Zhao Rukuo’s Account of Sunda
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In the early thirteenth century, about half a century before the Mongols conquered the Southern Song and established the Yuan dynasty, the Chinese official Zhao Rukuo (趙汝适, pinyin: Zhào Rŭkuò) wrote an account of the world’s states and peoples known as the 諸蕃志 (Zhū Fān Zhì — lit. ‘Record of All Barbarians’). The text was based on Zhao’s interactions with travellers and sailors in Fujian, where he lived and worked, as well as on earlier maps and accounts (particularly the 嶺外代答 [Lĭngwài Dàidā] of Zhou Qufei).
The Zhū Fān Zhì was completed in around 1225, and it contains probably the earliest surviving description of Sunda, the western part of the island of Java. The account is brief and, as far as I am aware, not found in earlier texts. It must have come from Zhao’s conversations with mariners.
In this short post we’ll have a look at Sunda as it appears in the Zhū Fān Zhì. A somewhat outdated and incomplete English translation of the entire book was put together in 1911 by Friedrich Hirth and William Rockhill, but I have put together a new translation of the relevant section below. The text here is from Wikisource — not the most reliable version of Zhao’s words, perhaps, but it is accessible and accords with other versions I have seen. I am not an expert Sinologist, although I have an undergraduate degree in Chinese and can read a bit of Literary Sinitic/Classical Chinese. I have some good resources at my disposal, too. If you are a fluent reader of Literary Sinitic and fancy correcting my translation, let me know! Help will be gratefully received.
Anyway, here is what Zhao says:
新拖國有港，水深六丈，舟車出入，兩岸皆民居。亦務耕種。架造屋宇，悉用木植，覆以椶櫚皮，籍以木板，障以藤篾。男女裸體，以布纏腰，剪髮僅留半寸。山產胡椒，粒小而重，勝於打板。地產東瓜甘蔗匏豆茄菜。但地無正官。好行剽掠，番商罕至興販。
‘The country of Xintuo (1) has a harbour six zhang (2) deep. Boats and carts come and go, and all along both shores are the people’s dwellings. They also engage in agriculture.
They all build their houses using wooden poles (3), roofing them with palm bark (4), with flooring (5) of wooden planks and screens made from strips of cane (6).
Men and women go naked [but] wrap their midsections with cloth. When cutting their hair they leave only half an inch behind.(7)
The mountains produce black pepper (8). The corns are small but heavy, and [they] surpass [those of] Daban (9). The land produces winter melon (10), sugarcane, gourds, beans (11), eggplant, and leaf vegetables (12).
However, the land has no government. [They] have a penchant for robbing and plundering, [so] foreign merchants rarely come to trade (13).
NOTES
(1) The name is a bit of a puzzler. In modern Mandarin 新拖 is pronounced xīntuō, which is quite far from Sunda. It doesn’t get much closer in other dialects or reconstructed pronunciations: the Middle Chinese (sin tha) and ’Phags-pa Chinese (sin t’a [where t’ is an aspirated /tʰ/]) reconstructions are also rather different from the Sundanese name, as are the various Hokkien pronunciations. The modern Cantonese pronunciation (/sɐntʰɔː/ — I sourced this one, unlike the others, from Wiktionary) is probably the closest, but the aspirated [tʰ] is still present and hard to explain. The very oldest inscriptions from Sunda use the same name as in modern Sundanese, so the difference is not due to a change in the local language. In later Chinese texts Sunda was written with different characters, as in the 順搭 (pinyin: shùndā) on the seventeenth-century Selden Map (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS.Selden supra 105). Either way, we must assume that 新拖 is Sunda; the name is sufficiently close and the context and content of the description seem decisive.
(2) 60 Chinese feet, or about 20 metres. A zhang (丈) is a unit of 10 chi (尺) or Chinese feet, roughly equivalent to one English foot and now defined in the PRC as precisely one third of a metre. Precisely which port is being described here is hard to say; by the time the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century the biggest Sundanese port was probably Kalapa (Portuguese: Calapa), modern-day Jakarta, but this should not be assumed to have been the case in the thirteenth century.
(3) Probably a reference to houses built on wooden piles, a feature of Southeast Asian domestic architecture now largely absent from Java but common elsewhere (and depicted in medieval reliefs from the island).
(4) 椶櫚 (zōnglǘ) refers to the Chinese windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei), a species that does not grow in Java. We should probably take this as meaning ‘palm’ in general rather than a specific species, bearing in mind that Zhao was probably relying on a secondhand description here. Bark and wooden shingles were common roofing material in pre-modern island Southeast Asia, in any case.
(5) This word is a little tricky. 籍 (jí) normally means ‘register’ or ‘record-book’, and although it can mean ‘strewn or cluttered with’, in the context here it is probably better to see it as a variant of 藉 (jiè), the basic meaning of which is ‘mat’ or ‘flooring’.
(6) Curtains and screens were important features of medieval and early modern Indo-Malaysian houses. They allowed the dwelling to be opened up to the air when needed — a desirable characteristic of houses in places with year-round heat. A description of several kinds of curtains (kasang) appears in the Old Sundanese narrative poem Bujangga Manik, which dates to the fifteenth century, and depictions of screens can also be seen in Javanese reliefs.
(7) As far as I am aware, this is the only description of this practice.
(8) 胡椒 — lit. ‘foreign pepper’. There is little question that this refers to black pepper and it is defined as such in all Chinese dictionaries. It is apparently controversial to suggest that Java produced black pepper in the Middle Ages, but (black?) pepper is mentioned in other sources; Marco Polo, for instances, notes it as one of the principal commodities of the island, and Duarte Barbosa (writing c.1516) says even more explicitly that pepper (pimenta) was Sunda’s chief commodity.
(9) A city in East Java. The characters are a little odd but 打板 (Middle Chinese: tengX paenX; ’Phags-pa Chinese: ta pan) is generally identified with Tuban.
(10) The word here (東瓜, pinyin: dōngguā, lit. ‘eastern melon’) is an outmoded one for wax gourds or winter melons, now known by the name 冬瓜 (lit. ‘winter melon’), which in Mandarin has an identical pronunciation to the name in Zhao’s text. Hirth and Rockhill translated 東瓜 as ‘pumpkin’, but that usually refers to the American cultivars of Cucurbita pepo, which did not make their way to Afro-Eurasia until the Columbian Exchange. The species in question here is Benincasa hispida, known in Java as baligo (late OJv/MJv). It tastes fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat it.
(11) Probably soybean (Glycine max), known to have been grown in Java for some time. The word 豆 can refer to any number of other beans, however, including broadbeans (Vicia faba), adzuki beans (Vigna angularis), and rice beans (Vigna umbellata). The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) only came to island Southeast Asia with the Columbian Exchange.
(12) One could read this list of vegetables in other ways depending on how the characters are divvied up, and my translation here differs from that of Hirth and Rockhill.
(13) By this point Sunda may have been an established kingdom, as at least one known (but unfortunately now missing) inscription, the Kebonkopi II inscription (dated 854 CE), refers to it as such, but it is entirely possible that central authority was weak and the ‘government’ unrecognisable to Chinese traders. Either way, the idea that Java was full of bandits and robbers is commonly encountered in medieval texts, including particularly the description of Niccolò de’ Conti (c.1450) (cf. also Ludovico de Varthema [1510]).
There is little surprising in Zhao’s account of Sunda except perhaps that it exists at all. Sunda must have had a much lower population density than Central and East Java at this time and, as Zhao notes, foreign traders probably visited it much more rarely than they did Sumatra or Java proper (Fig. 1). It is an interesting place nonetheless, and the brief description in the Zhū Fān Zhì complements descriptions from later periods, particularly those of the Portuguese conquistadores, like Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa, who visited Java/Sunda three centuries after Zhao’s informants.
The Middle Chinese evidence and some of the lexical interpretations above come from Paul Kroll’s 2017 A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, while the ’Phags-pa Chinese pronunciations are taken from William South Coblin’s Handbook (2006). As I said above, if you have any comments on the translation, let me know.
A. J. West
Leiden, 2019
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