Curators at the Rijksmuseum have dated the bezoar and its mount to between 1600-1650. This was a time of change for the Malay world. During the 1400s, trade between Arab, Chinese, and Southeast Asian merchants made the city of Malacca one of the great trading ports of the region.B. W. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 58. With the arrival of the Portuguese and the fall of Malacca in 1511, power and exchange routes in the region shifted significantly. The Portuguese controlled the Strait of Malacca throughout the 16th century. Partly due to the ongoing Eighty Years War (1568-1648) however, the young and vigorous Dutch Republic began to vie with Portugal for control in Asia, founding the major trading center of Batavia in 1619. In 1641, aided by the kingdom of Johor, Malacca was besieged and taken by the Dutch East India Company (VOC).Ibid., 71. A year later, almost all Malay rulers within the Straits area had reached out to the VOC, recognizing the winds of political change. After the temporary Dutch subjugation of Aceh in northern Sumatra in 1667, trade throughout the Sumatran interior opened up, and a steady flow of gold, pepper, tin, and bezoar stones began to make its way downriver to foreign merchants.Ibid., 75.
Unlike other commodities from the area, bezoar stones were very niche. They were usually byproducts of hunting, found in the bodies of deer, monkeys and porcupines, although for European traders their origins were enigmatic and cloaked in confusing terminology. Genuine stones were rare finds, and the process of obtaining them often involved going to small coastal outposts and bartering with the local indigenous people, such as the orang asli.Orang asli is a collective term referring to the indigenous people of the Malay peninsula. The orang asli acted as gatekeepers for a complex regional trading system that had been in place for hundreds of years. Access to the valuable forest products in eastern Sumatra required the cooperation of the orang asli who hunted and gathered in the vast, seemingly trackless expanses of upland forest.Timothy P. Barnard, Multiple Centres of Authority: Society and Environment in Siak and Eastern Sumatra, 1674-1827, Verhandelingen van Het Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 210 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2003), 18. Many of the exotic products required highly specialized knowledge for collection. For outsiders, these products were shrouded in mystery. Besides bezoars, other products included tree resins such as dammar, camphor, and dragon’s blood, as well as more mundane commodities such as honey and wax.Timothy P. Barnard, “The Timber Trade in Pre-Modern Siak,” Indonesia, no. 65 (1998): 87–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/3351405.
These forest products typically fell under the purview of whichever dominant polity the local orang asli had allied themselves with. While this implies subordination of orang asli to the local authority, the reality was that rulers had to vie for their loyalty, exchanging status and protection for valued forest goods. Some products, such as bezoars and rhinoceros’ horns, were specifically associated with royal regalia, and were supposed to be sold exclusively to the local power or sultanate. These ideas about royal perquisites (larangan raja) are first noted in the 16th century chronicle of the rise and fall of the Malaccan Sultanate, the Malay Annals (Sĕjarah Mĕlayu).John Leyden and Thomas Stamford Raffles, Malay Annals (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Ormf, & Brown, 1821), 94–95. Such products were not just economically valuable, but were also filled with spiritual meaning and power. In practice, however, a certain amount of outside trading always took place, typically between the orang asli and local Malay or Chinese traders.
Because bezoars were associated with power and spiritual potency, they were also frequently sent as diplomatic gifts, both to other Malay rulers and to the VOC.This can be seen in letters between the Siak ruler and the VOC council in Malacca. See VOC 3183: Letter from Raja Alam to Governor Schipper and Council (received 14-3-1765). This may have been how our bezoar made its way to the Netherlands, or perhaps it was traded locally in one of the downstream ports, passing from an orang asli hunter to a local trader or a Dutch merchant. Its path may very well have been even more convoluted, especially if it is older, but at its root is the forest craft of the orang asli. A bezoar may have been a symbol of spiritual power for a Malay ruler, ritually extended to European allies, but its exchange provided a very real source of power for indigenous people.
