Tidung

The Tidung are the indigenous people of the forested northeast coast of Borneo. Their name means “hill people”, and they speak a North Bornean language of the Murutic group. They began as hill Dayak farmers and coastal fishermen. From at least the eleventh century the region was organised under the Tidung Kingdom, which may originally have been a tribal confederacy.

Conversion to Islam between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, alongside contact with the Sultanate of Sulu, turned them into a Muslim, Malayised people who called themselves Islam Dayak. In 1557 Queen Ikenawai married Radja Laoet from Sulu and a new Islamic dynasty, the Kalkan or Tenggara line, centred itself on Tarakan.

Through the eighteenth century the Tidung kingdom and neighbouring Sultanate of Bulungan were chief powers of northeast Borneo, controlling river mouths and trade in forest and sea produce.