The City of Cowlang (Quilon / Kollam)

1732

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 11 x 14 in (28 x 35.5 cm)
Sheet size: 11.75 x 15 in (30 x 38 cm)

The City of Cowlang (Quilon / Kollam) — A Rare Early Plan of a Malabar Entrepôt

A rare early eighteenth-century engraved bird’s-eye plan of Cowlang (Quilon, modern Kollam, Kerala), issued in the 1732 edition of Awnsham and John Churchill’s A Collection of Voyages and Travels—one of the most influential English compendia of global exploration and maritime intelligence. The plate presents Kollam as a fortified coastal settlement, showing its street pattern, harbour frontage, plantations, enclosing town walls, and the surrounding tropical landscape, animated by figures, grazing animals, and even an elephant.

The composition is enriched with European sailing ships in the anchorage, a mileage scale, and a lettered key cartouche, underscoring the city’s strategic maritime importance within the Indian Ocean trading world. Though published in Churchill’s widely circulated collection, the view was originally engraved for Philip Baldaeus’s True and Exact Description of the East India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel (1672), and was later reissued here for an English readership increasingly attentive to Asian ports and colonial strongholds.

Quilon was a Portuguese trading post in the sixteenth century, and the plan reflects the city’s appearance during the period of early European domination along the Malabar seaboard. Yet Kollam’s significance long predates colonial intervention: as the ancient port of Quilon, it flourished under the Pandya dynasty and later became the capital of the Kingdom of Venad (c. 825). Arabs, Chinese, Jews, Romans, and other mercantile communities engaged in trade at Kollam for centuries, establishing it as one of the great historic entrepôts of global sea commerce.

An evocative and historically resonant early plan of Kollam—valued for its rarity, maritime context, and layered publication history within the principal English travel collections of the eighteenth century.

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