Kota Gelanggi

Kota Gelanggi is an archaeological site reported in 2005 as potentially the first capital of the ancient Empire of Srivijaya and dating to around 650–900 and one of the oldest Kingdoms on South East Asia's Malay Peninsula. The site's existence was announced as a 'discovery' by the Malaysian press on 3 February 2005.

The reported site of the ancient city is in the dense jungles of the southern Malaysian state of Johor Darul Takzim, near a forest reserve currently managed as the Linggiu Reservoir by the Public Utilities Board (PUB) of Singapore. This puts the site somewhere within a 140-square-kilometre (54 sq mi) area of the forest reserve surrounding Sungai Madek and Sungai Lenggiu.

The early 17th century Malay literary work Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals) records that Kota Gelanggi lies on the upper reaches of the Johor River with a main fort made of black stone (or Kota Batu Hitam in Malay). "Kota Gelanggi" may derive from the Malay mispronunciation of the Thai word Ghlong-Keow or "Box of Emeralds", hence in Malay, Perbendaharaan Permata (Treasury of Jewels). Some scholars believe that the city formed part of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, and may therefore be the unidentified 12th Naksat city of ancient Siamese folklore. Ancient Tamil inscriptions show that the city was raided in 1025 by South Indian Chola Dynasty conqueror Rajendra Chola I, after he had destroyed the Malay Kingdom of Gangga Negara. The latter is generally equated with the ruins and ancient tombs that can still be seen in Beruas district in the state of Perak. Old European maps of the Malay Peninsula show the location of a city known as Polepi (i.e. Gelanggi) at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula.

References to Kota Gelanggi were reported in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by colonial scholar-administrators including Dudley Francis Amelius Hervey (1849–1911), who published eye witness reports of the city in 1881 and Sir Richard Olof Winstedt (1878–1966), who stated that an Orang Asli (indigenous group) was prepared to take people to the site in the late 1920s. The ancient city was also known to the adventurer-explorer Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), who discovered the ruins of Johore Lama while searching for Kota Gelanggi.

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