Raja Ali Haji

Raja Ali Haji was born in 1808, in the Bugis royal line that governed the sultanate of Riau-Lingga, and lived at Penyengat, the island where this court was seated. A grandson of a famous war leader and son of the first man of the island to make the pilgrimage, he was at once a scholar, a poet and a historian. He is above all the codifier of his language: he is credited with the first monolingual Malay dictionary and a grammar treatise that fixed written usage. He died at Penyengat in 1873.

In the catalogue 1

• ChronicleThe Precious GiftTuhfat al-NafisRaja Ali Haji · 1865Literature