Trengganu

Trengganu lies on the eastern coast of the Malay Peninsula, where the Terengganu and Nerus rivers meet the South China Sea. Its ports connected inland communities with maritime trade, and its rulers belonged to the Malay political world of the peninsula. The Terengganu inscription, written in Jawi in the fourteenth century, records Islamic law and testifies to the early presence of Islam in the region.

Trengganu became linked to Malacca and later to Johor. In the eighteenth century a new sultanate took shape under Zainal Abidin I. His successors balanced relations with neighbouring Malay states and Siam. Sultan Mansur sent golden flowers to Bangkok in the 1780s, a gesture understood differently by the two courts: as friendship and alliance by Trengganu, and as acknowledgment of Siamese overlordship by Bangkok.