Kalah

Notes

"Modern scholars have debated Kalah’s precise location on the Malay Peninsula since 1718, and they still haven’t reached a consensus. The medieval Arab geographers placed Kalah equidistant between Sīrāf, in Iran, and China (by which they probably meant southeastern Chinese ports); that would put it on the Malay peninsula, but it’s not clear that they knew precisely where. Modern scholars fall into three camps, two of which place Kalah on the thousand-kilometer stretch of coast between Phuket in modern Thailand and Klang in Malaysia." "Goitein located Kalah, probably correctly, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. He also identified it as Kedah, a port in the northwest corner of present-day Malaysia; that identification turns out to have been somewhat arbitrary." (Rustow, "Kalah in the Lands of Java: T-S Ar.30.42," Fragment of the Month (November 2021)