Place · port city · India
Kollam / Quilon
The Malabar port of Kollam (Quilon) in Kerala — one of the oldest continuously inhabited port cities in India, named in Chinese records as Ko-lan-pu (visited by Zheng He 1403-1431), by Marco Polo (visited 1292) and in the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes (c.550 CE as 'Male'). The 849 CE Tharisapalli copper plates of Ayyanadigal Thiruvadigal, the Venadu king, record a Christian trading guild grant and are among the earliest documents of South Indian trade organisation. The Portuguese established a factory in 1502; the Dutch took Kollam from them in 1661. The 1341 Kodungallur flood that silted Muziris shifted Malabar trade to Kollam. The modern city holds the Thangasseri lighthouse (1902) and the Portuguese St. Thomas Fort ruins.
- Date
- 1200–1700
- Function
- Trade & production
- Condition
- living city
- River basin
- coastal
- Confidence
- Established / referenced — established port; exact itineraries depend on edition
- Location
- 8.890, 76.590
Connections (1)
- Traveller routeKozhikode / Calicut
Kollam and Calicut were the two great Malabar ports of the medieval centuries, and both appear in Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and the Chinese records within a few decades of each other. Identifying every place-name in Polo's account requires caution — he dictated it in prison and the manuscripts diverge considerably — so these are representative coastal nodes rather than a surveyed route.
On these journeys
Sources
Marco Polo travel text and medieval Indian Ocean trade scholarship.
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