18 Boundaries and Beyond
all the major textile-weaving towns of India, in the Malay-Indonesian
Archipelago and Guangzhou.^58
Malacca probably had a population of between 120,000 and 200,00 0
as estimated by Luis Filipe F.R. Thomaz.^59 Thomaz describes the Malacca
sultan as the chief merchant of his state who “beneβited from the proβits
of commercial activity through levying customs duty”.^60 In Malacca there
were four Shahbandars, harbor masters, who were appointed from
among the merchants in town: one for the Gujaratis who were the most
important group of all; one for the Bengalis, Pegus and Pase; one for the
Javanese, Moluccans, Banda and Palembang; and one for the Chinese.
They were empowered to receive the captains of the junks from their
countries, present them to the Bendahara, the highest ofβicial in charge of
all civil and criminal affairs, and allot to them warehouses and dispatch
their merchandise.^61
Although Tomé Pires’ arrival in Malacca coincided with the years
immediately after the Portuguese occupation of the port city in 1511, his
account of the last days of the Malacca kingdom testiβies to a commercially
active, prosperous sea port. It was not to last. The port soon lost its glory
in the sixteenth century under the governance of the Portuguese. Its
decline was the outcome of the Portuguese monopolistic approach to
commerce and their hostility towards Muslim traders.
Chinese Outbound Shipping and Long-distance Trade
About 2,000 years ago, seamen from China’s southeast coast had been
among the participants in the coasting trade, which probably reached as
far as the Gulf of Siam. From the seventh century and thereafter, Chinese
participation in longer-haul voyages emerged slowly. Throughout the
whole period, China had been the main consumer market for the goods
imported or transshipped from the South Seas. Despite dynastic changes,
from the seventh to the βifteenth centuries, in commercial terms the
country continued to be a large and wealthy state. It had developed into
“an area of economic high pressure, attracting to itself overland caravans,
tributary missions from foreign princes, and large ocean-going vessels
- Ibid., p. 105.
- Luis Filipe F.R. Thomaz, “Melaka and Its Merchant Communities at the Turn
of the Sixteenth Century”, in Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian
Ocean and the China Sea, ed. Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 25. - Ibid., p. 26.
- The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, pp. 28, 264–5.
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