Dragon Tail (peninsula)

The Dragon's Tail is a modern name for the phantom peninsula in southeast Asia which appeared in medieval Arabian and Renaissance European world maps. It formed the eastern shore of the Great Gulf (Gulf of Thailand) east of the Golden Chersonese (Malaysia), replacing the "unknown lands" which Ptolemy and others had thought surrounded the "Indian Sea".

The peninsula known to modern cartographers as the "Dragon's Tail" or "Tiger's Tail" appeared under various names on different maps.

The peninsula does not appear in any surviving manuscript of Ptolemy's Geography or other Greek geographers. Instead, it is first attested in the Ptolemaic-influenced Book of the Description of the Earth compiled by al-Khwārizmī around 833 AD. Ptolemy's map ended at 180°E of the Fortunate Isles without being able to explain what might lie on the imagined eastern shore of the Indian Ocean or beyond the lands of the Sinae and of Serica in Asia. Chinese Muslims traditionally credit the Companion Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas with having missionized the country as early as the 7th century; the trading community was large enough that a large-scale massacre is recorded at Yangzhou in 760 amid the An Shi Rebellion against the Tang. Merchants such as Soleiman showed Al-Khwārizmī that the Indian Ocean was not closed as Hipparchus and Ptolemy had held but opened either narrowly or broadly. Al-Khwārizmī left most of Ptolemy's eastern coast but the creation of the strait created a new peninsula, beyond which he placed the Sea of Darkness and the Island of the Jewel.