu [6]. The decisive evidence came from Ch’ing Dynasty sources, which listed Tan-tan as a dependency of Johore alongside Trengganu and Pahang, and which placed it closer to Amoy than either Johore or Singora [6, p. 17]. The author identified the village of Tendong, ten miles from the Kelantan River mouth, as the most probable seat of the ancient capital [6, p. 18].

Malay and Indigenous Toponymy: Origins and Erosion

A second, complementary strand of scholarship concerns the etymology and origin of Malay and indigenous place-names themselves. Zainal Abidin bin Ahmad’s 1925 survey drew on folklore, local oral traditions, and literary sources to explain the origins of toponyms across the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States, arguing that most place-names derive from geographical features, prominent landmarks, founding incidents, or superstitious associations, and that many of the explanatory legends attached to them are later inventions that have calcified into folklore [7]. Ahmad recorded at least five colonial-era or modern name changes within living memory: Kuala Kelang to Port Swettenham, Semujong to Seremban, Durian Sa-batang to Telok Anson, Pengkalan Batu to Kelang, and Sungai Genta to Tanjong Malim [7, p. 79]. For Seremban, he presented the traditional legend of Jong Tersemu—a petrified junk whose story is a variant of the Nakhoda Ragam tale—and contrasted it with the alternative derivation from Sungai Ujong [7, p. 80]. His personal field observation of Bukit Jong in April 1916 found only a cave sheltering a Chinese temple, a big bell, and red candle wax, noting that “the Chinese are the greatest frequenters of the place as suppliants and worshippers” [7, p. 80].

H. T. Haughton’s 1889 etymological survey of Singapore and its vicinity was written at a moment when the island’s original Malay and Orang Laut populations were rapidly diminishing under the pressure of Chinese and Indian immigration, and his overarching thesis was one of urgent documentation: the indigenous toponymy was already being corrupted beyond recognition in official charts and maps [8]. Haughton’s method was essentially comparative: he juxtaposed the form found in official documents against the form attested in local usage, then offered a Malay or Javanese etymology to explain the original [8]. He documented the degree of phonetic distortion in official cartography, noting that Pulau Khatib Bongsu (“the island of the youngest-born preacher”) appeared in charts as “Kitch Bungsee” and “Kita Bangsa” [8, p. 79]. The name “Roumania” applied to a point near Tanjong Penyusok was identified as a corruption of Rumenia, the Malay name for the fruit tree Bonea microphylla [8, pp. 75–76]. Three Orang Laut tribal names were preserved in the toponymy: Semulun, Seletar, and Beduanda Kalang [8, pp. 77].

J.V. Mills’s 1932 study addressed a persistent problem in Malayan historical geography: the same physical feature often appears under different names in Chinese, Portuguese, Malay, and English sources, and these names frequently resist straightforward identification [9]. His method was to cross-reference early navigational accounts—Chinese sailing directions, Portuguese chronicles, and British maritime directories—with local Malay names and legends to propose specific identifications. The most substantial arguments concerned the identification of features in the Singapore Strait and the approaches to Malacca. Mills proposed that the Chinese name Hsi-li (attested in Wang Ta-Yuan’s 1350 Tao i Chih lo) represents a Cantonese transliteration of the Malay selat (“strait”), pointing to Keppel Harbour as the site plundered by Siamese raiders [9, pp. 17–18]. He identified the Chinese Ki-pei (“cotton island”) with Parcellar Hill, tracing the name ultimately to Malay kapas or Hindustani kapas, and Ka-wang (“island of the false king”) with Cape Rachado, arguing the latter is a conflation of the Malay tanjong tuan with an older Chinese designation for “the false five islands” [9, pp. 19–20].

Reginald J. Bee’s 1933 note on Kelantan place names illustrated the poetic and sympathetic manner in which Malay speakers record local impressions in toponymy, while also noting that the interpretation of Malay place names is complicated by successive layers of religious thought grafted onto original pagan beliefs, combined with regional corruptions and idioms [10]. Bee explained nine names, including Tabal (from Patani dialect “place of drying sails”), Tumpat (named after a local type of cakes rather than the word for a filled-up place), and Gunong Sitong (a peak with a nose-shaped summit, whose real name is Gunong Restong) [10].

Administrative Renaming and the Politics of Names

The records also document cases in which place-names were changed by administrative authority, revealing the political dimensions of toponymy. Mills recorded the case of the village of Bunyi, forcibly changed to Suara by the Federated Malay States railway in 1919 to avoid confusion with Bangi, despite the new name being etymologically incorrect [9, p. 20]. Ahmad’s survey noted the broader pattern of colonial-era renaming, including the transformation of Kuala Kelang to Port Swettenham and Semujong to Seremban, which he presented as evidence of a systematic process of linguistic displacement [7, p. 79]. Haughton’s work, by contrast, was explicitly framed as an act of cultural preservation against this process, seeking to record the correct Malay forms before they were lost entirely [8].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on geographical names reveals a clear evolution in methodological priorities across the period from 1889 to 1957. The earliest contributions—Haughton (1889), Blagden (1899), and Maxwell (1909)—were primarily philological in character, working from lexical comparison and dialectal pronunciation to identify or correct individual names [8], [11], [12]. Blagden’s brief note on the name “Malaya” drew on I Tsing’s seventh-century writings to establish that the Malay country par excellence was in central Sumatra, a fact agreeing with native Malay tradition deriving the origin of many Peninsular Malays from the old Central Sumatran state of Menangkabau [11, p. 213]. Maxwell’s 1909 corrections to Groeneveldt’s Notes on the Malay Archipelago demonstrated the use of the Hindu title mudliyar in Java by 1292 and challenged the identification of a place in Cheng Ho’s itinerary as Hormuz, arguing on geographical grounds that a Persian Gulf location would not appear between Kelantan and Perak in a list of Southeast Asian ports [12, pp. 107–109].

The interwar period saw a shift towards more systematic and geographically grounded approaches. Braddell’s multi-volume essay (1931 onwards) represented the most ambitious attempt to reconstruct the ancient geography of the Malay Archipelago from Chinese, Greek, and Indian sources, relocating the entire corpus of early Indianised polities from Java to Borneo on the basis of monsoon sailing conditions, mineral evidence, and navigational logic [1]. Mills (1932) and Bee (1933) continued the tradition of discrete etymological notes but with a greater emphasis on cross-referencing multiple source languages. Hsu Yun-ts’iao (1947) and Linehan (1951) introduced archaeological evidence as a decisive criterion for identification, moving beyond purely textual analysis [6], [2]. Wheatley’s 1957 articles marked a further methodological advance, using the internal constraints of itineraries—time, distance, monsoon windows—as the primary tools of geographical reconstruction, an approach that became characteristic of his subsequent work on early Southeast Asian urbanism and trade [4], [5].

The historiographical debates documented in these records reveal several points of sustained contention. The identification of Ch’ih-t’u divided scholars between the Siamese hypothesis (Abel-Remusat through le May) and the Malay Peninsula hypothesis (Kern, Ferrand, Moens, Coedes, Briggs, Luce, and Wales) [5, pp. 128–129]. The location of Tan-tan generated competing proposals from Schlegel, Pelliot, and Gerini before Hsu Yun-ts’iao’s process of elimination [6]. The identification of Ptolemy’s Sabara or Sabana produced a direct disagreement between Linehan and Douglas [2], [3]. These debates, conducted across the pages of the Society’s journal over nearly seven decades, collectively established the methodological foundations for the modern study of Southeast Asian historical geography.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. R. Braddell (1941). An introduction to the study of ancient times in the Malay Peninsula and the Straits of Malacca JMBRAS 19(1): 21–74.
  2. W. Linehan (1951). The identification of some of Ptolemy’s place-names in the Golden Chersonese JMBRAS 24(3): 86–98.
  3. F.W. Douglas (1953). Sabara and sabana JMBRAS 26(1): 212. Read on JSTOR
  4. Paul Wheatley (1957). Possible references to the Malay Peninsula in the Annals of the Former Han JMBRAS 30(1): 115–121.
  5. Paul Wheatley (1957). Ch’ih-t’u JMBRAS 30(1): 122–133. Read on JSTOR
  6. Hsu Yun-ts’iao (1947). Notes on Tan Tan JMBRAS 20(1): 47–63.
  7. Zainal Abidin bin Ahmad (1925). The origin of some Malay place-names JMBRAS 3(1): 79–82.
  8. Haughton H.T (1889). Notes on names of places in the island of Singapore and its vicinity JSBRAS 20: 75–82.
  9. J.V. Mills (1932). Notes on some Malayan place-names JMBRAS 10(1): 16–20.
  10. R.J. Bee (1933). Some Kelantan place names JMBRAS 11(2): 138. Read on JSTOR
  11. C.O. Blagden (1899). The name “Malaya” JSBRAS 32: 211–213.
  12. W.P. Groeneveldt and W.G. Maxwell (1909). Groeneveldt’s notes on the Malay archipelago and Malacca. W.G. Maxwell JSBRAS 52: 105–110. Read on JSTOR