Jong

Jong is a historical term used in the Malay and wider Southeast Asian maritime tradition to refer to a large sailing vessel. In old Malay and Javanese sources, the jong is described as a sizable, oceangoing ship with one or more decks and multiple masts, designed for long-distance voyages across the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Nusantara archipelago. It played a central role in regional trade and naval movement from antiquity through the early modern period.

The jong is often discussed in relation to the Chinese junk, but most scholars treat the two as distinct vessel types. While both are large multi-masted ships, the jong reflects indigenous Southeast Asian shipbuilding practices and regional design adaptations. The term appears in historical chronicles such as the Sejarah Melayu (The Malay Annals) and various inscriptions and texts describing fleets of Malay polities and trading networks.

Historically, jong ships supported extensive maritime activity, enabling commerce, political power projection, and cultural exchange among coastal states, including the Malay sultanates, Sumatra, Java, and Borneo, as well as connections to India, the Middle East, and China. They contributed to the development of thriving port cities and regional trade routes that shaped the history of maritime Southeast Asia.

Beyond ships, jong also occurs in other linguistic contexts. In Dutch, jong means “young” and appears in surnames such as de Jong. In Korean and other languages, Jong can be a component of given names or romanizations, but these uses are unrelated to the Southeast Asian ship term.