Hang Tuah

The market at Sungai Duyong smelled of fish drying in the sun and split firewood, and then a man came through it with a blade out and the ordinary noise of the morning turned into something else. People went over stalls and into the water. A boy who sold wood for a living did not. He stepped into the open with a woodcutter’s tool in his hand, put the man down, and went back to his stall, and the Bendahara of Malacca, who had seen the whole thing from his boat, decided that this one was worth taking into the palace.

That is where Hang Tuah begins in the *Hikayat Hang Tuah*, and everything the Malay world has argued about since comes out of that first exchange: a boy with nothing is noticed, is taken up, is made useful, and spends the rest of his life paying for it.

He was the son of a poor family on the Duyong river, and he came with four sworn brothers who are almost never named apart from him. Hang Jebat, Hang Kasturi, Hang Lekir and Hang Lekiu. Even that count is unstable. In Jawi script the letters *ra* and *wow* are close enough that Lekir and Lekiu may be one man copied twice, and there are scholars who read the group instead as a Malay reworking of the five warriors who attend Krishna in the Mahabharata. The five of them rose together, and the sultan of Malacca made Tuah his Laksamana, the admiral, which in the epic means rather more than a naval command. He is the ambassador, the bodyguard, the abductor of brides, the man sent to fetch fruit from a collapsing palm and to bring back news from the next world, and the joke buried in his name is that everything he touches turns lucky for someone else.

The kris came from Java. Sent to Majapahit in his sultan’s train, he was matched against Taming Sari, the finest warrior the Javanese court had, and beat him, and took the man’s kris, which carried invincibility with it. The epic is not subtle about what that transfer means. Majapahit’s luck walked out of Java in a Malaccan hand. The *Hikayat* is savage about the Javanese throughout, painting their king as a ditherer and their great minister Gajah Mada as a schemer, and the Malay Annals, the older chronicle that supplied most of the raw material, know nothing at all about Taming Sari or the duel. That kris is a later addition, and a very good one.

His embassies took him further than most Malay heroes travel. The epic sends him to China, to Vijayanagar, to Siam and to Istanbul, and off the coast near Macau it has him meet a Portuguese fleet and silence its cannon with a spell, which is a piece of wishful thinking so bare-faced that it is almost touching. Malacca fell to those cannon in 1511. The chronicle, meanwhile, gives its famous China mission to a different minister entirely, Tun Perpatih Putih, along with the trick of eating long uncut greens so that the envoys have to lift their chins and get a look at an emperor no foreigner is permitted to see. That trick has been drifting onto Hang Tuah for generations and now turns up in Malaysian schoolbooks under his name, which tells you something about how a legend feeds.

Then the court turned on him. Rivals accused him of sleeping with one of the palace women, the sultan ordered him executed without asking a single question, and the Bendahara hid him in the jungle instead of carrying out the order. Hang Jebat heard that his brother was dead, understood exactly who had killed him and why, and did the thing the epic cannot forgive and cannot quite condemn: he revolted. He took the palace, drove the sultan out of it, put on the royal clothes and held the building against everything sent at him, and none of the sultan’s warriors could get near him, because the man was carrying Taming Sari. Only one person could. Hang Tuah was brought out of hiding, pardoned for a crime he never committed, and sent in to kill the only man in Malacca who had thought him worth avenging. It took seven days. When it was done he sat with the body and said that nothing in life is simple.

Malay readers have been picking sides ever since. Tuah is loyalty and Jebat is justice, and the question of which of them was right is one of the genuine long-running arguments of Malay letters, revived by every generation that needs it. The Malay Annals, to complicate matters, say the rebel was Hang Kasturi.

He grew old badly. Sent up Gunung Ledang to carry his sultan’s marriage proposal to the spirit princess who lives on the mountain, the Laksamana could not finish the climb, and Tun Mamat went on alone to hear her terms: bridges of gold and silver from Malacca to the summit, seven trays of mosquito hearts, seven of mite hearts, a vat of tears from young girls, and a bowl of the blood of the sultan’s own son. In the older version of the story, the one that ends him, Hang Tuah takes his kris and throws it into the river and swears he will not come back to Malacca until it floats up again. It never did.

His powers were never really his. The kris made him unbeatable and the kris could be taken, and in the epic a white crocodile steals it from him at the end, after which Malacca begins to die on schedule. His real weakness is structural and the *Hikayat* knows it: a man whose whole virtue is obedience has no defence against being ordered to do something monstrous, and the story hands him that order and watches. The epic itself was probably put together in Johor between about 1688 and the 1710s, long after Malacca fell, as a coded account of a Johor admiral who was honoured, then called a traitor, then killed. Hang Tuah, in other words, was partly built to be argued about.

Whether he lived at all is a live question with a decent answer. Eleven letters sent from Malacca to the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1480 and 1481 survive in the Okinawan archive, and two of them are signed by the Laksamana; only one man held that office under the sultan of the day. It is not his name on the paper, only his title, and the identification is an inference rather than a signature. He has a well at Kampung Duyong that is said never to run dry and a mausoleum at Tanjung Kling, though there are people in Palembang who say the grave is theirs. And the line every Malaysian schoolchild can recite in his voice, that the Malays will never vanish from the earth, appears nowhere in the epic at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Hang Tuah?

Hang Tuah was the legendary Laksamana, or admiral, of the Malacca Sultanate in the fifteenth century, and the central figure of the Malay epic *Hikayat Hang Tuah*. He rose from a poor family on the Duyong river to become his sultan’s warrior, envoy and enforcer. He is the most celebrated hero in Malay literature and the standard symbol of loyalty to a ruler.

Why did Hang Tuah kill Hang Jebat?

Hang Jebat rebelled against the sultan of Malacca to avenge Hang Tuah, who had been sentenced to death on a false accusation of adultery. Hang Tuah had secretly been hidden by the Bendahara rather than executed, and when the sultan learned the truth he recalled him and ordered him to put down the revolt. Hang Tuah fought Hang Jebat for seven days and killed him, obeying the same ruler who had condemned him.

What is the kris Taming Sari?

Taming Sari is the kris that made Hang Tuah invincible, taken from the greatest warrior of the Majapahit court after Hang Tuah defeated him in a duel. In the epic the weapon carries its owner’s luck, so its transfer signals Majapahit’s fortune passing to Malacca. It does not appear in the Malay Annals, the older chronicle, and belongs to the later epic tradition.

Was Hang Tuah a real person?

Most historians accept that a real Laksamana stands behind the legend, though the epic around him is largely literary. Eleven letters sent from Malacca to the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1480 and 1481 survive in Okinawan records, two of them signed by the Laksamana, and only one man is known to have held that office at the time. The letters carry the title rather than the name, so the identification with Hang Tuah remains an inference.

How does the story of Hang Tuah end?

After failing to complete the climb up Gunung Ledang on his sultan’s errand, Hang Tuah threw his kris into a river and swore he would not return to Malacca until it resurfaced, which it never did. In the epic itself he loses Taming Sari to a white crocodile and departs with his sultan to live as a dervish as Malacca falls to the Portuguese. His mausoleum is at Tanjung Kling in Malacca, although Palembang also claims his grave.

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