Kollam Coast

Kollam stands on the southern Malabar coast beside Ashtamudi Lake. Its port welcomed merchants from across the Indian Ocean, including Chinese traders whose ships impressed the Persian traveller Sulaiman in the ninth century. Ibn Battuta also visited Kollam in the fourteenth century. The Portuguese established a trading centre at Tangasseri and built a fort there; the Dutch took the town in 1661. Kollam later came under Travancore, whose government maintained its secretariat here into the nineteenth century.