An introduction to the study of ancient times in the Malay Peninsula and the Straits of Malacca
Roland Braddell, a British colonial administrator in the Straits Settlements, published this continuation of his multi-volume essay in 1941, covering the political history of Funan from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D. and mounting a sustained argument that the ancient toponyms Yava-dvipa, Iabadiou, Ye-po-ti, and their Chinese variants referred to Borneo rather than Java or Sumatra. The piece represents the most ambitious attempt in the English-language literature of its day to reconstruct the ancient geography of the Malay Archipelago from Chinese, Greek, and Indian sources.
Summary
The first section traces the political history of Funan through its final centuries. Braddell follows the succession of kings recorded in Chinese dynastic histories—the Liang Shu, Sung Shu, Nan Ch’i Shu, and Ch’en Shu—from the Brahman king Kaundinya of the fourth century through Jayavarman and Rudravarman in the fifth and early sixth centuries. He then examines the conquest of Funan by Chen-la, weighing the conflicting attributions in the Sui Shu and Hsin T’ang Shu against Cambodian epigraphy. Drawing on the inscriptions of Bhavavarman and his brother Citrasena (Mahendravarman), Braddell sides with Dr. Sircar’s modern view that Bhavavarman, a prince of the vassal state Chen-la, struck the decisive blow against Funan in the mid-sixth century, with the conquest completed by his nephew Isanavarman. The Funan royal line persisted in diminished form, sending embassies into the early seventh century before disappearing entirely into the Khmer empire.
The second and longer section is a geographical excursion designed to fill the gap between Funan and Srivijaya. Braddell systematically re-examines seven Chinese and Greek toponyms—Yava-dvipa, Ye-tiao, Iabadiou, Tchou-po, Tou-po, Ye-po-ti, and Cho-po—which Pelliot and most subsequent scholars had identified with Java. His method is to set aside phonetic reasoning and test each name against the hard evidence of geography, mineralogy, and navigation. He argues that Ptolemy’s Iabadiou was placed well to the east of the Golden Chersonese (the Malay Peninsula), which excludes both Sumatra and Java; that Fa-hien’s Ye-po-ti must have been north of the equator, as demonstrated by the monsoon winds governing the sailing from Ceylon to Canton; and that Tou-po was noted for producing gold, silver, and iron simultaneously—a combination that fits Borneo but not Java or the Malay Peninsula. He further demonstrates that the Sunda Strait was not used as a sea-route between India and China until the Portuguese era, making the Straits of Malacca the only viable passage and rendering any identification of these toponyms with Java geographically implausible.
Braddell’s argument is underpinned by detailed analysis of monsoon sailing conditions, drawing on Admiralty Pilots and contemporary accounts of Chinese junk navigation to show that the winds would have made Borneo’s western coast an inescapable waypoint for any vessel sailing the South China Sea. He corroborates this with the well-documented gold and diamond wealth of the Kuching-Pontianak region, the presence of antimony (locally called batu perak, “silver stone”), and the survival of the place-name Sabah in northern Borneo as a possible echo of Ptolemy’s Sabadiou. The cumulative effect is to relocate the entire corpus of early Indianized polities in the archipelago from Java to Borneo, with profound implications for understanding the direction and sequence of Indian cultural expansion in Southeast Asia.
Key Findings
- The Liang Shu records that King Kaundinya, a Brahman of the fourth century, was divinely commanded to “go and reign in Funan” and subsequently “changed once more all the rules according to the methods of India” (p. 21).
- Ptolemy places Iabadiou 2½ degrees of longitude east of the Golden Chersonese, with its eastern extremity 20 minutes of latitude north of its western extremity—positions incompatible with either Java or Sumatra but consistent with the western coast of Borneo from Cape Api to its northern promontory (pp. 32–33).
- Fa-hien set sail from Ye-po-ti on the 16th day of the 4th moon (May) on a north-east course for Canton, a sailing only possible from a position north of the equator during the SW monsoon; from Java the prevailing ESE wind would have made such a course impossible (pp. 55–56).
- Ma Tuan-lin records that Tou-po contained gold, silver, and iron and used a gold coinage; Borneo is the only island in the region documented as containing all three metals, while Java is “poorest in metallic ores” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (pp. 44–45).
- The Sung Shu records that in 430 A.D. the kingdom of Ho-lo-tan, situated on the island of Cho-po, sent as tribute “a diamond mounted in a ring, parrots, Indian and Ye-po clothes”; Braddell notes that Borneo is the only place in Malaysia famous for diamonds (p. 60).
- Braddell cites Gerini’s conclusion that “no ship ever proceeded from India to China via Sunda Strait until the advent of the Portuguese in the eastern seas,” supported by the absence of any such route in I Tsing’s itineraries or in the Chinese chart of c. 1399 (p. 53).
Conclusion
Braddell’s definitive historical takeaway is that the seven toponyms in question—spanning the second through the sixth centuries A.D.—almost certainly referred to a single place, and that place was Borneo, not Java or Sumatra. He argues that the acceptance of Java as the referent of Yava-dvipa was a self-reinforcing scholarly error, propagated by repetition without examination of the primary evidence, and that the navigational, geological, and textual facts collectively exclude every alternative location. The broader implication is that Borneo, not Java, was the primary recipient of early Indian cultural expansion in the archipelago, a conclusion he considers “worthy of close argument” for its bearing on the origins of Srivijaya and the Sailendras.
Context
- Braddell served as a senior British colonial official in the Straits Settlements and was a long-standing contributor to the JMBRAS; this essay is the fifth instalment of a work begun in 1931, reflecting decades of sustained engagement with the primary sources.
- The study draws on Chinese dynastic histories (Liang Shu, Sung Shu, Nan Ch’i Shu, Ch’en Shu, Sui Shu, Hsin T’ang Shu, Chiu T’ang Shu), Ptolemy’s Geography, the Ramayana, the Surya-Siddhanta, Cambodian epigraphy, and the navigational accounts of Fa-hien and I Tsing, supplemented by contemporary British colonial reports on Borneo’s mineral wealth and the sailing practices of Chinese junks in the early nineteenth century.