History

Sukadana
Sukadana's history is fascinating. The current town, a small, quiet village, despite its recent upgrade in status to kabupaten, was once the seat of a sultanate that ruled the entire west coast of Borneo.

First century AD
It's possible that Egyptian voyagers, upon whose accounts Ptolemy's Geographia was based, visited Sukadana on his explorations of Asia, with an alternative reading of W. J. van der Meulen's work: "Ptolemy's Geography of Mainland Southeast Asia and Borneo" (1975. Indonesia, 19:1-32)

1600s
Jan O. M. Broek. 1962. Place Names in 16th and 17th Century Borneo Imago Mundi, 16:129-148:


 * Written support comes from Bloemaert, the Dutch merchant, who was in 1608 in Sukadana...


 * Bloemaert also tells that from Teyen one can, "along a small river", reach Landa. Today this means going downstream the main Kapuas, following the Kapuas ketjil (small Kapuas) to Pontianak, and then up the Landa(k) river, also a traditional diamond country. These river routes between Sukadana and the diamond districts may explain why this city [Sukadana] was known to early Europeans as a mining center itself. G. M. Lodewijcksz (1598) speaks of Laue "on the river Succadana", where one can obtain diamonds... Geological exploration reports of the 19th and 20th centuries never mention Sukadana as a diamond area, but always refer to the Landak and Sanggau districts.


 * Pires tells that "the island of Tamjompura" has many inhabitants, a great deal of gold, and many diamonds. "No other place is known where there are diamonds except in the kingdom of Orissa (Rixia), near Bengal. These are the best, and then come those from this island of Tanjompura, and then those from Laue. They are not found anywhere else." Where exactly was the main port of this country? A city by this name is nowhere mentioned by Dutch visitors to the coast of Borneo, although their early maps (until about 1620) insist on showing it. In 1604 Van Waerwijck, his fleet anchored at the Karimata islands, sent a sloop to Sukadana to investigate the trading possibilities. Hans Roef went to Sukadana in 1606 or 1607 to buy diamonds, and a factory for this trade (and other items) was established and maintained until 1623. No one ever mentions Tanjungpura or any such name. Might not Sukadana be the (later) name for this old diamond trading center? Rouffaer has made another suggestion, which subsequently has become almost generally accepted by Dutch historians. On the middle Pawan River, which has its mouth some 45 miles south of Sukadana, lies the little town of Tandjoengpoera (Tanjungpura). Following the linguist Van der Tuuk, Rouffaer translated this term as meaning the "city of rays", and thus as diamond city. "The Javanese named the entire island of Borneo after this diamond market." This suggestion, however ingenious, leaves some lingering doubts.


 * Apart from the philologic argument, there are geographic reasons for doubting that this Tanjungpura was the "market" visited by the foreign traders. The Pawan river reaches the sea near the present Ketapang through two mouths, both of which have shifting channels of at most six feet depth at springtide. Tanjungpura lies some 35 miles up the river, and is reached in two days by boats which are commonly poled up-stream through the shallow river. The situation cannot have been much different 400 years ago, as European maps of about 1620 already show coastal points corresponding to the present outline. It is hard to believe, therefore, that sea-going vessels visited this inland town. Moreover, Tanjungpura is poorly located for the diamond trade. The upper sections of the Pawan and its tributaries reach well to the northeast, at quite a distance from the diamond districts. Even if the river mouth was formerly more accessible, or traders went inland by small boats, this would not have affected the town's relation to its hinterland. In this respect Sukadana's favorable location comes to mind again. We must remember that Pires and others speak of an area ("island") rather than a specific city. There may easily have been a transfer of the name of the country to its main trade center on the west coast, at the gateway to the diamond districts. I conclude, therefore, thai Sukadana is the old diamond trading center of Tanjungpura.

Van Warwyck, a Dutch pioneer trader, on Sukadana (Masselman, G. 1963. The Cradle of Colonialism. Yale University Press, New Haven; p 159):


 * The place has little to offer except some diamonds which the natives washed out of the river gravel in the interior. These few diamonds lent (in the past) more glamour to the town than it deserved and led to several useless trading ventures.

Concerning temporary marriage customs, Reid (Reid, A. 1988. Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia. Modern Asian Studies, 22:629--645) writes:


 * The English in places may have had a similar practice if we can believe their great enemy Coen (Coen, J. P. 1619. Letter to Heren XVII, 5 August 1619, pp 445-95 in Jan Pietersz. Coen. Bescheiden Omtrent Zijn Bedriff in Indie, ed. H. T. Colenbrander, Vol. I, s'-Gravenhage, Martinus Nijhoff, 1919; p. 478) who rejoiced that the English factors in Sukadana (West Borneo) were so empoverished that `they had to sell their whores' to pay for their victuals

1700s
Timothy Barnard (Barnard, T P. 2001. Texts, Raja Ismail and Violence: Siak and the Transformation of Malay Identity in the Eighteenth Century. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 32:331-342):


 * By the 1790s the period of rotating rulers in Siak came to an end when Said Ali, the great-grandson of Raja Kecik, gained the throne through force and manipulation. The losers in this context went into permanent exile and eventually became the rulers of Sukadana, in Borneo. These exiled members of the Siak royal family maintained the Hikayat Siak, and in this text the phrase `orang Siak' comes to mean the followers of Said Ali.

The Tufhat al-Nafis, a 19th-century text from Riau (Raja Ali Haji, The Precious Gift, translated by V. Matheson and B W Andaya, 1982, OUP, Kuala Lumpur; p 187):


 * After their marriage, Raja Ali moved to Sukadana [from Mempawah], where he built a settlement, complete with palace, audience hall, and fortifications, and where he promoted trade. The country prospered with kapal, wangkang and many other kinds of perahu coming to do business.  The Yang Dipertuan Muda recieved a great deal in tolls, replacing all the business he had lost in Riau.

1800s
Extract from Sketch of Borneo, by J. Hunt, Esq. [Communicated to Sir Stamford Raffles 1812.] ``Borneo: appendix'' Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collection, (1878)


 * There are only fifty parets or mines now wrought in the whole kingdom of Sukadana, thirty of which are in the Sambas district, each mine having at least three hundred men, Chinese, employed in them.


 * Matan belongs to the Rajah of that name: he had the title of Raja of Sukadana until driven out of the latter place by the Dutch seventeen years ago. There are ten thousand Dayaks in this district, and a few Chinese and Malays. The mines of gold are abundant, and capable becoming highly productive, as well as the mines of iron and unwrought tin; but the Sultan is much addicted to the use of opium, and hence neglects a valuable country, capable, under better management, of becoming the most valuable district in all Borneo.

John Craufurd (1853. A Sketch of the Geography of Borneo. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 23: 69-86):


 * That the Hindoo religion,however, had made some progress on the western, southern, and eastern coasts of Borneo is unquestionable. On that coast is to be found some few names of places which have a Sanskrit origin. Sukadana, the name of a Malay state already mentioned, is pure Sanskrit, meaning "parrot's gift" as my friend Professor Horace Wilson informs me.