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CHAPTER 1

FROM HOBBITS

TO HINDUISM:

PREHISTORY

TO INDIANISATION

The little group moved quietly uphill through the trees. They were wiry men with long limbs and dark skin, carrying spears tipped with chipped stone and woven baskets loaded with edible things from the forest. They had been following the line of a thin river snaking through the hills, and they had spotted the cave from below. It formed a hollow in the western ranges of an island that the first Portuguese sailors, many millennia later, would call Flores—‘flowers’ in their own language. There were few dangerous animals in these forests, but three thousand feet above sea level it would be cold after dark, and the cave would make a fine shelter for the night. The men paused for a moment on the threshold. It was a vast space, with a vaulted ceiling of dangling stalactites. They made their camp—perhaps not too far back into the darkness—and sparked a fire from the dry things in their baskets.

The men were Melanesian hunter-gatherers, part of a wider population that was slowly picking its way through the forests of the Archipelago. The Melanesians were, as far as we know, the first modern humans to reach what is now Indonesia, some forty thousand years ago. They carried stone axes and they buried their dead. Sometimes they laid their hands on the walls of caves, then blew a thick spray of chewed ochre pigment against the rock to leave a ghostly outline of their presence. For the most part they moved through the open forests or along streams and shorelines, hunting out fruits and roots, fish and shellfish, and wild animals for meat. Eventually, in the more fertile landscapes, they settled into hut clusters and cleared the ground for a simple kind of agriculture.

Their movement through the Archipelago was generally slow: they had time and geography on their side, for during much of their period of expansion the sea levels were far lower than they are today. At the poles the icecaps had swollen, locking up huge quantities of the world’s water, and you could walk from Thailand to Bali without getting your feet wet. Every so often, however, some unknown impetus prompted a more decisive journey, and the Melanesians took to the water on rough craft. The near ancestors of the little band, settling down for the evening in the Flores cave, had made the crossing over the current-charged Lombok Strait between Bali and what is now the island chain of Nusa Tenggara, a body of water so deep that it had never dried out. More of these crossings followed, and eventually the Melanesians would carry their journeys to New Guinea, and out into the long vapour trail of islands in the southwest Pacific.

But this group of travellers—crouched around the campfire in the limestone hollow which their distant descendants would call Liang Bua, ‘The Cool Cave’—had no reason to believe that anyone had been here before them. The men could not have known that they had paused at one of the great S-bends of palaeontology, one of those rare traps—almost always a cave—where all the muck of prehistory accumulates in deep layers.

Perhaps one of their number went out at dusk to forage. Perhaps he heard something moving in the bushes and assumed it was a giant monitor lizard or one of the elusive dwarf elephants that lived in the deeper parts of the forest. But what he actually saw when he looked up must have sent a powerful pulse of shock deep into his core: it was a creature on the cusp between a something and a someone, staring back at him from the undergrowth.

It was dark and heavyset, with short legs and long, flat feet. Its brow sloped down into a broad face and its arms hung low at its sides. It was almost—almost—like a crude reflection of the Melanesian traveller himself, but for the fact that its head would barely have reached his waist. If they made eye contact it must have been a profoundly unsettling moment. Then the creature turned and hurried away into the trees with a strange, high-stepping gait, and the man shrieked over his shoulder to his friends in the cave that there was something out there in the forest…

Though the inhabitants of Flores would tell tall tales of a short people called the Ebu Gogo long into the twentieth century, no one knew that the stories might have some connection with fact until 2003, when a team of Indonesian and Australian palaeontologists, digging in the damp levels of the Liang Bua cave, came upon a tiny 18,000-year-old skeleton, ‘as fragile as wet blotting paper’. Elsewhere in the cave they found other bone fragments from the same creature, some dating back as far as 95,000 years, along with shards of worked stone suggesting that, whatever it was, it had been able to use simple tools. The individual specimens were simply numbered, and the putative new species was named Homo floresiensis. But the media, noting its three-foot-high stature and big feet, quickly dubbed it ‘the Hobbit’.

In the subsequent years the scientific community fell to bitter wrangling over the precise nature of this forgotten population of tiny hominids. Some claimed that it was a late-surviving relic of the pre-human Homo erectus. Others insisted that the Ebu Gogo were simply modern humans suffering from a genetic disorder or a malfunctioning thyroid. Based on the long timescale of the creatures’ existence and several crucial features of its skeleton, current consensus is edging towards the notion of a new species, more closely connected to the earlier Homo erectus than the later Homo sapiens, but all these arguments miss the most startling point.

We have long known that there were early humanoids in Java more than a million years ago. Their bones have been found along the banks of the Solo River. Thickset, heavy-jawed and beetle-browed, they are popularly known as ‘Java Man’. But Java was connected to mainland Asia at various points, and no one credited these lumbering ape-men with much more than a meandering journey on foot, and technological skills extending no further than a few crude stone choppers. But the discovery of the Flores Hobbit proved that long, long before the Melanesians arrived—at least 95,000 years ago, and possibly as far back as 840,000 years—something almost human had made the first serious maritime journey in Indonesian history: across the Lombok Strait, the great Rubicon between the Asian and Australian ecological spheres. More remarkably still, that creature was still there, deep into the period of Melanesian travel in the Archipelago.

The Ebu Gogo myth notwithstanding, it is generally assumed that the Hobbits vanished some 12,000 years ago, around the same time that the dwarf Flores elephant died out, possibly due to a major volcanic eruption. But its unsettling presence in the forest offers a glimpse of the deep layers that lie beneath the shallow topsoil of tangible human history.

History has to start somewhere, however, and the arrival of the Melanesians in the Archipelago is the perfect point of departure. Not only were they the first modern humans in the region; their descendants still live in large swathes of eastern Indonesia today. Dark-skinned and curly-headed, Melanesian people predominate in the regions of East Nusa Tenggara, southern Maluku and New Guinea.

This Melanesian realm represents the outland of modern Indonesia, however, and most of the major set-pieces of the region’s history were staged far to the west in the busy spaces of Sumatra and Java. The inhabitants of these places represent a far more recent series of landfalls in Southeast Asia, and they belong to the greatest tribe of maritime travellers the world has ever known—the Austronesians.

No one knows why they left; no one knows how many of them there were; but sometime around seven thousand years ago, a number of people set out towards the southeast from the damp interior of southern China. They headed not directly to Southeast Asia, but to Taiwan. This small teardrop of mountainous land was to prove the unlikely springboard for an epic expansion.

From around six thousand years ago, propelled most probably by local overpopulation, early Taiwanese Austronesians took to their boats—small, open outriggers for the most part—and headed south to the northern Philippines. They brought with them dogs and pigs, pottery made of red clay, and well-worked stone axes. They also knew how to tame buffalo and grow rice. Once they had reached the Philippines, the galaxy of islands beyond sucked them ceaselessly southwards. Some five thousand years ago they made it to Sulawesi, and half a millennium later—at about the same time that the Egyptians were working on the Great Pyramid at Giza—they made further journeys to reach Java, Sumatra, Timor and Borneo. From the latter landfall some of their number hopped back northwards across the South China Sea to settle in the southern corner of Indochina. Others turned sharply eastwards to find footholds on the northern foreshore of New Guinea, and then embarked on the most improbable of all their journeys, launching themselves into the apparent abyss of the Pacific Ocean to become the Polynesians. By the time the Anglo-Saxons were established in England and the Abbasid Caliphate approaching its apogee in far-off Baghdad, they had made it to Hawaii and Easter Island. Meanwhile, back to the west, other Austronesian seafarers had set out from the Archipelago on a voyage that would place the horizontal poles of their realm a full 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometres) apart: around 1,500 years ago they crossed the Indian Ocean and settled in Madagascar.

Historical distance has a telescoping effect, and this, coupled with crude maps and précising passages, can all too easily give an impression of the Austronesians coming in great waves—a waterborne Southern Mongoloid horde sweeping all aside as they rampage from island to island. The Austronesian expansion was indeed one of the swiftest and broadest in human history, but even so, more than four thousand years separated their first departures from Taiwan and the last of their major migrations to New Zealand. By then the Maoris, the Javanese and the Taiwanese aborigines were nothing more than distant linguistic cousins. Even within the Archipelago, where the journeys between islands were modest, they would have moved slowly over the course of many generations, and most Austronesians probably had no idea that they were participants in some globe-straddling migratory epic.

As the Austronesians settled into the Archipelago they formed villages—huddles of high-roofed huts in the green spaces between the volcanoes. They raised pigs and chickens and made pots, cleared patches of forest, and began to grow rice, and slowly developed into the Javanese, Balinese, Malays, and the other peoples of the western Archipelago. Theirs was a society of scattered settlements, a culture of clans, not kings. Wars—and there surely were wars—were small in scale and tribal in nature. There was no obvious political unity beyond that of individual communities, but there was a certain cultural continuity.

Given that most parts of the Archipelago have subsequently come under the influence of two or even three major world religions, it would be easy to suppose that no trace of what went before could possibly remain. But look at Indonesia in the right light and the original outlines still show through today. The most obvious places to start looking are in the remote eastern landfalls where neither Hindu-Buddhism nor Islam, still less Dutch colonialism, ever had much impact—places where a resolute handful still cling to the unsanctioned religious designation of ‘other’. Sumba, in the nether regions of Nusa Tenggara, is one such place. Here, indigenous ancestor worship has only ceased to be the dominant religious tradition within the last two generations, and here, as in the old Austronesian world, there is a culture of clans and villages without dominant kings. The traditional belief system in Sumba is known simply as Marapu—‘Ancestors’—and it is the forefathers who are given the active role in a spiritual world from which the Supreme Being has long-since disengaged. Village homes with a founding lineage are built with enormous towering roofs as both a symbol of long descent and as a temporal abode for the ancestral spirits, and the most important moment in life is death. The journey to join the ancestors is marked by epic funerals, the bloody sacrifice of a buffalo, and interment in monumental stone sarcophagi, eerily echoing the cromlechs and portal dolmens of prehistoric Europe.

None of this stuff is restricted to Sumba, however. Four hundred miles to the northwest, in Sulawesi’s Tana Toraja, there are similarly bloody and grandiose funerals, and a nine-hundred-mile journey westward from there finds a clear echo of the sweeping, ship-like rooftops of the Toraja villages in the Minangkabau settlements of Sumatra. Even in Java and Bali, the places most thoroughly drenched with foreign culture, there are older traces. The old affection for tombs plays into a Balinese system in which formal Hindu cremation (with pomp and circumstance strikingly similar to that of Torajan or Sumban funeral rites) comes only after an initial burial in a village graveyard. In Java, meanwhile, the classic local architectural feature—the joglo, the towering pavilion roof—is in its original form simply the high-hatted home of those claiming descent from village founders, essentially identical to the clan houses of Sumba.

The Austronesians had arrived by water, and the sea lanes did not salt up in their wake. Small, fast-running outriggers crisscrossed the shallow seas from the earliest days, carrying modest cargoes—at first within the Archipelago, and then further afield. Here and there some radical new product was carried back to the islands from the Asian mainland. Around three thousand years ago a skilful society of metalworkers, the Dong Son, had developed in the north of what is now Vietnam. Amongst the fine bronze items that they forged through their cunning ‘lost wax technique’ were mighty kettle drums. By the middle of the first millennium BCE these drums were beginning to appear across the Archipelago, where the people of Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara found a role for them in their own traditions as prestige objects, and even as coffins. Before long, ores were being shipped from the Archipelago to the Asian mainland, and metalworking techniques were being quietly transmitted back into the ports of Java and Sumatra. An international trade network was slowly coming together, and the Austronesians of the western Archipelago would soon find themselves at one of the most important maritime staging posts on earth, the point of contact between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and the halfway house for seaborne traffic between the twin behemoths of mainland Asia: China and India.

By the dawn of the Current Era, goods gathered in or traded through the Archipelago were reaching Europe. Virtually no one traversed the entire length of this maritime trade route, however. It was a string of way-stations, and individual journeys were usually short: southeast China to Sumatra; Sumatra to Bengal, then a series of short hops around the Indian coast and north to the Persian Gulf; up the Euphrates, then overland across the Syrian desert to the eastern Mediterranean. By the time a packet of Javanese camphor or Malukan cloves was delivered to a Roman apothecary, it might have been transhipped a dozen times or more.

The crews of all the boats that plied the trade routes were at the mercy of the winds. During the dry period in the middle of the year, a long easterly breeze drives out of the red heart of Australia and along the length of the Archipelago, before bending north towards China. During the sodden months of the northern winter, meanwhile, the flow reverses. In December a sailor setting out from southeast China could expect to make landfall in Sumatra in as little as two weeks, and to be in India a month beyond that. But once he got there he might have to wait six months for the winds to switch before he could head back in the opposite direction. At all the little entrepôts along the line temporary communities of seamen gathered at anchor, waiting for the wind. Half a year is a long time to kick your heels, and inevitably some of these sailors made themselves comfortable and never went home.

Small communities of Indians and Chinese developed in Archipelago ports. The locals accepted the occasional new technological trinket and took the odd linguistic loan. Indeed, they almost certainly allowed the outsiders wives and concubines in return—for salty dogs have always been overwhelmingly male. But for the most part, they left this human flotsam and jetsam to get on with their foreign cultural practices undisturbed.

But as trade developed still further in the early centuries of the Current Era, there was an increasing impetus to form proper polities. If you didn’t establish your own authority over a river-mouth port and the goods that passed through it, then somebody else—quite possibly a wily foreigner—would do so instead, and would grow rich on the profits. But the indigenous people of the Archipelago simply didn’t have a suitable state mechanism of their own. Their traditional notion of tribal chief might work well enough out in the villages, but it was simply too modest to provide the linchpin for a nascent trading nation. Even their original Austronesian honorifics—ratu, datuk and suchlike—lacked sufficient grandeur. They were faced with the options of either going quietly back to their clan-houses and letting history pass them by, or of making a pragmatic adaptation. A few canny chieftains seem to have made the latter choice, for when the first indigenous Indonesian kings appeared in the early centuries of the Current Era, they did so under the portentous foreign title of raja—a glittering moniker of Indian Sanskrit origin which was connected, via the Indo-European root, to the words ‘regent’ and ‘regulate’. It was a term that brought with it a whole new culture.

The boat—a long, low Persian dhow with its huge lateen sail reefed in—swung to its mooring in the murky channel. It was the wettest part of the year, and the river was flowing furiously. But with a following wind the boat had made good time—crossing the full breadth of the South China Sea, negotiating the sharp turn at the bottom of the Malay Peninsula, and finally traversing the tidal stretches of the Musi River in all of twenty days. Now it had come to anchor deep inside Sumatra. The green levels of the island stretched away on all sides, and further inland to the west, towards the unseen bulk of the Bukit Barisan mountain range, there were banks of monsoon cloud. It was December 671 CE.

Standing on the deck of the dhow, looking out at the strange new prospect before him, was a Chinese man in the robes of a Buddhist monk. His name was Yijing, and he was thirty-seven years old. Yijing had been born in the city of Yanjing on the dusty levels where Beijing stands today. When he was seven, his family had sent him to a Buddhist monastery on the slopes of Mount Tai, a hulk of toothy stone rearing five hundred feet over the plains of Shandong. The boy grew up with his head in the clouds.

Yijing was, by all accounts, a profoundly religious child, and by the age of fourteen he had been ordained as a monk. He also seems to have been afflicted by a powerful sense of wanderlust, however, and a quiet life of contemplation in the chilly mists of Mount Tai was never on the cards. He developed a quiet obsession with the two great traveller-monks of early Buddhist China—the mighty fifth-century wanderer Faxian, and his later counterpart Xuanzang, the man who would inspire the Ming-era novel Journey to the West—and decided to follow in their footsteps to India.

However, in the later seventh-century, political turmoil in Tibet and Eastern Turkestan meant that the old overland trails traversed by Faxian and Xuanzang were firmly off-limits, so Yijing came up with an alternative plan: he would travel to India by sea. In November 671, he boarded the ship of a Persian trader in Canton (modern Guangzhou), and twenty days later they came to anchor on the Musi River, deep in the forests of southern Sumatra, at a riverine settlement which Yijing, struggling with the Indic consonants, called ‘San-Fo-Qi’.

This place was not some old-fashioned Austronesian village of ancestor-worshippers, however. The town was already a substantial settlement, ringed by a palisade wall. More importantly for Yijing, it was the hub of a civilised religious culture:

In the fortified city of Fo-Qi Buddhist priests number more than one thousand, whose minds are bent on learning and good practices. They investigate and study all the subjects that exist just as in [India]; the rules and ceremonies are not at all different. If a Chinese priest wishes to go to the West in order to listen and read, he had better stay here one or two years and practise the proper rules and then proceed to central India.

Parts of the Archipelago, it seems, had successfully turned themselves into mini Indias.

In the early centuries of the Current Era, Java, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and other parts of the western Archipelago had undergone a process of ‘Indianisation’ as new states formed under kings bearing Indian titles and confessing Indian faiths. The question of how exactly this process came about has long puzzled historians. European orientalists in the nineteenth century, hardwired with a sense of cultural superiority and hidebound by their own Greco-Roman concepts of civilisation, simply could not believe that ‘the degenerate Javan’ or ‘the indolent Malay’ had, of their own accord, raised the mighty monuments that dotted the Archipelago. They postulated a period of active expansionism with proselytising Indian colonists descending on Southeast Asia in droves. This idea has since been roundly discredited, not least because of the uniquely local features that Indian traditions developed in the Archipelago. But there is still some debate over how exactly the conversion did take place.

Much credit has traditionally been given to those little communities of Indian traders gathered in Archipelago ports. It was they, intermarrying with locals and displaying a compelling cultural sophistication, who converted the indigenous Austronesians, the theory goes. But there had been regular contact between the Archipelago and India for several centuries before the first significant signs of conversion ever appeared, and the long-standing presence of foreign traders alone is not enough to explain the change.

Local conversion myths, meanwhile, regularly feature a wandering holy man in the form of the Vedic sage Agastya, who comes striding through the rice fields, with his trident in hand, to convert some indigenous chieftain at a single stroke. This motif—of the wandering mystic and the miraculous conversion—is one that would come to be repeated a thousand years later during another period of cultural shift. But while there doubtless were a good few itinerant storytellers traversing the Archipelago during the period of Indianisation, they could not have done the job by themselves.

Other theories place the onus for conversion on the locals. Here and there some pretender prince, with ideas too big for the traditional role of village chief, might have seized control of a federation of hamlets or a growing port. Once he had done so he would have found himself in need of a political concept to bolster his new position as head of a proto-state. The Indian idea of kingship was perfect for the task. Not only was the notion of a raja or maharaja far more sophisticated than that of a village ratu; an Indian king was actually divine, an incarnation of a god, and as such magnificently unassailable. It was an intensely attractive job title for any man with political ambitions. What was more, by signing up to Indian cultural traditions, the ruler instantly tapped into a nascent internationalism. He allowed himself a cultural connection with other chiefs imbibing from the same Indic cup, everywhere from the Mekong Delta to the Arabian Sea.

Shifts of religious allegiance in Southeast Asia usually come from the top down, and the communities clustered around the new kings would have followed their lead, with concentric circles of diminishing influence extending into the hinterland. As literacy arrived in the Archipelago, it came first in the form of Sanskrit and Pali, and when local languages were first written down the medium was a version of the South Indian Pallava script.

Indianisation did not amount to a wholesale rejection of older traditions, however. The new kings of the Archipelago were pragmatic in their adoption of new customs. Though the Austronesian communities of Java, Sumatra and the surrounding landmasses accepted the broad fourfold Indian division of society into priestly Brahmins, knightly Kshatriyas, farming and trading Vaishyas, and common Sudras, they gave little space to obsessive stratification into infinite sub-castes. They were also always ready to take advantage of any latent flexibility, and to insert their old indigenous deities and practices into the new systems.

The faiths which seeped into parts of the Archipelago during the centuries of Indianisation are often crudely lumped together under the term ‘Hinduism’. Indeed, this is the term that Indonesia’s few million modern inheritors of the pre-Islam mantle use for their own faith today. But ‘Hinduism’ is a recent designation, first popularised by eighteenth-century European travellers, who used it as a reductive catch-all for the myriad interconnected traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

Roughly speaking, the states that formed around Archipelago rajas subscribed to one of four Indian religious traditions. Some, at an early stage, focused their worship on the Brahmins, the inheritors of the original Vedic traditions of north India. Kings only recently converted to a new religious outlook had much need of the priestly caste to bestow legitimacy. A fifth-century stone pillar from Kutai in eastern Borneo, one of the earliest Indianised states, records a raja called Mulavarnam showering gifts of gold and cattle on a local community of Brahmins. Later, worship of the god Vishnu developed a powerful hold, and later still it was Shaivism—devotion to the god Shiva—which held general sway. And by the time Yijing arrived in Sumatra in the seventh century and noted that ‘Many kings and chieftains in the islands of the Southern Ocean admire and believe, and their hearts are set on accumulating good actions’, the faith to which he was referring was his own Buddhist creed.

Buddhism, which emerged from the broader Indian tradition in the fifth century BCE, had the advantage of a more missionary bent than the other subcontinental schools, and it had found fertile fields in Southeast Asia. As for that muddy township on the banks of the Musi where Yijing scrambled ashore from a Persian ship at the end of 671, he may have known it as San-Fo-Qi, but its own inhabitants called it Srivijaya, the Buddhist trading state that would soon become the preeminent power of the Archipelago.

Yijing, sweltering in the heat of the tropics, found the Srivijayan capital a busy township. At its heart was the walled-off compound of the raja, an ambitious man by the name of Jayanasa. His palace was a series of wooden pavilions and platforms. Outside this inner sanctum were the wooden hutments of traders, artisans and minor courtiers, and scattered through these quarters and into the countryside beyond were the sanctuaries and temples of the Buddhist monks. Along the banks of the Musi, meanwhile, were rafts of moored boats, the scent of cooking and the chatter of children emerging from the rattan domes sheltering their middle sections. These were the floating homes of the Orang Laut, the ‘Sea People’ who plied Archipelago waters practicing a mix of trade and piracy.

At some point Yijing had an audience with the king, and he was well received. He settled down for six months and began to get to grips with the unfamiliar squiggles of Sanskrit and the more arcane details of Buddhist theology. Once the wet weather had passed, the king arranged a passage for him to the neighbouring city-state of Malayu, where he stayed for another two months. Then he crossed the narrow straits to yet another of these Indianised entrepôts—Kedah at the narrowest, northernmost section of the Malay Peninsula. Finally, in December 672, Yijing set sail once more and headed for India. He would spend almost fifteen years in the subcontinent, and during his stay he would achieve his ambition of visiting the holy places of Buddhism, of perfecting his own grasp of the holy languages and the holy law, and of meeting with many holy men. Eventually, in 687, he headed back to Srivijaya, bringing a bundle of accumulated Buddhist texts amounting to some half a million stanzas. In his absence the state had grown exponentially. Malayu was now a Srivijayan vassal, and Raja Jayanasa was clearly a man on the make.

Srivijaya, which first appears in historical records under Jayanasa’s rule, had not been the first political entity to emerge in Sumatra. The island is a huge lozenge, angled across the equator and stretching some 1,050 miles (1,700 kilometres) top to toe. From its wild and wave-lashed western shore the land rises rapidly into the ridges and ravines of the Bukit Barisan, a spine of volcanic uplands running the entire length of the island. On the far side of this range the land levels out into slabs of low-lying forest and swamp, threaded by many meandering rivers and giving way eventually into the sheltered Straits of Melaka. By the dawn of the Current Era, this narrow band of water between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula was already a crucial shipping route for traffic between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. It would remain so forever more, and over the coming centuries various ports would rise to prominence along its shores, growing fat on the transhipment business.

In the fifth century a minor regional power called Kantoli had appeared in the convoluted mesh of islands and deltas that flank the western shores of the Straits of Melaka. Kantoli, however, had merely dabbled in trade; it was its successor, Srivijaya, which first truly claimed the title of ultimate Straits entrepôt.

Srivijaya was not a nation in the modern sense, with defined geographical frontiers—and, indeed, neither were any of the other trading polities that came after it. Instead, it was the hub of a web of interconnected vassal ports that stretched up and down the Straits of Melaka, and out into the Archipelago. Those close to the centre might be kept firmly under the thumb, but the more distant vassals probably paid little more than lip service to their notional overlord, and were usually at the hub of their own smaller spiral of sub-states. Today Srivijaya is sometimes called an ‘empire’, but in truth the classic model of Archipelago power featured a grand, but geographically limited, central territory, and a scattering of regional franchises and sub-franchises. Srivijaya was more a brand than a bone fide nation state.

But still, in the immediate vicinity of southern Sumatra, Raja Jayanasa was an imposing figure. By the time Yijing returned to Srivijaya his host had not only conquered neighbouring Malayu; he had brought all the small islets of the Straits under his sway, and was tightening his grip on the sea lanes. He underscored these victories with some decidedly ominous threats, carved into celebratory stone columns and set in place in the newly annexed territories:

All of you, many as you are, sons of kings, chiefs, army commanders, confidents of the kings, judges, foremen, surveyors of low castes, clerks, sculptors, sea captains, merchants and you washer men of the king and slaves of the king, all of you will be killed by the curse of this imprecation. If you are not faithful to me, you will be killed by the curse.

This might seem like the deranged bluster of an unhinged dictator today, but in the seventh-century Archipelago it showed how thoroughly Jayanasa had taken advantage of the Indian notion of divine kingship. He had invested in himself the power to strike down his foes with supernatural force. Above the chiselled threat was the carven hood of a seven-headed serpent beneath which holy water emerged from a narrow spout. Those submitting to the raja had to drink from the aperture, and it was in this liquid that the curse was carried. Transgressors, it was declared, would find themselves rotting away from the inside out.

The wandering monk Yijing, exhausted by a quarter-century of travel and translation, went home to China, where he died in 695. At the turn of the eighth century, Raja Jayanasa, too, passed on to whatever reincarnation his expansionist actions had earned him.

Srivijaya did not crumble on his death, however, and its subsequent kings found themselves at the crucial anchorage on a mighty web of trade that spanned the Archipelago. From the headwaters of the Musi, small canoes descended carrying gold and camphor; across the water from the river mouth, the miners of Pulau Bangka were digging pitch-black tin ore from the granitic bedrock; precious stones were spewing from the estuaries of Borneo; and from Java came pepper, slaves and rice (the latter a vital necessity, for Srivijaya only ever had a limited agricultural hinterland of its own). From even further afield there was fragrant Timorese sandalwood. Cloves and nutmeg came from Maluku, and at the very furthest limits of the network, Melanesian hunter-gatherers in the islands off western New Guinea, living lifestyles little changed since their distant predecessors had had that unnerving encounter with the Flores Hobbit, found that there was a foreign market for the fabulous feathers of the greater bird-of-paradise.

Srivijaya did not own or even loosely control all of this: it simply tapped into it. Arab travellers would later report that its kings had ‘tamed the crocodiles’ of the Straits of Melaka. This was probably not meant to be taken literally, for it was human rather than reptilian predators that the kings really had at their beck and call. They had harnessed the wiles of the piratical Orang Laut, the Sea People, and it was they, haunting the mouth of the Musi River, who were able politely to oblige any passing ship to detour upriver to the capital. But despite their paramountcy within Southeast Asia, the Srivijaya kings were happy to play the role of deferent vassal when it came to an even greater regional power. From Jayanasa’s days onwards Srivijaya sent regular tribute to China, where local scribes recorded it as yet another barbarian fiefdom acknowledging the mastery of the Chinese emperor.

Given this tradition of tribute missions sent from Srivijaya, it might seem strange that it was India, rather than China, that set the cultural tone in the Archipelago. But in fact China’s highly advanced political structure probably counted against it in this respect. In India there was no overarching control and no enduring institution of centralised power, and this may actually have fuelled the stream of cultural influence that seeped from its underbelly into Southeast Asia: the place was as leaky as a sieve. China, meanwhile, had storied thrones and imperial capitals, and over the centuries the whims of the centralised courts would render the country virtually schizophrenic in its relationship with the outside world. China would sometimes fling open its door to trade and travel, only to slam it furiously shut a generation later; it would unleash its own armada of monopolising seamen onto the Southeast Asian trade networks, only to haul them home and scupper their boats after a few voyages. The tribute system with which Srivijaya complied was in fact often the only way to continue trading during a bout of Chinese xenophobia. Shipments of Srivijayan ivory, birds’ nests and spices would be accepted as ‘gifts’ by the port officials of Canton, and the favour would be returned in the form of metals, porcelain and silk.

All told, Srivijaya survived for some six centuries, but by the dawn of the second millennium CE it was already in decline—probably partly due to an inability to keep pace with the changing moods of China. As power at the centre began to wane, the outermost vassals of the Srivijayan network would have begun tentatively to test the waters with a few overlooked tribute missions and unacknowledged regal missives, and then, very swiftly, the threads would have snapped as outlying entrepôts reasserted their outright independence. The network contracted. Raids by bullying outsiders began to wrack the capital, and in 1025 the Cholas—a swaggering mob of pirates from South India whose economy was founded on plunder—sacked Srivijaya and many of its one-time vassals along the Straits.

At the end of the eleventh century the centre of the dwindling power shifted north from the Musi to the hub of Srivijaya’s former vassal, Malayu, near the site of the modern city of Jambi. There was a last flurry of temple building, with an array of red-brick monuments thrown up on the banks of the Batang Hari, but the flame was guttering. Before long it had gone out altogether.

By the time the Muslim sultans of Palembang established their own riverine kingdom on the Musi in the sixteenth century, neither they nor their subjects had the faintest idea that the ruins of a mighty state lay buried in the thick black soil beneath the foundations of their own city. But the Palembang sultans were, in their own small way, inheritors of a tradition of semi-divine kingship that had originated in Srivijaya—as were all the other kings of the Archipelago. Their common subjects, too, owed a considerable debt, for their own mother-tongue was a language that had first emerged from Jayanasa’s realm. Southern Sumatra was the original wellspring of the Malay language, and it had been Srivijaya’s dominance of the shipping routes that had first fuelled its spread as the lingua franca of the Archipelago, a role that it still claims today in its updated form as Bahasa Indonesia, the national Indonesian language, and the near-identical modern Malay spoken in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.

In the thirteenth century China suffered one of its periodic catastrophes: the Mongols swept southwards and usurped imperial power, overturning the old systems of tribute and diplomacy. By the 1360s, however, Mongol power itself had dissolved. As the courtiers of the new Ming Dynasty attempted to rebuild the Middle Kingdom, someone had the bright idea of calling in overdue tribute obligations from the islands of the distant south. In 1370, a full seven hundred years after Yijing’s visit, an ill-informed Chinese diplomatic mission went looking for San-Fo-Qi.

Following the old monsoon trade winds, the officials eventually arrived in Jambi—to the astonished delight of the local rulers, who had long since gotten used to their own obscurity. They eagerly agreed to resume the tribute missions of old. Over the coming five years several embassies to China set sail from Jambi. The excitement rather went to the head of the local king, a man by the name of Wuni, and he began to believe that there might still be some flicker of life in the Srivijaya corpse. In 1376, he sent a request for Chinese acknowledgement as maharaja of a revived Srivijaya, and recognition as the greatest tributary chief in the Archipelago. In far-off Nanjing, the Ming officials had not yet grasped the real state of affairs in Southeast Asia, and the next year they sent a mission to acknowledge Wuni’s improbable request. Unfortunately for the Chinese, they had reckoned without Java, the real centre of power in the fourteenth-century Archipelago. Before the Chinese reached Jambi, the Javanese got wind of the affair. They dispatched their own fleet, which tracked down the mission ship and slaughtered all the Chinese diplomats, before descending on Sumatra to teach the upstart Wuni a pertinent lesson and to obliterate whatever modest trace might remain of the magnificent Srivijayan heritage.

When word of the incident reached China, the Ming officials reacted with remarkable pragmatism. Instead of attempting to extract some sort of revenge for the death of their diplomats they decided to forget all about Sumatra, and to award the exclusive status of tributary to the Javanese king who had ordered the killing from his seat on the island that would be the lodestar of the Archipelago forever more.