The Poetry of Fact

The Golden Khersonese

STUDIES IN THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE
MALAY PENINSULA BEFORE A.D. 1500

By Paul Wheatley

Kuala Lumpur
University of Malaya Press
1961

An historical geography, in the hands of the right author, is an instance of what I would call the poetry of fact. Most poets are attracted to nonfiction. Blaise Cendrars, the great French writer, traveler, rogue, raconteur, said somewhere (I’m guessing his Paris Review interview, but who knows) that if a person reads for two hours a day and writes for two hours a day he will be able to read most of the great works and will certainly leave behind a substantial body of work. The rest of the time he is free to be a vagabond, or jewel thief, or commissioner of agriculture. He also said that among his favorite works were shipping logs. Cendrars was a poet in love with travel, with absurd journeys, with treks and adventures. He was quite young when he traveled through Siberia and wrote a poem about it in the lilting rhythm and clack of the Tran Siberian railway. He also lied quite a bit, or fabricated. His real adventures, in the Amazon, in America, in Russia, are as fantastic as his invented ones. This is the way it goes.

I’ve never had the patience for ships logs, but Paul Wheatley does and in his Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 we have before us a beautiful book of translated quotations from Chinese encyclopedias; traveler’s accounts written by itinerant would-be Arhats, roving the seas between China, Sri Lanka and India, resting for a while in the city states of Srivijaya to soak up the local store of Buddhist text and wisdom; of Greek shipping guides, Roman geographies, Indian inscriptions and Arabian pilot manuals. Many of these give longitude and latitude figures as well as detailed sailing instructions which bear no immediate relationship to current notions of geography. Place names must be transliterated and reconciled. Verbally described land and sea features visualized and mapped. It is painstaking work in a half dozen languages describing a world that did not describe itself till late in the period, and where few archaeological remains survive.

A geography such as Wheatley’s forms the analytic basis for later syntheses. It exists to be corrected and even refuted, but it exists, logical, precise about its imprecision, dispassionate and objective. Here is the second paragraph of his preface:

“In Malaya the face of the country is a far less valuable document than in some temperate lands such as Europe or North China. The ravages of climate, insects and moulds and the erosive power of equatorial rainfall combine with the phenomenally rapid deposition of alluvium to obliterate the imprint of man’s occupance almost at the moment when he relinquishes his tenure of the soil and go far to thwart the subtlest investigation of the archaeologist. There are no features in the Malayan landscape comparable, for example, with the lynchets of the European chalklands, the ‘lost’ villages and fossilized shots of the English Midlands or the abandoned settlements of eastern Siam, while there are no ecclesiastical or administrative units from this early period to manifest Malay preoccupation with soil and landform such as is betrayed by the shape of the English parish, or, from a later date, the seigniories of Lower Canada.”

Here is a description of the terrain, from the introduction:

“The exceptional strategic advantages of the Peninsula during the early period were hardly matched by its intrinsic resources so that the rulers of the city-states which grew up there were seldom able fully to exploit their nodality in regard to South-East Asia. The tectonic skeleton of the Peninsula consists of a series of coulisses, arranged in echelon and in an arcuate form convex westwards. In the narrow isthmian tracts the topography is moulded by a succession of low corridors running between ridges which are set obliquely to the trend of the coasts, so that easily traversable trans-peninsular routes have been channeled towards well-marked foci…. In the southern and broader half of the Peninsula the coulisses develop into a mountain system in which eight sub-parallel ranges can be distinguished. The main watershed lies nearer the west coast than the east and includes five of the six highest peaks of the Peninsula. Towards the south the coulisses are progressively less emphatic and present fewer obstacles to trans-peninsular communication…. In the northern two-thirds of the peninsula massive limestones present typical karstic scenery with caves and rock-shelters, swallow-holes and serrated pinnacles. In the isthmian region isolated limestone cliffs, preserved by some accident of denudation not yet elucidated and rising sheer from the ground sometimes for several hundred feet, are characteristic features of the landscape. These mountain ranges, then, constitute the bones of the Malay Peninsula, but the starkness of the skeleton is mitigated to a very considerable extant by a mantle of alluvium which, ranging in width from a few hundred yards to forty miles in parts of the south, extends from the coast in an almost unbroken belt and tongues up the valleys far into the foothills of the central ranges. On such alluvial plains as these grew up the isthmian city-states of the first millennium A.D…, but the scattered and discontinuous arrangement of the lowlands prohibited the emergence of a central power controlling the whole area.”

Wheatley is fundamental to a basic understanding of how the material conditions of South-East Asia shaped the destiny of its people. His prose is the opposite of Schaefer’s, which is infused with the languid, decadent rhythms of English Romanticism, and yet it soars above the functional analysis of Bray’s. The objective, descriptive prose of the scientist in his hands is transformed into the poetic, which of course demands its own precision.

The Malay Peninsula lies midway between India and China. The next port of call is the south central coast of modern day Viet Nam, where the ancient kingdom of Champa lay, also subject to a scattered and discontinuous topography.