Bugis
Wikipedia ↗Chapters that mention this person or place (1)
The King from Across the Strait
An Indonesian actor said \"without Indonesia, there would be no Malaysia\". Tone aside, the sentence holds three true pieces of history, and three places where they were stitched wrongly
In October 2026, after a skincare brand's football-meme row, the Indonesian actor Boy Hamzah said on social media that Malacca's founder came from what is now Indonesia, so "without Indonesia there would be no Malaysia". The tone of the remark is not worth repeating, but the question it touches deserves a serious answer: Malacca's royal line is indeed traced to Palembang in tradition; in the eighteenth century the Bugis of Johor–Riau and a Minangkabau prince in Negeri Sembilan also came from across the strait; Aceh's fleets attacked the peninsula, and a peninsular prince once served as Sultan of Aceh. But the fifteenth century had no "Indonesia", the *Malay Annals* and the Portuguese record tell two different stories, and the Malaysia of 1963 was formed by a constitutional procedure, with Indonesia, at the time, on the side that objected.