Place · Chola-raided port kingdom · Indonesia
Malaiyur (Jambi / Malayu, Sumatra)
The Jambi region in central Sumatra, Indonesia — modern identification of the Malaiyur named in Rajendra Chola I's 1025 CE Tanjore inscription as one of the Southeast Asian cities taken in his naval campaign. Jambi was the mid-Sumatran successor state to Shrivijaya after the Chola raid broke the Palembang-based empire; the Malayu kingdom at Jambi became the dominant maritime power in the Malacca Strait through the 12th-14th centuries before the Majapahit absorption. The 1286 Padang Roco inscription — Krtanagara of Singhasari's gift of an Amoghapasha statue to the Malayu king — documents the Jambi court's Buddhist Mahayana orientation. The modern identification of Malaiyur with Jambi remains debated; it is the leading candidate among several.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
- Location
- -1.580, 103.610
Most commonly identified with Malayu / Jambi on Sumatra; the identification is not absolutely settled.
Connections (1)
- Tanjore inscription nameNagapattinam
Malaiyur, generally connected with Jambi or the Malayu polity of Sumatra, is one of the names in the Tanjore record of the 1025 campaign whose modern identification is not settled — which is true of several. The repository keeps these as inscriptional place-names rather than asserting a location, because the inscription is the only source and it gives names in a sequence, not coordinates.
On these journeys
- Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
- Yijing — the sea road to Nālandā (671–695)
- Niccolò de' Conti — twenty-five years east (1419–44)
Sources
Tanjore inscription; modern scholarship on the Chola–Srivijaya expedition
Open Malaiyur (Jambi / Malayu, Sumatra) in the repository →