In 1728, the royal court of the Kingdom of Mrauk U in Arakan sent Persian letters to an Armenian merchant in Chennaipattana across the Bay of Bengal. The letters, one of which is a decree or farmān inscribed with the Pali seal of King Chandrawizaya Rājā (r. 1710−31), “The Moon of Victory,” and addressed to the merchant Khwājeh Georgin, have laid in obscurity in the British Library as part of the collection of the physician and naturalist Hans Sloane (Figures 1 and 2). In the Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, Charles Rieu dismissively deems the letters, classified as Sloane Mss. 3259 and 3260, as “barbarous Persian” and dates them to the Arabic month of Shaʿbān in the Hijri lunar year 1090 (1679).Footnote ¹ But although the month written in the letters is indeed the Arabic Shaʿbān, the year 1090 is not “Hijri” but rather “Magi” or Maghi/Magh, as clearly inscribed in the manuscripts, corresponding to the year 1728. Without doubt, the farmān is the Persian translation of the earliest dated Burmese palm leaf manuscript in the British Library, a single long palm leaf, Sloane Mss. 4098, that is a permit issued by King Chandrawizaya in response to a “foreign trader” seeking permission to trade in Arakan. The Burmese palm leaf is marked by the same two faint royal seals in Pali that also appear on the Persian farmān and is addressed, according to the entry in the British Library card catalogue, to one “Khoja Joro Jin.”Footnote ² The connection between these Burmese and Persian documents has previously gone unnoticed and so have the implications of the existence of a Persian farmān from the court of a Buddhist sovereign in Southeast Asia.

Figure 1. Persian farmān from Rājā Chandrawizaya of the Buddhist Kingdom of Mrauk U in Arakan to Khwājeh George in Chennaipattan. Rolled with a wax seal and next to the cloth it was sent in, addressed: in farmān beh Khwājeh Georgin beresad (“this farmān is to reach Khwājeh George”).

Source: Mss. 3259, Sloane Collection, British Library, 14 Shaʿbān 1090 Magh (1728). Courtesy of the British Library.

Figure 2. Persian farmān from Rājā Chandrawizaya of Mrauk U in Arakan to Khwājeh George in Chennaipattan.

Source: Mss. 3259, Sloane Collection, British Library, 14 Shaʿbān 1090 Magh (1728). Courtesy of the British Library.

The history of Indo-Persian contact with Southeast Asia remains obscure, but for centuries a global system of inter-imperial trade linked the Indo-Persian Mughal world to the Southeast Asian mainland and archipelago. By the fifteenth century, Islam had become established through trade and pilgrimage in the Indonesian archipelago while on the Southeast Asian mainland, Buddhist empires blending Islamic and Indo-Persian influences rose to power. Although the kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia did not convert to Islam as in the archipelago, the growth and spread of Theravada Buddhism stimulated trade and interaction with Islamic, Indo-Persian societies.

The Indo-Persian world refers to the early modern geographical continuum where Persian once was a language of trade and exchange, and had a cultural presence as a spoken or written language of courtly literature and correspondence. During the early modern period, circa 1400−1800, the Indo-Persian world encompassed Timurid Central Asia, Safavid Iran, Mughal India, and parts of the Ottoman Empire. It was an “Indo-Persian” world, as opposed to the more Iran-centric term “Persianate,” in the sense that while the language of exchange was indeed Persian, a vast corpus of literature was produced within a Mughal and South Asian context, with its audience comprised predominantly of South Asian readers. Southeast Asia represented the far edges of this geographical and cultural sphere, seen as the fringes of the Indian subcontinent. Consequently, studies of the Indo-Persian and Islamicate Mughal world have only rarely explored interactions with Southeast Asia.

In the early modern period, trade, diplomacy, and the prevalence of Persian as a literary and cultural language of the court more closely linked early modern empires in South Asia and the Southeast Asian mainland. In the kingdom of Ayutthaya (1351−1767) in Thailand, during the reign of King Narai (1656−88), a thriving community of Persian merchants from Safavid Iran attained influence and prestige in the Thai court.Footnote ³ Further north, along the eastern littoral of the Bay of Bengal, the Theravada Buddhist kingdom of Mrauk U (1429−1784) in Arakan shared imperial, cultural, and commercial ties to the Indo-Persian and Mughal worlds.Footnote ⁴ Although Buddhist, the Mrauk U Empire was steeped in the culture and trappings of Islamic kingship, with its kings adopting Persian names, and minting their titles as sultans and pādishāhs onto multilingual Pali-Persian coins bearing the kalemeh, the profession of the Islamic creed, and recognizing the kingdom’s sovereigns as rājās and shāhs. Footnote ⁵

The existence of the farmān from the court of King Chandrawizaya Rājā suggests the immersion of the court of Mrauk U within Indo-Persian networks and currents of trade and correspondence, as well as Persianate and Mughal forms of imperial fashioning, into the eighteenth century. The farmān (Persian framān) denotes a royal decree, command, edict, or order—a public legislative document given in the name of the sovereign. The farmān was a form of legal document and genre of courtly correspondence that prevailed among the chanceries of Persianized Turko-Mongol Islamic empires in the Near East, Central Asia, and South Asia.Footnote ⁶ But Persian farmāns were not known to have been written in the courts of the Buddhist sovereigns of Southeast Asia. The decree of King Chandrawizaya reveals, if only through a glimmer, how a Pali kingdom in mainland Southeast Asia adopted elements and aspects of a Persianate and Mughal royal repertoire.

In Mughal travel and encounter literature, the Southeast Asian mainland and its littoral was conceived as the far edge of the Indian Ocean, a zone of wondrous forest kingdoms and their rarities under the stewardship of an idealized sovereign. The Mrauk U Kingdom of Arakan was mapped as a place neither Muslim nor Hindu that was part of “the marvels and wonders of the islands and ports near Bengal” (ʿajāʾeb o gharāʾeb dar banāder o jazāyer).Footnote ⁷ In the widely read Persian chronicle Tārikh-e Fereshteh, also known as Gulshan-e Ebrāhimi, written circa 1612, the Iranian chronicler Muhammad Qasim Hindushāh “Fereshteh” refers to Arakan as part of “distant islands” (jazire-ye dur) ruled by a rājā who “has always two white elephants, and that when one dies, orders are issued to search the woods for another to supply his place.”Footnote ⁸ These schematic views of Arakan and the city of Mrauk U were comprised of frequently related and longstanding merchant and mariner tales and legends surrounding mysterious “Indian” voyages, islands, and kingdoms. The courts of the sovereigns of Arakan, being fluent in the Persianate commercial, diplomatic, and literary currents of Mughal India and the Bay of Bengal, represented and projected their empire as a forest kingdom of matchless marvels and rarities of nature lorded over by a sacred and universal king. This theme of a wondrous and exotic forest empire of manifold luxuries finds echoes in the 1728 farmān of King Chandrawizaya Rājā, permitting trade to merchants and agents in India across the Bay of Bengal.

King Chandrawizaya’s decree reads:

In its form and materiality, the farmān of King Chandrawizaya represents a Persian-Islamic genre of correspondence produced within an Indic-Buddhist setting and context. This is most visibly indicated by the multilingual nature of the letter, as the Persian script of the text is marked in Pali by a royal seal at the beginning and the end. The royal seal reads in Arakanese rājā dhippati rhwe nan sa khan, “Supreme Lord, Master of the Golden Palace.”Footnote ¹⁰ Although there are no extant seals to compare to this one, which is also stamped onto red wax on the cloth that the letter was sent in, it resembles the multilingual Pali and Persian coins of Mrauk U. In its form and structure, the Pali seal of Chandrawizaya conforms even more closely to the Persian seals of the Mughals, most notably in the circular shape of the seal and in the pattern of lines and latitudes in the field. Its Pali script is presented in the form of Persian seals of the Mughal Empire, appearing on paper as opposed to the palm leaf or parabeik upon which the Pali script is traditionally found. The unusual material culture of the letter is matched by certain corollaries in the structure of the farmān, which bears the signs of traditional Southeast Asian documentary formulae. The decree of King Chandrawizaya followed a certain accepted schematic structure of the Persian farmān genre: the invocation of God and the introduction of the title of the sovereign and his reign; the disposition of the royal mandate; and the call to recipients and subjects to recognize and execute the command. Farmāns were imperial directives issued on different sorts of political, administrative, and economic subjects. The decree of Chandrawizaya most closely resembles the form and content of the Mughal trade or commercial farmān, granting concessions and allowing royal protection to foreign merchants and companies to conduct trade in the empire.Footnote ¹¹ In its structure, however, the Arakanese farmān was also clearly adapted to local, vernacular forms and idiosyncrasies. One revealing sign of this variation in structure occurs with the great emphasis placed on the date, given at the beginning of the document, customary among Southeast Asian courts focused on auspicious times and dates.Footnote ¹²

King Chandrawizaya’s farmān was addressed to the Armenian merchant Khwājeh Georgin, or Khwājeh George, of Chennaipattana, and delivered by the hand of his brother Khwājeh Tasalli, a sea captain known for journeying across the Bay of Bengal to Pegu and Arakan along the littoral of the Southeast Asian mainland. From other extant sources from the period, fragments of the identities of the merchant brothers may be pieced together. The Records of the Madras Government in 1728 mention a court case between the Madras merchants George Christianezar and Philip Muzavin, with one “Coja Tessaly” undertaking to represent George Christianezar in the case.Footnote ¹³ Khwājeh George again appears in the record as “Coja George Christianeza” in a case involving another Armenian merchant in Madras, “Coja Joan,” in 1736.Footnote ¹⁴ Traces of Khwājeh Tasalli, Khwajeh George’s brother and representative to King Chandrawizaya of Mrauk U, appear in Records of Fort St. George, which note that during the spring monsoon season of 1707, a nākhodā or sea captain by the name of “Coja Tassaree” had returned from a voyage to Pegu to the Coromandel Coast.Footnote ¹⁵ Again, in the summer of 1732, it is recorded that a captain named “Tassalee” had “sailed for Arracan.”Footnote ¹⁶ Khwājeh George and Khwājeh Tasalli were thus prominent merchants in the port of Chennaipattana, when it was governed by the East India Company as the Madras Presidency of Fort St. George. The merchant brothers seemed to have been key intermediaries and middlemen in the trade with the Southeast Asian mainland across the Bay of Bengal, as indicated by their efforts at negotiating and opening up trade with the Kingdom of Mrauk U in Arakan. The farmān suggests the immersion of Armenian merchant networks originating from Safavid-era Isfahan within the currents and conventions of the Persianate world, its commerce, its letters, and its courtly etiquette, which they carried to the eastern shores of the Indian Ocean. Armenian high merchants (khwājeh) and sea captains (nākhodā), sought trading concessions encoded in Persian farmāns from Indian Ocean sovereigns. As Sebouh Aslanian has detailed in his book on global Armenian trade networks, within a decade of the founding of the Armenian quarter of New Julfa in Isfahan during the seventeenth century, Armenian merchants became settled in Burmese ports where in subsequent years they got the monopoly on the ruby trade and came to play “an important role both as merchants and diplomatic go-betweens to various Burmese kings” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁷ From rubies to elephants, Armenian merchants found access to the trade of the forest treasures of Southeast Asian kingdoms.

The farmān from King Chandrawizaya conveys the integration of the Kingdom of Mrauk U within the networks of the Indo-Persian world. The rājā’s decree reveals the role of the Persian language as a medium of communication for the conduct of trade and to express mutual and shared courtly ethics of sacred kingship and sovereignty. At the heart of the transaction was the trade in elephants, a mutual symbol of kingship in the Mughal Empire and the Buddhist kingdoms of the Southeast Asian mainland. Elephants were the royal mount, a part of the spectacle and repertoire of the projection of kingship and sovereignty in the regalia of the court and out on the hunt. Taming elephants conferred the sovereign’s possession over the sacred forest and its nature. Most significantly, for centuries elephants were a decisive force in battles in South and Southeast Asia. Their exchange as imperial megafauna between courts was a mutually understood transaction.Footnote ¹⁸ In this way, the trade in elephants between Arakan and Chennaipattana was a ritual and tributary exchange between imperial formations, with Armenian merchants serving as intermediaries between the Mughal Empire (along with the East India Company and South Asian princely states) and the Kingdom of Mrauk U, all of which were immersed within an Indic imperial repertoire. The trade in elephants and ivory was in part spurred by this symbolic exchange between sovereigns, a sign of kingship, power, and the harnessing and domestication of the forest realm. The trade in elephants and ivory between South and Southeast Asia was thus embedded within Indo-Persian customs of imperial fashioning and the projection of royal power.Footnote ¹⁹ The exchange of elephants was part of an economy of inter-imperial exchange.

Beyond imperial regalia and power, elephants were also prized for their tusks, the source of ivory (dandān-e fil). The market for ivory evolved from its use as a material object, from carved royal thrones and panels to jewelry and ornaments. Ivory was an object of luxury and its consumers were royals, kings, and princes, who displayed it on their thrones, palanquins, cabinets, and courtly objects d’art. Ivory also found usage in religious establishments, particularly in Buddhist art and iconography. For this, there was a Bengali saying that “even a dead elephant is worth a million rupees” as merchants made great profit from the ivory trade.Footnote ²⁰ Due to the heavy demand and limited supply of ivory, merchants searched for new sources, and the forest kingdoms of the Southeast Asian mainland were reported to be the habitat of multitudes of wild elephants. Khwājeh George and Khwājeh Tasalli were merchants in the lucrative trade of elephants and ivory in South and Southeast Asia. Through a grasp of Persianate and Mughal customs and cultures of transactions, the Armenian merchants became intermediaries in the trade between Indic courts and sovereigns in South and Southeast Asia. In King Chandrawizaya’s correspondence with Khwājeh George and Khwājeh Tasalli are found details of the ivory trade and its intricate protocols. Above all, it hints at the heightened imperial reach over the forest habitat of elephants by the eighteenth century, due to the great wealth that could be made from the trade of just a few precious pieces of ivory.

King Chandrawizaya’s farmān was the golden ticket, the legal document which permitted Armenian merchants from India to enter Arakan and trade with the kingdom of Mrauk U. This royal decree was the permit, a license of access to the commerce of an empire on the margins still entwined within Persianate networks. It was the literary instrument, the writ of passage that permitted transactions with empires fluent in Persian courtly and commercial parlance. Its social and cultural context was the Persianized Indic court of Mrauk U, the realm of an idealized universal sovereign with a sacred reign, the farmān of King Chandrawizaya gave “divine protection” to Khwājeh George and Khwājeh Tasalli to conduct trade in the kingdom. The legal right of “divine protection” (hefz-e ellāhi) given by the writ of the king opened the gates of the “bazaar” of Mrauk U to trade and transactions. The farmān served as a written sign of the king’s “trust” (eʿtebār), and guaranteed that Khwājeh George and his brother Khwājeh Tasalli were recognized by “the grace and kindness of the Golden Foot” (Qadam-e Talā).Footnote ²¹ A second, shorter letter, written in a different hand and lacking the Pali seals, was addressed to Khwājeh George and sent from an unnamed merchant of Arakan following up, reiterating, and substantiating King Chandrawizaya’s decree of opening to trade.Footnote ²²

The commercial relations between King Chandrawizaya Rājā and the Armenian merchants of Chennaipattana, however, were to be short-lived. In 1731, three years after these exchanges and the promise of the opening of trading relations, the king was assassinated and the throne of Arakan would subsequently pass between fourteen different monarchs until the eventual fall of the kingdom in 1784. The prospect of trade with Arakan became haphazard as reports appearing in the East India Company archives detailed the insecurities and turbulence caused by Arakanese raiding and piracy in the Bay of Bengal. The Burmese Konbuang dynasty’s violent conquest of Mrauk U in 1784 only exacerbated the climate of chaos and turbulence as Arakanese refugees from the fallen kingdom crossed over the frontier into the Bengal borderlands, bringing the Burmese Empire and the East India Company to the verge of war. It would not be until 1795 that the East India Company would send its first official embassy to the Arakanese and Burmese littoral to seek the opening of commercial relations, with a particular emphasis upon the lucrative teak trade. But the mission, led by the Orientalist officer Michael Symes, accompanied by his Indo-Persian munshis and go-betweens, still followed longstanding precedents and patterns of Persianate correspondence. In seeking the sanction of the court of King Bodawpaya of the Konbaung dynasty for company merchants conducting trade along the Burmese littoral, the mission relied on the medium of Persian correspondence, procuring a Persian farmān from the Burmese king to open up the teak trade, a farmān that only exists (for now) in its English translation in Symes’ travelogue, An Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava.Footnote ²³