Thailand’s largest island was once called Junk Ceylon
Phuket province packs Thailand’s biggest island plus thirty-two smaller ones into just 547 square kilometres—the country’s second-smallest province—off the Andaman coast and linked northward by the Sarasin Bridge. Its Malay name root bukit means hill; Western charts long said Junk Ceylon for Tanjung Salang.
Austronesian Malays lived on the island before Siamese settlers pushed south. An older name, Thalang, from the Malay telong meaning cape, survives in the northern district that held the old capital. Tin and rubber once paid the bills; tourism now dominates, and foreign residents are estimated to number more than a hundred thousand.
Lying on the sea lanes between India and China, the island turns up constantly in Portuguese, French, Dutch and English ship logs, although no European power ever fully took it. Fernão Mendes Pinto, who reached Siam in 1545, wrote early European notices of Junk Ceylon and observed that pirates and rough seas were already driving merchants toward Patani and Ligor, today Nakhon Si Thammarat.
By the seventeenth century tin had made it a trading prize, fought over by the Dutch and English and, from the 1680s, the French. A French East India Company vessel sailed away loaded with tin in September 1680, and King Narai put the missionary René Charbonneau in charge of the island until 1685. That year Narai granted France a tin monopoly through the envoy Chevalier de Chaumont, whose former steward Sieur de Billy became governor. Siam’s revolution of 1688 cut French influence, and a force under Desfarges that retook Thalang in April 1689 had gone back to Puducherry by January 1690.
In 1785, during the Nine Armies’ Wars, the British captain Francis Light warned that Burmese troops were coming just after the military governor had died. His widow, Than Phu Ying Chan, and her sister Mook had island women dress as soldiers and line Thalang’s walls; fooled about the garrison’s size, the Burmese gave up after a month-long siege that ended on 13 March 1785.
Source: Phuket province
