A Malay sultanate. Sultan Iskandar Muda conquered Pahang in 1618. In the Hikayat Malem Dagang: ‘Between Raja Raden and his royal host there soon grew up such a brotherly feeling, that the former… gave up his wife, a daughter of the ruler of Pahang to the king of Acheh.’ The consort of Sultan Iskandar Muda, ‘Putroe Phang,’ was from Pahang and warned him to avoid certain dangerous territories. The fleet ‘next proceeds to Phang (Pahang) the king of which country is overjoyed at meeting his new and his former son-in-law (Sultan Iskandar Muda and Raja Raden).’ Asahan (Aseuhan) A principality on the East Coast of Sumatra. In the Hikayat Malem Dagang: ‘The first principality of the Malay Peninsula at which the fleet touches is Aseuhan (Asahan), the residence of the pagan Raja Muda… In the negociations connected with this conversion Malem Dagang plays a very chivalrous part.’ In the fictional Hikayat Nun Parisi, ‘They proceed to Aseuhan, the territory of the powerful prince Bahrun Diwa, who has married ninety-nine wives one after another.’ Also: ‘a relative of the king of Bangka Ulu’ is mentioned in Nun Parisi.
Expanded account from The Achehnese, Vol. I — Pahang
Pahang is a Malay state on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula mentioned in The Achehnese Vol. I as one of the targets of the great seaborne expeditions of the sultanate of Acheh in the seventeenth century.
The Seventeenth-Century Expeditions
Snouck Hurgronje introduces Pahang in his survey of the political meaning of the sultanate, in the closing pages of his chapter on the Achehnese political system. He writes that “with the shortlived period of prosperity ended all such glorious expeditions as those undertaken in the 17th century against Malacca and Pahang, but the bold seafarers and pirates of Acheh continued to make themselves dreaded along the coasts of Sumatra and among the surrounding islands. The monopoly of trade claimed by the great sultans could in the end no longer be enforced.”
The Pahang expeditions of the 17th century thus belong to the great age of the sultanate — the age of Iskandar Muda and his predecessors — when the Achehnese fleets were powerful enough to attack not only the Portuguese at Malacca but also the Malay states of the peninsula. Snouck’s point is that the surviving sultanate of his own time was the ruined relic of that political and military power.
Significance
Although Pahang itself appears in Vol. I only in this comparative reference, the mention is significant for Snouck’s central thesis: that the sultanate of Acheh in its closing decades was, politically, only the ghost of its former self. The Pahang and Malacca expeditions of the 17th century stand as the high-water mark of Achehnese arms, against which the enfeebled sultanate of the late 19th century — unable even to keep its own piratical Tuankus of Kuala Batee in check — is to be measured. Vol. II of The Achehnese contains further comparative material on the relations of Acheh with the Malay states.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Pahang
Pahang is a Malay sultanate occupying the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, drained by the Pahang River — the longest river in peninsular Malaysia — and traditionally oriented towards the China Sea and the trade of the South China Sea rather than towards the Strait of Malacca. Although it appears only once in the surviving correspondence assembled by P. H. van der Kemp in his study of the Aceh agreement of 1819, the single mention is striking: it places Pahang within a list of places a Dutch official proposed to seize if only the Netherlands would send a sufficient force to the eastern approaches of the Strait.
The mention comes in the private letter of 16 March 1819 from Governor Thyssen of Malacca to Rear-Admiral Wolterbeek at Batavia, printed by Van der Kemp in his appendix. Thyssen was alarmed at Raffles’s recent movements and at reports of British intentions against the Karimon Islands and Lingga. “Bovendien zoude men dan bezit kunnen neemen van Pahang, Lingen en alle zulke plaatsen als ons convenieerde,” Thyssen urged — “moreover, one could then take possession of Pahang, Lingen and all such places as suited us.” The implication is striking: a senior Dutch official in the Strait of Malacca, in the spring of 1819, was prepared to contemplate a Dutch forward movement not only on the Riau archipelago but on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula itself.
The strategic logic was that, if Britain was to seize the Carimons and Singapore and from there press on the Dutch position at Riouw, the Netherlands should answer by extending their own reach along the peninsula — including the east-coast sultanate of Pahang. Such a counter-move would have placed the Dutch astride the South China Sea end of the peninsula and complicated the British position in the Strait immeasurably. In the event, no such action was taken; the Dutch could muster neither the force nor, it seems, the political will. The episode reveals the kind of bold strategic thinking that circulated in Dutch official correspondence of 1819, even when nothing came of it.
Pahang’s inclusion in Thyssen’s list also reflects the broader Malay political geography of the period. The sultanate of Pahang was at this time closely connected with the Johor successor states of Riouw and Lingga; its ruler, Bendahara Ali, was a member of the same Temenggong Johor dynasty that would shortly consolidate power in Johor. To think of Pahang, Lingen and Riouw in a single breath was therefore not geographical fancy but a recognition that the Malay sultanates of the peninsula’s east coast and the Riau-Lingga archipelago formed a single political system. The Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 would, of course, divide that system: the Riau-Lingga chain became Dutch, while Pahang and the other peninsular sultanates fell within the British sphere that would, after 1874, become the Federated Malay States.
See Also
- Acheh
- Asahan
- Hikayat Malem Dagang
- Kuta Alam
- Malem Dagang
- Parisi
- Putroe Phang
- Raja Muda
- Raja Raden
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- Sumatra
- 17th century
- Iskandar Thani
- Johor
- Malacca
- Lingga
- Riouw
- Malay Peninsula
- Treaty of London (1824)
- Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.