The Sultanate of Kedah

A ruler converts

formationDrafted from Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920)

Long before it became a Muslim sultanate, Kedah was known to Arab and Chinese traders alike as a mart for tin, its people Buddhist and its politics shaped by the great powers around it - first Palembang and the Chola kings, then the Javanese empire of Majapahit, all of whom in turn claimed some suzerainty over it. Kedah's own dynastic annals, the Hikayat Marong Mahawangsa, record seven pre-Muslim rulers bearing Sanskrit and Siamese titles before the line's eighth ruler became its first Muhammadan king, taking the style Sultan Muzaffar Shah.

Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920) · Imhadi · Public domain

A date fixed by two traditions

An Achinese account gives 1474 as the year of that conversion, and the date is confirmed independently by a story in the Sejarah Melayu, the Malay Annals, in which a Raja of Kedah travels to Malacca to request the royal regalia from Sultan Mahmud Shah, the last Malay ruler of Malacca before its fall to the Portuguese in 1511. Genealogically, Sultan Muzaffar Shah is always reckoned as the great-great-great-grandfather of the Sultan Sulaiman Shah later carried into captivity by Aceh in 1619 - a span of generations that fits the 1474 date far better than the confused chronology of the Annals themselves, which were repeatedly revised long after their original composition.

A preface and a branching line

expansionDrafted from Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920)

Sultan Muzaffar Shah's own line did not pass down a single unbroken chain. The Kedah Annals record three sons succeeding him in turn - Muazzam Shah, who reigned from Kota Palas; a Raja Muhamad Shah; and a Sulaiman Shah who ruled at Langkapuri, the old name for Kedah itself - before the throne narrowed back to a single line through a later Muhammad Shah and, by tradition, a Mansur Shah, down to Mahmud Shah and finally the Sultan Sulaiman Shah whom Aceh would carry into captivity in 1619.

A history written in a king's own reign

It was in the reign of Muazzam Shah, the second Muslim ruler of Kedah, that the Annals themselves claim to have first been composed

• a claim that, if true even of the work's original core, would make them one of the oldest Malay chronicles of any kind. Later hands plainly reworked the text more than once: it carries interpolations from as late as the seventeenth century, and its list of rulers was extended long after any of these early kings had died.

Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920) · Muzium Negeri Kedah · Public domain

A kingdom overshadowed

These sultans reigned through the collapse of the Malay world's old order. Sultan Mahmud Shah of Malacca, from whom an earlier Kedah prince had once sought the royal regalia as a mark of Malacca's own seniority among Malay courts, was driven from his capital by the Portuguese conquest of 1511 and died in exile two years later. Malacca's fall left no single Malay power in a position to protect a smaller court like Kedah's, and by the time a Portuguese account of 1516 described the kingdom, it named Kedah plainly as tributary to Siam - overshadowed, as it would remain for the following century, by stronger neighbors on every side.

Blockaded for its tin

expansionDrafted from Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920)

Kedah's standing as a major tin port made it a target for every power with a fleet nearby. In 1611 a Portuguese force sailing down from Tenasserim under Dioge de Mendoca Furtado destroyed the towns of Kedah "with fire and sword." Nominal Siamese overlordship did nothing to prevent the attack, nor did it prevent Aceh's Sultan Iskandar Muda, campaigning along the peninsula in 1619, from leading Kedah's own Sultan Sulaiman Shah into captivity alongside the ruler of Perak - an occupation of Achinese influence that lingered for years afterward.

Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920) · Scott Semans · CC BY 3.0

A river kept under blockade

The Dutch East India Company proved just as persistent a problem. In 1642 the reigning king agreed to let the Company have half of Kedah's tin production at a fixed price and to admit no ship without its permission - a concession Perak, protected by its own vassalage to Aceh, had refused to make. When Kedah chafed at the arrangement, the Company responded with force: instructions from Batavia ordered the blockade of the Kedah river repeatedly through the 1660s, and the correspondence of the Dutch governors shows the order renewed again and again against a kingdom that, for all its wealth in tin and gold and elephants, could not shake off the Company's grip on its own coastline. By the early eighteenth century Kedah was recorded as one of several ports formally subordinate to the Dutch government at Malacca.

Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920) · The Bangsawan · CC BY-SA 4.0

A population cut to a thirtieth

endDrafted from Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920)

Portuguese raids, an Achinese captivity, and decades of Dutch blockade had all failed to break Kedah outright. The Siamese invasion of 1821 did what none of them had managed. Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Shah, who had begun his reign at Kuala Kedah, was forced to flee to Province Wellesley as Siamese forces occupied the country and divided it into four separately administered parts - Kedah proper, Setul, Perlis and Kubang Pasu, each placed under its own ruler answering to Siam.

Six years, a thirtieth of a population

The scale of the devastation that followed is recorded starkly: in six years, Kedah's population fell from 180,000 to 6,000. The exiled sultan spent years trying to recover his throne, at one point sailing from Malacca toward Kedah to launch an attack, only to be intercepted and taken to Penang by a British gunboat before he could land. Not until 1843 was he permitted to return, restored to a diminished Kedah under continuing Siamese protection, reigning from Kota Kuala Muda because Alor Star, the old capital, had grown over with forest in his absence.

Winstedt, History of Kedah (1920) · CK Tan · CC BY 3.0

An afterword under two protectors

Kubang Pasu was eventually restored to Kedah's own governance, but Perlis remained a separate state and Setul stayed part of Siamese territory permanently. The arrangement held until 1909, when Siam transferred its suzerainty over Kedah to Great Britain, which administered it thereafter as one of the Unfederated Malay States - a second protector following the first, neither of them the independent sultanate that had once bargained with the Dutch East India Company on something closer to equal terms.