Not one to squander the obvious golden goose, the first sultan of the Malay Peninsula shrewdly crafted a lucrative enterprise on the needs of the passing traders and traffickers, and secured the patronage and protection of the Ming dynasty. And he was raking it in, becoming a source of considerable pride and nostalgia in modern Malay minds, a notion succinctly captured in the Malacca's Sultanate Palace and the Museum of History. Malacca soon established itself as an important trading port for China and traders began to flock here.
In 1405, Admiral Cheng Ho sailed into the Malaccan harbour in great style and grandeur with a crew of 37,000 in 317 ships. Malacca was Admiral Cheng's logistical headquarters for a total of seven expeditions between 1405 and 1433 when he navigated his navy to such distant and exotic places as Ceylon, Maldives, Mecca and Zanzibar. For sure, the man would have loved to visit again, but his luck ran out with the resurgence of isolationist Confucius thinking in the Chinese ruling bureaucracy. All that remains of the wonder sailor are the commemorative Sam Poh Kong Temple and the Hang Li Po's Well.
Parameswara's successors continued to prosper as a Ming Protectorate and from the tested formula of greasing the wheels of maritime trading. Islam had arrived earlier with the Arabic and Gujarati traders in the 1200s and become entrenched with the conversion of the rulers to the faith. At the height of its glory, the Sultanate of Malacca owned a tributary empire embracing the whole of the Malay Peninsula and much of eastern Sumatra, and won a battle or two against the forces of the famed Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya. Then in 1511, under the naval craftsmanship of Alfonso de Albuquerque, the second Portuguese governor of India, the Sultanate succumbed to Portuguese guns and powders.
