An introduction to the early history of the northern Malaysian state of Kedah.
The northern Malaysian state is one of the states with the longest record of habitation, with evidence of settlements in the area dating back to the Pleistocene age – somewhere, that is, between 1.8 million and 20,000 years before the present. The location of Kedah has been very helpful for human settlement, with access to two seas, jungle, mountains and rivers all providing access to different types of food and interaction with other people for trade. These are very important: a place which has two types of food available because of varying environmental conditions is known as an ecotone. An example is a village on the coast with a jungle not far inshore. Such a region offers fish and seafood from one direction and game and jungle fruit, vegetables and herbs in the other direction. If there is some environmental problem, for example climate change, disease or warfare, then people living in an ecotone can still rely on one source of food even though the other may be (perhaps temporarily) unavailable.
Be that as it may, Kedah also had the benefit of trade from both the Indian Ocean merchants and from those in the South China Sea. In some cases, to avoid the monsoon rains and winds, ships would stop on one side of the peninsula and transship their goods by land to a port on the other coast. This offered many opportunities for a trading settlement, where people from numerous different cultures could meet and interact with each other, sharing ideas, technology and innovations of different sorts. This is perhaps why the origin of the name ‘Kedah’ is disputed, with people claiming it derives from Arabic, Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian or Chinese words, among others. This means that merchants from all those cultures were visitors to Kedah and, in many cases, established long-term trading posts within the larger settlement.
From the period of European exploration and colonization in the South Sea islands, Kedah became famous as the centre of the tin trade and the home for the largest black pepper market. It is difficult to imagine these days how important spices such as black pepper were in the medieval world, when so many European people were forced to eat seasonal vegetables for a few months and salted meat and vegetables for the rest of the year. British and Scandinavian people suffered particularly from the overwhelming saltiness of most of the year’s food and perhaps this is a reason for the taste for beer that so many people from those countries continue to cultivate today.
