Malay History from Chinese Sources

Extract

In an article on the Malay Founder of Malacca (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. xii, pts. 3 and 4, 1948) I used the Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires to advance the view that the Portuguese and Chinese were wrong in failing to identify the Parameswara with Megat Iskandar Shah, the Mukans-autirsha or, better, Mou-wa-kan-sa-yu-li-eul-cha of the Chinese.

I suggested that all the evidence went to show they were not father and son but the same ruler with the different titles he bore before and after conversion to Islam, and that this founder of Malacca died in 1424.

In a posthumous article in Toung Pao (vol. xxxviii) Paul Pelliot (p. 168) notes the further point (which is not apparent from Groeneveldt's Notes: Essays on Indochina, 2nd ser., vol. 1) that, according to the Ming-chan tsang and Ming Che, Megat Iskandar Shah visited China in 1414 to announce the death of his father and ask for investiture; but that according to the Chou-yu tcheoutseu lou (8,136) and Ming-chan tsang it was in 1419. This discrepancy confirms my doubt as to the accuracy of the Chinese chroniclers, who seem to have construed every Malay visit as an act of homage.

Paul Pelliot (p. 169) gives another case where the Chinese sources are obviously inaccurate. The Ming Che (325, 3a-4b) records events of 1474, then of 1481, and continues that “some time after” two envoys Lin Jong and Houang K'ien-heng were sent to invest “the son of the king, Ma-ha-mou-cha” (Groeneveldt's “Mahamusa”).