ABSTRACT
Statements by early Chinese voyagers have been taken to imply that Indian traders visited the Malay world in neolithic times before the Aryan invasion of India. Certainly they must have needled the way there for the coming of Hindu priests and Buddhist monks and for the Hindu adventurers who founded little port kingdoms on Malaya’s estuaries. As we have seen, desire for the gold and spices of the lands beyond the Ganges greatly increased the amount of Indian shipping at the opening of the Christian era. Buddhism had lessened Hindu prejudice against crossing the sea and mixing with barbarians. Larger Indian ships were being built and the monsoon winds were understood. But in spite of bigger ships, or rather because of them, Indian traders naturally shunned the calms of the Malacca Straits by crossing on foot the narrow Malay peninsula on their way to Indo-China. Others were content to go no farther than the west coast of Malaya. And the beads dug up at Kuala Selinsing in the north of Perak and the Indian and Roman beads from Kota Tinggi on the Johore River suggest that international trade started with neolithic Indonesians as primitive as the naked Sakai or the Dayak, who both deck their persons with those ornaments. Among primitive Malays it must have been the practice for chiefs to take the lead in commercial transactions as the Sakai headman and the Batak raja still do. The practice was not only natural but inevitable in communities where property belonged not to the individual but to the tribe. And when Indian adventurers married the daughters of Malay headmen, the practice was fortified by the growth of families not only bilingual but possessed of the quicker intelligence desirable for transacting business with the foreign customer. Under such conditions it was easy enough for the Hindus to introduce the Indian system of royal trading. I-tsing, the Buddhist monk who travelled at the end of the seventh century, tells how the king of Sri Vijaya possessed ships that sailed with cargoes to and from India. So it is in a literal sense that Arabs trading in the ninth century with Kedah declare that the Maharaja of Sri Vijaya was made as rich as any king in the Indies by trade in cloves, sandalwood and nutmegs, in ivory, ebony and gold, in camphor from Sumatra and tin from Malaya. To this royal commerce the coming of Islam made no difference. Tomé Pires records how at Malacca Muzaffar Shah “bought and built junks and sent them out with merchants” and how the ruler of Malacca waxed rich by “putting his share in every junk that goes out”. He also relates how by ships from the Malay archipelago and the Far East “dues are not paid on merchandise, but only presents to the king and his ministers”. Even on the visits of the early rulers of Malacca to China there is a caustic but illuminating remark made by a Chinese chronicler, that the barbarians brought tribute not from any sense of duty but in quest of the advantages of trade.
