Port of Kollam

The story of Port of Kollam

Start with what is actually there, because the gap between the history and the site is the most interesting thing about it. Kollam Port today is a wharf of about 177 metres, twelve metres wide, with a working draught of six and a half metres — enough for vessels up to roughly 15,000 deadweight tonnes and not enough for much else. There are two cranes. The declared cargo is sand, cashew and tiles. A seaboard breakwater of some 2,100 metres and a leeward arm of about 500 metres make the sheltered water, and the long concrete-capped walk out along the seaboard arm is, in practice, what visitors come for. Photographs of the port taken from the Thangassery lighthouse show the whole arrangement in one frame: the dogleg of rubble, fishing boats moored inside it, open sea outside, and a quay so short that a single coaster fills it.

That is not a diminished version of something. It is what a nine-hundred-year-old roadstead looks like after the ships got bigger. Medieval Kollam did not need a deep-water berth because medieval ships anchored in the roads and were worked by lighters; the shelter, the lagoon behind it and the freshwater river system inland were the whole asset. Modern shipping inverted every one of those advantages, and the port has spent the past two decades trying to dredge its way back — a scheme to take the draught to ten metres, so that ships of 170 metres and over need not carry on to Kochi, has been costed at about ₹5.7 crore and has been under way, in one form or another, long enough that no completion date should be printed here.

The modern revival has a paper trail of first days, and they are recent enough to be worth listing plainly. A coastal shipping project was launched on 9 November 2013. The first container vessel, the MV Suryamukhi, came alongside on 18 January 2014. The first foreign ship followed on 4 April 2014. An electronic data interchange facility was commissioned on 6 January 2016 under the code INKUK1, and a roll-on/roll-off service opened when the 160-metre MV Maria arrived on 17 March 2016. On 17 June 2024 the port was designated an immigration checkpoint. Read as a list, it is the record of a place repeatedly declaring itself open for business — which is a different thing from a place that is busy.

Now the history, and the reason a two-berth minor port earns a page at all. The conventional founding date is AD 825, and Kollam is the rare Indian port whose founding is not merely recorded but counted from: the Malayalam era, Kollavarsham, begins with it and is still in daily use in Kerala for temple calendars, agricultural dates and festival reckoning. Who founded it is where the sources part company, and we would rather show you the seam than paper over it — the detail is set out in the corrections below.

What is not in doubt is that within a single generation this harbour was important enough to generate one of South India's most extraordinary documents. The Tarisappalli copper plates of 849 CE record a grant by the Venad ruler under Sthanu Ravi to a merchant remembered as Maruvan Sapir Iso, who built a church at a place the plates call Kurakkeni Kollam. The plates are witnessed in Kufic Arabic, in cursive Pahlavi and in Judeo-Persian Hebrew. Persians, Arabs and Jews were not visiting this harbour in the ninth century; they were resident in it, signing legal instruments in their own hands. That document, and the wider medieval-trade story it anchors, is told at length on our Ashtamudi Lake page, because the lake behind the port is what made the port possible.

The Chinese connection is older and better attested than most visitors expect. The Chinese geographer Jia Dan compiled itineraries between about 785 and 805 CE that describe trade with Kulam on the Malabar coast — before the conventional founding date of the port itself. Tang-dynasty records give the settlement the name Mahlai and refer to its king by a word that is recognisably Venad. Ibn Battuta, three centuries later, named Kollam as one of the five Indian ports he saw across twenty-four years of travelling. Two merchant guilds, the Anchuvannam and the Manigramam, are recorded here, one foreign and one local, which is about as clear a statement as the record ever makes that this was a two-way arrangement rather than a place things were taken from.

And then, in 2014, dredging off the coast started bringing the evidence up in the slurry. Chinese potsherds and coins were noticed in the spoil in January of that year, and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Kerala ran explorations at Thangassery across the 2013–14 and 2014–15 seasons. The published assemblage is worth knowing precisely, because it is routinely rounded into a headline. Forty-four Chinese copper-alloy coins were recovered and studied; forty-three of them could be dated. Thirty-six are Northern Song, five are Tang and two are Southern Song. Ten were issued under the emperor Shen Zong, nine under Ren Zong, five under Tai Zong. They run from twenty-three to thirty-five millimetres across and from about one to eight grams. Twenty-one distinct obverse legends were identified — and exactly one coin in the whole set carries any mark on its reverse.

The earliest are Tang, which means the coin evidence and Jia Dan's itineraries point at the same century. The latest legible reign-legend in the published set is Chong Ning Zhong Bao, struck between 1102 and 1106. So the datable material brackets roughly four hundred years of contact — and it does so from a single stretch of seabed off a fishing harbour.

The archaeologists add a caution that almost nobody repeats, and it is the most interesting sentence in the whole paper. There is no scholarly agreement that these coins ever circulated as money in Kollam. Chinese cash was valued by form and size rather than by metal content, and the authors suggest that in a port where Chinese merchants were major stakeholders the coins may have carried no local monetary value at all, with trade settled by other means. The coins may be evidence of who was here rather than evidence of how anything was paid for. That is a smaller claim than the headlines make, and a more honest one.

The seabed has produced something older still. In August 2009 a team led by P. Rajendran recovered Lower Palaeolithic tools from the Thangassery seabed — stone implements from a shoreline that was dry land when sea levels were lower. They are frequently folded into the 2014 coin story as though everything came up in one bucket. They did not, they are five years earlier, and they belong to a different order of time entirely.

What you can do with all of this, standing at the port, is limited and honest. Walk the breakwater, which is a genuine public walk with people on it at every hour of the evening. Look south to the Thangassery lighthouse and north along the beach to the fishing fleet. Watch whatever is alongside — a coaster, a dredger, a pile-driving barge. And know that the water you are looking across is the same anchorage that a Tang itinerary, a ninth-century copper plate in three scripts, a fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller and forty-four Song coins all independently describe.

Legend & myth

The first correction is the one most likely to be copied onto your itinerary from somewhere else. English Wikipedia's article on Kollam Port says the harbour was founded as an alternative to reopening an inland seaport called Kore-ke-ni, and equates that name with Nelcynda, with Tyndis and with Thondi — the ports of the Periplus and of Tamil literature. We do not print that, and we have already published the reason on our Ashtamudi Lake page: no Phoenician or Roman source names Kollam, and no scholar we could trace places Nelcynda, Bacare or Tyndis here. What we can now add is where the error comes from, which is more interesting than the error. The Tarisappalli copper plates of 849 CE call this place Kurakkeni Kollam. That is a real ninth-century name for a real place, and it is the name in the primary document. Somewhere between the copper plate and the encyclopaedia it became Kore-ke-ni and was then matched to a Greco-Roman port a thousand kilometres of coastline and eight centuries away. The name is genuine. The identification is not.

The second is the founding, and here the honest answer is that the sources disagree and we are not going to pick. One line of sources, including the English Wikipedia article on the port, says Kollam was founded in AD 825 by Mar Abo with the sanction of Udayamarthandavarma. Another, at least as widely repeated, says it was founded by two Church of the East bishops, Mar Sabor and Mar Proth, with the permission of Ayyanadikal Thiruvadikal, the Venad king. These are less contradictory than they look — our own page on the Kadamattom church already records that Mar Abo is better known to history as Mar Sabor, and that he did not arrive alone — but the royal name genuinely differs between tellings, and neither version rests on a document anyone can show you. Treat AD 825 as the conventional date rather than a recorded one, and treat the founder as a tradition rather than a fact.

The third correction is about numbers, and it matters because both figures in circulation are true and they describe different things. You will read that thousands of Chinese coins were recovered at Kollam in 2014. That is what the dredging is reported to have brought up, and the peer-reviewed paper repeats the figure. But the assemblage that was actually collected, measured, photographed and published is forty-four coins, of which forty-three were datable. Both numbers belong in any honest account. Quoting the thousands alone makes it sound like a hoard was excavated; quoting the forty-four alone hides the scale of what came out of the spoil. Nobody, as far as we can establish, has published a catalogue of the thousands.

The fourth is chronological. The Stone Age tools and the Chinese coins are not one discovery. The Lower Palaeolithic implements were recovered from the Thangassery seabed in August 2009 by a team led by P. Rajendran; the coins and potsherds were noticed in dredging slurry in January 2014. Sources that describe a single January 2014 find of "Chinese coins and Stone Age weapons" have merged two events five years apart, and in doing so make the palaeolithic material sound like an afterthought to a medieval trade story when it is a separate finding about a drowned shoreline.

The fifth is a ranking, and the reason we do not print one is that our sources contradict each other in the same breath. English Wikipedia's infobox calls Kollam the third largest port in Kerala by cargo. A Commons photograph of the same port, uploaded by the same photographer whose images illustrate that article, is captioned "the second largest port in Kerala". We could find no official list from the Kerala Maritime Board that settles it, and with Vizhinjam now in the picture any ranking would date quickly. The port's size is better conveyed by the wharf being 177 metres long than by an ordinal.

The sixth is about the pictures, and it is the sort of thing that quietly becomes fact. Three superb early views of this harbour circulate under filenames that read as dates: a "1505" image, a "1670" one, a "1708" one. Only the last is straightforwardly what its name suggests. The "1505" file is not an engraving at all but a hand-coloured Portuguese manuscript town-plan which Commons dates to about 1600; what belongs to 1505 is the event its own caption records, the founding of the fortress under the Viceroy Dom Francisco de Almeida. It is a document of around 1600 remembering 1505, and it is a much better object for being that. The "1670" engraving is by Coenraet Decker and shows the Dutch assault on Kollam of December 1661, published in Wouter Schouten's account in 1676. A trade scene it is not.

The seventh is small and practical. The port is not the beach and the two are next to each other. Some listings send visitors to "Kollam Port" meaning the breakwater walk at Thangassery, and some mean the operational wharf, which is a working cargo facility and not a place to wander into. The walk is the visit. And one file that circulates as "Kollam Port Wharf" is, when you open it, a photograph of the breakwater with people strolling on it — the wharf is elsewhere in the frame, or not in it at all.