A colleague and friend pointed out to me that I should look at information in a work known as The Crystal Sands: The Chronicles of Nagara Sri Dharrmaraja.
This is a Thai-language text that was translated into English and published in 1975 by the late historian David K. Wyatt. Cornell University has made a digital copy of it available here: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/57566
This text is a “history” of an important polity on the Malay Peninsula now known as Nakhon Si Thammarat, but formerly known in Western writings as Ligor. I put the word history in scare quotes because there are many issues with this text that prevent us from using it as a clear “factual” record of events, and Wyatt explains all of this in his introductory chapters.
Nonetheless, at the very least, this text can provide us with some overarching “ideas” about the past of Nakhon Si Thammarat and the region of the Malay Peninsula.
Like other chronicles from Buddhist Southeast Asia, The Crystal Sands begins with a “Buddhist origin story” that links the polity with certain events relating to the Buddha.
It then has information about the establishment of the polity and its tributaries, and then it contains a record of a conflict with a place called “Javā,” which Wyatt explains in a footnote, “is not to be confused with Jāva, the island” (94, fn 8). Instead, Wyatt found a reference to a place on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula across from Chumphon in a nineteenth-century work by the French bishop, Pallegoix, that had a similar sounding name and he argued that this was the place that “Javā” referred to.
I don’t agree with that.
While it is difficult to date the information in this text and to know when exactly it was recorded (or re-copied), the information about the founding of the polity, the establishment of its vassals, and the conflict with Javā appear to be referring to a period somewhere around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Given that there is plenty of information in Chinese and Arabic sources for a place at that time called something like “Jaba,” and given that there is geographic information in those texts that enables us to place Jaba around the area of what is now Songkhla, I would argue that the Javā in The Crystal Sands is referring to Jaba/Songkhla.
Further, Chinese and Arabic sources also make it clear that this place was a rival of Angkor, and it is mentioned in Cambodian sources as “Java.” These terms are all referring to the same place: Songkhla.
One interesting detail that emerges about the establishment of Nakhon Si Thammarat is that there are two kings who come from outside and who establish themselves as rulers: one from the west, from perhaps Bago (Pegu), and one perhaps from Angkor.
The first point that is interesting is that this text records that outsiders became rulers of Nakhon Si Thammarat. Why would that happen? If we consider that trans-peninsular trade routes were extremely important, then Nakhon Si Thammarat would be a good place to control.
I’m not sure if there were routes that went across the Peninsular there, but it is right between areas where there definitely were such routes.
Epidemics and Kings (A Side Note)
In explaining the arrival of both of these outside rulers, The Crystal Sands indicates that there were epidemics that led them to leave their homes. Then there is also an epidemic at one point which brings to an end the rule of one ruler in Nakhon Si Thammarat.
While it might be possible that epidemics historically played an important role in bringing about political change, I also wonder if this is perhaps a kind of rhetorical device to avoid talking about “conquest.”
The guy who may have arrived from Angkor is said to have been wandering around for eight years with 40,000 followers, elephants, etc. Hmmmm. . . Ok, yea, maybe.
Meanwhile, if I remember correctly, I think that there is at least one story about the founding of Ayutthaya which indicates that there had been an epidemic just prior to that point.
All of this makes me wonder if talking about “epidemics” was a way of avoiding saying that a king had taken control by force, as that would potentially point to illegitimacy.
The Crystal Sands lists the tributaries that were established by Nakhon Si Thammarat. There are a couple that Wyatt couldn’t definitively identify, but the image above indicates where he thought they all might have been.
What is fascinating about the geographic placement of these tributaries is that 1) Songkhla was not one of them, and 2) they have Songkhla surrounded.
Regardless of whether trade crossed the Peninsula or came up from the area of the island of Java and the Straits of Melaka, if this text is to be believed, Nakhon Si Thammarat had tributaries that were strategically in place to control virtually all of that trade.
Nakhon Si Thammarat even supposedly had Kedah as one of its tributaries, and in earlier periods we can see from Arabic sources that Kedah was Jaba’s/Songkhla’s key access point to ships coming from India and the Middle East.
The above map gives a better sense of how isolated Jaba/Songkhla was. On one side, Phatthalung and Trang were both tributaries of Nakhon Si Thammarat. It looks to me like there could have been an overland trade route between these two places, and there were ways to reach the sea from Phatthalung without having to go by Songkhla.
Then on the other side, Pattani, Sai Buri, and Kedah were all vassals of Nakhon Si Thammarat too. Again, I’m not sure if there were overland trade routes between these places. While the distance looks far, the Sai Buri river goes pretty far inland, so perhaps there was an overland route between those places.
Even if there was not a trans-peninsular route there, Kedah was clearly a very important harbor and had historically been Jaba’s/Songkhla’s key access point to the world of traders on the western side of the Peninsula.
So, what did Jaba/Songkla have left? Probably just the overland route from somewhere around what is now Satun to Songkhla.
So, a couple of years ago I wrote a blog post called “The Singora-Angkor Rivalry: The Greatest Story of Premodern Southeast Asian History (You’ve Never Heard).” Singora is, like Ligor, a name that Westerners formerly used, and in this case, it referred to Songkhla.
In looking at Chinese sources, I could clearly see that there had been a rivalry between Angkor and the place I am now calling Jaba (but which is Shepo in Chinese sources and Zabag/Jaba in Arabic sources and Javā in The Crystal Sands, etc.), and which I have always argued was in the area of what is now Songkhla. At that time, I did not know what to call “Shepo/Jaba/Zabag,” so I decided to use “Singora.” Now, however, I’m thinking that it’s perhaps best to just call it “Jaba.”
In this rivalry, it is clear that at first Jaba had the upper hand. Before the eleventh century, for instance, Jaba seems to have had tight control over the trans-peninsular trade routes and it attacked Angkor.
Then in the early eleventh century, the Chola kingdom in southern India attacked Jaba. Over the next couple of centuries, i.e., the time period that this information in The Crystal Sands seems to refer to, it looks like Angkor tried to create a network of tributaries that went around Jaba (that’s what I wrote about in the blog post a couple of years ago), and this is precisely what I think The Crystal Sands shows us as well, as Nakhon Si Thammarat was part of that network.
Indeed, it looks like Nakhon Si Thammarat played a key role in limiting Jaba’s/Songkhla’s power, and understandably, Jaba/Songkhla was probably not very happy about that, which would explain why there are records of a conflicts between Jaba/Songkhla and Nakhon Si Thammarat in The Golden Sands (see Chapter 4, pgs. 95-98).
