Kelantan and the Chinese Kelantanese

Abstract

When a student of history of the Malay Peninsula attempts to walk down the lane of history and find out for himself the life of the people after they had emerged from the huge span of time called 'the Stone Age' into the dawn of 'civilization', what he sees is nothing but haze interspersed with names of ancient places which confuses more than giving him a clear itinerary. It is as Paul Wheatley said in the preface of The Golden Khersonese "it is doubly unfortunate that there should be a complete lack of indigenous written sources before the sixteenth century. The earliest extant work in Malay, the Sejarah Melayu, is attributed to a date no earlier than the middle of that century..... the historical geographer must rely on gleanings from foreign literatures, among which four yield signifi- cant contributions to the Peninsular story. Most extensive is the information to be culled from Chinese histories, encyclopedias, travels and topographies, invaluable evidence which is supplemented from the ninth century onwards by Arabs and Persian records". Anker Rentse, in his "A Historical note on the Northeastern Malay States", said that "recent investigations into the works of Chinese Chroniclers are now beginning, and together with western travellers' records and archaeological research, to form a picture of early culture in the Malay Peninsula, and there are signs which indicate that future research work may find a key in the Northeastern Malay States as well as in Kedah and Perak to establish the data about the Malay culture before 1500 A.D.