Place · Chola-raided port · Indonesia
Ilamuridesam (Lamuri / Lambri, Aceh)
The Aceh region of northern Sumatra, Indonesia — modern identification (also debated) of the Ilamuridesam named in Rajendra Chola I's 1025 CE Tanjore inscription as one of the Southeast Asian cities taken in his naval campaign. Lamuri (also Lambri) was a northern Sumatran port on the Malacca Strait, controlling the key chokepoint between the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea trade routes. Marco Polo's 1292 account describes Lambri as a kingdom whose people had tails. The 13th-century rise of the Samudera Pasai sultanate on the same stretch of Acehnese coast absorbed the earlier Lamuri polity; Pasai became the first Islamic state in Indonesia. The exact modern archaeological identification remains contested.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
- Location
- 5.550, 95.320
Most commonly identified with Lambri near the northern tip of Sumatra (modern Aceh).
Connections (1)
- Maritime routeQuanzhou
Quanzhou to Sumatra to the Palk Strait is the standard eastern route of the period, and Polo did it in a fourteen-ship Mongol convoy escorting a bride to Persia. He gives the monsoon waits, the stockade on the Sumatran shore and the pepper duty; Yijing had described the same passage as a monk buying deck space six centuries earlier.
On these journeys
- Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
- Ibn Baṭṭūṭa — qāḍī, exile, envoy (1333–1347)
- Marco Polo — the Indian Ocean homeward (c. 1292–95)
Sources
Tanjore inscription; modern scholarship on the Chola–Srivijaya expedition
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