---
title: Islands of Waq-Waq
type: Place
description: A remote land or cluster of islands at the edge of the medieval world, placed variously off East Africa, in Southeast Asia, or at Japan.
resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waq_Waq
tags: [waqwaq, geography, islands, indian-ocean]
timestamp: 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z
---

# Islands of Waq-Waq

The islands or land of Waq-Waq (*al-Wāqwāq*) were a remote territory in medieval Arab geography, set at the eastern or southern edge of the inhabited world. The name appears in more than twenty sources between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, some treating it as a place reached by traders and others as a country of marvels.

## Early notices

Ibn Khordadbeh, in his ninth-century *Book of Roads and Kingdoms*, put Waq-Waq east of China and reported that gold was so plentiful there that the inhabitants made the chains of their dogs and the collars of their monkeys from it, and that the country exported gold and ebony. The tenth-century historian al-Mas'udi, in *The Meadows of Gold*, described a Waq-Waq lying beyond the land of the Zanj and Sofala on the East African coast.

The most circumstantial account is that of Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, whose tenth-century *Wonders of India* records a seaborne raid: a fleet said to number a thousand ships came from Waq-Waq around 945 CE and fell on the East African coast near the island of Qanbalu, seeking ivory, tortoise shell, ambergris, panther skins, and Zanj captives, having sailed for a year to reach it. Because notices like these pointed in different directions, geographers came to write of more than one Waq-Waq, commonly a Waq-Waq of the Zanj near Africa and another east of China.

## Where was it

| Proposed location | Argued by | Basis |
| --- | --- | --- |
| East Africa, beyond Sofala | al-Mas'udi and later writers | placed past the land of the Zanj |
| Madagascar or Sumatra | Gabriel Ferrand | island reports and trade routes |
| Japan | Michael Jan de Goeje | the name read as a Cantonese form for Japan |
| Southeast Asia (Srivijaya or Mataram) | Ann Kumar, Tom Hoogervorst | the 945 raid and Austronesian seafaring |

The 945 raid, together with the Austronesian settlement of Madagascar, has led several modern scholars to connect Waq-Waq with seafarers from the Indonesian archipelago, whose long voyages across the Indian Ocean are well attested. No single identification has won general agreement, and it is likely that the name gathered reports of several real places.

## The island of women

A separate tradition, repeated in the Thousand and One Nights, made Waq-Waq an island of women ruled by a queen, its population entirely female. This strand runs alongside the account of the [[waqwaq-tree|tree]] whose fruit were women, and the two were sometimes told as one. For the name itself, see [[etymology|the etymology]].
