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Chapter 2

Southeast Asian Maps and

Geographic Thought

Moreover, they [the Thais] submitted a map of their own country.

Ming Annals recording Thai ambassadors in China, 1375.

In order to examine early indigenous Southeast Asian maps, we first need to ask: What is a map? We will use a fairly broad definition: a map is a spatial representation of a place, thing, or concept, actual or imagined. Note that the subject of the map is not restricted. A map can chart the path to a neighboring village, to a successful endeavor or a fortuitous event, or even to the next life; it can illuminate the relationship between various levels of existence or consciousness, or between a previous or future age of the earth. Whether a monk charting the metaphysical, a king illustrating the divine link he shares with the gods, or an ordinary person inspired to scratch out a plan of her paddy in the moist earth for the sheer pleasure of doing so, our definition lays down no parameters for the medium used; a map need not even be of a material nature.

Indian Influence

Until the arrival of Islam, Southeast Asian ideas of man's place on earth were very much influenced by cosmological considerations that ultimately came from India. These external influences, which were themselves the result of a co-mingling of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain beliefs, conceived the earth as a small part of a vast cosmos, according it a far less central role in Creation than in Christian doctrine. The desire to understand the cosmos was a natural concern since it was simply an extension of knowledge about one's own immediate environment. The nature of the cosmos became even more significant when Buddhism took hold in Southeast Asia, and 'other-worldliness' began to play an increasingly important part in formalized cultural practices. The Buddhist concept of release from the cycle of birth and death, for example, rested on a far-encompassing view of the cosmos.

Jain thought stressed a spatial boundlessness in which the universe contained both known and unknown universes.²² Hindu traditions stressed the infiniteness of time, illustrated by the concept of mahakal, the 'time which lies beyond knowable time', while space was often bounded to reflect the spheres of influence (kshetra) of various manifestations of the Hindu concept of god. For followers of the faith, the concept of boundlessness imparted a sense of profound wonder and humility; it may also, on occasion, have assisted those responsible for preserving and propagating the faith to explain such problematic logistical questions as the whereabouts of gods and deceased souls.

Early Indian instructional texts, compiled over a period of several hundred years and known as the Purana, were principally devoted to the mysteries of the creation of the universe, rather than the genesis of humankind on earth. This less mortal-centric perspective probably contributed to a greater emphasis on metaphysical mapmaking in early Southeast Asia than in the West, where a philosophically-engendered geography, as epitomized by 'T-O' maps or Terra Australis, used the earth rather than the cosmos as its vehicle.

Indian and Southeast Asian thought regarding the actual Genesis was typical of what appears to have been a nearly universal concept. As with the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions which came later to Southeast Asia, Indian cosmogony envisioned the Creation as beginning with a formless seed material; the allegory of an egg, with its yolk surrounded by amorphous embryonic fluid, was a common and natural expression of this thought. This primordial matter gradually assumed the anatomy of the universe (or universes) through the combination of elemental materials formed in the first stage, as well as through the intervention of various agents and natural laws. Eventually, the original fertile substance became articulated with the stars, planets, and all other components of Creation.

In the pre-modern era, such a cosmography, with regional variations and nuances, was accepted both in Asia and in the West. In the West, it gradually lost favor when empirical resting and scientific methods became a new gauge of truth, but in Southeast Asia it remained until the pervasive Western influence of the latter nineteenth century. If the importation of Indian beliefs into Southeast Asia began as a means of legitimizing an Indian-style political system, then Indian influence may have to some extent dampened empirical cartography in Southeast Asia.

Indian-derived Southeast Asian thought envisioned a large cosmos with many universes. Earth and its universe was pivoted on Mount Sumeru, an axis-mountain of fabulous proportions in the Tibetan Himalayas or Central Asia, which we will see more of when we look at Southeast Asian cosmological maps. Water, mountains, and continents grew from this mountain-axis; the continents were arranged symmetrically like the petals of a lotus blossom, or as concentric circles of alternating seas and continents. The inhabited earth, called Jambudvipa, lay at the centre of this scheme of things, or otherwise constituted the southern 'petal', and contained the Bharatvarsha, which was the traditional territorial reach of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cultures. In the nearest sea, called 'Salt Ocean' (Lavansagara), there was a continent, Angadvipa (dvipa ='land with water on two sides, or continent'), which may have represented Malaya, and Yamadvipa, which may have been Sumatra. Another 'continent' which is frequently cited in popular Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain writings is Suvarnadvipa, identified with Indochina, Sumatra, or Southeast Asia in general. In one Thai world view which evolved from this imagery, the earth was a Rat surface divided into four continents separated by unnavigable seas, the whole of which was encompassed by a high wall on which all the secrets of Nature were engraved; holy men agilely transported themselves to these walls to learn from its inscriptions.²³

Fig. 8 Borobudur, from Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of java (1817); the cosmic mountain axis, architecturally realised in stone.

The sense of humility imparted by concepts of temporal and/or spatial boundlessness nurtured a relatively equitable view of the worth of outside realms. This extended fully from other universes and other worlds, to foreign territories and cultures. In fact, as one moves outward from the jambudvipa [Indianized sphere] of Indian/Southeast Asian cosmology, the various terrae incognitae one encounters are not forbidding, but rather become progressively more sublime and idealized (though never reaching the status of the various heavens, which lie vertically 'above'). As a result, the Southeast Asian perspective of other peoples, and even bloody Southeast Asian conquest, were rarely characterized by the chauvinism of the 'Middle Kingdom' notions of the Han Chinese, or of the West's propensity for dividing the world into 'civilized' and 'savage' nations.

Earth and Geography

Throughout pre-modern Southeast Asia, the earth was presumed to be flat. In most regions this belief did not begin to fade until well into the nineteenth century, and in rural areas it could still be found even into the early twentieth century. Acceptance of the earth's sphericity had to overcome religious objections, since Buddhist scriptures contained readily-perceived contradictions to a spherical world that needed to be interpreted anew before the flat earth model could be respectfully discarded. A somewhat ironic parallel might be drawn with Medieval writers in the West who used the Bible to debunk the established Greco-Roman view of a spherical earth, although the Rat earth was a minority belief in medieval Europe. Both Christianity and Buddhism rationalized discrepancies between canon and science in similar ways: the scriptures were meant to be taken literally only when it came to matters of spiritual truth; details of natural science are revealed figuratively and allegorically. Perhaps Buddha knew that the people to whom he preached were not yet capable of understanding such fantastic notions as a spherical earth, so it was better that he left such spiritually irrelevant matters aside. To address them would only have distracted his followers from more important metaphysical truths.

The mechanical workings of the universe were rationally envisioned within the context of a flat earth. A representative Thai cosmographical text, the Traiphum, described a path between two mountain ranges through which the stars, planets, moon and sun pass "in an orderly fashion", thereby facilitating the calibration of time and the growth of astrological knowledge. In the words of the Traiphum, the celestial objects' flight through the valley "enables us to know the years and the months, the days and the nights, and to know the events, good and bad." This approach to explaining the mechanics of the universe is analogous to a medieval European concept of a mountain which facilitated night and day by forming a partition behind which the sun and moon disappear in the course of their travel.²⁴

Fig. 9 Northern Thai map combining an itinerary relating to religious sites in India with cosmological concepts. (No date, but probably a twentieth century copy of earlier maps). [Courtesy of Cornell University Library]

Indigenous Southeast Asian thought imparted a consciousness of one's physical orientation on earth and in the universe, as regards the cardinal directions, as well as such semi-metaphysical concepts as earth and sky, inside and outside (one's abode), upstream (or upmountain) and downstream (or downmountain), or towards and away from the center of one's kingdom or territory. Later, Indian cosmological precepts were readily assimilated by Southeast Asian peoples, Sumeru becoming the anchor of the cardinal directions and the mandala symbolizing the kingdom and its center. As with other Asian civilizations, such concepts were often paralleled with male and female attributes.

For the typical peasant working the fields and harvesting the rivers, the 'world' probably amounted to such immediate concerns as the itinerary from home to field to market- as indeed it still does. The larger view was a more abstract, cosmological and spiritual matter. In this respect, the ordinary Southeast Asian was again, not so very different from his or her European contemporary. Mariners sailing on the open seas, boatmen shuttling up and down a river route, and hill people collecting produce for a central market, all perceived quite a different 'map' of the world. Those societies which were situated on major commercial arteries− for example the cosmopolitan Srivijaya kingdom which dominated trade through the Malacca Strait and along the coasts of Sumatra and Java from about 800-1300 A.D.− were most likely to have a more sophisticated understanding of the world. At a later date, those regions which accepted Islam might have inherited the Arabic cosmographical tradition, and by the seventeenth century some Islamic courts-notably Makassar- had already solicited and zealously studied European geographical texts and other scientific works. Conversely, other hand island civilizations, such as the Balinese, preserved a very introspective world view.

Extant Buddhist literature from Lan Na illustrates how the world view of peoples of the inland regions was geographically narrow. The authors of these records were primarily interested in the events of their own region, their own village, and their own monastery. Distant places entered into the archives only when specifically relevant to an event at home, for example if the inspiration for the founding of a local school or temple originated elsewhere. Lan Na records- the oldest of which are Mon inscriptions on stone dating from the early 1200s- do not record the history of the local Lawa people, nor any neighboring Burmese kingdom, nor China, nor the Thai kingdoms of Sukhothai or, later, Ayuthaya.²⁵ On the other hand, Wat Jet Yot, the temple of the seven spires in Chiang Mai, symbolically maps seven places in distant India, because these locations are holy sites that relate directly to the life of Buddha and Buddhist doctrines. Similarly, a map from Lan Na (fig. 9) shows the temple of Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment (represented here by a temple within a box, with several roads branching out from it) and the location of other important Buddhist sites in relation to it. It is both a cosmography and an itinerary rolled into one, with distances marked in either travel time or linear measurements.

In early Southeast Asia, there was no absolute distinction between the physical, the metaphysical, and the religious; although something might be either predominantly sacred or predominantly profane, essentially abstract or primarily physical, such concepts blurred together at the edges. Southeast Asian geographic thought, like Southeast Asian life, could be at once, both empirical and transcendental. However, as in the case of other seemingly exotic characteristics of pre-modern Southeast Asian cosmographic thought, this oneness of the mundane and the fantastic was typical, not extraordinary, in the medieval world.

Astrology, along with its necessary ingredients, astronomy and mathematics, flourished in ancient Southeast Asia, just as it did in Europe. In turn, the study of mathematics and astrology connected with celestial and cosmographic ideas. For example, in parts of Southeast Asia, the numbers four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two were considered to be attributes of Sumeru and thus to have special meaning (the sequence of numbers corresponds to increasing powers of two, and to the numbers 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, and 100,000 in a binary system). This idea is developed, for example, in the Thai map in figure 14, which depicts sixteen heavens.

Cosmological and mathematical geography had repercussions in the actual political geography of some kingdoms: in the Malay courts of Kedah and Pahang there were four great chiefs, eight major chiefs, and sixteen minor chiefs; Perak and Malacca once added thirty-two territorial chiefs. During the enthronement ceremonies in Cambodia and Thailand, the new king was surrounded by eight Brahmans, representing the Lokapalas (world protectors in Hindu mythology) guarding the eight points of the Brahman cosmos. In ninth-century Java, the kingdom of Hi-Ling was ruled by thirty-two high officials.²⁶

Allegories were naturally well-suited to many Southeast Asian cosmographies. The people of volcanically active islands of Banda, for example, believed their archipelago to lie on the horns of a great ox, which caused earthquakes when shaking its head. Bali was said to lie on the back of a turtle, Bedawang, who floated on the ocean.²⁷ In seventeenth-century Mataram (Java), troops were sometimes envisioned as being arranged in the form of a crayfish.²⁸

Although Western mapmaking philosophies have now largely supplanted native cartographical traditions, it would be misleading to see the history of Southeast Asian cartography as a gradual incorporation of European values. The modern Western ethic of mapmaking- namely that maps should present geographic data in the most 'accurate', clear and analytical fashion possible- was not the principal aim of Southeast Asian cartographers, just as it was doubtfully a major concern of medieval mapmakers in Europe.

That the assimilation of Western mapmaking and cosmography was not an even process is colorfully illustrated in mid-nineteenth century Siam. Western cosmological principles were by that time already accepted by some members of the Siamese court, yet local mapmakers within its doors evidently felt no need to 'look' Western. Excerpts from an account by Frederick Neale, an Englishman who visited Siam in the 1840s and who was shown a map by the king paint a vivid image of this. The visitor, who found the court to be eclectic and even surreal in its taste, was brought to the palace by a "gorgeously gilded state canoe," and then carried on the boatmen's shoulders to dry land, where he found the palace's courtyard "filled with a strange conglomeration of beautiful Italian statues... and of uncouth and unseemly figures of Siamese deities and many-armed gods." Once within the king's chambers, a "self-performing little organ" played music of Mozart as a curtain slowly drew aside to reveal "the corpulent and half-naked body of the mighty and despotic king of Siam."

The king, to illustrate a territorial dispute with Burma, produced "a chart of the two kingdoms which had been drawn by his prime minister. " As the canvas map was carefully unrolled on the floor in front of the visitors, the king studied the their faces

as though he expected that the brilliance of the painting, and the exquisite display of Siamese geographical talent, would have caused us to faint away on the spot, or to go into rapturous fits of delight.

Instead, they thought it such gibberish that they were

very nearly outraging all propriety by bursting into fits of laughter, and very painful was the curb we were obliged to wear to constrain our merriment.

The map (see fig. 10), indeed, was hardly a 'map' in their eyes:

[It] was about three feet by two; in the center was a patch of red, about eighteen inches long by ten broad; above it was a parch of green, about ten inches long by three wide. On the whole space occupied by the red was pasted a singular looking figure [the Siamese king], cut out of silver paper, with a pitch-fork in one hand and an orange in the other; there was a crown on the head, and spurs on the heels... His Majesty [explained that] such portion of the chart as was painted red indicated the Siamese possessions, whereas the green signified the Burmese territory.

Within the Burmese domain, an ill-formed black figure represented Tharawaddy, the Burmese king, and many disoriented small figures represented his subjects, the whole symbolizing

what a troubled and disturbed state the Burmese empire was, and what an insignificant personage, in his own dominions, was the Burman King.

Although the European observer mocked the map for its geographic worthlessness, he also understood that its actual purpose was to 'chart' the relative virtue and strength of the Siamese and Burmese sovereigns. This was a map of kingly omnipotence and kingdomly integrity, a propaganda map, with no intended value to a traveler.

Travel, Trade and Statehood

Travel, trade, and statehood promote geographic concepts and are natural precursors to mapmaking. While it is true that the common folk of Southeast Asia stayed, for the most part, within their villages, travel far from home figured naturally in the collective psyche of most societies. A youth might wander about for a few years in search of adventure and profit, and then, having gained at least a patina of glamour, if not riches, return to his natal village. Buddhists and Muslims alike undertook religious pilgrimages and sought teachers of their faith; in the case of Buddhism, the respectability of a life of travel was perhaps set by the religion's foundations, for the life of Buddha was itself largely a series of wanderings. Other traditional (if less respectable) travelers common in Southeast Asia were the troubadours and actors, who led a nomadic existence, meandering from one village to the next. Chinese texts, for example, record a group of Funanese musicians whose sojourn in China resulted in the establishment of a music institute near Nanking.

Fig. 10 Caricature of a Thai map of Thailand and Burma, Frederick Neale, Narratives of a Residence at the Capital of the Kingdom of Siam, 1852. (7.9 x 5.7 cm)

Southeast Asia developed sophisticated internal trading patterns, and throughout the seventeenth century- with perhaps the exception of Vietnam's forever awkward relationship with China-these commercial relationships remained more significant than outside influences. Those who were actively involved in trade, needed to be able to repeat each leg of their commercial circuit with confidence, and the images they developed of their itineraries influenced their view of the physical world.

Although the typical Southeast Asian village might be self-sufficient in its production of the all-important staple, rice, other commodities were typically traded up and down river. In many parts of Southeast Asia today, one can still see people from the mountains walking down to the rural markets to sell their modest pickings of odd mushrooms, spices, and other local exotica not found closer to the villages. In earlier times, such trade was an integral part of daily life. Commodities such as the dried fish, fish sauce, and lime produced in the lowlands would be traded for the highlanders' woods, bamboo, herbs, and perhaps lacquer. Most products that were traded across river or mountain did not travel great distances.

Salt was the exception. Of essential commodities in early Southeast Asia, only salt was not obtainable by most people via simple trading channels. Acquired from large pans built at appropriate sites along the coast, salt might typically be part of several trading routes before finally reaching villages far upland. In terms of the complexity and the length of its route from source to final recipient, this most-traveled of essential commodities was surpassed only by prestige goods like Chinese ceramics and other luxuries items.

Commercial intercourse in Southeast Asia received a boost in the first century when the newer Mahayana school of Buddhism, which looked more kindly upon trade than did either Hinduism or the older Theravada Buddhism, eased existing spiritual constraints in India and, in turn, promoted Indian commerce with Southeast Asia. At the same time, larger trading patterns were developing within Southeast Asia following the emergence of major states like Ayuthaya, which started exporting rice to Malacca in the fifteenth century. Southeast Asia also began to develop trade routes which facilitated commerce with India and China. In this instance the people of the region acted as trans-shippers rather than consumers, with Chinese texts recording Malay ships arriving at Chinese ports in the early centuries of the Christian era.

The trade route between Southeast Asia and India was serviced by Indian or Southeast Asian mariners, or a network of the two. Historians had traditionally assigned this role exclusively to Indian vessels, arguing that Southeast Asian peoples were not yet capable of such a voyage. However, scholars have more recently noted that any vessel and pilot capable of reaching Africa from Southeast Asia- as those of Sumatra and Java had done since the first century A.D. -could surely have reached India as well. Malay pilots learned to ride the monsoons, and Malay shipbuilders probably pioneered the balance-lug sail, which were square, pivoting sails set in the front and back of the ship that allowed pilots to sail into the wind by 'tacking'. The technology is related to (and may be the ancestor of) the triangular-shaped lateen sail of the Arab dhow, and was in turn borrowed by the Portuguese and Spanish in the design of the caravel.

Migration involved even longer voyages on the open ocean than did trade, and is a recurring motif in Southeast Asian history. During past millennia, groups of various Southeast Asian peoples island-hopped their way east into the unknown ocean sea, settling the various Pacific island archipelagos. Some of these emigrants developed their own cartographic tradition, such as the Marshall Islanders, whose 'stick charts' assisted in navigating the open ocean, or in the instruction of such navigational techniques.

Earlier Southeast Asian seafarers had headed west and south. Roughly two thousand years ago, when European sailors still confined themselves to making coastal passages that kept them within sight of land, Indonesian pilots mastered the long open-ocean voyage to Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope. Unlike the Southeast Asian settlers of Micronesia and Polynesia, these voyages were commonly made as a round trip. The Indonesian seafarers who settled Madagascar, kept the route between the two distant lands active until the fifteenth century.

Glimpses of craft that Javanese or Sumatrans might have used in the eighth or ninth century have been preserved in stone relief on the magnificent ruins of the 'temple mountain' of Borobudur (see fig. 11), built by the Sailendras of Sumatra. Of the many hundreds of scenes carved on its walls, there are several depicting sophisticated ocean-going vessels with balance-lug sails.

The kingdom of Funan, established on the Mekong River delta by about the first century A.D., is usually regarded as the first known state of Southeast Asia, though the only definite written record of it is from fragments of an account by two Chinese envoys in the third century.²⁹ The economic success of Funan was largely a result of its strategic location between points east and west, since it was in an ideal position to service merchants and pilgrims who traversed the Isthmus of Kra, or shuttled between India and China by sailing around the Malay Peninsula. Archaeological finds excavated at the Funan port of Oc-eo, which include Roman and Indian artifacts believed to date from the second and third centuries, indicate that it was a bustling center of maritime trade.³⁰

A monarch used maps to record his conquests and to impress upon his people the extent of his sovereignty, to record the lands under his jurisdiction for the levying of taxes from his subjects, and to facilitate the creation of roads and irrigation systems. Two thousand years ago- about the same time that Indonesian people pioneered the voyage to Madagascar and Funan was founded in what is now southern Vietnam- the people of Banaue in northern Luzon constructed monumental rice terraces which have remained largely intact to this day. These stone structures formed vast terraces rising nearly a mile from valley floor to mountaintop. A jewel of ingenuity and engineering, the design created artificial waterfalls, which gently irrigated the terraced crops below. Although the rice terraces in Luzon are the most spectacular of early irrigation systems, sophisticated irrigation complexes with rice-terracing are known throughout Southeast Asia. Funan, and the Cambodian kingdom of Angkor which followed it in southern Indochina, were both highly dependent on their extensive irrigation systems.

War was another situation that provided an incentive for creating maps. An early Western allusion to this kind of map-making comes from Mendes Pinto, who wrote of the queen of Prome (Burma) and her council "mapping out the way in which they were to proceed" with organizing a defense of their city.

Siam boasted about the many neighboring kingdoms over which it claimed suzerainty, and from which it exacted tribute. It was a literate society whose monarch was so attuned to the written word that Nicholas Gervaise, a priest resident in Ayuthaya from 1683-87, wrote that "there is no employment in the royal palace more exhausting than that of the reader" to the king. Although Chinese texts record Siamese geographic mapmaking by the year 1373, three centuries later, when Gervaise wrote of the Siamese king's "eight or ten warehouses, among several others, that are of unimaginable wealth," he made no reference to maps, but simply stated that "it is impossible to say how many precious, rare, and curious things" are in these warehouses.

Simon de La Loubère, who followed Gervaise in Ayuthaya (1687-88), specifically stated that he never saw a Thai map, yet he left us a tantalizing hint of a Thai geographic item of some sort. He wrote that he had hoped to secure a Siamese map of the kingdom, but had to settle for one done by a French engineer, M. de Ia Mare, "who went up the Menam [Chao Phraya), the Principal River of the Country, to the Frontiers of the Kingdom" (see fig. 128). But since La Loubère believed this map to be inadequate, he had Jean Dominique Cassini, the director of the observatory at the Academie Royale in Paris, "correct it by some Memorials which were given to me at Siam [Ayuthaya]." What were these 'memorials' given to him which helped improve his map of the kingdom? Apparently, they were geographic items of some sort- yet nothing which in his mind befitted the definition of 'map'. La Loubère did, however, offer an insight into Thai cosmography, having studied and recorded the "rules of the Siamese Astronomy, for calculating the Motions of the Sun and Moon."

Writings loosely attributed to Kosa Pan, a Thai emissary who traveled to France in 1686, reveal a conscious interest in maps.³¹ In these memoirs, Kosa Pan matter-of-factly requests plans of Chambord Castle and "the great temple Notre Dame". At the Siamese embassy's audience at Versailles, Ambassador Pan "made no secret that our most desired objects were maps of the country, plans of palaces and fortresses [and military images]." A contemporary account of Kosa Pan's visit to France contained in the Mercure Galant supports the spirit of these quotations. Independent confirmation of his keen interest in maps and the fact that he did indeed obtain various examples from European sources came four years later, in 1690, when Engelbert Kaempfer visited the ambassador, who was now 'High Chancellor' in charge of foreign affairs, at his home in Ayuthaya. Hanging in "the hall of his house," wrote Kaempfer, were only "pictures of the royal family of France, and European Maps.

Fig. 11 This stone relief is one among many depicting native, ocean-going vessels on the walls of the great temple complex of Borobudur in Central Java, built ca. 800 (see fig. 8). Borobudur was first brought to light in 1814 by Thomas Raffles, who ordered the ruin be cleared of under-growth and thoroughly surveyed. [Photograph by Richard Casten, 1994]

The Thai poet Sunthorn Bhoo (1786-1855) speaks of maps quite naturally, writing in a work of fiction that a "ship went out of the way and drifted to an unknown place where nobody could tell where the spot was located on any map."³²

Extant Southeast Asian Maps

The corpus of extant early maps from Southeast Asia is limited to a relatively small number of geographic and non-geographic maps dating from the past few hundred years, and cosmographic edifices dating as early as the seventh century. Although traces of the missing history of geographic maps can be filled in from references to early Javanese, Vietnamese, and Thai maps in Vietnamese and Chinese chronicles, and from the records of early European explorers, most of Southeast Asia's earlier cartographic history remains mysterious.

Some clues to the very beginnings of humankind's mapmaking have been found in the durable medium of rock, but although proto-cartographic motifs in the form of rock art, or petroglyphs, are extant in neighboring India and China, as well as in Europe, no such record is known in Southeast Asia. Several rock art sites of an uncertain date have been discovered in the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, Flores, and Timor, but none are known to contain any cartographic elements.³³ Nor do we learn more by moving forward thousands of years to consult ancient texts. Although there are an abundance of geographic and cosmographic descriptions in many old Hindu and Buddhist texts, oddly enough there is no known reference to a 'map' per se, or at least not to what we can now discern as such. The earliest extant textual records of Southeast Asian geographic maps are found in Chinese texts of the fourteenth century (recording a Javanese map of 1293) and fifteenth century (recording a Thai map of 1373). The Europeans who began scouting Southeast Asia at the turn of the sixteenth century were map-conscious explorers; yet even their record of Southeast Asian maps is frustratingly scant and inconsistent.

Cosmologically-oriented stone structures survive in Cambodia, but no geographic maps. In the middle of the third century A.D., Funan, which was the most important state in southern Indochina before the rise of the Khmer empire, was visited by envoys of the Wu dynasty of China. The Chinese ambassadors described Funan as a place where the people "live in walled cities, palaces, and houses" and have "books and depositories of archives and other things".³⁴ We do not learn, however, whether or not the 'other things' in their archives might have included maps.

A thousand years later, in 1296-97, the Chinese ambassador Chou Ta-Kuan carefully described many facets of Angkor and Khmer culture, but never mentioned maps. He did, however, provide definite measurements regarding various features of the city, which covered an area of about one hundred square kilometers, making it one of the largest cities in the world at that time. Chou also speaks of astronomers in Cambodia, though does not specifically mention the charting of celestial objects.

"In this country," writes Chou, "there is a hierarchy of ministers, generals, astronomers, and other functionaries"; other passages in his chronicle describe the prediction of eclipses as being among the astronomers' duties. Indeed, some modern researchers have theorized that the making of astronomical observations was part of the purpose of the great temple of Angkor War. The building of Angkor War in itself might reasonably have involved maps or plans; the height and direction of the edifice's walls, which cover substantial distances, deviate from a theoretically straight line in height and direction by less than one-tenth of one percent. Evidence of the careful recording of the positions of celestial objects has also been noted in Pagan.³⁵

Many of the undertakings which modern sensibilities would associate with the making of maps, were accomplished by Southeast Asian peoples without leaving any evidence of mapmaking. There is no indication that charts of any type were made by early Indonesian sailors to assist their monumental voyages. Nor do the Funanese, who must surely have been well-aware of the importance of their pivotal location for trade between the China Sea and Indian Ocean, seem to have created any kind of graphic representation of their land-in-the-crossroads. Nor are there any known plans for any of the ancient irrigation systems or temple complexes of Southeast Asia.

The absence of any evidence of Philippine mapmaking, or even any clear mention of them by early visitors, is perhaps the greatest enigma. There is nothing to show that maps played any role in the bustling intercourse that had developed between the many islands of the Philippines, even though entrepreneurs from Luzon were adventurous enough to have established a trading colony in Malaya before the Portuguese burst on the scene at the turn of the sixteenth century (see page 138). When Thomas Cavendish returned to England in 1588 he brought a map that he had acquired in the Philippines, but it was of Chinese, not Southeast Asian, origin. In the mid-eighteenth century Alexander Dalrymple, the first head of the British Hydrographic Office, reported that a servant from Luzon had given him a map whose bearings generally agreed with Dalrymple's own, but we do not know whether this 'indigenous' map was ultimately based on Filipino or Spanish information.

Whether this silence represents the lack of any substantial geographic tradition in these regions, or simply the failure of local maps to survive the centuries, is disputed. None of the spatial imaging involved with travel, construction, the levying of taxes, or other endeavors necessarily required the making of maps. Various classes of people ranging from nomads to pilgrims to traders and caravaners, routinely traveled confidently without maps. Experience taught the traveler the nature of a route and its itinerary.

Printing, Binding, and the Survival of Early Maps

Indigenous Southeast Asian maps were not, as far as is known, reproduced via printing methods. To put this into perspective, we can note that all but a minute fraction of the impressively large inventory of extant early European maps owe their survival to their mass-production by woodblock or copperplate, which began in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and (to a much lesser extent) to the establishment of chart-producing houses, which made multiple manuscript copies of a given map. Nor did Southeast Asian peoples bind their maps into atlases or other book forms, save for certain, Chinese-influenced, Vietnamese works, and the Traiphum and other cosmographic or itinerary-related manuscripts from Thailand. A comparison of extant copies of European maps bound into books as compared to maps produced in similar numbers but sold as loose sheets will demonstrate the enormous effect this has on survival rate. If we were to subtract from the surviving corpus of European maps, those reproduced by printing or by chart-copying houses, and those preserved in books, then the history of European mapmaking would hardly be less mysterious than that of Southeast Asia.

Other factors also limited the chance of a document's survival to our time. In the first place, the climate in most parts of Southeast Asia promotes the decay of organic materials. Vast archives were also lost in war; most famously, the Burmese sacking of Ayuthaya in 1.767 is said to have destroyed most contemporary Thai records. The people themselves may have been unconcerned about preserving such documents for the distant future, seeing them simply as temporary creations- the most extreme example of this is in Tibet, where cosmographic mandalas are painstakingly created from powdered sand only to be swept away after brief ceremonial use, symbolizing the Buddhist concept of the impermanence of life. Lastly, they may have been deliberately destroyed there is speculation that Siamese authorities may have periodically purged their archives of older materials which were no longer current. This practice, known as chamra, may have become especially common when Siamese authorities adopted Western surveying techniques during the nineteenth century, their new mapping 'language' making the entirety of their past cartographic archives no longer relevant.

Secrecy

Secrecy may also have played an instrumental role in limiting the survival of indigenous maps, just as it did in Renaissance Spain and Portugal, and also in Japan. La Loubère speculated about secrecy in Siam in the seventeenth century, observing that "the Siamese have not made a Map of their Country", or if they had, that they "know how to keep it a secret. " But while the experiences of La Loubère does not afford any direct evidence of Thai cartographic secrecy, those of a British ambassador in the early nineteenth century most certainly do. John Crawfurd, who was sent as Britain's ambassador to Bangkok in the early 1820s, actually described his acquisition of geographic data from a Thai mariner. His account of the embassy, published in 1828, included a "Map of the Kingdoms of Siam and Cochin China'' by John Walker, compiled from the embassy's own surveys and older sources, as well as from new information obtained (we learn from the book's final appendix) from "a Mohammedan mariner, a native of Siam," whose owns ports-of-call occasionally coincided with those of the British mission.

Crawfurd, it seems, was only able to gather information from his Thai source when far away from Siamese soil and he records how the Thai sailor grew increasingly apprehensive about divulging information the closer they got to Siam. When the embassy met the "Mohammedan mariner" and his colleagues in Penang, the details they revealed in respect of their country "supplied more useful and practical knowledge than all we had before obtained from printed sources." However, as Crawfurd's party "approached Siam they became much more shy and reserved, and now communicated nothing without a strict injunction to secrecy," indicating with gestures that the king would execute them if they were caught divulging such information.³⁶ Figure 12 illustrates a simple map of Bangkok which was included in the published account of the embassy and which is identified as having been acquired from a native source.

Fig. 12 Plan of Bangkok, taken from a native sketch. Crawfurd, 1828. [Private collection]

The power structure in Dutch-held Indonesia may also have promoted secrecy regarding the population of the archipelago and its land divisions. The Dutch authorities, in the interest of corporate efficiency, preferred to delegate some administrative responsibilities to local chiefs rather than burden the Dutch East India Company with direct responsibility for the indigenous infrastructure. These chiefs, in turn, would have benefited from keeping confidential particular information about their domain and the size and distribution of its population. Furthermore, traditional seafarers like the Bugis of Sulawesi and the maritime merchants of Java and Sumatra may have been particularly keen to keep their maps and other pilot aids confidential once they witnessed the aggressive commercial spirit of their European visitors.

Map making Media

Although there is only scant record of maps or mapmaking in early Southeast Asia, there is ample reference to writing materials and methods. With the obvious exception of stone edifices, the media used were often volatile, and the climates with which they had to contend promoted decay. Maps for day-to-day affairs may have been drawn on leaves, a common medium for writing in Southeast Asia. Ralph Fitch, a visitor to Burma in the late sixteenth century, witnessed written appeals being presented to the king:

"supplications [to the king of Burma are] written in the leaves of a tree with the point of an iron bigger than a bodkin. These leaves are an ell long and about two inches broad; they are also double."

This was a description of palm leaves, which maximally measure about 6-7 cm wide by about 55-60 cm long, being used as a writing material. The 'iron bigger than a bodkin' was the stylus which was used to incise the characters. A thick paper, made from the bark of mulberry and other trees, was another common writing medium, and was more durable than leaves. This khoi paper was brown or black, but could also be bleached white.

Writing on palm leaves may not always have been immediately obvious to European eyes, unaccustomed to the use of such a medium. The initial 'bruising' of the leaf with the stylus did not always produce a readily apparent image− to heigh ten the image, the leaf would first be rubbed with a sooty substance and then wiped clean, leaving a black imprint on the rubbed areas of the yellowish leaf.

These leaves were quite practical, as they could be rolled up and carried without concern for their getting wet, which in the torrential downpours of the rainy season and when traveling by river must have been a common occurrence. Although water might wash off the image, leaving the leaf 'blank', the messenger or recipient had only to apply some soot (even from a dirty finger) to restore the image. Thus the writing on a leaf being couriered through the elements might, in such circumstances, not be visible to another person.³⁷ Our Chinese ambassador in Angkor in 1296-97 was struck by this, writing that when the leaves are "rubbed with something moist, [the characters] disappear."

A more durable medium than palm leaves was described by the same Chinese observer. Chou noted that "for ordinary correspondence, as well as official documents, deer skin is used, which is dyed black" and written on with a type of white chalk. The Thai word for 'book', nangsü, derives from nang (meaning, 'skin, hide, or bark') and sü ('written character').³⁸ Cloth and cowhide were also used as writing media.

Transient Maps

Maps of an inherently transient nature are documented in the Caroline Islands, also known in the eighteenth century as the 'New Philippines'. The Philosophical Transactions from the Year MDCC included a map of the Carolines (fig. 13) copied from an indigenous map consisting of stones arranged to represent islands. The Transactions explains that

the map was not made by Europeans, for none have yet been upon these islands, but by the islanders themselves, after this manner. Some of the most skilful of them arranged upon a table as many little stones as there are islands belonging to their country; and marked out, as well as they could, the name of each, its extent and distance from the others: And this is the map, thus traced out by the Indians, that is here engraved.

The Body as a Map

Peripheral evidence suggests that the human body might have served as a cartographic medium in Southeast Asia, although this is only speculation. There are two forms this might have taken, one 'permanent', the other temporal: tattooing, and the positioning of the hand and fingers into a map. Tattooing was prevalent in much of Southeast Asia before the dictates of Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity suppressed such body art. A batik map from Java, tentatively dated at about 1800, is known to exist, and tattooing and batik may have a common past.³⁹ There is no record of tattooed maps in Southeast Asia proper, but what appear to be tattooed cartographic motifs are described in some detail by a Frenchman traveling in the Caroline Islands in the early nineteenth century. According to the visitor, the islanders'

legs and chest are covered with long straight lines which at first look like striped stockings. They trace the outline of several small fish on their hands, each of about an inch long. It is strange to note that these figures bear the names of various islands. Peseng [one of the islanders], on his left thigh, above the knee, had a certain number of these fish as well as hooks, which represented Lougounor and the neighboring island groups; in addition, each line on his legs and hands was identified with the name of an island, from Faounoupei as far as Pelly. Having accounted for all these islands, there were still a few lines left which he called Manila, Ouon [Guam], Saipan, etc.; and as there were still a few lines left, he named them, chuckling as he went, lngres [England], Roussia, etc. Perhaps this practice had been introduced to more easily recall the islands of their archipelago. It is a type of geographic rosary...⁴⁰

The positioning of the hand and fingers in the form of a map was codified by João de Barros, Lisbon's official historian of Portuguese adventures in the Indies (see page 123, below). Writing in the mid-sixteenth century, Barros told his readers how to 'make' a map of Southeast Asia by placing the fingers of the left hand in certain prescribed positions. Not only were the coastal contours of mainland Southeast Asia reasonably well represented by the fingers, but inland features could be indicated as well, by means of the knuckles and joints. The origin of the idea is not known.

Music as a Map, and the Mapping of Music

In some parts of Southeast Asia, geographic data may have been recorded in an entirely non-material form. Song could preserve the essential knowledge for a voyage or trek in a way that was much easier to commit to memory than cold data and which was also impervious to material wear and loss, in effect a 'pilot book' bound in the medium of music. The Arab pilot Ahmad ibn Majid, who sailed in Southeast Asian waters, composed a navigational text in 1462 which was written in poetry to facilitate memorizing its instructions and there may have been similar native Southeast Asian examples.

Fig. 13 Map of the Caroline Islands, based on indigenous data, as interpreted by missionaries; from the Philosophical Transactions, 1721. The figures within each island indicate the number of days its inhabitants said it took them to sail around it, while the numbers between the islands indicate the duration of a voyage, in days, from one island to the next. (18 x 20.5 cm)

The societies of Southeast Asia proper are not known to have notated their music. The 'mapping' of music is, however, found in Tibet. Possibly as early as the ninth or tenth century, Tibet developed forms of so-called 'neumatic' notation, in which music was recorded with graphic signs representing the pitch movement of a melody -well within our definition of 'map'.⁴¹ Various inflections of a line, looking not unlike the stylized coasts of sea charts, indicated melodic ascent, descent, angular movement, vibrato, and the degrees of each. Forms of neumatic notation were also used in various parts of Europe and western Asia.

Principal Types of Southeast Asian Maps

We do not know how representative surviving Southeast Asian maps are, either in terms of quantity or characteristics, since the durability of the various media used, as well as the inclination of their makers to preserve them, spanned the range from perhaps as little as seconds, to millennia. The extant corpus of Southeast Asian maps probably does not accurately represent the relative numbers of various types of maps in everyday Southeast Asian life, since the survival of maps is heavily skewed in favor of cosmological maps. Stone edifices, by a great margin the most durable of cartographic media, were used for cosmological and religious cartography, and such cartography did not become obsolete. Geographic maps would more likely have been on far less permanent media, would have been subject to wear and loss, and might be superceded by more current mapping. The sand mandalas of Tibet are the exception, since the impermanence of these cosmographic maps was part of their very meaning, but their story is still part of the 'permanent' record of their society.

With these limitations in mind, we can look at the various types of Southeast Asian maps and the dates of surviving examples of each, and then comment on their counterparts in the West. Southeast Asian maps can be divided into four general categories:

1) those which are purely cosmographic (in this context meaning 'metaphysical' or 'spiritual') in nature, or otherwise non-geographic.

2) those that symbolically represent actual geographic features for religious or cosmographic purposes.

3) those that attempt to record true geography, whether by report or empirical observation.

4) itineraries, which might be written, memorized, or committed to song, that served to construct a mental image of time and space, direction and position, topography, and landmarks.

There is not always a fine line separating these categories. Just as daily life in Southeast Asia could entwine the mundane with the magical, Southeast Asian cartographic thought could blur the distinction among the cosmographic, symbolic, and empirical.

Cosmographic Maps

In pre-modern Southeast Asia, mapping one's path to a different level of existence was as important as charting the way to the next valley. Maps representing the intangible or metaphysical world in the form of stone temples or edifices are the earliest surviving examples of Southeast Asian maps.

In order to look at Southeast Asia's cosmological maps, it is necessary to look at the place of mountains in Southeast Asian life. Not only are mountains are a primary feature of the Southeast Asian physical landscape, but they are also an integral part of the region's spiritual landscape too. A king's sovereignty was often inextricably linked with a mountain, either actual or symbolic. Mountains could represent the embodiment of higher states of existence and at the same time be the dwelling place of gods. This reverence for mountains was indigenous, but was complemented by outside influences. The most famous of spiritual mountains was Sumeru, believed to lie to the north, in the center of the world, that is, in the Tibetan Himalayas or the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia.

When Hinduism spread through Southeast Asia, beginning in about the first century A.D., it brought with it the idea of Sumeru and other Indian traditions about mountains, which subsequently merged with indigenous animist religions. The Hindu god, Indra, was sovereign of Sumeru, and dwelled in a place called Trayastrima at the mountain's summit. The Khmers of Cambodia had their own equivalent of Sumeru, which they called Mount Mahendra; when Hindu beliefs reached Cambodia, they merged with the religious aspect of Mahendra with early Khmer rulers becoming identified as the earthly incarnations of the deities of this cosmic mountain.⁴² Siva, the most powerful of Hindu gods, was the 'Lord of the Mountain', and the veneration of Siva as a mountain deity existed in Cambodia as early as the fifth century.⁴³ In Burma as well, the imported Hindu veneration of mountains assimilated indigenous spirits.⁴⁴ The concept of sacred mountains continued with the arrival of Buddhism; early thirteenth century Chinese annals record that in a country to the west of Cambodia "there is a mountain called Wu-nung [probably from the Malay word for mountain, gunong]" from which one enters Nirvana.⁴⁵

The island of Bali, according to local legend, was originally a flat, mountainless land. However, when Islam supplanted Hinduism throughout most of Java, the Hindu gods, having elected to resettle on neighboring Bali, first needed to create on their new island home, mountains that were high enough to be their abode. In another version, the mountains were moved from eastern Java. The most exalted of these god-dwellings, the Balinese 'Sumeru', was Gunung Agung, on the east of the island.⁴⁶ Bali was the world, and Mount Agung was its 'navel' (puseh). Representations of Sumeru, which are in effect cosmological maps, are invariably found in the temples of even the most humble Balinese villages.

Mountains were the source of spiritual life; they were also the origin of the other 'element' of the world, rivers, and thus were the source of physical life as well. In this last respect, the perfect silhouette of an Indonesian mountain, towering above the valley floor or rising above the seas, was sometimes compared to the image of a breast.

The fertility of the land was part of the iconography of a type of symbolic map which is known in the form of stone carvings from Champa (central eastern Vietnam).⁴⁷ These had their origins as magical "stones of the soil," in which the stone embodied the god of the earth; unlike imported beliefs, in which gods inhabited earthly entities, the indigenous view may have regarded the earth itself as a god. Such mystical objects were analogous to stones or earth mounds worshiped by Vietnamese and Chinese. The Champa monoliths were in the form of Lingas, Hindu phallic symbols representing the god Siva, or the reproductive power of nature. They were placed at the center of a village and appear to have formed a multi-faceted microcosm of the territory, the embodiment of the kingdom or feudal group of which the Linga was the center. The top of the stone was the emblem of Siva; Siva was accorded the apex of stone both because he was 'Lord of the Mountain' (Meru) and because political power in early Champa and Cambodia was legitimized by the identification of the king with Siva. An octagonal section under this cap represented the god Vishnu, and a four-sided section below it symbolized Brahma, the overseer of all things sacred (another instance of the special significance of these numbers). A lowermost section represented the earth, that is, the kingdom. Thus the stone was at once a schematic of the order of the universe, a symbol of the divine authority of the king and his singular embodiment with Siva, and a map of the powers that bestowed fertility to the land and people. This 'map' of power, fecundity, and earth probably served as a sacred tool in fertility rituals. Other Cham stone carvings were semi-cadastral in content, and will be mentioned in connection with empirical maps (see page 38).

Sumeru was symbolically replicated throughout Hindu-Buddhist Southeast Asia. Hindu temples centered on shrines representing Sumeru, the axis of the universe, date from the seventh century in Java, and edifices with Buddhist architectural symbols based on Sumeru survive from the eighth century. The epitome of these is the great temple at Borobudur (ca. 800 A.D.). Borobudur and neighboring Hindu-Buddhist temples which chart the various states of existence, are the earliest surviving maps in Southeast Asia. The lower levels of Borobudur depict mundane matters and represent lesser states of spiritual awareness: as one rises to the upper levels the subjects become increasingly elevated and metaphysical, with the very top symbolizing the achievement of blissful enlightenment. Taken as a whole, the structure maps the oneness of the cosmos.

Similar motifs, though employing different media, are recorded in early Vietnam. By the late tenth century, about the time Vietnam regained independence from China after nearly a thousand years of vassalage, Vietnamese artists mapped cosmological beliefs by constructing a 'mountain' of bamboo in a river, and in the following century by building a brick edifice with adjoining ponds.⁴⁸

In Cambodia, the magnificent temples at Angkor (early twelfth century) also constitute a cosmological map, charting both space and time. Modern researchers have discovered that the distance between elements of the temple, going east to west, corresponds to the number of years in the present− final− age of the earth, according to Hindu belief, measured in hat (1 hat= approximately 0.4 meters).⁴⁹

Figure 14 is a Thai map of the cosmos, or cakkavala.⁵⁰ The bell-shaped enclosure looking like a walled city contains the sixteen lower heavens which rise above Sumeru. Each of the sixteen heavens is represented by one row of stupas (dome-like mounds containing a shrine) in three groups of three stupas each. Two extra stupas are placed on the top left and right to complete a play on numbers: 16 x 3 = 48 stupas; 3 x 48 = 144 stupas; the extra four stupas brings the total to 148 stupas. Our mortal world lies at the bottom of the heavens. On the left and right are the mansions of the world guardians in the four directions, and in between is the mansion of Phraya Yom, god of the infernal or nether regions. To the left of the stupas is the moon, to the right is the sun, with the various stars of the cosmos sparkling overhead. The oval-shaped enclosure in the lower center is the residence of various naga (serpent) kings. The upper of the two lines of text on the bottom seems to explain that the three mountains which support Sumeru themselves rest on a diamond slab (the figures on either side of the naga residence may be two of these stones), and the diamond slab itself rests on a podium. Several of the fish which are said to swim about the immense ocean surrounding Sumeru are identified in the bottom line of text. A few of the kinds of lotus which purportedly grow in these ocean waters are named in the text near the moon.

Fig. 14 Thai map of the cosmos, or cakkavala. The walled enclosure contains the sixteen lower heavens which rise above Sumeru. The moon is to the left of the stupas, while the sun is on the right, with the various stars of the cosmos sparkling overhead. On the left and right are the mansions of the world guardians in the four cardinal directions, and in between is the mansion of Phraya Yom, god of the infernal or nether regions. The mortal world lies at the bottom of the heavens. Fish from the ocean surrounding Sumeru are identified in the bottom line of text, and lotus which purportedly grow in these ocean waters are named in the text near the moon. [National Library of Thailand]

When Buddha stepped back onto earth after achieving enlightenment, his feet made an imprint in the various places he stepped, the first and most venerated of these being the supposed imprint atop Adam's Peak in Ceylon. This not only added to the Southeast Asian veneration of mountains, since it was via Ceylon that Theravada Buddhism spread to Southeast Asia, beginning in the late twelfth to early thirteenth century, but also led to the use of Buddha's footprint itself as a cosmological framework. For a follower of the faith, the imprint of Buddha's footprint upon the earth is roughly comparable to symbolic significance of the crucifix for Christians. Just as the cross assumed a cosmographic significance in the iconography of medieval Europe, the image of Buddha's footprint sometimes served as the framework for maps of Creation in Southeast Asia. Known as Buddhapada, these depict the cosmos in a similar, though sometimes more elaborate, format as the map in figure 14.⁵¹

Fig. 15 World map, Antonio Saliba /de Jode, ca. 1600 (Jollain, 1681). (71 x 61.5 cm [map], 71 x 111 cm [with text])

Fig. 16 World map (detail), Antonio Saliba /de Jode, ca. 1600 (Jollain, 1681). Note the connection of Chiang Mai Lake with a reservoir deep within the earth, as well as the unusual focus on islands of the Western Pacific− Nadadores, Barbudos, dos Hermanas, Arecifes, Saprovechada (Desaprovechada), and others.

Western Parallels of Cosmographic Maps

Representations of a multi-dimensional universe, such as the temples that emulate Sumeru and its spectrum of states of existence, are a hallmark of Asian cartographic thought, but have analogies in the West as well. Homeric mythology speaks of the heights of Mount Olympus as the abode of the gods, a region of great tranquility, and this idea was perpetuated in medieval Europe by such authors as Pomponius Mela and Solin us. Cosmological renderings of the earth in the context of the elements and religious/celestial spheres reflected many Europeans' view of Creation. Had Dante known of Borobudur, he would have found its symbolism eminently natural-like Dante's Commedia, it uses a mountain to stratify good and evil, heaven and hell.

A map by Antonio Saliba is one example of a Western map depicting the earth in such a cosmographical context (see rendering by de Jode, figs. 40 & 41). The map, originally published in 1582, depicts an earth-centered universe in cross-section, with several concentric circles symbolizing various levels of creation. At the very center are the bowels of the earth, depicted as an inferno. The writhing agony of condemned souls and the glee of satanic demons make clear that this is the Judea-Christian Hell, analogous to the bottom level of Borobudur, not merely a geological feature. Moving out from this base level of the cosmos we reach the elements, mineral mines, and water sources of the earth, and then the earth's surface, in the form of a terrestrial map. Above the earth we ascend through the different levels of the sky, passing meteorological phenomenon, celestial bodies, and in the outermost ring, the fire of the sun.

The Portuguese poet Luis vaz de Camões, who himself spent many years sailing about the Indies, described a similar metaphysical geography in his epic poem, The Lusiads. In imagery that would be as readily understood at Borobudur as in Lisbon or Rome, Camões tells of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese conqueror of the sea route to the Indies, being led by a nymph up a mountain to a "lofty mountain-top, in a meadow studded with emeralds and rubies that proclaimed to the eye it was no earthly ground they trod." On this fabulous mountain, which a Buddhist or Hindu could easily mistake for Sumeru, "they beheld, suspended in the air, a globe" which replicated the "the mighty fabric of creation, ethereal and elemental."

Next, in words that could equally well describe the symbolism of Borobudur's summit, the nymph explained that the highest sphere "rotates about the other lesser spheres within, and shines with a light so radiant as to blind men's eyes and their imperfect understanding as well." This highest level, where "the souls of the pure attain to that Supreme Good that is God himself, " seems interchangeable with the state of moksa in Hinduism and Jainism, and the Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Camões' nymph then described the various spheres below, which include the stars, sun, and planets. Beneath these, in the center, is situated "the abode of mankind", and below that lies the realm of Hecate, goddess of darkness. Thus in European metaphysical thought, as in Southeast Asia, the spatial coordinates 'high' and 'low' provided a metaphor for higher and lower states of existence which in turn were linked to the notion of good and evil.

Fig 17 'T-O' world map, 1472. The Biblical Ham, Shem, and Japhet are marked on the continent where each propagated humanity after the Deluge. (6.5 cm. diameter) [Sidney R. Knafel]

Sacred Geographic Maps

Some early Southeast Asian maps symbolically depict the geography of spiritual events, thus forming a genre intermediate between the cosmographic and geographic. This kind of representation of sacred geographic space, found in several stone temples, constitutes the earliest surviving non-cosmographic Southeast Asian maps. Burmese temples in Pagan (thirteenth century) and Pegu (fifteenth century), as well as Lan Na temples in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai (both fifteenth century and now part of Thailand), replicate sites around Bodh Gaya in northeast India, where Buddha reached Nirvana, or enlightenment.⁵² Burmese chronicles record that artisans were sent to the temple at Bodh Gaya (thought to have been made in the third century B.C.), to draw up plans for the Pegu rendering of the temple. The Thai temple of Wat Jet Yot, in Chiang Mai, has seven spires representing the various sites where Buddha tested his tenets after attaining enlightenment. The Lan Na manuscript illustrated in figure 9 is part a religious itinerary map, and part cosmography. It is probably typical of spiritually-oriented geographic maps made for hundreds of years, although this surviving example is most probably a twentieth century copy.

Western Parallels of Sacred Geographic Maps

As with cosmological maps, there are abundant Western analogies for such maps. Representations of the path of the Buddha, which we have already seen in the arrangement of temple spires and will find again in the Traiphum manuscript, parallel European maps which illuminate the peregrinations of saints and prophets, or the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. A more subtle example is found in the medieval 'T-O' map (fig. 17), which depicts the earth as a circle with a superimposed 'T' shape, dividing the circle into Asia (the area above the 'T'), Africa (lower right), and Europe (lower left). The 'T' itself, while providing the rudimentary divisions of the continents, may have been derived from the Greek tau, an ancient form of the cross that was adopted by early Christians as a clandestine symbol of their faith. Thus, the 'T' symbolically superimposed Christ upon the entire earth, and, in fact, some medieval mappaemundi literally superimposed the figure of Christ over the world. The letters 'T' and 'O' may, for some authors, have also denoted Orbis Terrarum, that is, the 'sphere of the earth'.

Fig. 18 Parts of a long itinerary map from southern Thailand dating from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. According to a label accompanying the manuscript, it pertains to the history of Nakhon si Thammarat, and was given to the National Library by Prince Damrong. [National Library of Thailand]

Empirical Geography: Indigenous Southeast Asian Mapping

The mapping of Southeast Asian soil, in a most rudimentary sense, may be found in semi-cosmographic, semi-'terrestrial' stone carvings which were placed at the center of some Cham villages or territorial groups.⁵³ Such monoliths were a microcosm of a well-defined territory and were ritually linked to stones located on the territory's boundary. The all-important central stone was in part an elementary cadastral symbol, a 'map' of the land; at the same time, it was a guarantor of fertility and an object of religious veneration. Since territorial statues and religion were entwined, and since religion partly served to legitimize rights to land, the monolith's cadastral and religious aspects worked together in harmony.

Apart from the purely speculative evidence cited earlier to suggest a long history of indigenous mapmaking, the known record of Southeast Asian cartography begins with textual references to maps from Vietnam, Java, and Thailand. Although none of these maps survive, they antedate the semi-geographic Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai temple maps. The Vietnamese maps originated with the needs of government, which are of course a major impetus for the making of maps, both for the protection of boundaries and the assessment of population and taxes. In 1075, according to a Vietnamese history book of 1479, a map was made of Vietnam's southern border with Champa; the same book records a map made in the 11 70s that was the result of "a royal inspection tour of the coasts and the frontiers."⁵⁴ Given the long Chinese tradition for fastidious record-keeping and the strong influence of China on Vietnam's governmental affairs, it is not surprising that it is in Vietnam where we find the earliest surviving record of 'practical' Southeast Asian maps.

Vietnam initiated a more thorough cadastral mapping of its land and people in the second half of the fifteenth century, when its court imported Chinese notions of social infrastructure and a stronger, more centralized government. Equipping the government with better control over its land and people, mechanisms were established for a methodical, thorough survey of the entire country. In 1467 the king ordered the (then) twelve provinces of Vietnam to map their respective regions. The maps were to record topography, man-made and natural features, travel routes, and other relevant data. The court collected the individual surveys to which they added extra statistics about the populace and the newly-annexed Champa, which Vietnam had conquered in the 1470s. The combined information was declared the official atlas of the kingdom in 1490, just before the European onslaught, though the earliest surviving Vietnamese maps, date from the seventeenth (or possibly sixteenth) century.⁵⁵ The nineteenth-century Vietnamese atlas illustrated in figure 163 probably bears stylistic similarities to such earlier works.

Chinese records demonstrate that mapmaking had a part in the Thai court by the later 1300s. The Ming Annals record that in 1373 the Ming court received an embassy from the country of Hsian-Lo (believed to be the region of Sukhothai, Ayurhaya, and Lop Buri, central Thailand). According to the Ming Annals,

... envoys were sent [from Hsian-Lo] to congratulate on the New Year Festival of the next year and to present native products. Moreover, they [the Thais] submitted a map of their own country.⁵⁶

An interesting example of a map apparently intended to record or facilitate a person's travels is illustrated in figure 18. Seven sections, our of a total of about 41 are shown. The map comes from the southern part of Thailand, and was probably made in the late Ayuthaya or early Bangkok period (latter part of the eighteenth century). Temples, houses, landmarks, fauna and plants passed en route are depicted and labeled. The several lines of continuous text appear to relate to the circumstances and events pertaining to a person's travels, speaking of someone who lives beyond the rice paddy, describing meetings with a man of high rank, a story involving a dowry, and the like.⁵⁷

Another geographical map from southern Thailand has been preserved among the papers of Henry Burney, a British captain active in the mapping of Siam in the 1820s. The map (fig. 19) depicts roughly 250 kilometers of the west Malay coast, from the Thai-Burmese border, south to Phuket (the large rectangular island at the bottom of the map). Captain Burney wrote on the map (lower left) that this is a "Chart sketched by a Siamese Priest at Pungah" (Phang-nga, the mainland region directly above Phuket).⁵⁸ Another British envoy, James Low, also recorded his pleasure at the quantity and quality of indigenous maps that he had acquired in Penang in the 1820s.

The earliest known reference to a map from insular Southeast Asia is found in a Chinese account of the Yuan invasion of Java in 1292-93. Compiled in 1369-70, the Yuan shi (History of the Yuan) records that in 1293, Raden Vijaya, a leader of the Javanese state of Kediri, presented a map and census record to a Yuan military commander, thus symbolizing submission to Chinese rule. This event suggests that mapmaking had already been a formal part of governmental affairs in Java.

In 1505, the Bolognese traveler, Ludovico di Varthema, mentions a chart used by the pilot of the vessel on which he sailed to Java from either Buru or Bornei.⁵⁹ Boarding the local vessel,

we rook our way towards the beautiful island called Giava, at which we arrived in five days, sailing towards the south. The captain of the said ship carried the compass with the magnet after our manner, and had a chart which was all marked with lines, perpendicular and across.

A more impassioned record of indonesian sea charts came from Alfonso de Albuquerque, founder of Portugal's empire in Southeast Asia. In a letter to King Manuel of Portugal, dated April 1st of 1512, Albuquerque wrote that he had acquired

a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the Land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove Islands, the navigation of the Chinese and the Gores [people of Formosa], with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen.

He claimed to the king that the Javanese chart revealed

the course your ships must take to the Clove Islands [Moluccas], and where the gold mines lie, and the islands of Java and Banda, of nutmeg and mace, and the land of the king of Siam.

Albuquerque assured his king that the map was a

very accurate and ascertained thing, because it is the real navigation, whence they come and whither they return.

If Albuquerque was accurate in reporting that the Javanese chart included Portugal and the 'Land of Brazil', which clearly must have come from European sources, then the sharing of geographic data was already a reciprocal affair.

These or similar Javanese maps probably supplied some of the data for charts drawn by the Portuguese pilot Francisco Rodrigues in about 1513. Although the Javanese original is not known to have survived, an extant manuscript has been identified as being the Rodrigues derivative.⁶⁰ Rodrigues, together with Antonio de Abreu and Francisco Serrão, penetrated insular Southeast Asia as far as Banda with the assistance of Malay pilots in 1512. His charts record these and other islands, and were probably compiled on the basis of Javanese information.

Yet there remains the enigma of why Indonesian charts, which were so readily acquired in the early years of Portugal's presence in Southeast Asia, would subsequently have become so mysterious. Willem Lodewijcksz, a member of Cornelis de Houtman's expedition to Java in 1596, reported that the Javanese, although transporters of goods among the islands, did not use maps for sailing, nor did they have the compass until they acquired it from the Portuguese. Buginese (Sulawesi) mariners' charts from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries are extant, but these show a strong Western influence.⁶¹

Fig. 19 Thai map of the west Malay coastline from the Thai-Burmese border south to Phuket, "sketched by a Siamese Priest at Pungah [Phang-nga]." From Henry Burney's papers.[By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library]

After the Portuguese reference to tapping indigenous charts in the early sixteenth century, there is little mention of European reliance on native Southeast Asian maps for two and a half centuries. In the middle and latter eighteenth century some mapmakers dedicated to surveying Southeast Asian shores, notably Alexander Dalrymple, openly acknowledged appropriating Malay charts for their own (page 238, below). Was the practice of European cartographers incorporating Southeast Asian sources unusual? Or was Dalrymple simply being more forthright than most?

In the northern periphery of Southeast Asia, evidence of indigenous surveying is found in early European accounts of their attempts to map the imposing expanses of mountains and plateaus in Tibet. Missionaries made a large-scale survey of Tibet in 1717 in which they took maps "drawn on the spot from the report of the natives, by the Lama Mathematicians". The map explains that since "the Lamas made no Astronomical observations in the Course of their Survey, the Missionaries have corrected this Map with their own."⁶²

Burma enjoys a relatively rich cache of surviving geographic maps, or copies of such maps. In 1795 Francis Hamilton sought out maps while traveling through Burma, and his analysis, along with engraved reproductions, was published in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century.⁶³ But with the act of examining something comes the risk of altering it, and indeed Hamilton's wonderful zeal to acquire indigenous maps led him to commission them, which in turn may have influenced his Burmese cartographers. Hamilton himself makes this bluntly clear, noting that the Burmese map-makers he employed were "wonderfully quick in comprehending the nature of our maps [and] very soon improved their plans." Thus Burmese maps often form exceptions to generalizations which might be made about indigenous Southeast Asian maps, having been influenced by Western prototypes.

Although surviving Southeast Asian geographic maps present a wide diversity of characteristics, some generalizations can be made. Cartography was doubtfully a profession in itself. As with pre-Renaissance Europe, Southeast Asian cartographers rarely left any mark of their authorship, and maps were rarely dated. Maps generally lacked a uniform scale and were not constructed on any particular projection. No known Southeast Asian map has any grid to represent latitude or longitude, though both Varthema and Albuquerque alluded to rhumb lines on Javanese charts.

Southeast Asian cartographers tended to stylize features and exaggerate waterways. Chinese art and cartography are similar in this regard, and the stylization of water systems can be found on medieval European maps as well.⁶⁴ Stylized maps have their uses and are still employed when simplicity and clarity are of a higher priority than accuracy of scale or direction, as is the case when mapping subway lines or depicting electronic circuits.

The more stylized and metaphorical nature of early Southeast Asian maps, as opposed to European maps, may be said to be consistent with their approach to art and language in general. The French envoy to Siam, La Loubère, certainly oversimplifying, correlated this to climate:

In cold countries, where the imagination is cold, every thing is called by its Name... it is not the same in hot Countries, (where] the briskness of the Imagination employs them in a hundred different ways, all figurative... to them it seems that an exact Imitation [in art] is too easie, wherefore they overdo every thing. They will therefore have Extravagancies in Painting, as we will have Wonders in Poetry... the Secret is, to give all these things a Facility, which may make them appear Natural.

Itineraries

Travel in early Southeast Asia was probably more dependent on itineraries than maps per se. The sorts of geographic aids used by Southeast Asian peoples may well have amounted to instructions, not so different from the types of aids a pilgrim or sailor may have used in medieval Europe. The village to which one was traveling would be 'mapped' as being so many days by perahu upriver, after which the traveler finds a bend in its course and a certain landmark, at which point one then leaves the boat and crosses the mountains just to the left of where the sun rises, and after two more days following sundry other topographical clues, one reaches one's destination.

In such itineraries, two different methods could be used to measure distances. A journey could be recorded either in units of linear measurement, or else in units of elapsed time. In Thailand, for example, linear distance was measured in wa (fathom), a unit which probably equaled about 1.8 meters, but is today fixed at 2 meters.⁶⁵ According to oral tradition, one of the people in the king's retinue would carry a 'wa-stick', a stick cut to the exact length of one wa. It would be that person's responsibility to flick the stick over and over with his wrist, as they walked, to record the number of wa traveled.

Fig. 20 Part of Mindanao and the Carolines, based on indigenous data contained in figure 13. From a Jesuit report by Joseph Stocklein, 1726. (22.4 x 35.3 cm)

Elapsed travel time, however, was the more common gauge of distance for longer journeys, and in Thailand this was usually measured in khrao (overnight stages). The association of physical space with time, rather than literal distance, is perhaps one reason why indigenous maps generally appear to have no uniform scale -scale may have been consistent with the elapsed time of travel rather than linear distances per se.

A surviving itinerary from sixteenth century Lan Na, The Chronicle of Chiang Mai, records the travels of King Mä Ku from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai, Thöng-Phayao, Phrä-Lampäng, Lamphun, and back to Chiang Mai, in 1559. This text records distances both in linear terms (wa, or fathoms), as well as in units of elapsed time (khrao, or overnight stages). An excerpt follows:

From Wang Kham he [KingMa Ku of Chiang Mail went to sleep [i.e., one overnight stay, or khrao] at Pa Sieo, 12,000 fathoms [i.e., the surveyor had recorded approximately 12,000 flicks of the wa-stick]. From Pa Sieo he went to Phræ, 12,000 fathoms [another 12,000 flicks of the wa-stick], and he stayed in Phræ for 12 days. On the fourth waning of the seventh moon he installed Phraya Chiang Lüak to rule Phræ. From Phræ, he went to sleep at Khrao Ton Hua, 5,000 fathoms [5,000 flicks of the wa-srick]. From Khrao Ton Hua, he came to sleep at the Nam Ta, 9,000 fathoms.⁶⁶

Interpreting route lists was an art− as was the interpretation of itineraries and pilot guides in medieval Europe (it is no coincidence that the tide of a great Spanish navigational treatise, published in 1545, is Arte de Navigar, literally 'Art of Navigation; implying an acquired skill rather than a precise science). As with European and Arab pilot books, it is likely that even if a map was drawn to illustrate a journey, the guiding data would be the itinerary. The southern Thai map in figure 18 is an example of itinerary text illuminated with a map.

Caroline Islanders memorized the relative distance between their islands in terms of travel time on the sea. Spanish missionaries recorded this data in the early eighteenth century and entered it on a map engraved for the Philosophical Transactions of 1721 (fig. 13). The Transactions explains that the numbers on that map placed in, and between, the islands are travel times as related by the islanders:

The figure in the midst of every island, shows how many days' sail it is in circumference. The figure between each island, shows how many days are required to pass from one to the other,

This local information was subsequently converted into European linear scales, such as leagues of 3 Italian miles on a map compiled by Father Cantova (fig. 20).

Arab navigators also frequently used units of elapsed time rather than linear distance in their navigational texts; the zam, for example, equalled one watch at sea, or three hours.

In the later seventeenth century, the French traveler La Loubère observed that the Thai have a linear measurement, "their Fathom, which equals the French Toise within an inch," This unit was used in the surveying of land, "and especially in measuring the Roads, or Channels, through which the King generally passes." Along the road from Ayuthaya to Lop Buri, which lies roughly 70 kilometers to the north, "every Mile is marked with a Post, on which they have writ the number of the Mile."

The Traiphum

Literally meaning 'three worlds', the Traiphum (figs. 21 & 22) is a Thai text and map which gives an account of the Creation from the Theravada Buddhist perspective, although the work is ultimately part of Southeast Asia's larger Hindu-Buddhist heritage. An all-encompassing cosmography, the Traiphum charts everything from the mechanics of the universe to the wanderings of Buddha, from earthly geography to relative states of desire. The Traiphum is a map of Existence itself, a cycle of genesis and apocalypse which charts the journey that an individual, or indeed any living creature, may, over many lifetimes, take. Our 'real' world is but one of thirty-one states of existence, in three different worlds, which beings inhabit according to their level of accumulated merit. Mount Sumeru is the central axis of the earth and of the sun, moon, and stars, and accounts for changes in the seasons. Various subjects from the Traiphum are still found in the murals which decorate temple walls throughout Thailand.

The Traiphum is believed to have originated in the mid-fourteenth century in Sukhothai, Siam's capital before Ayuthaya. The text has been modified and expanded since then, and the earliest surviving fragment dates from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. There was a renaissance in Traiphum-making after the Burmese pillaging of Ayuthaya in 1767, during the court's decade and a half sojourn in Thonburi before settling in Bangkok. After the centuries-old court was laid to ruins, the remaining court archives were brought to Thonburi, and the deteriorating documents copied. The first king of the new capital in Thonburi had the Traiphum text reconstructed, and both manuscripts illustrated here date from this transitional period during the latter part of the eighteenth century.

A journey through the Traiphum illustrated in figure 21, from left to right, begins with sacred Buddhist sites in India, such as revered temples, the bo tree under which Buddha was born, his mother's town, and the bo tree under which he reached enlightenment.⁶⁷ The greatest concentration of sacred places is found in this section. Moving to the right, just before the mid-point of the map, we descend from the previous, more metaphysical realms, to 'tangible' places within the immediate sphere of Siam, although there is never a clear break between the empirical, the mythological, and the sacred.

This central portion of the Traiphum identifies a number of towns in Lan Na and northern Thailand which are clearly recognizable today, including Chiang Mai and Sukhothai. Strong Lan Na influence is not surprising since Chiang Mai had been important in Siam's affairs for centuries, with close communication between north and south at this time as the two kingdoms set aside their animosities to join forces against Burma, their perennial nemesis. No doubt it was this close contact between Thonburi and Chiang Mai (whose court moved to a camp south of Lamphun in 1775) which resulted in this particular Traiphum's pronounced emphasis on northern features.

Fig. 21 The Traiphum, manuscript, 1776. [National Library of Thailand]

Continuing to the right, the mapping of actual towns continues into the territory of Siam, with Ayurhaya prominent (even though it then lay in ruins). Reaching Bangkok and the southern Thai peninsula, the nature of the map changes yet again, now marking the number of days' travel between towns. But the itinerary nature of this section soon fades. To the west (the bottom mainland portion), in Burma, two nagas (waters spirits, represented as serpents) appear in the Narai River, just north of Rangoon. They ask Buddha to leave his footprint upon the land, which would be a holy and fortuitous occurrence.

Nearby, a monkey is perched at the edge of the mainland, overlooking a chain of little islands which runs along the bottom of the map and leads to a large island, which is Ceylon. We have now entered the realm of the Indian epic, the Ramayana, which tells how

Rama rescues his wife from captivity on Ceylon by running along a 'bridge' linking it with the mainland; the monkey at the northern end of the bridge is Rama's knight.

Buddha used the bridge as well, stepping from the mainland over Rama's Bridge to Ceylon after he had attained enlightenment. In doing so he left his footprint upon the summit of Adam's Peak, which is of course the imposing and precipitous mountain on the far right. There is a note referring to this most venerated of all Buddha footprints atop the mountain.

'Rama's Bridge' is in fact a line of minuscule sand banks dotting the waters between the island and India. The Traiphum, however, depicts a massive chain stretching out to what would seem to be the southern part of the Malay Peninsula. This is probably simple license on the part of the artist, since scale and orientation are Fluid on the map, allowing us to journey from the Indian features on the far left to Malaya, Burma and Rama's Bridge. This image of Rama's Bridge and Ceylon might, however, be alternatively seen as evidence of European influence− for a long time Sumatra was identified as Ptolemy's island of Taprobana (Ceylon) on Western maps. If so, the stepping stones of Rama's Bridge then become the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, with 'Lanka' placed in the position of Sumatra.

The Traiphum's representation of Ceylon itself is clearly based on indigenous sources. The four great stupas of Anuradhapura are marked in the southwest of the island, as are a couple of points along the pilgrimage route to Adam's Peak; Europeans are unlikely to have bothered to map such features, even if they had known of them. The one conspicuous omission in the depiction of Ceylon is the inland city of Kandy. Although Kandy is an ancient city, it gained importance when it became the last (albeit brief) retreat of the Ceylonese kings after the Portuguese took control of the kingdom of Kotte (Colombo) in 1539. The absence of Kandy on the Traiphum in figure 21 could either have been a mistake in the copying process, or because the image was transcribed, without alteration, from a much older model.

The smaller island to the right of Ceylon is identified as an isle of 'naked people', a characterization generally associated with the Nicobar islands. Though seemingly far displaced from the Nicobars' true location to the north of Sumatra, mapping it as the final island on the extreme right firs logically into the Traiphum's fluid scale and panoramic orientation.

Figure 22 illustrates a markedly contrasting Traiphum map, now located in Berlin. More geographic than cosmographic, it depicts Asia from Japan to India, with east and south at the top. The map's scale and orientation is wildly inconsistent, beginning with China and Japan on the left, and ending with Ceylon (the yellow, triangular island) on the right. The latter clearly lies off the coast of India here, lacking the ambiguity of the previous Traiphum. The six white islands and the white corner of the adjacent foreshore are all Japan, with China occupying the rest of the lefthand mainland. The cluster of eight islands to the right of Japan are the 'black farang islands, farang meaning both 'foreigner' and 'guava'. The fat peninsula is Indochina and the river presumably the Mekong; the long peninsula is Malaya; and the peninsula on the extreme right is India. Lastly, the square box at the bottom center is Ayurhaya, though the city already lay in ruins when the map was made. A ship enters the Gulf of Siam above it.