All over Southeast Asia is found a particular type of coarse Chinese export porcelain traditionally known as ‘Swatow’ ware but now more accurately identified as originating from Zhangzhou, dating from the late Ming period, from the end of the sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. One characteristic type of large Zhangzhou dish had a central circle with eight smaller circles around it, all filled with inscriptions in Arabic script. Such an example may be seen in Singapore’s ACM (level 1).
These plates bore a resemblance to the great seal of the sultans of Aceh, which over a period of 250 years always gave the name of the sovereign in a central circle surrounded by eight small circles containing the names of illustrious forebears. The marked visual similarity between the great seal of the Aceh and the Zhangzhou calligraphic plates gave rise to a tradition that the Ming plates with Arabic inscriptions were specially ordered from China by the rulers of Aceh in the shape of their seal. However, a close chronological examination belies this widely-held belief. The ‘tradition’ of the Acehnese link seems to have been newly ‘invented’ in the twentieth century, and in fact the Zhangzhou plates were largely produced before the Acehnese ‘Ninefold Seal’ was created in the mid seventeenth century.
About the Speaker:
Annabel Teh Gallop is Lead Curator for Southeast Asia at the British Library, London. Her main research interests are in Malay and Indonesian manuscripts, letters, documents and seals, and the art of the Qur’an across the Indian Ocean world. Recent publications include ‘Migrating manuscript art: the ‘Sulawesi diaspora geometric style’ of Qur’anic illumination’ in Regime change: new horizons in Islamic art and visual culture, ed. Christiane Gruber and Bihter Esener (London: Gingko, 2024) and Malay seals from the Islamic world of Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019), a catalogue of over 2,000 seals from Southeast Asia inscribed in Arabic script.