A presentation within Panel 1 of Day 2 which looked at Pahang, China and The Spice Route.
Despite Peninsular Malaysia’s significance in regional histories and its long exposure to external influences, the early history of its constituent states— particularly Pahang—remains understudied. Previous explorations into the prehistory of Pahang are dated and brief, often based on the lacking prehistoric chronology of sites in neighbouring regions and racial ethnographic preconceptions of wider Southeast Asian ethnic groups. These cursory looks into Pahang, rather than the state itself, focus on the spread of external influences into the region such as Hindu and Buddhist art forms. The earliest mentions and characteristics of Pahang as a state are found through the foreign perspectives of contemporary late imperial Chinese dynasties. These include the Chinese Song period Song Shu, Yuan dynasty Daoyi Zhilüe, and the Ming period print Dongxiyang kao. The disparate mentions of Pahang in these texts provide no firm location for the state aside from it being established on the eastern coast of the Malay peninsula. While these texts offer ambiguous geographical data, they furnish valuable insights into Pahang’s political economy, resource networks, and sociopolitical structures through accounts of tribute missions and diplomatic exchanges. By interrogating these foreign perspectives, this essay seeks to illuminate Pahang’s formative period, bridging the gap between its nebulous prehistory and the establishment of the Pahang Sultanate in 1470.
Follow this link to view the slides from this talk: https://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/sant/islamic_studies/2025-12-22-sant-islamic_studies-jonathan_privett-slides.pdfhttps://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/sant/islamic_studies/2025-12-22-sant-islamic_studies-jonathan_privett-slides.pdf
