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To’ Engku Klang. {Appendix of his History of Selangor

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

To’ Engku Klang. {Appendix of his History of Selangor

R.O. Winstedt’s A History of Selangor, published in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1934, traces the political development of Selangor from its prehistoric archaeological remains through the Bugis conquests of the eighteenth century to the establishment of British residency in 1874. Winstedt’s overarching thesis is that Selangor’s modern statehood emerged not from indigenous Malay political evolution but from the intersection of Bugis military enterprise, Chinese commercial immigration, and ultimately British imperial intervention in a succession crisis that domestic warfare alone could not resolve.

Summary

Winstedt begins with the meagre material evidence of pre-Bugis Selangor—neoliths, socketted iron tools of the “ape’s bones” type, and a bronze bell—and then reconstructs the polity’s early political history from Chinese, Javanese, and Malay textual sources. The Klang delta appears in the Ling wai tai ta (ante 1178) as a dependency of Sri Vijaya, in the Nagarakrtagama as subject to Majapahit in the mid-fourteenth century, and in the Malay Annals as a river state under Malaccan suzerainty in the fifteenth century. Tin mining was already significant by 1613, when d’Eredia recorded an annual output exceeding one hundred bares from Klang (pp. 1–2).

The Bugis migration, originating from the house of Luwu in South Celebes, transformed Selangor from a collection of minor river states into a strategic military base. Winstedt identifies the five sons of Upu Tenribong Daing Rilaka—Daing Parani, Daing Menambun, Daing Merewah, Daing Chela’, and Daing Kamase—as the principal agents of this transformation, and demonstrates how Selangor served as a staging ground for Bugis campaigns against Raja Kechil of Siak, in Kedah, and in Perak throughout the first half of the eighteenth century (pp. 3–6). Winstedt argues on the evidence of the Misa Melayu that Raja Lumu, son of Daing Chelak, was formally created the first Sultan of Selangor (Salahu’d-din Shah) by the Sultan of Perak between 1765 and 1770, rather than by the Bugis themselves or by Sultan Sulaiman of Johor-Riau (pp. 6–7).

The period from 1800 to 1857 saw Sultan Ibrahim project Selangor’s power into Perak (conquered in 1804) and into the diplomatic rivalry between the Dutch at Malacca and the British at Penang. The 1825 treaty, brokered by Governor Fullerton, fixed the Bernam river as the boundary between Selangor and Perak and marked the first occasion on which the British acquired a legal right to prevent Siamese armaments from reaching the state (pp. 11–15). Under Sultan Muhammad (r. 1830–1857), the state decayed under the extortions of the Sultan’s numerous offspring, and the 1834 massacre of the Chinese miners at Lukut presaged the administrative breakdown that large-scale Chinese immigration would produce (pp. 16–17).

The civil war of 1866–1874 was triggered by the death of Sultan Muhammad without a settled succession. Raja Mahdi, a Bugis chief at Klang, defeated the Sultan’s brother-in-law Raja ‘Abdu’llah in 1866, but the real contest was between Mahdi and Tengku Zia’u’d-din (Kudin), the Kedah-born Viceroy appointed by Sultan ‘Abdu’l-Samad in 1868. The war reached its nadir in the Petaling ambush, where two European officers and 56 sepoys were slaughtered, and the forts at Kuala Selangor fell to Sayid Mashhor (pp. 28–29). The Viceroy’s eventual victory, secured with Pahang forces under Wan Ahmad, was consolidated by the British appointment of J.G. Davidson as first Resident in 1874, a move precipitated by the murder of Malacca subjects by pirates under Raja Ya’akob and the Viceroy’s own application for a British officer (pp. 30–32).

Key Findings

  • The only material relics of pre-Bugis civilisation in Selangor are a few neoliths, three socketted iron tools (“ape’s bones”) from Batang Berjuntai, and a bronze bell from Klang; all are held in the museums of Kuala Lumpur, Taiping, and Singapore (p. 1).
  • Winstedt dates the formal creation of the first Sultan of Selangor (Salahu’d-din Shah) to between 1765 and 1770, on the authority of the Misa Melayu, arguing that the Bugis would not have created a new sultanate within the Johor-Riau empire before Sultan Sulaiman’s death in 1760 (pp. 6–7).
  • The 1823 treaty between Selangor and Perak stipulated that the duty on Perak tin ($12 per bahar) was to be equally divided between the two states, a claim that generated prolonged dispute after the 1825 boundary settlement (pp. 12–15).
  • In September 1834, approximately 300 Chinese miners at Lukut rose and massacred their employer Tuanku Busu, a chief and near relative of the Sultan regarded as heir to the throne; Winstedt identifies large-scale Chinese immigration as the factor that “finally broke down Malay administration” (p. 16).
  • The Petaling ambush (1872) resulted in the deaths of two European officers (van Hagen and Cavalieri), eight European or Eurasian non-commissioned officers, and 56 native sepoys; the heads of the two officers were borne in triumph through Kuala Lumpur (p. 28).
  • The Sultan’s own letter welcoming Frank Swettenham as Assistant Resident in 1874 describes him as “very clever in the customs of Malay government and…very clever at gaining the hearts of Rajas with soft words, delicate and sweet, so that all men rejoice in him as in the perfume of an opened flower” (p. 32).

Conclusion

Winstedt’s definitive historical takeaway is that Selangor’s transition from a Bugis-dominated military state to a British-protected constitutional monarchy was not a smooth evolution but a violent rupture: the civil war exhausted the old Bugis-Malay power structures, the Chinese mining economy created dependencies that neither the Sultan nor the Viceroy could manage without external arbitration, and the murder of British subjects by the Sultan’s own son provided the legal pretext that converted the Viceroy’s personal request for a British officer into a formal treaty of protection. The pax Britannica, Winstedt closes, “brought contentment and prosperity to Selangor and gave its people footballs in place of creese and cannon” (p. 32).

Context

  • This article forms the main body of Winstedt’s multi-part A History of Selangor, published serially in the JMBRAS in 1934; the present section covers the pre-colonial and early colonial periods up to the appointment of the first Resident.
  • Winstedt, as Assistant Director of the Malay and Singapore Museums and later Director of Education in the Straits Settlements, had direct access to the archaeological specimens and archival correspondence (Dutch Dagh-Register, Penang state papers, Misa Melayu, Tuhfat al-Nafis) that underpin his narrative.

References