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Johor Lama

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Johor Lama

Johor Lama is a site on the Johore River in southern Malaya that served as the fortified capital of the Johore Sultanate from approximately 1540 until its destruction by the Portuguese in 1587, and which has since been the subject of sustained archaeological and historical investigation into the nature of early maritime trade in the region. The site comprises two distinct archaeological contexts — a sixteenth-century fortified city and a continuously occupied village — and has yielded a diverse assemblage of glass and stone beads, Chinese ceramics, and other material remains that bear on the chronology and character of trade networks linking the Malay Peninsula to the Indian Ocean and China Seas [1, pp. 198–199]. Its significance lies not only in its role as a political centre of the post-Malacca sultanate but also in the questions its material culture raises about the timing and complexity of long-distance exchange in Southeast Asia [2, p. 88].

Historical Context and the Question of the Capital

The historiography of Johor Lama’s elevation to capital status was long mired in confusion. From Valentijn (1724–26) through Marsden, Crawfurd, Newbold, and into the early twentieth-century works of Wilkinson and Winstedt, writers variously placed the Malacca royal family at Johore, Bintan, Muar, or Pahang in the years immediately following the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511, often conflating events of 1511–12 with those of 1519–20 or 1526 [3, pp. 48–50]. I. A. MacGregor, writing in 1955, undertook a systematic re-examination of the primary Portuguese chronicles — Castanheda, Barros, Correa, the Commentaries of Albuquerque, and Damião de Góis — alongside contemporary documents such as the letters of Fernão Peres de Andrade (February 1513), Tomé Pires (January 1513 and the Suma Oriental), and Giovanni da Empoli (1514), to reconstruct a more reliable sequence of events [3, pp. 48–55].

MacGregor demonstrated that Sultan Mahmud of Malacca first withdrew to Bertam after the fall of Malacca, was driven out in September 1511, moved to the Muar area, and reached Bintan by January 1513, where he remained until his death at Kampar between November 1527 and July 1528 [3, pp. 19–21]. The earliest plausible date for Johor Lama’s establishment as capital is therefore around 1540. When Dom Estêvão da Gama attacked the sultan’s fort in 1535 and 1536, the settlement was not at Johor Lama but well beyond Kota Tinggi, based on the chroniclers’ consistent statement that the city lay seven leagues from the river’s mouth, the physical geography of the Johore River, and the sailing times reported [3, pp. 33–35]. By 1545, however, Simão de Mello reported 300 lancharas assembled by the “king of Jantana,” indicating the sultan was sufficiently established to be based at Johor Lama [3, p. 37].

The city met its end on 15 August 1587, when a Portuguese fleet of 16 vessels carrying 500 troops under Dom Paulo de Lima captured and burned it after a two-day assault [3, pp. 55]. The city garrison numbered 12,000 men, including allied rulers from Trengganu, Indragiri, and Kampar [3, p. 55]. Dom Paulo de Lima’s own letter of 26 November 1587 states he attacked with 400 soldiers against 8,000 defenders and three allied kings, capturing 800 pieces of bronze artillery and 1,200 vessels; Portuguese casualties were 80 killed according to Couto, 55 according to Santos [3, pp. 65–66].

The Fortified City: Archaeological Evidence

The first systematic archaeological investigations at Johor Lama were conducted in 1953, initiated by the late P. D. R. Williams-Hunt in March and continued by G. de G. Sieveking in August, with contributions from Paul Wheatley and C. A. Gibson-Hill [1, pp. 198–199]. The expedition focused on two areas: the kampong (village) and the fort on Tanjong Batu hill. Williams-Hunt’s preliminary survey collected potsherds from the village surface, identifying Swatow blue-and-white crackle ware with reign marks ranging from Hsuan Te (1426–35) to Wan Li (1573–1619), alongside Sawankalok ware and stamped pottery [1, p. 224].

Sieveking’s August excavation of a gun embrasure and a section of the seaward rampart revealed masonry of Older Alluvium on the outer courses and reef coral on the inner courses [1, pp. 227–228]. A previously unknown northern defensive system was uncovered, comprising a ditch up to ten feet deep, an earth rampart, and a fortified salient projecting along the coast [1, p. 225]. The authors concluded that the fort and the kampong must be treated as separate sites in any comprehensive interpretation of Johor Lama [1, pp. 198–199].

Three old boat remains in the kampong were also investigated. Boat “A” was a non-sewn hull of uncertain origin, tentatively identified as a Perahu (Sampan) Pukat dating c. 1750–1850; Boat “B” was a Chinese twakoo with a second skin of red seraya planks, likely beached 50–100 years before 1953; and Boat “C” was a modern Malay kolek johor, no more than thirty years old [1, pp. 229–230]. The authors explicitly rejected the antiquity of the stamped pottery previously cited as evidence of early settlement, stating it was “valueless as evidence of the age of a settlement” [1, p. 233].

The Bead Assemblage and Trade Connections

Since the 1930s, stone and glass beads have been known to be picked up from the surface in the neighbourhood of Johor Lama and Makam Sultan near Kota Tinggi [2, p. 88]. Dr. G. B. Gardner collected approximately 600 beads and 800 gem stones from these sites in the 1930s, and his findings were assessed by Horace Beck, then the leading student of beads in the world [2, pp. 88–89]. Gardner gave very early dates to some of his beads — one steatite bead was identified as Hittite, probably made about 700 B.C., and two glass beads were placed in a pre-Christian horizon — and related about 120 beads to the Roman Empire [2, p. 89]. Both Beck and Gardner were inclined to believe that the “Roman” beads had indeed come to Johor in Roman times, a position that Sir Roland Braddell, writing in 1947, extended to suggest “evidence of a bead trade into Johor from before the Christian era and continuing for at least 200 years after that era” [2, p. 90].

Alastair Lamb, writing in 1964, challenged this interpretation. Drawing on the logic of the late C. A. Gibson Hill, who had demonstrated the absurdities involved in reading into the archaeological material from Kota Tinggi evidence of some 1500 years of continuous settlement, Lamb argued that there was no reason to assign either the Chinese porcelain sherds or the fragments of stamped earthenware to a date before the opening of the fifteenth century A.D.; and it followed that the beads, whenever they may have been manufactured, must in the Johor context fall within the same chronological limits [2, p. 90]. The Makam Sultan site, on the evidence of its ceramics and some of its non-Mediterranean beads, was first occupied no earlier than the late fourteenth century A.D. [2, p. 97].

The Johor bead assemblage is remarkable for the wide variety of its contents. In Beck’s list of 59 numbered items, one finds Hittite and Cypriot beads of great antiquity, Roman beads, beads of possible Chinese manufacture, and beads of possible European manufacture [2, pp. 92–97]. The specific gravities of the beads extend over a far greater range than those from other prolific bead sites in Malaya — Kuala Selinsing, Pengkalan Bujang, and Takuapa — where the dominant type is an opaque red glass bead and PbO (lead oxide) never exceeds 5 per cent [2, pp. 87–88]. At Johor, several beads have specific gravities of 3.6 to 4.6, far exceeding the 2.3 to 2.5 range typical of Mediterranean glass, indicating a significant component of Chinese-manufactured glass [2, pp. 87–88]. This suggests that the bead trade to or through Malaya in the fifteenth century began to acquire a complexity it had not possessed in earlier times, a conclusion consistent with the great expansion of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean and the China Seas taking place at that time [2, pp. 87–88].

Among the more unusual finds is a single gold bead acquired by M. Roger Tirot in late 1963 from a Malay villager near Kota Tinggi. Measuring 7 mm along its axis of threading and 6.75 mm wide, it is in effect a 20-sided framework, an equatorial band of six lozenges linked by filigree ribs to two rings [2, p. 97]. Its very close similarity to gold beads from Oc-èo in South Vietnam, which L. Malleret attributed to Mediterranean origin from the period of the Roman Empire, makes it a significant find; yet, as with the glass beads, there is no strong reason to assume it came to Malaya in Roman times [2, pp. 97–98]. Two beads of yellowish-white opaque glass moulded in the shape of human molar teeth, found at Makam Sultan, represent a category for which no prior literary reference exists in the available literature [2, p. 98].

Research and Documentation

The investigation of Johor Lama has proceeded along two parallel tracks — historical and archaeological — that have only partially intersected. The historical track was dominated by MacGregor’s 1955 monograph, which resolved a dating problem that had generated contradictory accounts for over two centuries through systematic collation of Portuguese chronicle evidence against contemporary documentary sources and physical geography [3, pp. 48–125]. His work drew on primary manuscripts held at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon), the Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Distrital (Évora), and the Arquivo Histórico e Geral do Estado da Índia (Goa) [3, p. 125]. The archaeological track was initiated by the 1953 fieldwork of Williams-Hunt, Sieveking, Wheatley, and Gibson-Hill, which established the fundamental distinction between the fort and the kampong as separate archaeological contexts and rejected the antiquity of the stamped wares [1, pp. 198–199]. Sieveking’s subsequent 1956 note further corrected the identification of the stamped earthenware, reassigning it from Han dynasty Chinese pottery to local Malay Peninsula production of the nineteenth or twentieth century, a conclusion supported by the recovery of a large fragment from between the inner and outer skins of Boat “B” [4, p. 194].

The bead studies represent a third strand, beginning with Gardner’s 1930s collection and Beck’s 1936 report, and continuing through Lamb’s 1964 analysis, which applied a strict contextual dating argument to challenge earlier assumptions of direct Roman contact [2, pp. 88–98]. The principal historiographical debate has thus centred on the question of whether the “Roman” beads and the gold bead evidence direct Mediterranean contact with the Malay Peninsula in the first few centuries of the Christian era, or whether they are more plausibly explained as objects that reached the site through the expanding trade networks of the fifteenth century and later [2, pp. 89–90]. The available evidence, as Lamb and the 1953 field team both concluded, favours the latter interpretation: the site was first occupied no earlier than the late fourteenth century, and the material assemblage reflects the increasing complexity of maritime exchange in the Indian Ocean and China Seas rather than any earlier horizon [2, p. 97], [1, p. 233].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. G. de G. Sieveking (1955). The fortified city of Johor Lama and the use of archaeological evidence. {In Papers on Johor Lama and the Portuguese in Malaya, 1511–1641 JMBRAS 28(2): 198–199.
  2. A. Lamb (1964). Notes on beads from Johor Lama and Kota Tinggi JMBRAS 37(1): 88–98.
  3. I.A. MacGregor (1955). Johore Lama in the sixteenth century. {In Papers on Johore Lama and the Portuguese in Malaya (1511–1641 JMBRAS 28(2): 48–125.
  4. G. de G. Sieveking (1956). The stamped wares from Johore Lama JMBRAS 29(1): 194–195. Read on JSTOR