Visitors and Settlers: Notes on Timor and the Chinese as Cultural and Economic Brokers (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Abstract

Located on the fringe of the Southeast Asian “Mediterranean”, Timor only played a minor role in a vast exchange zone that interconnected diverse maritime centres to each other, despite being the largest of the Lesser Sunda Islands. Confined to an area with dense forests and steep mountains and without a maritime tradition of their own, the Timorese had few contacts with the “outside world”; these were essentially limited to encounters with foreigner visitors who were mainly attracted by one specific local product: the fragrant wood known as sandalwood (Santalum album). Sandalwood had a wide range of applications in different parts of Asia; it was used in medicine, for cosmetics, religious ceremonies, the production of scented objects, and for many other purposes. Among the early foreigners sailing to Timor in quest of sandalwood one finds Chinese, Malay and Javanese travellers and merchants. During much of the early modern period sandalwood was also the major and often exclusive reason for the Portuguese and Dutch to gradually extend colonial rule over Timor’s many ethnic groups and polities. The earliest record of Timor in Chinese texts dates back to the mid-thirteenth century; there is a brief reference to sandalwood and “the two countries of Dagang and Diwu” where it came from. The first name has not been identified, the second stands for Timor.1 The oldest description of the island is again found in a Chinese source. According to this work, called Daoyi zhilue and sometimes dated to c. 1350, there were several sandalwood ports. The author also lists the goods traded in exchange for sandalwood; he adds that high profits were