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CHAPTER 2

EMPIRES OF

IMAGINATION:

HINDU-BUDDHIST

JAVA

The plateau lies in the belly of an old volcano, 6,500 feet above sea level in the heart of Java. This is a broken landscape under a cladding of cold soil and pine trees, and there is still a smell of sulphur in the damp air. The name of this strange place is Dieng.

Sometime in the seventh century the first Shiva-worshipping temple builders came struggling up through the tiger-haunted forests to reach this spot, dragging their stonemasons’ tools and their Indian-inspired blueprints. But they were not pioneers in an untrammelled world, for Dieng’s name—Di Hyang, often translated today as ‘Abode of the Gods’—is older than any Sanskrit-speaking arrival. Hyang is an ancient Austronesian concept of deity.

In far-flung corners of the Archipelago even today, away from the influences of India and Islam, mountains are the abode of ancestral spirits and fiery gods. From Gunung Dempo in Sumatra to the tricoloured crater lakes of Kelimutu in Flores, volcanic summits have always been sacred. As the seventh-century builder-priests paced out the plots for a new vision on Dieng’s marshy, sulphur-scented levels, they were walking over an ancient place of power and pilgrimage.

It would be easy to overlook Java. A slender slip of land, six hundred miles long and less than a quarter of that across, it rests beneath the equator at the point where the southern arc of the Archipelago bears away eastwards towards distant New Guinea. It is a fraction of the size of Sumatra or Borneo, and is some distance from the crucial shipping junction in the Straits of Melaka. At a glance, then, it is not the most likely candidate for the cradle of history. But peer more closely at Javanese geography, and something becomes apparent. The Archipelago-long string of volcanos that is moderately spaced down the length of Sumatra and scattered, island by island, through Nusa Tenggara bunches up dramatically here, with a legion of fiery peaks marching in tight formation along the entire length of Java. Dieng is just one of dozens of active or dormant Javanese volcanoes. They provide a spine for the island, and though their capacity for sporadic violence gives the place an uneasy edge, the eruptions have doused the soils with nutrients. The peaks snatch at passing weather systems and squeeze out their moisture, and the bowls of land between them are well-watered. Java is one of the most fertile places on earth. What’s more, its mellow northern littoral is indented with safe river-mouth anchorages and brushed by easy trade winds.

There were already Indianised states here well before the rise of Srivijaya in Sumatra. They are glimpsed in the passing comments of Chinese scribes and travellers. In 412 CE, Faxian—the wandering monk whose story would inspire Yijing almost three centuries later—stopped by on his return from India in a West Java state that seems to have been called Holotan. As a good Buddhist, Faxian was none too approving of the state of religious affairs he encountered in Java: ‘Heretic Brahmans flourish there, and the Buddha-dharma hardly deserves mentioning’, he noted.

Later another state—this one called Tarumanagara—grew up in the same place, and there were others, hinted at in Chinese chronicles and traced in scattered stone pillars, marked with the wriggling worm-casts of the Pallava script. But the relics of these earliest Javanese states are remarkably thin on the ground, for the inhabitants built their homes and palaces of wood and thatch, and in the hot, wet climate these materials would last little more than a single monsoon once a kingdom had collapsed.

But by the seventh century, a new state had appeared on the northern coast of Central Java. When the Chinese heard of this polity they noted its name as ‘Ho-Ling’. This may have been a corruption of ‘Kalingga’, or perhaps ‘Areng’, but whatever it was called it marked the beginning of a relay of royal realms in Java that has continued all the way to the present day. And under the Ho-Ling aegis an epic tradition began of religious architecture in a medium more permanent than mere wood.

Java’s earliest stone temples sprang up on the Dieng Plateau in the second half of the seventh century. People from the surrounding hills had probably been making offerings to ancestral spirits at the steaming sulphur vents and cool caves here for many centuries, but these new places of worship were sophisticated miniatures of Indian influence and local innovation. The builders cleared spaces amongst the stunted trees, and raised carven blocks into squat but finely formed towers. Soon there were some two hundred temples scattered across the plateau and the surrounding hillsides. They were modest structures that were rarely more than twenty-five feet (eight metres) high. But their design set the pattern for a coming epoch: the leering kala ogres above the portals; the narrow access steps; the three levels of construction that symbolised the worlds of the mortals, the enlightened and the gods. And soon the royals of the rice lands below the Dieng eyrie would take these conventions and inflate them to a truly epic scale.

Down the steep slopes from Dieng along trails beetling back and forth through the forest, under the ribbed flanks of the Sindoro and Sumbing volcanoes and southeast across smoky foothills and deep green ravines, a returning pilgrim would come to the lush levels of Kedu. This bowl of low, well-watered land was hemmed with forested hills. To the east rose the hulk of Gunung Merbabu and its mighty twin, Merapi, angriest of all the volcanoes of Central Java. To the north an easy route led between the mountains towards the ports of the north coast, and snaking over the plain came the Progo River, a band of pale water which ran southwards, out of Kedu itself and across a triangle of rich, level land spreading south from Merapi. This was all fabulously fecund country. Palms stood in long ranks and the hillsides were thick with forest. The Progo was fed by myriad smaller streams, churning around bleached boulders and driving deep clefts into the limitless black soil, and the well-watered plots gave out a ceaseless cycle of crops across the seasons. It was a true land of milk and honey, and it would soon become the enduring cradle of Javanese civilisation.

By the early eighth century the main political action in Java seems to have shifted from the north coast to Kedu and the wider basin of the Progo. In 732, a local raja had his craftsmen raise an inscribed stone on a hilltop south of Merapi. It told of his rule over ‘a wonderful island beyond compare called Yava’. This king was called Sanjaya, a title he would pass on to a storied dynasty, and the general term for the area of Java over which he claimed control was Mataram, a name that would come to have such a hold on the Javanese imagination that it would eventually be revived by a line of Muslim sultans nearly a thousand years later.

Unlike their Srivijayan contemporaries in far-off Sumatra, the royals of Mataram were not, initially, concerned with maritime trade. There were no safe anchorages on the southern shores of Java, and the ports of the north coast were some distance away. What was more, they had no particular impetus for internationalism at this early stage: the region produced all they could possibly need. Rice and pulses grew in the irrigated fields, and the forests turned out fruits and seeds and dyestuffs. There were mines for salt, fish in the rivers, and a solid tradition of craftwork. Much of the excess produce did, eventually, find its way out to the ports, but it travelled by way of middlemen in the markets that rotated through rural settlements on a five-day cycle, and the rulers probably had little direct involvement in the trade.

The power of these Javanese rulers was rooted in water of the fresh, rather than salt, variety. Any given tranche of farmland had to be irrigated to keep its soils turning out crops through the fiery dry months in the middle of the year. Complex networks of dykes and ditches criss-crossed the countryside, and keeping them all free from leaks demanded cooperation across any number of banyan-shaded villages. The councils and collectives that managed these water networks were the earliest forms of organised government, and from time to time the chief of a particular network would decide to extend his influence beyond the head of his longest irrigation trench.

Villages became small kingdoms, and something not unlike the Srivijayan hub-and-spoke model of power developed in Central Java. A king would have his own timber-built palace, known as a kraton, with a clutch of directly ruled fields and hamlets close by. Ranged at a distance around this fulcrum were the seats of other feudal lords, vassals of the central chief but each with its own spiral of subject villages. Still further afield would be other fiefdoms owing only the most notional allegiance to the centre. Across the network the rudiments of a tax system were already in place. Each village owed a certain time-honoured portion of their crops to the overlord, and each community owed a tranche of their time too, a fixed amount of man-hours to be given over to labouring on the landlord’s behalf. These obligations in time and kind might be owed only to the local village chief, or they might be passed all the way up the chain of command to the king himself.

The whole set-up allowed separate dynasties to travel side-by-side in the same region, vying for ascendency without annihilating each other. Over the generations the hub of the power-wheel might shift to some new village as a different dynasty won supremacy; the spokes leading to outlying vassals would realign, but the power structures and systems of tax and tribute would remain essentially unchanged. In Mataram there were two of these jostling lineages, twin clans which would leave the most monumental of marks on the Javanese landscape.

In 779 the son of the first Sanjaya king, Panangkaran, erected his own inscription amidst the green fields of Mataram. It was a rectangular slab, densely fenced with strips of Sanskrit, and it described his own realm as ‘the ornament of the Sailendra dynasty’. Forty-seven years earlier, Panangkaran’s father might have considered himself the biggest fish in the Mataram pond, but now the Sanjayas found themselves the underlings of the shadowy Sailendras, the ‘Kings of the Mountain’.

Everything about the Sailendras is enigmatic: we know nothing about their background and precious little about their culture. The source of their power is uncertain, and even their ethnicity is a bone of contention. But perhaps the most incongruous thing about the Sailendras is their religion. Four centuries earlier, the scholar-monk Faxian had dismissed Java as a realm of ‘Heretic Brahmans’, and though there was a garbled origin myth in Ho-Ling involving a wandering Buddhist prince—from Kashmir, of all places—for the most part Java seemed well established on the Hindu side of the coin. But then in the middle of the eighth century, a fully formed clan of orthodox Mahayana Buddhists materialised in Kedu and established supremacy over all Mataram. Their foreign faith clearly gave them a spiritual connection with Srivijaya, and it may be that the Sailendras had at least some direct familial link with Sumatra. That they used Malay instead of Javanese in some of their inscriptions certainly bolsters this idea. Some have even suggested that the Sailendras and the Srivijayans were one and the same, and that for some reason they had upped sticks in Palembang and headed south for an interlude in Java.

Whatever the case, within a few years of setting themselves up in Kedu the Sailendras had embarked on the most ambitious building project that Java had ever seen, an overwhelming undertaking that would leave the Shaivite sanctuaries of Dieng looking like the merest molehills. The structure—standing at the junction of the Progo and Elo rivers—amounted to 1.5 million blocks of chiselled grey andesite, and when it was finished it was the biggest Buddhist monument on earth. Its name was Borobudur.

Work on this epic edifice probably began around 760, and continued for some seventy years. The stone was quarried from the banks of the Progo, then hauled uphill to be set in the model of a monumental mandala. Nine concentric terraces were raised, the lower six square in form, the upper trio a set of shrinking circles culminating in a single stupa. The walls and balustrades of the lower terraces were covered with friezes in narrative order—more than 2,500 individual panels amounting in total to a strip of stories some three miles (five kilometres) long. They told tales from the massed library of Buddhist lore, along with snatches of local colour: a house built on stilts on the old Austronesian model with wooden plates on the supports to keep out clambering rodents; a ship running through a driven sea with straining outriggers and full-bellied lateen sails; weighing scales and earthenware water jars; pigeons on the rooftops and monkeys in the treetops.

The men who built Borobudur worked without a single blueprint, and each generation of Sailendra kings made their own modifications and innovations. Just how many people worked on the vast monument over the years is unknown—there are no contemporary inscriptions giving clear and practical details of its construction. Looking at the thing as it now stands it might be easy to conjure up images of Pharoanic megalomania, with legions of cringing slaves labouring under the lash to build the insane follies of a despotism. That there was no entrenched Buddhist culture out in the countryside of Central Java surely supports this notion—the labourers lugging two hundred-pound (one-hundred-kilo) blocks up from the Progo lived in a land where the elite had practiced Shaivism for centuries and where the rural peasantry concerned themselves with their own local spirits and deified forebears. All this business of Bodhisats was, quite literally, a foreign language.

But this may not be the full story: given the seven-decade timeframe of Borobudur’s construction, a couple of hundred men, working when harvest cycles allowed, could have achieved a very great deal. The Sailendras in all likelihood simply called upon that traditional obligation to offer part-time labour to the overlord. Men who were used to giving a portion of their working life to building roads or roofs for the ruler, or helping in the planting of royal rice fields, found themselves deflected in the direction of the andesite quarries on the Progo River. And given the remarkably catholic approach to alien belief systems that Java has displayed over the centuries, they probably simply shrugged when presented with yet another outlandish pantheon, and got on with the business in hand.

Nowhere else in the Archipelago could have supported a project on this scale. Away to the north in Sumatra the Srivijayans might have had maritime mastery, but seated amongst the swamps they had to import much of their own rice, and they had direct rule over only a small population of traders and fishermen. They could hardly have conceived a project on the scale of Borobudur, let alone brought it into being.

The Sailendras vanished almost as abruptly as they had appeared. By the early decades of the ninth century their dynasty was in decline, and that other regal lineage, the Sanjaya, was making a comeback. The Sanjaya scion of the day, a man by the name of Rakai Pikatan, embarked on a Sailendra-slashing rampage through the rice fields, and the last Sailendra king, Balaputra, turned tail and fled to Sumatra to seek refuge with his co-religionists in Srivijaya. All that remained was the recently completed Borobudur, coated now with white plaster and glowing like a single molar in the green jaw of Java. This spectacular architectural legacy of the departed Buddhist overlords seems to have rather rankled with Rakai Pikatan. If the Sailendras could build something as remarkable as Borobudur, then so could he: to mark the Sanjaya resurgence, in 856 he ordered the building of Prambanan.

If the Buddhist interlude under the Sailendras had been an aberration in the Javanese narrative, then Borobudur itself was an anomaly in the local architectural tradition: squat and square and quite unlike anything that went before or after. The resurgent Sanjayas, however, went back to the architectural form pioneered in Dieng two centuries earlier. The Prambanan temple complex, built on the banks of the Opak River close to the spot where Rakai Pikatan had his palace, featured a trio of towering temples in the classic three-tiered Javanese style, but expanded on a monstrous scale. The central temple was 154 feet (47 metres) tall.

Over the coming half-century Central Java developed an unfettered addiction to temple building. In almost every potentially auspicious spot, every pleasing plateau or conspicuous confluence, a column of carven black stone was thrown up by the masons. The plains and hills around Prambanan are thick with these temples. Some are dedicated exclusively to Shiva; a few are given over to the Buddha. But something significant was underway at the time: Java, it seems, was chewing up and digesting these once divergent Indian traditions and turning them into something of its own—a syncretic faith in which worship of Shiva dominated, but into which a Vaishnavite thread was also woven along with all sorts of local strands, and where the Buddha was a paid-up member of the pantheon. This tradition, which first took shape in Sanjaya-ruled Mataram, is best described as ‘Hindu-Buddhism’.

They heyday of Sanjaya-ruled Mataram lasted a mere fifty years. What brought it to an end is unclear, but the unconstrained royal passion for temple building may have eventually put an unbearable strain on the old systems of labour obligation. Here and there a family might have quietly decided to strip the rattan walls of their hut, load their buffalo, and head east to a new country where there were no temple-mad kings. Such a process would only have accelerated in the third decade of the tenth century, when a massive eruption of the Merapi volcano devastated Mataram and caked the countryside with cloying grey ash. It was certainly at around that point that the elite itself decided to pack up and move out, leaving the temples to the birds and shifting the centre of royal power in Java some four hundred miles to the northeast. The move would bring an unexpected boon: the two distinct power sources that had fuelled the previous polities in the Archipelago—the maritime advantages of Srivijaya and the agricultural wealth of Mataram—were about to intersect with spectacular consequences.

The mountain rises sheer from the sweltering coastal plains of northeast Java. It is modest compared to the monsters of the interior—a mere 5,240 feet (1,600 metres). And it is long-dead: no sulphurous smoke issues from its crown and the water from its springs is icy cold. But it is perfectly formed. Its crown bursts through the blanket of forest, marked with deep grooves and catching at the running cloud, and lower down, each of its cardinal points is marked by a smaller outlying summit. Sailors passing along the channel offshore can see it even on days when the bigger peaks behind are cloaked in cloud. It is a mountain that has been catching the eye and the imagination for millennia, and there were surely sacred sites on its forested flanks long before Indian, Arabian or European traditions washed ashore here. Its name is Gunung Penanggungan.

Penanggungan is the northernmost sentinel of the Arjuno-Welirang massif, a hulk of high ground with a river basin opening on either side. To the east lies the Malang plateau, drained by the Kali Welang River and with the huge Bromo-Tengger massif rising beyond. To the west, meanwhile, a much broader river basin opens—the floodplain of the Brantas, East Java’s longest river.

It was in these basins on either side of Penanggungan that royal power reconfigured in the tenth century, and the mountain became the sacred mascot of the new realms, claimed to be the tip of the mythical Mount Mahameru, home of the Hindu pantheon, broken off when the gods transported it from India to Java. This new, volcano-guarded wellspring of history still offered all the rich returns of field and forest which had fuelled the ruling dynasties of Mataram. But the Brantas delta also emptied into a sheltered sea with safe anchorages and steady trade winds. If a single centre point of the Archipelago can be identified, then this is probably it. The region was equidistant between the Straits of Melaka and the Spice Islands of Maluku. Makassar, the major gateway to eastern waters, was an easy sail away across the Java Sea, as were the river mouths of southern Borneo.

The various kingdoms and dynasties that bubbled up on the Brantas and around the flanks of Penanggungan over the centuries were essentially reincarnations of the same polity. But with each rebirth the power grew—shipping lines crept further across the Archipelago and beyond, and new vassals were collected on far-flung shores. The capital of these East Java kingdoms was usually somewhere around the point where the Brantas splits into its delta, approachable by boat from the sea and in full view of Penanggungan. This political hub was twinned with a port at the mouth of the Kalimas distributary, the site of the modern city of Surabaya. Trade goods of all kinds passed through this harbour, but the greatest boon was spices—for nutmeg and cloves from Maluku had already become a major global commodity. Soon, East Java kings were collecting tribute from distant islands, and even beginning to challenge the Straits of Melaka as the focus of Archipelago trading power.

The first truly great king to rise out of this bubbling cauldron—and, indeed, one of the first historical figures in the Archipelago to have a character and a narrative still clearly discernible today—was a man by the name of Airlangga.

Airlangga was the son of Javanese princess called Mahendradatta and a Balinese king called Udayana. Bali was a remote and rugged place that had kept its old Austronesian traditions strong. Its own chieftains had probably had little contact with royal Java in the days when the Mataram region was the centre of the local universe. But once Javanese power had reconfigured closer at hand on the Brantas delta, the trajectories of Java and Bali had become increasingly intertwined—as Airlangga’s ancestry so clearly shows. There was, however, already the potential for neighbourly ill-feeling, and Airlangga’s Javanese mother Mahendradatta would eventually be reincarnated as the most grotesque of all Balinese horrors—the mythical witch-widow Rangda.

Airlangga was born around 991, quite possibly in Bali itself, and his name meant ‘Jumping Water’, presumably as a nod to his strait-spanning ancestry. He would not be the only great Indonesian leader of mixed Javanese-Balinese ancestry—though it would be a full nine hundred years before his successor appeared.

He came to power in the early eleventh century after his father’s kingdom had been destroyed in a conflict with Srivijaya. According to legend, the teenage Airlangga was the sole survivor of the old court, and after its destruction he sought refuge with a community of ascetics in the karst hills near the south coast. This motif of a youthful king-in-waiting serving out a period of exile amongst the jungle mystics would repeat over and over down the course of Javanese history, and would even find echoes in the political exiles of the twentieth-century independence struggle. In Airlangga’s prototype tale the prince was tracked down to his remote retreat by a gaggle of dissolute Brahmans, who beseeched him to take up the royal mantle and resurrect the East Java polity. By the second decade of the eleventh century he had done their bidding and was back on the Brantas delta, ruling from a capital called Kahuripan and labouring under the spectacularly grandiose title of ‘Sri Maharaja Rakai Halu Sri Lokeswara Dharmawangsa Airlangga Anantawikramottunggadewa’.

After Airlangga’s death in 1049 his kingdom was divided between his sons. In the received version of events the old king himself had ordered the partition in an effort to stave off a civil war upon his demise. In truth, however, the split may have been the result of just such a war, rather than a preventative measure. It wasn’t until the middle of the twelfth century that a king called Joyoboyo managed to put the divided realm back together. He ruled from a capital at Kediri on the middle reaches of the Brantas and had a sideline in popular prophecy. Joyoboyo codified the concept of the Ratu Adil, the messianic ‘Righteous Prince’ who would periodically emerge from the ether to save Java from catastrophe. Apocryphal versions of his predictions are still doing the rounds today.

In 1222, yet another new king forged yet another new royal capital at Singhasari, in the basin of the Kali Welang River, close to where the city of Malang stands today. If Airlangga and Joyoboyo had provided the model for righteous princes and mystic kings-in-waiting, then this man, Ken Arok, offered an altogether less admirable prototype. He has gone down in legend as an orphan thief who wheedled his way into a vassal court of Kediri, killed the local lord, and then set about overthrowing Kediri itself. He was, in short, a jago—a term that literally means ‘fighting cock’ but which encompasses rebels, gangsters, upstarts—and the epitome of exactly what happens when a righteous prince goes wrong.

While power was ping-ponging back and forth between the jagos and the just, ever larger volumes of spice were being transhipped through the Brantas ports. Java’s renown as a bustling hub of tropical trade soon spread throughout Asia, and even wandering Italians would pick up snatches of conversation about its riches. Marco Polo, travelling to China in the second half of the thirteenth century, reported that Java ‘is of surpassing wealth… frequented by a vast amount of shipping, and by merchants who buy and sell costly goods from which they reap great profit’.

The pot of power in East Java was already coming up from a slow simmer to a rolling boil, but the fuel that would see it bubble right over came from an unexpected angle—a diplomatic mission despatched by a warrior king from the Mongolian steppe.

They could see the cone of Gunung Penanggungan from their ships, with the line of the Javanese coastline dark beyond a steel-grey sea. It was early 1293 and the Mongol commanders must have wondered what exactly they were doing in this strange place.

Three decades earlier, the Mongols had descended on China and set themselves up as celestial emperors in the form of the Yuan Dynasty. As Yuan Emperor, Kublai Khan—in between decreeing stately pleasure domes and trying to rein in the rampaging Golden Horde—set about sending missions to demand acknowledgment from the Southeast Asian vassals of the previous Chinese dynasty. He was particularly concerned about the Singhasari kingdom which, by the late thirteenth century, had its own vassals in Bali and Borneo, and which was even developing diplomatic ties with the Champa kingdom of Vietnam. Worried about what looked like a sort of proto-hegemony in the Archipelago, Kublai Khan despatched three missions to seek tribute from Singhasari. He sent the first in 1280, with another the following year. Neither met with much success, so in 1289 yet another diplomatic fleet departed on the monsoon trade winds, anchored off the Brantas delta, and sent a party ashore to negotiate with the then Singhasari king, a decidedly headstrong man by the name of Kertanagara. The visitors soon discovered that Kertanagara was not in the business of taking orders from anyone, not even the ruler with the best claim to the title of most powerful man on earth. What exactly he did to Kublai Khan’s principal diplomat, Meng Qi, depends on who is telling the tale, but the unfortunate envoy certainly lost face, so to speak—Kertanagara either cut off his nose, branded his visage with a red-hot iron, or sliced his ears off. Naturally, the Great Khan did not react mildly when his humiliated ambassador came home: in 1293 he sent another fleet to seek revenge.

The avenging armada was enormous. Around a thousand vessels had come lumbering across the South China Sea from Canton under the command of a trio of multi-ethnic admirals—a Mongol, a Uighur and a Han Chinese. They extracted submission and tribute from petty polities along the way, and when they swung to anchor off the mouth of the Brantas delta and looked out on the distant outline of Penanggungan, they must have felt that they were undefeatable. However, the first local messengers who paddled out to meet them let them know that things in the region had changed since the departure of the red-faced envoy four years earlier. The troublesome king Kertanagara was dead and Singhasari itself had been toppled by a rebel prince called Jayakatwang, who had installed himself at the earlier capital of Kediri.

The Mongol commanders would later realise that at this point they ought to have swung their ships around and crept off as quietly as they could. Instead, they allowed themselves to be convinced by a son-in-law of the deposed Kertanagara to take part in a counter-revolution against Jayakatwang at Kediri. This sonin-law—whose name was Raden Wijaya—had a small fiefdom on the Brantas downstream from Kediri, and since the fall of Singhasari he had been quietly playing the role of malleable vassal. Now, however, he led the Mongol army up the river, overwhelming outlying Kediri garrisons. In April, with the last of the monsoon rains, the invaders surrounded the Kediri capital and forced an easy capitulation out of Jayakatwang.

Raden Wijaya very clearly carried the same jago genes as his Singhasari forebear, Ken Arok, for he now embarked on the most spectacular piece of treachery. Instead of politely thanking the baffled Mongols who had just done his improbable bidding, he turned against them and conjured up a country-wide uprising. The Mongols did their best to resist, but this land of rice fields and palm groves was no place for men of the open steppe, and they had no real idea what they were doing in Java in the first place. After two hard, sweaty months of guerrilla warfare up and down the lower Brantas, they scuttled back to their ships and fled.

The Mongols, who had sacked Baghdad and stormed all the way to the borders of Christian Europe, had been chased out of Java by a junior prince of a toppled dynasty. Raden Wijaya had good reason to feel proud of himself. He went back to his little capital—a village about twelve miles west of Gunung Penanggungan—and turned it into an empire called Majapahit.

The word ‘Majapahit’ rings like a bell through the halls of Indonesian history. The name of no other realm before or since resounds as this one does. This is, in part, down to the way in which it has been used and abused in the long centuries since its fall. Later Javanese kings, nineteenth-century European orientalists, and strident Indonesian nationalists have all retooled its reputation to fit their own prejudices and purposes. But despite the static of later fantasy that crackles around it, the historical Majapahit really was very impressive indeed.

Raden Wijaya (who ruled as ‘Kertarajasa’) died in 1309. He was succeeded by his son Jayanagara—by all accounts a rather sleazy character who had an unsavoury sexual obsession with his own stepsisters and who died in 1328 at the hands of a court physician he had cuckolded. Surprisingly, given his reputation, Jayanagara left no son of his own, and after his death there was a period of regency rule with queens at the head of the court. In 1350, however, a young prince named Hayam Wuruk ascended the throne.

By this time the Majapahit capital had grown from a village to a grand city. Some thirty miles up the Brantas from the sea, the kraton—the royal palace—was ringed by a wall of red brick. To the north, on the banks of the river, was the residential and trading city of Bubat, with a pulsing marketplace centred on a great square. There were all manner of foreign communities here, Chinese and Indian amongst them. The high-point of the Majapahit year was the celebration that marked Chaitra, the first month in the Hindu Saka Calendar. Festivities went on for weeks, with parades of princes dressed in cloth-of-gold. There were challenges of combat in the square at Bubat, and elaborate ceremonies in which the king received tribute then dished out lavish largesse in return. According to court chroniclers, towards the end of the festival things usually descended into a glorious tropical bacchanalia, with massed feasting on ‘meats innumerable’, and quaffing of heroic quantities of palm wine and arak until the point at which the entire population was ‘panting, vomiting, or bewildered…’

Hangovers notwithstanding, the realm was remarkably well-run. On the Brantas delta the old and corrupt layers of taxation through local lords were simplified so that payment—in cash or kind—went straight to the kraton. Majapahit also had a thriving spiritual life. Both Buddhist monks and Shaivite priests were given their own quarters in the capital, and the surrounding countryside was studded with temples. Airlangga’s old bathing temples on the slopes of Penanggungan got a new lease of life, and away to the south, in the beautiful countryside where the Brantas valley rumples up towards Gunung Kelud, an old Singhasari Shiva complex was updated and expanded to become the mighty temple of Panataran, a major focus of royal pilgrimages. There were already distinct local versions of the Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, rewritten so that the escapades of the Pandava brothers and the adventures of Rama and Sita were now played out against a recognisably Javanese backdrop. Batik was already being crafted in village workshops, and complex traditions of music and dance were coming to fruition, as a visitor from the north of Sumatra described:

Everywhere one went there were gongs and drums being beaten, people dancing to the strains of all kinds of loud music, entertainments of all kinds like the living theatre, the shadow play, masked plays, step dancing, and musical dramas. These were the commonest sights and went on day and night in the land of Majapahit.

These refined entertainments—the wayang kulit shadow puppetry, the masked topeng dances and more—would remain the cultural mainstays of Java and the lands that came under its influence forever more.

Feasting and frolicking cost money, of course, and the cash came mainly from trade. Majapahit had its own fleet—part merchant navy, part pirate armada—which traded out across the Java Sea and beyond, carrying, according to one account, everything from ‘pig and deer dried and salted’ to ‘camphor and aloes’. The kingdom also consolidated and extended the network of offshore tributaries and vassals that had been stitched to East Java during Singhasari days, and managed a good number of military conquests closer to home for good measure. All this did a great deal for Hayam Wuruk’s reputation as a god-king, and soon his court chroniclers were tripping over themselves to heap superlative epithets upon his head:

He is present in invisible form at the focus of meditation, he is Siwa and Buddha, embodied in both the material and the immaterial;

As King of the Mountain, Protector of the Protectorless, he is lord of the lords of the world …

In fact the real genius behind all this commercial and military glory was not Hayam Wuruk himself, but his mahapatih, his prime minister, a thundering Machiavelli of a man by the name of Gajah Mada, the ‘Elephant General’.

Gajah Mada had first found favour under the debauched Jayanagara. It seems that he was a significant schemer from the start, for rumour has it that it was he who had incited the cuckolded court physician to kill his king. He was given the role of prime minister in 1331 in the regency period before Hayam Wuruk’s coronation. During the lavish ceremony that marked his appointment, Gajah Mada made a vow. He would not, he declared, ‘taste spice’ until Nusantara had been brought under Majapahit sway.

‘Nusantara’ literally means ‘the islands in between’. Gajah Mada probably meant by it something along the lines of ‘the outer islands’, but in time the word would form the key to the concept of the Archipelago as a single entity—if not a single nation. Today it is a synonym for ‘Indonesia’ itself.

By the time Hayam Wuruk was king, Gajah Mada had already made sure that Majapahit had more or less direct control over most of East Java, Madura and Bali, with a solid footing in Lombok and Sumbawa too. The Majapahit fleet had also become the main force in the Straits of Melaka. Over the course of Hayam Wuruk’s reign, more links were forged across Nusantara.

Not everyone was prepared to acknowledge Majapahit suzerainty, however. A particular thorn in the Majapahit side was its West Java counterpart, the Sundanese kingdom of Pajajaran, a realm which had never submitted entirely to East Javanese rule. In 1357, in an effort to forge a bond, Hayam Wuruk contracted a marriage with a princess by the name of Pitaloka, daughter of the Pajajaran king. When the Sundanese wedding party arrived in the capital Gajah Mada informed them that the girl would be less of a queen than a concubine, and that the moment had come for Sunda to submit to its East Javanese overlords. The Sundanese were a proud lot, and despite the fact that they were camped out in Bubat, smack in the middle of Majapahit and surrounded by hostile forces, they refused. It was a brave but suicidal gesture. In response, Gajah Mada had the entire bridal party—including the bride-to-be—massacred. Naturally relations between Majapahit and Pajajaran would never be particularly cordial after that, and even today the ethnic Sundanese country of West Java, centred on Bandung, is the one part of Indonesia where ‘Majapahit’ is something of a dirty word.

In the Negarakertagama, the epic poem written out on strips of lontar leaf to mark the apogee of Hayam Wuruk’s reign, a huge swathe of the Archipelago is claimed for Majapahit. Everywhere from the northern tip of Sumatra to the westernmost promontory of New Guinea gets a mention. It is a rundown that comes remarkably close to encompassing the entire Archipelago, and with the very notable exception of interior New Guinea and southern Maluku, it takes in all modern Indonesian territories and a little more besides. Any places in this vast maritime realm that failed to acknowledge Majapahit supremacy were, according to the Negarakertagama, ‘attacked and wiped out completely’.

Inevitably, later nationalists would latch very firmly onto this aspect of Majapahit and claim it as a pre-colonial precedent for the existence of the Indonesian nation state. Some of the islands and outposts mentioned in the Negarakertagama do seem to have been directly conquered by Majapahit at some point, but for the most part the list of scattered vassals probably amounts to little more than a run-down of all the places with which Majapahit had ever traded.

Rather than a true empire in the European sense, Majapahit, like Srivijaya before it, was a cultural and economic brand. The extent of its direct rule and centralised authority probably stretched little further than East Java, Bali and Madura, but its pervasive presence on the sea routes and its remarkable cultural sophistication gave it incredible kudos throughout the Archipelago. If the Majapahit king could have his chroniclers claim ownership of some isolated dot of land in a lost eastern sea that no one from Java had ever even visited, then the petty chieftain of that same dot might well award himself hand-me-down Javanese airs and graces when he wanted to impress his subjects. Origin myths in remote places like Adonara at the eastern extremity of Nusa Tenggara, or the misty Pasemah Highlands of Sumatra, make a claim of royal Javanese descent, and art-forms, palace architecture, dress and even language across the Archipelago would display a conscious Majapahit influence for centuries to come.

Gajah Mada died in around 1364. Hayam Wuruk continued without him for another twenty-five years, commanding that final annihilation of vestigial Srivijayan power in 1377 and earning Chinese respect, rather than retribution, for the extermination of their mission to Sumatra. But by this stage Majapahit had probably already passed its prime. All royal houses and great businesses eventually decay—and Majapahit was both. The problem for the East Java royals was probably that they had been too successful. The Archipelago economy had grown so vibrant under their aegis that the wealthy tributary chiefs of ports in Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and beyond had every reason to strike out on their own the moment they suspected a weakness at the centre. Majapahit’s energy had created the opportunity for the myriad entrepôt-states across the Archipelago that would ultimately usurp it. And the Majapahit-inspired atmosphere of internationalism would also provide the essential fertiliser for a cultural shift that would end the thousand-year process of Indianisation in the Archipelago.

In 1407, another Chinese fleet anchored off the coast of East Java. Unlike the Mongol armada 114 years earlier, it was not there to invade: its business was trade, treasure and tribute. It was quite unlike anything anyone had ever seen. A forest of brick-red sails stretched to the horizon over a flotilla of some three hundred ships. And if the size of the fleet was impressive enough, then the scale of the vessels themselves was truly staggering. The biggest amongst them were some 390 feet (120 metres) long with decks the size of football pitches. They were five times bigger than the Portuguese carracks that would begin to edge their way across the Indian Ocean in the following century. The fleet was a floating city of 30,000 men headed by seven imperial eunuchs and tended by 180 doctors and half a dozen astrologers.

Majapahit was still alive and kicking, and though its power had begun to atrophy in the western reaches of the Archipelago, it was still a place deserving of a visit from this, the first of a series of spectacular treasure fleets that the Ming Emperor, now ruling in place of the evicted Mongol Yuan Dynasty, would despatch to the furthest reaches of the Indian Ocean—and which would eventually carry the first giraffe back to China. The man placed at the head of these epic voyages was not the most likely candidate for the role of greatest seafarer in Chinese history. Zheng He (sometimes spelt as Cheng Ho) was the descendent of central Asian migrants, born in 1371 far from the sea in Yunnan and raised as a Muslim. As a small child he had been kidnapped by resurgent Ming troops, castrated, and dragged off to the north to serve as a eunuch at the imperial court. Despite his early emasculation, he grew to a formidable height and spoke with ‘a voice as loud as a huge bell’, becoming a key strategist in the Chinese court. When the first of the mighty treasure fleets sailed, Zheng He was placed in charge.

When Zheng He’s men came ashore in Java they discovered a rather violent place. In a small skirmish 170 sailors were killed, and one of the fleet’s chroniclers recorded that all the locals—‘little boys of three years to old men of a hundred years’—were armed with deadly kris daggers, and that ‘If a man touches [another man’s] head with his hand, or if there is a misunderstanding about money at a sale, or a battle of words when they are crazy with drunkenness, they at once pull out these knives and stab…’

The unravelling authority of Majapahit was probably responsible for the edgy atmosphere, but the capital on the banks of the Brantas was still a bustling place. And it was still remarkably cosmopolitan. The sailors would doubtless have found other Chinese living around the market square of Bubat, as well as Indians, Sri Lankans, and people from the Southeast Asian mainland. There is no record of whether Zheng He himself ever came ashore, but had he done so he would almost certainly have encountered a few co-religionists in Majapahit, for by the beginning of the fifteenth century there were Muslims quietly settling in all over the Archipelago. Majapahit might still be rumbling on—and indeed it would be another hundred years before it finally breathed its last—but the Hindu-Buddhist centuries were coming rapidly to an end and the scene was set for the next great sea change in Southeast Asia.