Citizenship of Malaysia

Before Melaka · Treatise · 11 min read

When Did the Malays Arrive on the Peninsula? Evidence Is Not a Passport

The Terengganu Inscription can demonstrate that a Malay-language political and religious order existed on the Peninsula in the early fourteenth century; it cannot be read as a birth certificate proving when the Malays first set foot ashore

If we order the timeline strictly by locally inscribed Malay-language evidence, the hardest piece of stone on the Peninsula is the Terengganu Inscription. But evidence is not a passport. The seventh-century Old Malay inscriptions of Sumatra prove that Malay political culture first took clear shape in the world of Palembang; the fourteenth-century Terengganu Inscription proves that the eastern coast of the Peninsula already possessed a political and religious order conducted in Malay script and Jawi. Wang Dayuan's account from Singapore reminds us that a Malay-language place-name environment and a record of Chinese residents enter the verifiable historical record at almost the same moment — both within the fourteenth century.