Article

Langkasuka

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Langkasuka

Langkasuka was an ancient kingdom centred at the base of Kedah Peak in the northern Malay Peninsula, known to Chinese, Indian, and Javanese sources from at least the first century A.D. through the fourteenth, and whose name has been the subject of sustained scholarly debate regarding its etymological origin and cultural affiliation. The kingdom’s capital, situated in the locality of the Sungei Bujang, developed from an early Indian settlement into a polity of considerable regional significance, with ramifications extending beyond the borders of the modern State of Kedah [1, pp. 119–120]. Its identity, chronology, and relationship to the broader cultural spheres of Dvaravati and Srivijaya have been investigated through textual, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence, yielding a picture of a polity that evolved through distinct phases of Indianisation before its eventual destruction in the late fourteenth century [1, p. 121], [2, pp. 13–40].

Scope and Historical Definition

The primary indigenous source for the kingdom’s origin is the Kedah Annals (Hikayat Marong Mahawangsa), a text in the Malay language preserved in the private repositories of the Kedah rulers and unknown to the Siamese until its discovery by the Raja of Ligor [1, pp. 119–120]. According to the Annals, the legendary founder Raja Marong Mahawangsa arrived by sea, anchored at a headland where a large island—identified as Kedah Peak—was in the process of becoming united with the mainland, and established his settlement among the gergasi, the aboriginal inhabitants of the region [1, p. 120]. The Annals derive the name Langkasuka from Lanka-suka, “Island of Gladness,” attributing it to the rejoicings that accompanied the construction of the audience hall [1, pp. 120–121].

External sources confirm the kingdom’s existence under various renderings of the name. The “History of the Liang Dynasty” (502–556 A.D.) records a country called Langgasu or Langga, whose people were ardent Buddhists and who stated that the country had been established four hundred years earlier; one of its princes had lived in India as an exile, married the daughter of an Indian king, and upon his return became king, dying twenty years later and being succeeded by his son Pa-ka-da-to, who sent a Buddhist envoy to China in 515 A.D. [1, p. 121]. The Chinese pilgrim I-tsing, writing about 692 A.D., mentions a country called Langkasu [1, p. 121]. The Tanjore Inscription of 1030 A.D. refers to both Ilangasogam and Kadaram (Kedah) [1, p. 121]. Chau-Ju-kua, writing about 1225 A.D., mentions Lang-ya-si or Ling-ya-sseu-kia [1, p. 121]. The Javanese poem Nagarakrtagama, composed in 1365 A.D., mentions both Langkasuka and Kedah as distinct entities, and the Pasai Annals record the destruction of Langkasuka about 1370 A.D. [1, p. 121].

Notably, no Arab geographer—neither Ibn Khordadbeh (846 A.D.), Sulaiman (c. 920 A.D.), Ibn Muhalhal (c. 941 A.D.), nor Idrisi (1154 A.D.)—ever uses the name Langkasuka or any variant; all employ forms of Kedah [1, p. 122]. This absence is significant given that Arab merchants officially converted Kedah to Islam about 1474 A.D., and suggests that the name Langkasuka had already fallen out of common usage by the ninth century [1, p. 122].

The Etymological Question

The question of the name’s origin has been the subject of specific scholarly argumentation. W. Linehan, writing in 1948, proposed that the original name of the settlement was Lanka Asoka, “The Island of Asoka,” in honour of the Mauryan Buddhist emperor who reigned c. 264–228 B.C., and that the etymological derivation offered in the Kedah Annals is a later folk-etymological fiction [1, pp. 119–120]. Linehan argued that the early Indian colonists of Malaya, being fervent Buddhists, would naturally have named their first settlement after the great Buddhist emperor whose fame was immense in the Indian world [1, p. 122].

The critical epigraphical support for this reading is the Tamil form Ilangasokam in the Tanjore Inscription of 1030 A.D., which Professor K. A. Nilakanta Sastri confirmed could be taken as Ilanga (Lanka) plus Asoka, with the initial i and the rendering of ga as ka being typical features of Tamil transliteration [1, pp. 122–123]. Linehan further noted that the name Langkasuka survives in the modern Malay Peninsula as a tributary of the Perak (or Patani) river in its upper reaches, and in the north Malayan folk-tale of Negeri alang-kah suka, “Land of all one’s wishes,” a distant echo of Lanka Asoka [1, p. 122].

The designation Lanka (“Island”) is not incongruous given the geographical conditions at the time of the Indian colonists’ arrival. Dr. Quaritch Wales, relying on Low’s translation of the Annals, observed that Kedah Peak was probably a peninsula when the Indian colonists arrived, with much of the low-lying land north and south still under the sea, and that the comparatively high neck of land between Bedong and Gurun was unlikely to have been beneath the sea in historical times [1, p. 123]. The Annals themselves describe the large island as “just in the process of being united with the mainland,” and ancient geographers frequently did not distinguish between peninsulas and islands [1, p. 123].

Archaeological Evidence and Cultural Affiliation

The archaeological investigation of Langkasuka’s material culture has been advanced primarily through the work of H. G. Quaritch Wales, whose 1974 article reports on trial excavations and artifact examinations at three key sites in southern Peninsular Siam: Yarang, Satingphra, and Nakhon Si Thammarat [2, pp. 13–40]. At Yarang, the accepted location of Langkasuka’s capital, Wales declined to dig in the overgrown exterior where previous finds had been made and instead insisted on trenching within the city enclosure [2, pp. 13–14]. The first trench proved sterile, but the impasse was resolved when the local education officer, Mr. Anan Vathanikorn, showed him a collection of artifacts he was safeguarding at his home, supplemented by objects from the principal wat in Patani town [2, pp. 18–19].

The assemblage comprised terracotta votive stupas with Dvaravati-generic features, a stone dharmacakra (wheel of the law) five and a half inches high, a standing Buddha two feet in height in vitarka mudra (gesture of teaching), a bas-relief of the Buddha beneath the Bo tree flanked by the Bodhisattvas Maitreya and Lokesvara, a polished granite linga (phallic emblem of Siva) twenty inches in length, and a stone door sill three feet eleven inches long [2, pp. 18–19]. Wales judged the assemblage absolutely homogeneous, dating from the late sixth to early ninth century, and of a style paralleling Dvaravati rather than Srivijaya [2, pp. 18–19]. The single exception—the Mahayana bas-relief—indicated a degree of Srivijayan influence consistent with what was also appearing in Dvaravati at that time [2, p. 19]. The rounded corners of the ramparts and the complete absence of Srivijayan-style bronze Bodhisattvas, common at Chaiya and Satingphra, corroborated this reading [2, p. 19]. The linga from Yarang, with its pronounced oval swelling, raised gland and frenum contours, and short octagonal section, was dated to the sixth or seventh century on the basis of Malleret’s comparative criteria for relative antiquity [2, p. 19].

Wales’s overarching thesis is that the ancient city of Langkasuka at Yarang was a Dvaravati-parallel civilisation of the late sixth to early ninth century rather than a Srivijayan foundation [2, pp. 13–14]. He further argued that the subsequent urban history of the region involved a sequence of replacements: Langkasuka giving way to Satingphra as a Srivijayan seaport in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, which in turn was superseded by Nakhon Si Thammarat as the capital of independent Tambralinga from approximately 1230 [2, pp. 13–14]. At Satingphra, three trenches within the moated enclosure encountered the same single stratum of pottery deposits extending to natural sand at a depth of about three feet, comprising Sung-type glazed sherds, fine Lung-chuan celadons, greenish moulded wares possibly of Tonkin origin, white porcelains, and homogeneous local wares, but no blue and white and no Sawankalok [2, pp. 30–31]. This led Wales to date the town’s foundation to the eleventh century with flourishing in the twelfth and thirteenth, a century or more earlier than A. Lamb’s previous estimate [2, pp. 30–31].

Research and Documentation

The scholarly investigation of Langkasuka within the Society’s literature spans more than five decades, reflecting shifting priorities from textual and onomastic analysis to archaeological fieldwork. The earliest contribution in the present corpus is a brief item by R. O. Winstedt in 1923, “Was Johore once named Langkasuka?” [3, p. 253], which appears as a separate heading on the concluding page of his article on the Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim and suggests that the question of the name’s application to different territories was already a live issue in the early years of the journal.

The 1930s and 1940s saw a wave of scholarship on early Indian colonisation in Malaya, within which Linehan’s 1948 note sits [1, p. 119]. His article draws on the Sturrock romanised text of the Kedah Annals published in the JSBRAS in 1916, Low’s 1849 translation, the Tanjore Inscription, Chinese dynastic sources as compiled by Groenveldt, and Coedes’s 1944 Histoire Ancienne des États Hindouis d’Extrême-Orient [1, pp. 119–123]. Linehan’s onomastic solution—that the name derives from Lanka Asoka in honour of the Mauryan emperor—remains influential in subsequent discussions of the kingdom’s identity [1, p. 122].

Quaritch Wales’s 1974 article represents the mature synthesis of a long career in Southeast Asian archaeology, integrating his own earlier excavations at the Nakhon Siva temple in 1935 and at Satingphra in 1964 with new fieldwork conducted in 1973 [2, pp. 13–40]. The article responds critically to the work of Wheatley, Stargardt, Lamb, and O’Connor, and advances the argument that the Dvaravati and Srivijayan cultural spheres in the Peninsula were distinct and sequential rather than overlapping [2, pp. 13–14]. This position, grounded in the material evidence from Yarang, Satingphra, and Nakhon Si Thammarat, provides the most detailed archaeological framework for understanding Langkasuka’s place in the broader cultural history of the region.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. W. Linehan (1948). Langkasuka, the island of Asoka JMBRAS 21(1): 119–123.
  2. H.G.Q. Wales (1974). Langkasuka and Tambralinga: some archaeological notes JMBRAS 47(1): 13–40.
  3. R.O. Winstedt (1923). Was Johore once named Langkasuka? JMBRAS 1(1): 253. Read on JSTOR