Tandjoengpoera — also Tanjungpura — was the kingdom at the mouth of the river that empties into the bay of Aroe on the east coast of Sumatra, in what is now the Langkat region, and one of the polities whose memory is central to the bedekte taal reading of De Roo de la Faille. Tandjoengpoera is identified, in his reading, with the Sjahroe’n Noewi of the Sadjarah Malajoe — the “padoeka Boeboennja” who sent his hoeloebalang Awi Ditjoe to capture the radja of Samudra — and with the Boeboen of Anderson’s 1825 mission, where a “kampong Boeboen” at the river-mouth is recorded as a temporary refuge of Malays driven out by Siamese from Langkawi.
Identification with Sjahroe’n Noewi
In chapter VIII of the Sadjarah Malajoe, the great kingdom of Sjahroe’n Noewi sends its hoeloebalang Awi Ditjoe — with 4,000 fighters in a hundred vessels — to capture the radja of Samudra. De Roo de la Faille, reading the chronicle through the bedekte taal lens, identifies this Sjahroe’n Noewi with Tandjoengpoera-Aroe: “the padoeka of this Boeboen” was, he argues, “the radja of Tandjoengpoera-Aroe” — a polity that was once indeed of significance, the land of the Hindu dja-oe-wa (i.e. Djawaka) and “in continual war with the adjoining Pasej-Samodra on the north coast”. The radja of Sjahroe’n Noewi’s success in making the sultan of Pasej-Samodra tribute-paying is, on this reading, the historical kernel of the chronicle episode.
Anderson’s kampong Boeboen (1825)
In Anderson’s Mission to the East Coast of Sumatra (1825), the place appears as a “kampong Boeboen” — at “Kwala Bubon or Sungey Langkat” — recorded as the temporary refuge of “a large colony of Malays, however, from Lancavy, who fled when the Siamese attacked that place”. From Tamijang (where the population was “principally Achenese”) to Kwala Bubon, Anderson wrote, “the land forms a deep bay, not easily perceived from a distance, in consequence of two islands that front it, and which are not easily distinguished from the mainland, unless when close in shore. The names of the islands are Pulo Tampasalee and Pulo Sampa-tuah (Pulo Tampilis and Pulo Kampei)”. This is, De Roo de la Faille notes, a “clear description of the bay of Aroe with the teroesan between Tampilis and Kampei, and the kampong Boeboen at the river-mouth of Tandjoengpoera”.
The Persian name
The name Sjahroe’n Noewi is Persian — Sjahr “city”, noe “new”, noewi “newness” — together “Nieuw-stal” (New City). This Persian name De Roo de la Faille explains by reference to the new city of Ayodhya that the king of Siam built on the Menam around 1360: a Siamese overlordship that extended, by the Siamese code Kot Monthiera ban, over Udjong-tanah, Malaka, Malayu and Worawari. Tandjoengpoera, on this reading, was at once an east-coast Hindu-Javanese kingdom of the Djawaka and a Siamese tributary under the Persian-style name of “New City”. The same identification, De Roo de la Faille argues, fits the Cernovem of De Conti (~1430) and the Xarnauz of the Roteiro of Vasco da Gama.
Tandjoengpoera-Aroe and the Atjehnese age
After the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe in 1539, Tandjoengpoera-Aroe, like the rest of the east-coast Hindu-Javanese complex, was reduced to “poverty and piracy”, so much so that in the colonial period only a “soekoe Aroe” was remembered. The queen of Aroe’s flight to Pangkalan Soesoe at the fall of her kingdom — and the soengej Si Djanda that empties into the Besitang, which the locals in Van Rijn’s day still associated with “the widow Djanda Gidau named, of the last raja of Aroe” — fix Tandjoengpoera’s river-mouth as the geographical end-point of the Atjeh-Aroe War (1539).
Significance
For AcehWiki, Tandjoengpoera is the east-coast polity whose identification with Sjahroe’n Noewi ties the Sadjarah Malajoe’s chronicle geography to the Aroe-Atjeh sphere, and whose later reduction by the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe marks the close of its independent history. Its identification with the Cernovem of De Conti and the Xarnauz of Vasco da Gama’s Roteiro also fixes it as the principal east-coast landmark of pre-Atjehnese Sumatra in European and Arabic travel record.
See Also
- Aroe
- Aroe-baai
- Poelo Kampi
- Sjahroe’n Noewi
- Boeboen
- Kwala Boeboen
- Anderson’s Mission to the East Coast of Sumatra (1825)
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Sadjarah Malajoe
- Awi Ditjoe
- Djawaka
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Over Sjahroe’n Noewi”, pp. 24-31.