I was on a liquor-drenched party boat that was sailing in the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest and most important shipping lanes in the world today, when I saw its namesake in the distance. But it was. At the height of its power and influence in the 15th century, the territories of the Malacca sultanate covered the entire Malay Peninsula, including Singapura (modern-day Singapore) and the Riau Islands in the south, and extended into parts of Sumatra across the strait.
Merchants from as far as the Middle East and the Ryukyu kingdom (present-day Okinawa) called at its port. His monumental visits, accompanied by a fleet of the biggest ships the world had ever seen at the time, spawned many stories of dubious historicity that continue to not only serve the interests of the tourism industry, but also form part of the collective, imagined past of many Chinese Malaysians. There was more to Sino-Malacca relations than Zheng’s visits.
, completed in 1739 by professional historians in the subsequent Qing dynasty, has several volumes on foreign states, one of which contains a chapter on Malacca. This and other sources such as Chinese and European travelogues enable us to reconstruct the past not just of Malacca, but also other nearby settlements. The first Chinese official to visit Malacca was not even Zheng He but another eunuch called Yin Qing, who landed in 1401 as the emissary of the Ming dynasty’s Yongle Emperor with gifts for the local ruler Parameswara (transcribed in Ch.