In 1810, two Vietnamese officials presented to Emperor Gia Long a map of the routes to, and within parts of, Siam with an accompanying text based on information they had acquired the previous year while on a diplomatic mission.
Known as the Collected Records of the Routes in the Kingdom of Siam (Xiêm La quốc lộ trình tạp lục 暹羅國路程集錄). The map is now lost, but the text provides quite detailed information about the various travel routes in the area from the Mekong Delta to the northern part of the Malay Peninsula.
The text was published in Hong Kong in 1966 by Taiwanese scholar, Chen Jinghe. Later, it was translated into Vietnamese, and published in the journal, Nghiên cứu và phát triển, in 2013.
In what follows, I will translate a section that documents the route from Nakhon Si Thammarat to the island of Penang. In between, the route passes Songkhla and Kedah.
In this text, places are all referred to as “mương” 茫, the Thai word for a settlement or a polity. The term for Kedah used in this text is mương Say 醝. The Siamese referred to Kedah as “Saiburi,” and this is a short version of that name.
Finally, in this passage, we will also find mention of a people called “Cha Ba.”
From mương Lục Khôn [i.e., Nakhon] (六坤; Nakhon Si Thammarat), you travel by land between mountains with dense jungle. There are many vicious animals. After four days, you reach mương Sóng Sẻ (㳥𪀆; Songkhla). It is guarded by Siamese officials, and there are about 3,000 troops. People live in areas with fields. There are shops and markets that engage in trade with mương Say (醝; Kedah) and mương Xa Láng (車𣼽, Chalong [Phuket, “Salang” in the map below]).
From Sóng Sẻ you go by water to the Sweet Water Sea (Nước ngọt biển 渃兀𤅶; Songkhla Lake) and then enter the South River (U Taphao) and follow it to its source. A western route passes through a wilderness of reeds and grasses (曠野茅葦叢雜). After a two-day journey, you reach mương Say. This muang is guarded by Cha Ba officials and there are about 3,000 troops. People live in areas with fields. There are shops and markets that engage in trade with such mương as Sóng Sẻ, Hòn Cau (矾橰; Penang), and Xa Láng.
From mương Say you travel by road. On both sides are thickets of reeds. After traveling for half a day, you reach the coast. Crossing the water in a ship, in the time of one watch (canh 更), you reach Betel Island (Cù Lao Cau 岣嶗橰; Penang).
This place consists of interconnected mountains and open land. It is guarded by Farang (Hòa Lang 花郎) officials. The people live clustered together. The fields are planted with pepper. They sell various smelly (thiên 羶; “the rank odor of raw mutton”) Farang (Hòa Lang 和郎) products and have put in place six kapal (cấp bản 給板; Malay word for “ship”?) to prevent against robbery.
There is a lot in this passage that I find interesting, but at the moment I find particularly interesting the mention of Kedah being guarded by “Cha Ba” officials.
The people who translated this text into Vietnamese transliterated these characters as “Đồ Bà” (I can understand why they did that, but it’s a long story) and could not figure out what it referred to. These are vernacular (Nôm) characters, and they represent the sounds “cha” and “ba.”
“Cha Ba” is not difficult to figure out. This is the same “Jāba” that I’ve been writing about for weeks (the “ch” in Vietnamese is pronounced like a “j”).
Historically there was contact between the maritime “empire” based at Songkhla that I call Jāba and Vietnam. While that empire seems to have come to its end with Siamese expansion down the Malay Peninsula in the fourteenth century, the term “Cha Ba” continued to be used in Vietnam, particularly in the Mekong Delta, to refer to the people who came from that area.
Today we would refer to those people as “Malay,” and in this text from 1810, that’s what “Cha Ba” referred to as well.
This was not the island of “Java,” as there were no “Javanese” officials in Kedah in the early nineteenth century.
Those were Malay officials, and the Vietnamese diplomats who recorded this information referred to them as “Cha Ba,” a term that had a very long history dating back to a time when for roughly a millennium this region was at the center of a major trans-peninsular trade network (~400-1400).
Finally, it is interesting to see here that although there was trade between Songkhla and Kedah, the route between these places was described as being rather desolate. Indeed, the time when this region had been at the center of a major trade network was long gone by the time these Vietnamese travelers visited this region.
By the nineteenth century, only traces of that past remained: the route that these diplomats traveled over, and the name they used, Cha Ba.
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Arab people in 9 th century call them zabaj
Zabaj conquere ramni (sumatera) and kalah (kedah).
Ramni is the island length 80 farsakh
Zabaj island just half size of ramni island
On 14 th century
Arab call them jawi for jawa
Its like arab name :
Farsi for persia
Hindi for hindia
Shin for china
Conclusion :
The name of java / jawa / jawi / jaba / zabaj / saba / sebo / laba / yawa are the same