history of Southeast Asia

Origins

Knowledge of the early prehistory of Southeast Asia has undergone exceptionally rapid change as a result of archaeological discoveries made since the 1960s, although the interpretation of these findings has remained the subject of extensive debate. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the region has been inhabited from the earliest times. Hominid fossil remains date from approximately 1,500,000 years ago and those of Homo sapiens from approximately 40,000 years ago. Furthermore, until about 7000 bce the seas were some 150 feet (50 metres) lower than they are now, and the area west of Makassar Strait consisted of a web of watered plains that sometimes is called Sundaland. These land connections perhaps account for the coherence of early human development observed in the Hoabinhian culture, which lasted from about 13,000 to 5000 or 4000 bce. The stone tools used by hunting and gathering societies across Southeast Asia during this period show a remarkable degree of similarity in design and development. When the sea level rose to approximately its present level about 6000 bce, conditions were created for a more variegated environment and, therefore, for more extensive differentiation in human development. While migration from outside the region may have taken place, it did not do so in a massive or clearly punctuated fashion; local evolutionary processes and the circulation of peoples were far more powerful forces in shaping the region’s cultural landscape.

Technological developments and population expansion

Perhaps because of a particular combination of geophysical and climatic factors, early Southeast Asia did not develop uniformly in the direction of increasingly complex societies. Not only have significant hunting and gathering populations continued to exist into the 21st century, but the familiar cultural sequences triggered by such events as the discovery of agriculture or metallurgy do not seem to apply. This is not to say that the technological capabilities of early Southeast Asian peoples were negligible, for sophisticated metalworking (bronze) and agriculture (rice) were being practiced by the end of the 3rd millennium bce in northeastern Thailand and northern Vietnam, and sailing vessels of advanced design and sophisticated navigational skills were spread over a wider area by the same time or earlier. Significantly, these technologies do not appear to have been borrowed from elsewhere but were indigenous and distinctive in character.

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These technological changes may partially account for two crucial developments in Southeast Asia’s later prehistory. The first is the extraordinary seaborne expansion of speakers of Proto-Austronesian languages and their descendants, speakers of Austronesian (or Malayo-Polynesian) languages, which occurred over a period of 5,000 years or more and came to encompass a vast area and to stretch nearly half the circumference of Earth at the Equator. This outward movement of people and culture was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, the result of societal preference for small groups and a tendency of groups to hive off once a certain population size had been reached. It began as early as 4000 bce, when Taiwan was populated from the Asian mainland, and subsequently it continued southward through the northern Philippines (3rd millennium bce), central Indonesia (2nd millennium bce), and western and eastern Indonesia (2nd and 1st millennia bce). From approximately 1000 bce on the expansion continued both eastward into the Pacific, where that immense region was populated in a process continuing to about 1000 ce as voyagers reached the Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand, and westward, where Malay peoples reached and settled the island of Madagascar sometime between 500 and 700 ce, bringing with them (among other things) bananas, which are native to Southeast Asia. Thus, for a considerable period of time, the Southeast Asian region contributed to world cultural history, rather than merely accepting outside influences, as frequently has been suggested.

The second development, which began possibly as early as 1000 bce, centred on the production of fine bronze and the fashioning of bronze-and-iron objects, particularly as they have been found at the site in northern Vietnam known as Dong Son. The earliest objects consisted of socketed plowshares and axes, shaft-hole sickles, spearheads, and such small items as fishhooks and personal ornaments. By about 500 bce the Dong Son culture had begun producing the bronze drums for which it is known. The drums are large objects (some weigh more than 150 pounds [70 kg]), and they were produced by the difficult lost-wax casting process and decorated with fine geometric shapes and depictions of animals and humans. This metal industry was not derived from similar industries in China or India. Rather, the Dong Son period offers one of the most powerful—though not necessarily the only or earliest—examples of Southeast Asian societies transforming themselves into more densely populated, hierarchical, and centralized communities. Since typical drums, either originals or local renditions, have been found throughout Southeast Asia and since they are associated with a rich trade in exotics and other goods, the Dong Son culture also suggests that the region as a whole consisted not of isolated, primitive niches of human settlement but of a variety of societies and cultures tied together by broad and long-extant trading patterns. Although none of these societies possessed writing, some displayed considerable sophistication and technological skill, and, although none appears to have constituted a territorial centralized state, new and more complex polities were forming.

Influence of China and India

Between approximately 150 bce and 150 ce, most of Southeast Asia was first influenced by the more mature cultures of its neighbours to the north and west. Thus began a process that lasted for the better part of a millennium and fundamentally changed Southeast Asia. In some ways the circumstances were very different. China, concerned about increasingly powerful chiefdoms in Vietnam disturbing its trade, encroached into the region and by the end of the 1st century bce had incorporated it as a remote province of the Han empire. For generations, the Vietnamese opposed Chinese rule, but they were unable to gain their independence until 939 ce. From India, however, there is no evidence of conquests, colonization, or even extensive migration. Indians came to Southeast Asia, but they did not come to rule, and no Indian power appears to have pursued an interest in controlling a Southeast Asian power from afar, a factor that may help to explain why only the Vietnamese accepted the Chinese model.

Yet, in other ways the processes of Indianization and Sinicization were remarkably similar. Southeast Asia already was socially and culturally diverse, making accommodation easy. Furthermore, indigenous peoples shaped the adaption and adoption of outside influences and, indeed, seem to have sought out concepts and practices that enhanced rather than redirected changes already underway in their own societies. They also rejected some components: for example, some of the vocabulary and general theories related to the Indian notions of social hierarchy were borrowed but much of the specific practices were not, and neither Indian nor Chinese views of women as socially and legally inferior were accepted. In the later stages of the assimilation process—particularly in the Indianized areas—local syncretism often produced exuberant variations, which, despite familiar appearances, were expressions of local genius rather than just inspired borrowings.

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Still, Chinese and Indian influences were anything but superficial. They provided writing systems and literature, systems of statecraft, and concepts of social hierarchy and religious belief, all of which were both of intrinsic interest and pragmatic significance to Southeast Asians of the day. For elites seeking to gain and retain control over larger and more complex populations, the applications of these ideas were obvious, but it would also seem that the sheer beauty and symbolic power of Hindu and Buddhist arts tapped a responsive vein in the Southeast Asian soul. The result was an imposing array of architectural and other cultural wonders, at first very much in the Indian image and hewing close to current styles and later in more original, indigenous interpretations. The seriousness and profundity with which all this activity was undertaken is unmistakable. By the 7th century ce, Palembang in southern Sumatra was being visited by Chinese and other Buddhist devotees from throughout Asia, who came to study doctrine and to copy manuscripts in institutions that rivaled in importance those in India itself. Later, beginning in the 8th century, temple and court complexes of surpassing grandeur and beauty were constructed in central Java, Myanmar, and Cambodia; the Borobudur of the Śailendra dynasty in Java, the myriad temples of the Burman dynastic capital of Pagan, and the monuments constructed at Angkor during the Khmer empire in Cambodia rank without question among the glories of the ancient world.

Rise of indigenous states

In the realm of politics, Indian influence accompanied the rise of new political entities, which, since they do not readily fall under the Western rubric of “states,” have been called mandalas. The mandala was not so much a territorial unit as a fluid field of power that emanated, in concentric circles, from a central court and depended for its continued authority largely on the court’s ability to balance alliances and to influence the flow of trade and human resources. Such a conception of political organization already had surfaced among Southeast Asians, but Indian civilization provided powerful metaphors for the change underway and for ways of extending it. The mandala was the predominant form of the Southeast Asian state until it was displaced in the 19th century.

Between approximately the 2nd century bce and the 6th century ce, mandala polities appeared throughout Southeast Asia in the major river valleys and at strategic landfalls for sea traffic—generally, locations where routes for local and international trade crossed. These communities took different forms, depending on their physical setting. For example, walled and moated settlements predominated in much of the mainland but do not seem to have been constructed in insular Southeast Asia. Yet they served similar purposes to and frequently shared characteristics with mandalas in the same immediate region. Mandala sites have been located in the Mekong, Chao Phraya, and Irrawaddy river valleys; along the coasts of central Vietnam, western and northern Java, and eastern Borneo; and on the Isthmus of Kra. One of the most intriguing sites, called Oc Eo, is in the Mekong delta region of southern Vietnam. This port settlement, which flourished between the 1st and 6th centuries ce amid a complex of other settlements connected by canals (some up to 60 miles long), was not only an extraordinarily rich emporium dealing in articles from as far as Rome and inner Asia, but it was also a local manufacturing centre producing its own jewelry, pottery, and other trade goods. Almost certainly it also fed itself from wet-rice agriculture practiced in the surrounding delta. Little is known, however, about the nature of state structure in Oc Eo, although it seems to have been one of—and perhaps was prime among—an assemblage of local mandala-type principalities.

After the 6th century there emerged a number of larger and more powerful mandala states, principally in Cambodia, Myanmar, Sumatra, and Java. Often designated kingdoms or empires, these states nevertheless functioned and were structured upon the same principles that had governed their predecessors. They were, in some respects, unstable and prone to fluctuation because of shifting relations with outside powers and constant internal struggles for the position of overlordship, but they also were remarkably durable. No two states were exactly alike, each occupying a particular ecological niche and exploiting a particular combination of opportunities to survive by trade, agriculture, and war. The cultural impact of their courts long outlasted their political grasp and continued to inform their societies until modern times.

Perhaps the outstanding example of this durability is Srivijaya, the great Sumatran trading empire that dominated much of Southeast Asian commerce from about the 7th to the 13th century. Srivijaya does not appear to have been heavily urbanized or to have had a continuously occupied capital during its roughly 700 years of existence, nor does it seem to have possessed boundaries and clearly delineated territories. Its armies, while they could be mustered and quickly dispatched overseas, were weapons of limited use. Instead, Srivijaya maintained its authority in a shifting and extremely varied trading world largely by means of a shrewd brand of cultural and economic politics that involved, among other things, offering a protective and mutually beneficial trading environment to all comers and maintaining a courtly culture from which the idiom of overlordship issued grandly and convincingly. Srivijaya was ruled by a formula supple enough to attract trade from all quarters and to exploit it at the same time.

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Whatever the achievements of Srivijaya, the Khmer (Cambodian) state that flourished in the Tonle Sap region roughly between the 9th and mid-13th centuries is widely regarded as the most impressive of the concentrically arranged ancient Southeast Asian states. This admiration largely stems from the state’s extensive architectural remains, including the renowned Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat temple complexes. In many respects, however, the Angkorian imperial achievement was singular. Though informed by the mandala paradigm, the Khmer carried it further and shaped it more distinctively than other Southeast Asians before or since.

At its zenith, Angkor may have supported a population of one million in a relatively small area, with an elite apparatus and a population of bondsmen far greater than any of Cambodia’s neighbours. In achieving this, however, the Khmer state surrendered the flexibility and balance critical to the mandala pattern and eventually fell victim to its own brittleness. Other concentric states in early Southeast Asia rose and fell; the Khmer proved unable to revive theirs once it had fallen.