Under the Melaka tree

Every Malaysian schoolchild knows the story. Around the year 1400, a prince named Parameswara, on the run after losing his kingdom at Temasek, the island we now call Singapore, stopped to rest beside a river on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. His hunting dogs cornered a mouse deer, and the little animal, instead of fleeing, turned and kicked one of the dogs into the water.

Parameswara took it as an omen. A place where even the smallest creature stood its ground, he decided, was a place worth building on. He asked the name of the tree he was resting under. It was a pokok melaka, the Indian gooseberry, and the city has carried its name ever since.

That is the version told in the Sejarah Melayu, the Malay Annals, which were written down about two centuries later. Historians argue over the details. The date shifts by a few years depending on the source, the prince’s route from Temasek changes from one account to the next, and some writers prefer a less romantic origin for the name altogether. But the shape of the story holds: a small settlement, founded by an exile, that became very large very quickly.

Waiting for the wind

Geography did the rest. Ships sailing between India and China had to pass through the Strait of Malacca, and they sailed on the monsoons: south-westerly winds for part of the year, north-easterly for another. A merchant from Gujarat could ride one monsoon east, then had to wait months for the wind to turn before he could go home. Melaka offered a sheltered anchorage halfway, and a market where he could sell his cargo to someone else rather than make the whole journey himself.

Within a few decades the city had become the hinge of Asian trade. Cloves, nutmeg and mace came from the Moluccas, pepper from Sumatra, cotton cloth from Gujarat and the Coromandel coast, porcelain and silk from China. The Ming admiral Zheng He called more than once on his great voyages, and in 1411 Parameswara himself travelled to the Chinese court. The emperor’s protection helped keep the kings of Siam, who claimed the peninsula as their own, at a distance.

“Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.”

That line was written by Tomé Pires, a Portuguese apothecary who lived in the city shortly after 1511 and who claimed to have counted 84 languages spoken in its port. He meant it as an argument for conquest. It is also the best summary of what the sultans had built.

A city of rules

Melaka’s rulers embraced Islam in the first half of the fifteenth century, and the city became a centre from which the faith travelled along the trade routes of the archipelago. The court also produced the Undang-Undang Melaka, a code of laws covering land, marriage, trade and punishment, along with a maritime code that set out the duties of captains and crews. A merchant knew where he stood. That predictability was worth as much as the anchorage.

The wooden palace near the foot of St Paul’s Hill is a reconstruction, built in the 1980s from descriptions in the Malay Annals of the palace of Sultan Mansur Shah. With its steep roofs and carved panels, it is a reminder of how little physical evidence survives from the sultanate itself. What survives is the name, the court Malay that writers across the region imitated for centuries, and the stories.

Some of those stories live on in the street names. Jonker Street, where the night market sets up every weekend, is officially Jalan Hang Jebat, after one of the legendary warriors of the sultan’s court, and his companions Hang Kasturi and Hang Lekir have streets of their own nearby. The city was founded on a story about a small animal that refused to run. It has been naming things after its heroes ever since.