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Chapter 1

The Land and Peoples

of Southeast Asia

The vast world of islands, peninsulas, rivers, and mountains which is Southeast Asia was begot from the powerful union of the earth's Indian and Pacific Ocean plates. Though the term 'Southeast Asia' usually conjures up images of lush jungles and fertile rice lands, the region varies from the rolling pastoral landscape of northwest Vietnam, to Burma's dry plains, to the lower Himalayas and the snow-covered peaks of Irian Jaya. From the Himalayas sprouts a chain of mountains which forms the spine of continental Southeast Asia and which pierces the southwest Pacific to fashion the many islands of Austronesia. This immense natural threshold between the Indian and Pacific Oceans contributed to the individuality of the Southeast Asian peoples, and also to the rise of India and China as two vastly different and independent civilizations. Thus a parallel can be drawn between land and people− Southeast Asia as a geographic region is brimming with grand diversity, and it has spawned cultures which, though different in their particulars, nevertheless share many fundamental traits. Southeast Asia's geography and topography, and its position relative to India and China, have been fundamental forces in the birth and history of its many civilizations.

Rivers, alternating with mountains or forests, are a primary motif in Southeast Asian geography and in Southeast Asian life. The Sanskrit and Pali words for 'continent' are dvipa and dipa respectively, which consists of dvi = two, and apa = water, thus forming the mental image of a landmass as something between two waters, whether seas or rivers.¹ One of the native Vietnamese terms for their country is Non nuóc, meaning 'mountain and water.'² Because the shapes and courses of rivers, mountains and islands determined the movement of Southeast Asia's people, a map of daily human life in the Southeast Asian mainland and Indonesian islands can be visualized as endless 'vertical' and 'horizontal' lines. For the peninsular and inland people, life was shared with rivers and their generally north-south movement, while the trans-island or coastal travel of the people of insular Southeast Asia was largely east-west. Whereas the islands have multiple river systems, the mainland is dependent upon major river arteries and their fertile plains. The ancient kingdoms of Pagan, Angkor, and Vietnam were all rooted in fertile rice plains (Irrawaddy River plain, Tônle Sap, and Red River basin, respectively). River systems were also, as we shall see, the arteries of political power, since the nature of Southeast Asia's topography made direct political control over distant populations difficult.

Differences in agriculture have also made their mark upon the map. Some of these differences result from adaptation to environment, such as the farming techniques which hill peoples employ to survive in the mountains of Laos, Thailand, and Burma. Others are largely cultural, producing topographical contrast within the same environment. The Vietnamese and Cambodian sides of the Mekong Delta are an example of this; the eastern side is almost entirely devoted to rice paddies producing two crops a year, while the western side is more varied and wild.

Origins and Influences

The dates, locations, and circumstances of the advent of various skills among the peoples of Southeast Asia have long been debated. It is generally agreed that the domestication of animals, rice cultivation, and pottery making were developed indigenously, and that early Southeast Asian islanders were advanced ship builders and navigators. Although Southeast Asian peoples possessed the ingredients for sophisticated civilizations from early times, urbanized societies did not become the Southeast Asian style until relatively recently.

The Bronze Age in Southeast Asia has been a contentious topic.³ Bronze metallurgy unearthed in the northeast of Thailand is thought to be among humankind's earliest, and some scholars propose that the earliest bronze working in the world occurred in Southeast Asia. Other researchers trace the beginnings of Southeast Asian metallurgy to the southward expansion of rice cultivation in the Yangtze Valley; the bronzework then was influenced by the region's growing importance in the trading networks of China, India, and the Roman Empire. Southeast Asian Civilization, as it so invariably did with all external influences, modified metallurgical technology to its own requirements.

These early mysteries aside, external influence in Southeast Asia came mostly by sea travelers via the coastal regions, because the eastern Himalayas, which form Southeast Asia's northern frontier, discouraged migration from the north and west. The geography of Southeast Asia also worked against any great consolidation of kingdoms or regions because of the ruggedness of its mountains, rivers, valleys, and rapids, and the vast expanse of ocean over which the various archipelagoes are scattered.

The geography of Southeast Asia insulated the evolving cultures of India and China from each other; at the same time, to varying degrees the civilizations of Southeast Asia borrowed from both, adapting and modifying Indian and Chinese ideas to suit their needs. Chinese influence was strongest in Vietnam, but did not extend to southern Indochina until the eighteenth century. Southern Indochina, comprising Champa and Cambodia, was culturally more similar to the rest of Southeast Asia.

The oft-discussed 'Indianization' of Southeast Asia, which, began as early as the first century A.D. was never a blind embracing of Indian values, but rather the evolution of Southeast Asian culture drawing from the experience and inspiration of Indian civilization. So interwoven were local and Indian beliefs that sociologists have often been at odds over whether a given tradition or god was indigenous, Indian or indigenous but with an Indian name or veneer. Outlying regions, most notably the Philippines, experienced little or no influence from India because of their sheer geographic distance.

Nor was Chinese culture embraced for its own sake; even the traditionally strong influence of China on Vietnam was more limited among common people than royal institutions. For example, while the Vietnamese people adopted the use of chopsticks from China and abandoned elevated houses, raised on posts, Vietnamese music borrowed the Chinese scale structure only within the court's doors. Indeed, the failure of the early elite of the Red River Delta to create a viable state was due in part to their reluctance to incorporate indigenous traditions into their Confucian ideology.⁴

Southeast Asia's history of shaping its own civilization from imported influence is evident in the tradition, recorded by a Chinese ambassador, K'ang T'ai, in the middle of the third century, of the founding of the first known Southeast Asian state, Funan (the name being a Chinese transliteration of the old Khmer bnam, modern phnom, which means 'mountain').⁵ Funan, centered along the Mekong River delta, was said to have been born from the union of a local ruler with a Brahman visitor. The foundation myth records that in the first century A.D., there was a people whose sovereign, a woman named Soma, was the daughter of the water spirit (naga), who lived on a mountain. One day a merchant ship arrived from a country which lay 'beyond the seas', carrying a man by the name of Kaundinya. After the man came into the woman's realm and symbolically 'drank water from the land', the two married. While the historical basis of the story will remain a mystery, the legend accurately records two of the most basic truths about the Southeast Asian psyche and Southeast Asian history: firstly, that water and mountains are a basic fabric of Southeast Asian life (the woman was the progeny of the ruler of the water realm, who lived on a mountain); and secondly, that Southeast Asian civilization, while remaining autonomous (she was the land's sovereign ruler), borrowed freely from external influences (the marriage with a foreigner), though always in its own way and on its own terms. In some versions of the story, Kaundinya was said to have been guided by a dream to board the merchant ship, and to have brought with him a magic bow taken from a temple. The naga's daughter was sometimes said to have attempted to raid the visiting ship, but failed. Kaundinya's 'drinking the water of the land' may have also symbolized his importing the technology for Funan's extensive irrigation systems.⁶

The mythology of the civilization that evolved in the north of what is now Vietnam tells a similar tale, acknowledging Vietnam's debt to Chinese civilization, while defying Chinese domination. The myth traces Vietnamese roots to the union of a Chinese woman and a hero, the 'Lac Lord Dragon'. Lac came from the sea to the Red River Plain of what is now northern Vietnam, rid the land of demons, and taught the people "to cultivate rice and to wear clothes."⁷ He departed, promising to return if he was needed. When a Chinese monarch came south and tried to subjugate the people, Lac was summoned. He kidnapped the invader's wife, whose name was Au Co, hid her atop a mountain overlooking the Red River, and the Chinese monarch, unable to find her, returned home in despair. A son was born to Au Co and Lac Long Quan,, thus beginning a new dynasty.

A story recorded in Chinese histories originating in the early seventh century records Indian influence by royal marriage in the kingdom of Langkasuka (Patani, southern Thailand). During a period of Langkasuka's decline, a virtuous man loved by the people but exiled by the king fled to India, where a king gave him his eldest daughter in marriage. When the king of Patani died, the exiled man, accompanied by his Indian wife, was welcomed home as the new sovereign.⁸

Fig. 4 The bow being held by this mythical viol player is an early example of a South or Southeast Asian invention being recorded on a European map. The bow reached Europe via the Islamic world and the Byzantine empire in about the tenth century. Although its ultimate Asian origins are not known, the 'spike fiddle' (Indonesian gending) was known in Java no later than the eighth century. From a map of the north Atlantic by Ortelius, 1570.

Fig. 5 Javanese musicians at the Banten market, Lodewyckszoon, 1598 (Theodore de Bry, 1599). Lodewyckszoon explains that the gongs are used "to sound the hours, and play their music... as well as to summon people in the king's name, which they did when we arrived, to announce that anyone could buy and sell with us." (14 x 17.5 cm)

Arts and Daily Life

Many generalizations about early Southeast Asian peoples have been made from contemporary accounts left by visitors and from the ethnographic evidence. Most people of Southeast Asia built their houses elevated on posts, whether it was to seek protection against floods, insulate themselves from predators, or to benefit from the body warmth of their livestock, which were stabled underneath during the cooler nights.⁹

Broad generalizations can be made regarding food. Rice was the fundamental ingredient upon which the Southeast Asian diet was based. Throughout most of Southeast Asia, rice was harvested with a finger-knife by women. Fish was a staple, with coastal and inland peoples trading their salt-water and river fish with each other for greater variety. Neither meat nor milk products were substantial parts of the Southeast Asian diet. Fondness for chewing betel nut, which required the areca nut itself, betel leaf, and lime, was universal in Southeast Asia, and remains so in many areas today.

The music, dance, theatre, and other arts of Southeast Asia are all part of one extended family. That song was a part of everyday life, with the common people singing during their daily tasks, was striking to Europeans. Francisco Alcina, visiting the Philippines in the seventeenth century, claimed that "rarely can a Visayan man or woman be found, unless he is sick, who ceases to sing except when he is asleep." Basic similarities between their musical instruments, the masks and puppets of their theatre and rituals, and in the body movements of their dance were noted, though there were marked regional distinctions in all of these, for example in the scale structure of their music. The gong-chime was common to all peoples of Southeast Asia; neolithic stone slabs, tuned to a seven note scale, have been unearthed in Vietnam, and bronze kettle-drums date back at least two millennia in Indonesia. Although throughout Southeast Asia scales were usually based on a five or seven note system, the actual tuning varied between ensembles, with groups accurately maintaining their own individual calibration as if it were their distinguishing signature.¹⁰ In Indonesia, a particular tuning could be considered rightful property and could not be used by other musicians.

Fig. 6 Javanese dancers, Lodewyckszoon, 1598 (Theodore de Bry, 1599). Lodewyckszoon described how the dancers gently swayed their bodies to the rhythm of the music, their arm and leg movements synchronized, the dancers never leaping in the air. The Europeans also noted dancers' subtle finger movements which are captured in the engraving. The man on the right accompanies them on a metal xylophone or demung. (14 x 17.5 cm)

Along with theatre, dance, and music, people's bodies were a medium of art, the splendor of which was an important aesthetic preoccupation. Up until the modern era, a person's hair was felt to be an integral part of his or her physical and spiritual self, and hair styles varied little between the sexes.

Such practical arts as pottery and textile production were at once fairly uniform throughout Southeast Asia in terms of the technologies employed, but individual in terms of specific artistic treatment. Both these viral industries seem to have been exclusively the domain of women and, as with early cultures nearly everywhere, are examples not of sexual inequality in the modern Western notion, but rather of a division of labor and responsibilities according to gender.¹¹

Gender

Early European observers did, in fact, remark on common traits regarding the relations between men and women in Southeast Asia and perceived gender roles and relationships−albeit often over simplified and sometimes even patronizing -have been a defining aspect of the region's image in the eyes of European observers.¹²

Southeast Asian daughters were generally welcomed into the world as happily as sons, and were for the most part more empowered than their European, Arab, or Asian sisters, enjoying a status which rivaled, if not directly equalled, that of men. Europeans were surprised to find that Southeast Asian women were assertive in seeking partners, openly enjoyed sex, and even expected men to endure considerable fuss to fulfill their sensual pleasures (most famously the practice, apparently unique to Southeast Asia, of men undergoing the painful implantation of metal or ivory balls into their genitals for the benefit of their partner). Men, rather than women, presented dowries to their fiancees' parents, and newlyweds commonly went to live with the wife's, rather than the husband's, family. Such generalizations even held for the common people of Vietnam, who are so often the exception to the rule in Southeast Asia.¹³

In about 750 A.D., a Mon princess named Jam Thewi became the first ruler of Lamphun (then Hariphunchai), which was the first literate, sophisticated kingdom of Lan Na civilization (in what is now northern Thailand). Tradition records that Jam Thewi was selected by a rishi (hermit); when the rishi founded Lamphun, he wanted its first ruler to be an offspring of the ruler of Lop Buri but was indifferent as to the person's gender.¹⁴ The civilization of Champa, in the centeral region of what is now Vietnam, was a matriarchal society. The major entrepot of Patani on the east coast of the Malayan Peninsula was under the sovereignty of successive queens for over a century (1584-1688), and Bugis kingdoms were often ruled by women, as was the important north Sumatran kingdom of Aceh.

Europeans also noted gender deference. The first Dutch expedition to Java (1596) reported that if the king of Ban ten sent a male messenger to request the presence of "any subject or stranger dwelling or being in his dominions," the person "may refuse to come; but if once he send a woman, he may not refuse nor make no excuse." When the Portuguese traveler Mendes Pinto was in Ban ten in 1540, a woman of nearly sixty years of age arrived on a diplomatic mission. According to Pinto, she was paid the highest honors, and it was "a very ancient custom among the rulers of these kingdoms, ever since they began, for matters of great importance requiring peace and harmony to be handled through women. " In the seventeenth century, Simon de La Loubère, a Frenchman resident in Siam, reported that "as to the King of Siam's Chamber, the true Officers thereof are Women, 'tis they only that have a Privilege of entering therein", and many Southeast Asian countries celebrated female war heroes in their histories.¹⁵

Many visitors commented on the authority of women in matters of trade. Chou Ta-Kuan, a Chinese envoy who visited Cambodia in the late thirteenth century, recorded that foreign men who set up residence in Angkor for the purpose of business would find themselves a native spouse as quickly as possible to assist in their commercial affairs. William Dampier, resident in Tongkin (Vietnam) in the late seventeenth century, noted that it was the women who managed the changing of money, and that marriage would establish an alliance between foreign merchants who returned annually and local women with whom they entrusted money and goods.

The Geography of Kingdoms and War

Whereas the modern nation-state is defined by its borders, the traditional Southeast Asian kingdom was defined by its center. This philosophy of geo-political space parallels the mandala, or 'contained core', a sacred schematic of the cosmos in Indian philosophy.¹⁶ The kingdom was the worldly mandala, defined by its central pivot, not its perimeter. By moving closer to the center of the mandala, that is, to the center of the kingdom, one moved closer to the sacred core, traditionally a central temple complex, where spiritual powers and the fertile earth joined. This central "temple mountain" was analogous to a sacred mountain believed to form the center of the world, Sumeru (or Meru), and thus the kingdom was, in effect, a miniature cosmos.

As in feudal Europe, a Southeast Asian kingdom was an array of imprecisely defined spheres of influence, typically consisting of the king's immediate territory, over which he had total control, followed by a succession of further and further removed regions from which he might exact tribute and over which he exerted varying degrees of authority. Beyond these would be outlying regions that had their own monarch but which were not entirely autonomous. These regions might be accountable to one or more larger kingdoms, being obliged to pay tribute and never to act in a manner contrary to the large kingdom's interests.

The further one traveled upriver or upcountry from the pivot-point of power, the more authority faded to various shades of leverage, cooperation, tribute, and influence. There were usually patches of light and dark in the shading; a small, peripheral kingdom might have a particular reason to partially submit to a more distant superpower, most commonly for the protection such an arrangement might offer the petty state against a closer, less benign, power. Insular Southeast Asia's heavily mountainous topography undermined the ability of lowland polities to control upriver regions even more than on the mainland. Perhaps as a result, early insular Southeast Asia was typified by a spread of societies which were roughly 'equal', while the mainland kingdoms tended to see dominant majorities ruling over minorities.

Rulers secured a gradually diminishing degree of hegemony and influence over the upland regions by controlling the lower reaches of river arteries (this was especially true in the case of insular Southeast Asia) or the rice-fertile lowland regions (more so in the mainland than among the islands). A map of the river was, in effect, a barometer of sovereignty. Historians have drawn clear parallels between the control of rivers and irrigation canals, and the rise of despotism in Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asian peoples retained this classical concept of political space until profound European influence on their internal affairs required them to abandon it in the nineteenth century. Sometime prior to this, a new, radical concept of political space and boundary had evolved in Europe in which nations were defined by their perimeter, kingdom x lying on one side of an authoritative imaginary line, kingdom y on the other. In this new geo-political mind-set, all areas of a kingdom were equally part of that kingdom; the final grain of dirt before the border was as much the property of its kingdom as was its center.

Whereas European eyes presumed that a country's possessions extended as far as its border with its neighboring country, in Southeast Asia there were usually spaces in-between, 'empty' land, which was not part of any kingdom and which sometimes served as a neutral buffer. And while the European boundary formed an invisible wall that was to be guarded lest anyone attempt to violate it, the Southeast Asian border was porous, and was not intended to keep people either 'in' or 'out'. Even a wall built in Vietnam in 1540 to separate rival factions of that country, like the Great Wall of China, was doubtfully perceived as demarcating a precise division of territory.

These differences in the concept of statehood confounded political understanding between Southeast Asian kingdoms and encroaching European powers. Since Thailand alone was never colonized, and therefore Thailand alone negotiated as a sovereign kingdom with the West, clashes of these opposing concepts of political geography are revealed best in nineteenth century British-Siamese relations.

In determining their own political geography, the people of Southeast Asian were, sadly, no different from the rest of mankind. Cultural differences certainly existed−the Hindu-Buddhist Pyus, who lived in the region of what is now Pro me (Burma) between the fourth and eighth centuries, appear to have created a truly pacifist society- but, in general, a map of the power struggles in early Southeast Asia would show an ever-changing kaleidoscope of kingdom pitted against kingdom, with fickle alliances of convenience, and the scars of warfare distributed equally among the many nations vying for possession or tribute. The situation was exacerbated by the swords of foreign nations, which altered the map both by outright conquest as well as by manipulating local rivalries between native kingdoms and their neighbors. Contemporary descriptions of local warfare could not be more horrific. So ghastly was inter-kingdom violence that one nineteenth-century British observer commented (though disingenuously) that it was "the absence of pity, which distinguishes the Oriental as opposed to the Occidental."¹⁷

Religion

Southeast Asian religions represented various combinations of animism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, with Islam reaching many coastal regions by the time the first Europeans arrived. The supplanting of indigenous animism and ancestor worship in Southeast Asia coincided with, and facilitated, the rise of larger social organizations and states. Hinduism, the dominant religion in Southeast Asia until roughly the twelfth century, spread through civilizations along the Gulf of Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam, and parts of indonesia beginning about the first century A.D., and gradually permeated inland. Ancient edifices in Java and Bali, the most extraordinary of which is Borobudur in central Java (ca. 800 A.D.), demonstrate how far east Indian influences reached. The beginning of Hinduism's decline coincided roughly with the completion of Angkor Wat in the first half of the twelfth century, being gradually supplanted by Buddhism.

The successive waves of religions that came to Southeast Asia never entirely replaced those which preceded them, but rather built layers of combined beliefs. Indigenous animism and ancestor worship can still be discerned throughout Southeast Asia, and elements of Hinduism are still easily visible in regions influenced by Indianization. Bali alone has remained a truly Hindu society, albeit one much modified and informed by Buddhist and local traditions.

Buddhism arrived in Southeast Asia hand-in-hand with Hinduism. Two branches of Buddhism prospered: the older Theravada (or Hinayana) Buddhism, known as the 'Way of the Elders' or 'Lesser Vehicle'; and Mahayana Buddhism, or 'Great Vehicle'. Mahayana Buddhism, which regarded trade more favorably than did Theravada Buddhism, was the first to reach Southeast Asia, brought by the Indian merchants who practiced it. The older Theravada school, however, became the predominate faith, coming later by way of Sri Lanka. Except for Malaysia and southern peninsular Thailand, which are predominantly Muslim, Buddhism is still followed by the overwhelming majority of people in mainland Southeast Asia. Al-Idrisi, a twelfth-century Sicilian geographer, gave an impression of religious life in Indonesia based on the reports of earlier travelers which had reached him:

The prince is called Jaba, he wears a chlamys and a tiara of gold, enriched with pearls and precious stones. The money is stamped with his portrait. He shows much respect to the Buddha. [The king's temple] is very beautiful and is covered externally with marble. Inside and all around Buddha, can be seen idols made of white marble, the head of each adorned with golden crowns. The prayers in these temples are accompanied by songs, which take place with much pomp and order. Young and beautiful girls execute dances and other pleasing games, before the people who pray or are in the temple.¹⁸

Islam took root in Southeast Asia through a combination of patience and adaptation. Though extensive Arab contact with Southeast Asia predated Islam itself, and though the Chams of Vietnam adopted Islam in the tenth century, it was not until the end of the thirteenth century−about the time Marco Polo skirted Southeast Asia en route back to Venice−that the faith came to be a major influence in Southeast Asia's coastal regions. It was at first Indian Sufi intermediaries, rather than the Arabs resident in Java and Sumatra, who initiated the acceptance of islam in the region, which occurred only after certain adjustments had been made in relation to existing cultural orientations. Once established, the spread of islam accelerated through marriages between the daughters of wealthy Indonesian merchants and Islamic Indian traders, combined with commercial policies which favored Muslims. Like Hinduism and Buddhism before it, Islam accommodated itself to indigenous Southeast Asian values rather than dictating them, and many aspects of indonesia's pre-Islamic culture, have survived intact to this day.

Christianity, the most recent arrival in Southeast Asia, has had little success on the mainland, even by the Church's own figures, which include token 'converts' in the faith's excellent schools. Even the French failed to convert Indochina to Christianity, or to displace indigenous language and culture, despite their profound and extended presence in the region.

Christianity's unique successes are found in the islands. The Portuguese established Catholicism in East Timor, just as the Spanish did in the central and northern Philippines. Many of the Filipinos combined their former beliefs with the new creed of the Europeans, a practice which the Spanish, who exacted a tax from the islanders to pay for the Church's proselytizing, tolerated.¹⁹ The animism of pre-Spanish central and northern Philippines, involving a deity called Bathala and spirits such as anitos and ninos, was eventually overshadowed, but not lost.

Conversions were possible in these regions because the indigenous societies had less centralized control, in contrast to those communities which had already embraced Islam. The Spanish, from the beginning, were aware of the distinction: in 152 1, Antonio Pigafetta, an observer on the Magellan expedition, wrote that they had burned down a 'pagan' Philippine village whose people had refused conversion, and that they had planted a wooden cross on its site, but that if these Filipinos had been 'Moors', Magellan would have "set up a column of stone... for the Moors are much harder to convert than the pagans."

While the failure of Christianity to dominate the map of insular Southeast Asia may be a result of the resolve of the Islamic faith, the tenacity of Buddhism on the mainland appears to have come from its unusual attitude toward religion. The faiths of conquerors and colonizers have after many centuries made only token inroads into these countries, yet these were the very societies that generally did not maintain their beliefs through force. Early European visitors to Southeast Asia frequently commented on the Buddhists' freedom from proselytizing, Mendes Pinto poetically observing that the king of Siam considered himself "master of men's bodies, not their souls." Rather than these people having been the easiest converts, it seems that freedom of choice and non-coercion have kept the religious map of mainland Southeast Asia in this respect unchanged since pre-modern times. Jacques de Bourges, a French missionary in Siam in 1662-63, already understood this paradox, noting that "it is this pernicious indifference [to religious value judgements] which stands as the greatest obstacle to their conversion." When a Siamese man was beaten by a Portuguese for laughing during a Christian ceremony, the king refused any sympathy to his subject, noting only that "he should not another time be so intolerant. " Our French observer wrote that he

sometimes enquired why the King of Siam made himself so lenient in permitting... so many religions, since it is a received maxim of the most esteemed politics [i.e., the French Court] that only one be permitted, for fear that, should they multiply, the diversity of beliefs would cause spiritual friction, and so lead to conflict.²⁰

Fig. 7 Quintessential features of the Southeast Asian landscape: the village of Pilar, on the road from Balanga to the Marivelles Mountains, Philippines. After a drawing by M.E.B. de la Touanne, from the voyage of Baron de Bougainville. Published in Paris, 1828. [From The Philippines in the 19th Century, Rudolf J.H. Lietz, Manila 1998. Courtesy of Elizabeth and Rudolf Lietz]

He was told that, to the contrary, Siam derives great benefit from the diversity of beliefs, both for the arts and commerce. Further, the Frenchman reported that

there is another reason for this conduct; this is the view which is held by the Siamese that all religions are good, which is why they show themselves hostile to none.

In Burma in 1710 Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish sea captain who passed much of his life in Southeast Asia, observed that the (Buddhist) monks of Pegu (Burma)

are so benevolent to mankind that they cherish all alike without distinction for the sake of religion. They hold all religions to be good that teach men to be good, and that the deities are pleased with variety of worship, but with none that is hurtful to men, because cruelty must be disagreeable to the nature of a deity: so being all agreed in that fundamental, they have but few polemics, and no persecutions, for they say that our minds are free agents, and ought neither to be forced nor fettered.

Until Siam expelled most foreigners in 1688, the freedom given Christian missionaries to roam the kingdom and preach to the people was in fact misinterpreted as meaning that the king himself was ready to embrace the new faith. The exception was Vietnam, which though officially tolerant did endure infamous incidents of anti-Christian violence in the seventeenth century. Later violence against missionaries in Vietnam contributed directly to France's pretext for intervention.

That Christian missionaries, having left behind a Europe which was tearing itself apart with petty religious rivalries, were routinely perplexed by intractable Buddhist patience is particularly salient in seventeenth-century Cambodia and Laos. The missionaries' message was received with a mixture of tolerance and indifference which was even more impenetrable than the forests they had braved to reach their intended converts. Such an attitude, as modern historians have often observed, afforded the West neither conversion nor martyrdom. The "zeal of the pious and learned missionaries," the French emissary Nicolas Gervaise lamented in Thailand in the late seventeenth century, had failed to negate "the errors that have tainted this people for so many centuries." In our own day, the pressures of totalitarian rule have happily likewise failed to substantially change the metaphysical map of Burma, Laos, and and other parts of Indochina.

Colonialism

Unlike the religious map of Southeast Asia, the political map of the region was most certainly shaped by foreign powers. Even Thailand, the sole country in all of Southeast Asia never to have known the colonial yoke, was profoundly influenced by the colonization of its neighbors. Early Southeast Asia was not divided into the major countries we know today, but consisted of numerous smaller kingdoms as in contemporary feudal Europe. But kingdoms which once fought amongst themselves were gradually consolidated according to the interests of their colonizers; the borders established during the colonial era are essentially those that exist today, having changed little even after the treaties drafted to repair the chaos of the Second World War.

The savvy of Thai monarchs has often been credited for their country's success in escaping colonialism and in keeping the forces of Emperor Hirohito 'at bay' during the Second World War. While this is a fair compliment, Thailand's unbroken independence was also the result of sheer geographic luck; as we shall see, the kingdom was spared in part because it buffered the competing claims of England and France in Burma and Indochina, and because the strange course of the mighty Mekong River, which in Europe's eyes defined Thailand's eastern boundary, was wildly misunderstood until the late nineteenth century.

Spanish conquest unified the Philippines as a single country, though the archipelago's many islands encompassed diverse peoples, traditions, and religions; the southern Philippines remain largely Muslim, as they were at the time of Spanish arrival four and a half centuries ago. The various peoples and cultures which today comprise the modern country of Indonesia were first placed under one helm as a corporate entity- for what we know as Indonesia was originally a creation of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company, or V.O.C.), not of Dutch colonialism per se. By the early twentieth century, Dutch colonial rule, which grew out of the V.O.C. administration, encompassed every one of the vast and varied shores stretching from Sumatra to western New Guinea, save for the little Portuguese colony in eastern Timor. Burma is composed of several long-rivalrous kingdoms that were joined together under the British Empire; large minorities to this day do not acknowledge the jurisdiction of Rangoon over their lives. The country of Laos was a French creation, concocted from several perry states caught between occupied Vietnam and independent Thailand. Malaysia was sewn together from various sultanates on the peninsular main-land and from the Bornean territories of the former Brooke Raj (Sarawak) and the North Borneo Company (Sabah). The colonial entrepot of Singapore became part of post-colonial Malaysia and was then reborn as the independent Republic of Singapore. In a sense, one might see the modern nation of Singapore as the descendent of the Srivijaya empire, which dominated maritime trade through the Singapore-Malacca Straits a millennium ago.

The modern country of Vietnam was also the progeny of colonialism. But, although the tragic war between North and South Vietnam is still fresh in the memory of many of us, bloody intra-Vietnamese conflict dates back to well before French occupation, and the history of Vietnam's divided map began far earlier than the temporary division established at the Geneva Convention of 1954. In fact, the precedent to split Vietnam dates back to 1540, when a wall separating the warring northern and southern regions of the country was constructed at about 17° north latitude by the Chinese. The Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II, and the Indochina Wars that followed, marked the transition of Southeast Asia out of the colonial era.

Continuing Change

The map of Southeast Asia remains challenged by internal influences. Separatist movements in the southern Philippines and in southern peninsular Thailand, in both cases drawn along religious lines, would like to transform the maps of those countries, while secular ideologies have altered the map in Indochina. The present rulers of Burma have abandoned their country's 'colonialist' name in favor of Myanmar, though many people continue to use the older name because the use of 'Myanmar' could be construed as a legitimization of their power (the acknowledgment of sovereignty is, of course, one of the oldest functions of maps and their nomenclature). The island of Timor in Indonesia, which a century ago was split in half to settle competing Dutch and Portuguese claims, finds its niche on the map still being contested. Although western (Dutch) Timor has been part of the country of Indonesia since 1950, East Timor remained a Portuguese colony until 1975, when it was annexed by Jakarta. In 1999, however, economic pressures made Jakarta reconsider whether sovereignty for East Timor might be in Indonesia's interest. On the high periphery of Southeast Asia, China has forcefully asserted its long-standing claims to sovereignty over Tibet. The Paracels, seemingly inconsequential islands which pierce the vast South China Sea to the delight of air travelers with window seats, were seized by China in 1974 at the close of the Vietnam War. As the harvesting, mining, and drilling of the seas becomes as important as that of the land, possession of the Paracels threatens to become a destabilizing issue in the region.

Social and environmental upheavals are also changing the map of Southeast Asia. A dramatic redistribution of traditionally rural societies to urban areas has created mega-cities unprepared to support their people. Poor rural folk learn via modern means of communication and the media that cities, despite their often overwhelming poverty, are also zones of hope and change. This is being exacerbated by radical changes to the topography: the reckless deforestation of vast regions has rendered many local environments unable to sustain their communities. A case in point of this syndrome is the Isaan (northeast) region of Thailand, where land clearance policies enacted decades ago to expand the agricultural frontier, as well as the teak trade, have laid to ruin the forests which since time immemorial had moderated the extremes of the natural dry and rainy seasons. Severe drought, alternating with ruinous floods, is now the norm, leading many of the traditionally poor people of the northeast and other regions to try their luck in the cities, despite the difficulties of finding work and accomodation among the swelling ranks of the country's urban poor.

Some efforts are being made to better distribute population and resources. In a policy reminiscent of the homestead laws enacted in the United States in the 1860s, the government of Indonesia has offered people of Java and Bali a plot of land in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) or Irian Jaya (western New Guinea), complete with a one-way plane ticket and a year's supply of rice. Although this policy of transmigration (as it has come to be known) is done at the expense of further cutting of the rain forest and the cultural isolation of the volunteers, it nonetheless has succeeded in offering a new beginning for many families disenfranchised by the rapid changes of the past few decades. If this redistribution of people is successful, future maps may show much of New Guinea as ethnically Malay. But, for the moment, Irian Jaya is an example of the sometimes awkward incongruity between the political and physical map of Southeast Asia, for many of western New Guinea's indigenous people are only casually aware that their home lies on the map of Indonesia.