E. Dulaurier was a nineteenth-century French orientalist whose 1849 edition and translation of the *Hikajat Radja-radja Pasei* — the Malay chronicle of the kings of Pasé, the historical Muslim kingdom on the north coast of Atjeh — made this foundational Achehnese-Pasai text accessible to European scholarship and supplied one of the earliest Western-language reference points for the history of the Pasai sultanate. Dulaurier’s edition is cited in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* (1956, p. 209, footnote) in connection with the famous Minangkabau buffalo-fight founding legend, for which the Pasai chronicle is among the early Malay textual witnesses, and is listed in the Lijst van geschriften (bibliography) of De Karbouw (p. 261) as “DULAURIER, E., Hikajat Radja-radja Pasei, 1849.” His name is also cited in the source text as the reference for passages on pages 59, 60, 64, 70, 78, 79, and 82 of the original manuscript.
The Hikajat Radja-radja Pasei Edition
The Hikajat Radja-radja Pasei (also spelled Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai) is a Malay chronicle treating the early Muslim kings of Samudra Pasai, the North-Achehnese polity that was, before the rise of Koetaradja under Iskandar Muda, the principal Muslim state of the northern Sumatran coast and one of the earliest Muslim kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago. Dulaurier’s 1849 edition was a landmark of early French Malay scholarship; it preceded by a quarter-century the 1874 French rendering by A. Marre (Sumatra, Histoire des rois de Pasey), and remained the standard European point of reference for the Pasai chronicle through the late nineteenth century.
Dulaurier’s editorial approach involved presenting the Malay text alongside a literal French translation and notes, facilitating comparative linguistic and historical analysis. His edition is cited in De Karbouw in a footnote on the Minangkabau founding legend (in which a buffalo-fight between a Javanese and a Minangkabau buffalo decides the political fate of the Minangkabau country) alongside Marre’s 1874 Histoire des rois de Pasey (pp. 100 vg., 125 vg.), Brandes’s edition of the Pararaton (2nd ed., p. 149 vg.), and Westenenk’s Minangkabau writings — a list which shows that the Pasai chronicle circulated in Malay textual tradition in close proximity to the Javanese-Minangkabau historical-literary complex, and that Dulaurier’s edition was the European entry-point into that textual web.
Significance
Dulaurier’s significance for the encyclopedia of Acheh history is as the first European editor of the Pasai chronicle — a text central to the early history of Muslim Atjeh and to the broader historiography of Muslim Sumatra. His edition anchored the Pasai material in European scholarship a generation before the great Dutch ethnographic syntheses of Snouck Hurgronje (1893-94) and Kreemer (1922-23), and remains a citable reference point in modern scholarly literature on early Muslim Atjeh. Although superseded by later critical editions, it remains an important milestone in the dissemination of Malay literary texts to Western academia, and his name is frequently cited in bibliographies of the Hikayat and in discussions of early Malay manuscript studies.
See Also
- A. Marre
- Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje
- Hikajat Radja-radja Pasei
- J. Kreemer
- Kreemer’s De Karbouw (1956)
- Pasai
- J. P. Mead
- Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië
- Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
- J. L. A. Brandes
- L. C. Westenenk
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- Banda Acheh
- 1849
- 1874
Sources
Hikajat Radja-radja Pasei, edited by E. Dulaurier (Paris, 1849).
De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), pp. 209, 261.
16th-century Malay translation of the Burda of al-Busiri, manuscript DLP-54, p. 85, digitised as 20260707_232246_DLP-54-Een_16de_eeuwse_Maleise_vertaling_van_de_Burda_van_al_Bu_s_i_ri_OCR.txt.
Editorial Note — The First-Name Discrepancy
The two source files disagree on Dulaurier’s first name. The shorter article (people/dulaurier.md) gives “Eugène Dulaurier” as an alias, while the longer article (people/e-dulaurier.md) gives “Edgar Dulaurier.” Both files clearly describe the same person — the nineteenth-century French orientalist whose 1849 edition of the Hikajat Radja-radja Pasei remains the reference point for the early European study of the Pasai chronicle — and the canonical form “E. Dulaurier” has accordingly been retained in the merged article, with both “Eugène” and “Edgar” preserved as aliases. The historical person is most commonly cited as “E. Dulaurier”; downstream editorial reconciliation of the first name is needed.