Prapanca completes the Nagarakretagama

The poem, a kakawin in Indian metres, is dated at its end to the full moon of the month Asvayuja in the Saka year 1287, that is, 1365. The poet named it Desawarnana; the title Nagarakretagama, ‘the perfect doctrine of the state’, comes from the colophon of a Balinese copy made in 1740. Prapanca describes the walled palace of Majapahit and the quarters of priests and nobles around it, the king's progress through eastern Java with its visits to shrines and to the sanctuaries of his ancestors, the great sraddha ceremony for the soul of the queen grandmother Gayatri, the history of the kings of Singhasari and Majapahit, and — in cantos 13 and 14 — a long list of dependencies from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula to Borneo, the Moluccas and New Guinea, followed by the friendly countries from Siam with Ayutthaya to Champa, Cambodia and Đại Việt.

The text survived only in palm-leaf manuscripts in Bali and Lombok. In 1894, during the Dutch expedition against Lombok, the philologist J. L. A. Brandes saved the manuscripts of the royal library at Cakranegara from being burnt, among them a copy of the poem, which he published in 1902. Returned to Indonesia in the 1970s (in 1970 by some accounts, in 1973 or 1974 by others), the manuscript is kept at the National Library in Jakarta and was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2013. Historians read the poem as a portrait of Majapahit seen from its court, while debating how far its claims of overlordship over distant islands reflected real power; in the 20th century it became an inspiration for the Indonesian independence movement.