Raja Ijau
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Raja Ijau (also known as "the Green Queen" in English) was a Malay sovereign queen of Pattani who reigned from 1584-1616. According to the Portuguese chronicler Mendez Pinto, she came to the throne in 1584 as a sister of the murdered Pattani king after twenty years of unstable rule. She was already in power when the first Dutch and English Company agents visited this region of southern Thailand. She was also known as the 'great queen of Pattani'. According to Jacob van Neck's writing in 1604, he reported a relatively prosperous state under Raja Ijau, who was "one well-disposed to merchants". The Malay monarchy under her rule absored diversity of foreign traders into a polyglot elite united by the royal person, a Malay lingua franca, and a pattern of rules and sacred regalia passed down from courts such as Malacca and Pasai. The majority of the merchants were said to be Chinese merchants, of which the most important of them, such as the leading commercial official Datu Sirinara, had converted to Islam and adopted Malay court etiquette.
[edit] External links
 |
This Thai biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
