Hang Li Po
Chinese princess
Hang Li Po (Chinese: 漢麗寶; pinyin: Hàn Lìbǎo, or Wang Lìbǎo; Jyutping: Hon3 Lai6 Bou2; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Hàn Lê-pó) was reported to be a Chinese princess sent by the Ming dynasty to marry Malaccan Sultan Mansur Shah (r. 1456–1477), according to the Malay Annals. However, there is debate on whether Hang Li Po was a real person, as there is no reference to Hang Li Po in any Ming dynasty records. Also, the 16th-century Portuguese account Suma Oriental does not mention a Chinese princess married to Sultan Mansur Shah, but instead refers to an unnamed Chinese girl who married Malacca’s second ruler, Sultan Megat Iskandar Shah (r. 1414–1424), with three decades between the two rulers.
The princess's vast entourage was recorded to be 500 followers and Sultan Mansur Shah provided a hill for their settlement, now known as Bukit Cina, as a gift to his new Chinese bride, in the mid-15th century. Now, there are more than 12,000 graves in the cemetery and the oldest dates back to 1622. After the Portuguese conquered Malacca in 1511, the forested Bukit Cina was razed by Portuguese missionaries, who established a monastery atop the hill in 1581. When the Dutch captured Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641, the Dutch colonial administration re-designated Bukit Cina as a Chinese cemetery in 1685.
The figure of Hang Li Po was an early example of transculturation and interracial marriage in the early history of the Malay Archipelago.
“Hang Li Po” enters the record as chinese princess. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hang, Chinese and princess can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5647816. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1456, 1477, 1414 and 1424.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hang Li Po” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.