The Xenophile Historian

Before 800 A.D.

	A Geographical Introduction
	An Amazing Beginning
	The Arrival of the Malays
	Indianization
	Funan
	Other Mon and Malay States
	Burma: Pyu, Pegu and Arakan
	Early Vietnam
	Nan Zhao
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The peoples of this region are as diverse as the geography itself. Dominant ethnic groups like the Vietnamese, Thais, etc., have always preferred to live in river valleys and other low-lying areas, which are the best places for growing rice. Usually the highlands are available for anybody who wants them, and they have been settled by various ethnic minorities. The result is that about 85% of the population is concentrated on 15% of the land, with the minority groups thinly spread over the rest. Even ministates like Brunei and Singapore have ethnic minorities living within their borders; there is no homogeneous society in this part of the world.

Influence from outside has contributed to Southeast Asia's ethnic diversity. Every major city has a Chinese community, started by job-seeking immigrants who have been arriving since the 16th century. Every major religion has followers here: Hinduism (Bali), Buddhism (most of the mainland), Islam (Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the southern Philippines), Confucianism (Vietnam), and Christianity (mostly in the Philippines and Vietnam). There was even a community of 7,000 Burmese Jews until the 1980s, when they moved to India or Israel. Finally, the period of Western colonialism left its mark on the region; many countries still have economic and political ties to their former white rulers. For example, the Filipinos know more about the United States than they do about neighboring Malaysia, and Vietnam has nearly as much in common with France as it does with Laos.

An Amazing Beginning

Archeological excavations in Thailand (Spirit Cave, Non Nok Tha) and northern Vietnam (Dongson, Hoabinh) reveal a major surprise: the first Southeast Asians had agriculture and pottery at the same time as the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia. In fact, evidence now suggests that rice was grown here a long time before it was grown anywhere else, and even the pottery found here may be the world's oldest. The most impressive discovery was made at Ban Chiang, a hill on Thailand's Khorat Plateau, in the early 1970s; this hill covered a village that was settled continuously, for more than three thousand years. 126 skeletons were discovered intact, buried with the pottery and metal tools it was thought they would need in the afterlife. One 4,000-year-old skeleton was nicknamed "Nimrod" because he showed all the marks of a mighty hunter; he was unusually tall, and buried with deer antlers, hunting weapons, and a necklace of tiger claws. Even the oldest graves contained bronze bracelets, bells and spearheads, dating back as far as 3600 B.C.!

At this early date the Khorat smiths were doing better work than their Mesopotamian counterparts; by 3000 B.C. they figured out that the strongest bronze alloy is made by mixing 1 part of tin with nine parts of copper. They were probably helped by a geographical advantage: Southeast Asia is the world's richest source of tin. Tin is uncommon in the West, and before the Mesopotamians discovered it, they made bronze by mixing copper and arsenic, with brittle and sometimes hazardous results.

Since little archeological excavation has been possible in Southeast Asia to date--thanks to modern problems like the Indochina wars--the discoveries made so far have caused considerable controversy. Traditionally it was believed that the Middle East is the only cradle of civilization, and distant centers of civilization like India, China and Central America somehow learned it from their elder brothers in Egypt and Iraq. The discoveries mentioned above bring this theory into question. Did the Middle East invent everything first? Did the Far East get started on its own, without help from the West? Part of the controversy stems from the fact that in Iraq we can trace the development of metalworking from its earliest stages, while the bronze works found so far in Thailand are products of a fully developed metallurgy. Pro-Thai advocates argue that we have not yet figured out where Mesopotamia first got its tin, so if there was any transfer of metals and ideas, it was from east to west, not the other way around.

At the 1600 B.C. level, archeologists came across another important discovery: iron spearheads, knives and bracelets. Normally the Hittites of ancient Turkey are credited with being the first people to forge iron, but these objects are just as old as anything the Hittites produced. Around the same time, the people went from dry cultivation to the wet-cultivation of rice in flooded fields that is still practiced today; that greatly increased the total food supply. The carabao, or water buffalo, was domesticated around this time to pull plows, and the discovery of spindles and bits of thread suggest that they already knew how to make cloth from silk (this may have been learned from the Chinese).

Ban Chiang's achievements were limited to agriculture and metallurgy; they had no cities, no writing, no temples and no kings. Warfare seems to have been unknown as well; nobody was buried with any shield or weapon of war, no skeleton found to date shows signs of a violent death, and no settlement shows evidence of having been destroyed by fire or force of arms. They lived simply, turning out their pottery and bronzes until the first millennium B.C., when they vanished as mysteriously as they came. But by that time they had left their mark on other cultures. It now appears that China learned how to make bronze from them, for the Chinese word for copper, "tong," is the same word used in the oldest Southeast Asian languages.

There are hundreds of circular mounds--some as much as twenty feet high--that still await investigation in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They are spaced an average of 18 miles apart, and most of them are probably villages. Now that political conditions in the region have finally relaxed, it may be possible to excavate them to see if they can answer the questions raised by the artifacts found so far. Perhaps these hide the missing cities of the Ban Chiang civilization. Unfortunately, when the natives living near Ban Chiang found out that the potsherds in their ground were worth something to foreigners, they dug up and smuggled thousands of pieces out of the country before scholars had a chance to study them. Furthermore, when the villagers ran out of authentic pots to sell, they started making convincing-looking forgeries. The artifacts still lying in those other mounds may revolutionize our knowledge of ancient history, if the archeologists can get to them before the looters do.

The Arrival of the Malays

Back in Southeast Asia, the Dongson culture enjoyed its best years. Around 500 B.C., craftsmen in north Vietnam began making large bronze drums covered with various scenes, of people riding in boats, fighting battles, or conducting important ceremonies. These remarkable examples of metallurgy were buried with the dead, or served as urns to hold cremated remains. They probably had some sort of religious significance, because many of the tribes living in the region today believe that a person needs a drum to contact his ancestral spirits. To the northwest, around Lake Dian in China's Yunnan province, another bronzeworking culture sprang up after 1000 B.C. The Dian people produced not only drums but drum-shaped containers for cowrie shells (the local form of money), and the lids of the containers are even more elaborate than the drums. These lids have miniature figures of people and their surroundings, a complete diorama. For example, one such display shows 127 people gathered around a platform bearing 16 drums, with a thatched roof stretched over the platform and a giant bronze drum standing nearby. Both cultures were eventually conquered by the Chinese: Dongson in 111 B.C., Dian in 109 B.C.

One other achievement deserves to be mentioned here. Around 1 A.D., at Banawe, in the northern Philippines, somebody left an astonishing work of engineering; using only stone age tools, they carved entire mountains into terraces so that rice may be grown on the slopes. Today's residents on the terraces, a tribe called the Ifugao, still maintain and use them, and the terraces are considered the "eighth wonder of the world" by Filipinos. But Banawe and the journeys across the Indian and Pacific Oceans mark the end of the time when Southeast Asia was a technological leader; for most of the two thousand years since Southeast Asia has borrowed most of its culture from other nations, rather than inventing its own.

An Ifugao tribesman, with Banawe in the background.

Indianization

Indian interest in Southeast Asia increased when India and China began to trade with each other in the second century B.C. The trip between India and China was not easy; the direct route was over the Tibetan Plateau, a grueling hike only the hardiest traders were willing to try. Alternatives by land were not much better: either a trek through the mountainous jungles of Burma and Yunnan, or a long roundabout path through barbarian-infested Central Asia. Indian merchants searched for a water route, and they found it in Southeast Asia's seas. The area with the most traffic, the Malacca Strait between Malaya and Sumatra, soon developed a problem in the form of local pirates, but overall this was the quickest and easiest way to travel between Asia's two main centers of civilization. An alternative to Malacca was the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, but that added 90 days to the journey, with no port to stop in on the way; few sailors or passengers looked forward to such a trip.

With the Indian ships came Indian culture. Because the currents and winds of the Indian Ocean change with the seasons, ships would often have to wait in a Southeast Asian port for months until favorable winds came, giving those on board ample time to meet the natives. Indian missionaries converted the natives to Buddhism and Hinduism, and soon the local rulers were calling themselves maharajahs and imitating the courts of India down to the smallest details. By the first century A.D., the coasts of Burma, Malaya, Thailand, Cambodia and southern Vietnam were dotted with Indian-style city-states.

Funan

Late in the first century A.D., the entire lower Mekong region was united under a city named Vyadhapura. Only a Cambodian legend exists to tell us how it happened: according to this tale, one day an Indian Brahman (priest) named Kaundinya was directed by a heavenly spirit to sail eastward. After a difficult journey he reached the Cambodian coast, where a beautiful young woman paddled out in her canoe to greet him. At first Kaundinya was delighted to meet such a charming hostess, until he learned that she was Queen Willow Leaf, ruler of the country and daughter of a serpent god that was a personal enemy of his. When she declared that she would seize his ship and destroy him, he shot a magic arrow into her boat. The queen immediately realized that she was no match for the newcomer and agreed to make peace. Shortly after, the two were married, and their child became the first king of Funan.

We are not certain of the name by which Southeast Asia's first kingdom called itself; it appears to have been Phnom, which means "mountain" in Cambodian. The name we call it, Funan, comes to us from Chinese diplomats, who first visited around 230 A.D. Funan means "King of the Mountain"; both names are a reference to Mt. Meru, the home of the gods in Hindu mythology (Cambodia is quite flat). All of what we know about Funan comes either from Chinese records, or from excavations at Oc Eo, Funan's seaport on the Gulf of Thailand. Before the Chinese arrived, a series of military expeditions made vassals of all the city-states of Thailand and the Malay peninsula, giving Funan complete control of the Indo-China trade. Oc Eo was a bustling center of commerce in its heyday, with traders coming there from China, India, and even Rome (among the artifacts found was a Roman coin, dated 152 A.D.). So many canals were dug in the countryside that the Chinese talked about "sailing across Funan."

Normally the Chinese are not impressed by the accomplishments of other people, but Funan's visitors brought back a favorable report of the country's Malay upper class, which had palaces, abundant treasures, and a system of writing related to Sanskrit. Most of the people, however, were apparently Negrito, for one Chinese described them as "ugly and black," with frizzy hair. This same ambassador was offended by the sight of the Negritos walking around naked, and when he told this to the king of Funan, a law was passed requiring all to wear clothing in public, and the traditional Cambodian "sampot" or loincloth was invented.

Funan peaked as a nation under Jayavarman I (478-514) and then rapidly fell into ruin. Internal discord and raids from the Khmers in Laos weakened the state; by 539 it was paying tribute to the Khmers; in 627 the Khmers conquered it completely. But Funan had established the social, economic, and political patterns that most states on the Southeast Asian mainland would follow for centuries to come.

Other Mon and Malay States

We know little about these kingdoms today. Numerous artifacts have been found, but all of the inscriptions on them are religious texts; no information on the politics/history of the states can be gleaned from them, aside from the fact that they practiced Theravada (Hinayana) Buddhism. The Malay states gradually came under the rule of Srivijaya, the first Indonesian empire, in the eighth century. Dvaravati and Haripunjaya became part of the Khmer empire in the tenth century, and the other Mon state, Thaton, was conquered by Burma in the eleventh. The Mons were never displaced as residents, though; in Thailand they retained their separate ethnic identity during the whole Khmer period, and were absorbed into the Thai kingdoms that were established in the 13th century. They were still the largest ethnic group in the lower Menam (Chao Phraya) River valley as late as 1350.

Burma: Pyu, Pegu, and Arakan

The Pyus prospered from the occasional merchant who used the Irrawaddy to go between India and China. They also got along well with the Mons and with India. Chinese visitors reported that Pyu had a remarkably elegant and humane society. Fetters, chains and prisons were unknown, and the only punishment for criminals was a few strokes of the whip. The men wore gold ornaments in their hats and the women wore jewels in their hair; both sexes wore bright blue clothing. Pyus lived in wooden houses with roofing tiles of lead and tin, they used golden knives and surrounded themselves with art objects of gold, green glass, jade and crystal. Unlike the Mons, who had a king in charge of every Mon city, the Pyus governed each tribe by democratic assembly.

From the 6th century onwards the Burmese grew to become the largest of the Pyu tribes. This made little difference until 832, when Nan Zhao, the first Thai kingdom, launched a devastating raid that destroyed the Pyu capital (modern Hmawza, then called Shrikshetra). Leadership of the Burman peoples passed to the Burmese, but not everyone approved of the idea; even today the Burmese majority has trouble getting along with the other Tibeto-Burmans. This is especially true of the Karens, a large ethnic minority living next to the Mons in Southeast Burma; they have been implacable opponents of Burmese rule for most of the eleven centuries since the fall of Pyu. In 849 the Burmese founded their own city, named it Pagan (pronounced "Pah-gon"), and built a wall around it. At the same time the Mons built a new capital city to replace Thaton, named Pegu, on the east edge of the Irrawaddy delta.

The Burmese have a list of kings going all the way back to 107 A.D., but the first king for which inscriptions exist is Nyaung-u Sawrahan (931-964). The story of how he got the crown is worth telling here, because it shows some cultures have very unusual ideas about who is qualified to be king. The previous king, Theinkho, was defeated in battle, and while fleeing he came upon a farm with a delicious-looking crop of cucumbers. He decided to stop there, and picked a cucumber to eat it. What happened next was clearly caused by a breakdown of etiquette; Theinkho didn't seek to get permission before taking the cucumber, and Nyaung-u Sawrahan, the farmer who owned the field, didn't greet the king with appropriate words like, "Your Majesty, pardon, but thou asketh not for that cucumber." Instead, Nyaung came running and screaming, and beat the king to death with his spade! The queen was also there, but whereas you would expect her to declare Nyaung an outlaw and order him slain on the spot, she had him subdued, tied up, and taken into the palace. She was afraid that the people might rise up in revolt when they heard that the king was dead; she may also have been concerned about who would take care of her now. So she crowned the farmer as the new king, and brought him out when conditions looked safe. Nyaung-u Sawrahan is now remembered as the "Cucumber King," credited with turning his original farm into a beautiful garden, and bringing a generation a peace to the kingdom.

On the coast, between the Irrawaddy delta and the border of modern Bangladesh, there was a kingdom named Arakan. Arakan is a wedge-shaped land, 350 miles long and 90 miles across at its widest point; a mountain range named the Arakan Yoma separates it from the rest of Burma, making communications difficult. The Arakanese are closely related to the Burmese--in fact they speak an archaic Burmese dialect that is no longer used by the Burmese themselves--but the barriers of nature have made them more interested in India and the sea than in their brethren across the mountains. Most of them are Buddhists, but Buddhism has never been the state religion the way it has been for the Burmese. In fact, there is a community of Bengali Moslems in Arakan today, the product of Arakan's toleration of Islam when it was an independent state seeking commerce with India.

The Arakanese chronicles claim that their kingdom was founded in 2666 B.C., and they contain lists of kings going back to that date. Inscriptions have been found that mention a very old kingdom in the area (as old as 350 A.D., anyway), but they are written in Sanskrit, suggesting that Arakan's founders were Indian, not Tibeto-Burman. The first evidence of the Arakanese themselves dates to the tenth century, so they probably originated as one of the Pyu tribes, migrating as far west as possible when Pyu was destroyed. The northern half of the country was conquered by Anawrahta, the first important Burmese king, in the mid-eleventh century, but it remained a semi-independent province, with its own hereditary monarch, until full independence was regained two and a half centuries later.

Early Vietnam

The first Vietnamese state along the Red River, Van Lang ("Land of the Tattooed Men"), is probably a myth--Vietnamese legends claim it was founded in 2879 B.C.! At best Van Lang is a vague memory of the Dongson culture that existed in the region before the Viets arrived. The last Van Lang king was overthrown in 258 B.C. by an immigrant named An Duong Vuong (the chief of the Viets?), who renamed the state Au Loc. Au Loc was in turn conquered by a Chinese general named Zhao Tuo in 208 B.C. But even while the Chinese took over, the masters of China, the Qin dynasty, were overthrown. Instead of submitting to a new emperor, Zhao took for himself a Viet name, Trieu Da, adopted Viet customs, and declared the area under his control--the Red River valley plus Guangdong and Guangxi provinces--an independent kingdom called Nam Viet (Nan Yue in Chinese). At this point true history replaces legends.⁽²⁾

For nearly a century Trieu Da's successors used diplomatic and military duels to keep the Chinese out. Then in 111 B.C. Nam Viet was conquered by the Chinese emperor Wu Di. At first the Chinese ruled leniently, introducing many things the Vietnamese welcomed, like writing, roads, canals, improved agriculture, and iron tools/weapons. But the Viets refused to become Chinese; as a result, from the first century A.D. onwards the Chinese attempted a program of total Sinicization. Thousands of Chinese administrators, soldiers and scholars came in, filling the government jobs previously held by Vietnamese. Confucianism, Daoism, and the Chinese language were taught; Chinese customs and fashions became mandatory. Despite all this only the educated elite were affected much, and even they preferred to speak only Vietnamese at home.

The first major rebellion against Chinese rule (39-42 A.D.) was led by Trung Trac, the wife of a noble executed by the Chinese, and her sister Trung Nhi. They gathered the tribal chiefs with their armed followers, attacked and destroyed the Chinese strongholds, and proclaimed themselves queens of an independent Vietnam. The Chinese returned, however, with a new army, re-imposed their rule, and tried harder than ever to assimilate the natives. Another woman, Trieu Au, led a second uprising in 248, but it was crushed in six months; like the Trung sisters, she drowned herself to avoid capture by the Chinese. Three more revolts took place in the sixth century, and the Chinese won every time. After the first uprising the Chinese general, Ma Yuan, erected two bronze pillars on the southern border of Vietnam, marking where the Chinese thought the civilized world came to an end. Beyond those pillars lived only demons, ghosts, subhuman savages--and the Chams.

To the south, in the neighborhood of modern Hue, a different kingdom was getting started. Champa, as that kingdom was called, is first listed in Chinese records under the name "Linyi", and the date of its founding is given as 192 A.D. Ruled by a king clad in cotton, with gold necklaces and flowers in his hair, the Chams brought up pearls from the South China Sea and produced amazingly potent drugs and incenses. Warriors wore rattan armor and rode elephants in battle, often to raid Chinese settlements.

Like their neighbors to the south and west, the Chams were Malays. Because of their location, Champa was influenced by both Chinese and Indian culture at first. Later on, when the Gupta empire arose in India (4th century), a great deal of commerce between India and Champa took place. The result was that Champa's culture became totally Indianized. Sanskrit was widely used as a sacred language, the kings took on Sanskrit names, and the names of Champa's cities were Sanskrit ones as well: Amaravati (modern Quang Nam), Vijaya (Binh Dinh), Kauthara (Nha Trang), and Panduranga (Phan Rang). At the same time Indian and Cham art were identical.

The mountainous coast of central Vietnam could not provide enough farmland to keep the Chams fed, so from the earliest years their society was ship-oriented, depending on both trade and piracy (with no particular preference) to make a living. Most of the raids were directed north towards the Chinese-occupied part of Vietnam, until the Chinese retaliated by destroying Vijaya, the Cham capital, in 446. Champa fell under Chinese rule until it regained its independence in 510. Thirty years later, the decline of Funan gave the Chams an opportunity to expand south, and they advanced all the way to the edge of the Mekong delta.

In the following centuries Champa exchanged raids with the Chinese, Khmers, and Javanese. The skill of the Cham soldiers, their strong sea power and their virtually unassailable land position all contributed to Champa's success. But their piracy made all of Champa's neighbors enemies, and the Chams got more than they bargained for when the Vietnamese turned out to be as aggressive as they were.

Late in the eighth century Chinese control over Vietnam weakened, encouraging raids from Java (767) and the Thai kingdom of Nan Zhao (862-863); in 780 Champa bit off the provinces of Hue, Quang Tri, and Quang Binh. When China's Tang dynasty was replaced by anarchy in the early tenth century, the Vietnamese made yet another bid for independence. This time, under their leader Ngo Quyen, they were successful, and after an overwhelming naval victory in 939 the Vietnamese were free at last.

Nan Zhao

Even at this early date the Thais appear to have been a heterogeneous people. The reason for this is the basic nature of early Thai society. Often a group of Thai villages would band together under one prince to form an alliance called a muang. Most muang were temporary, lasting just long enough to solve a specific problem, but a really successful alliance would stay together for years. It did not take much to get the Thais to migrate, and whenever they were dissatisfied a prince would take his muang and move somewhere else. Population pressure also caused migrations. For example, a prince would want his sons to have as much land as he did; usually he would make his youngest son heir to the original territory and take the other sons with him as he went forth to conquer new lands for them. This process tended to fragment Thai society into many smaller ethnic groups. Another factor was the way they treated the previous inhabitants of the lands they moved into; they enslaved them, rather than killing them or driving them away. Because the Thais were spread out over a large area, sharing their land with non-Thais, they were usually an ethnic minority in their own country, even as late as the 14th century.

In the late 7th century, the Chinese were put on the defensive by an expanding Tibet which threatened to annex all of southwest China. In 713 the Chinese gave up trying to defend the southwest by themselves and formed anti-Tibetan alliances with six Thai city-states in western Yunnan. One of the Thai princes, Pi Logo, brought all six states under his rule; in 738 the Chinese recognized him as the "Nan Zhao" or "Southern Prince." Prosperity came immediately, since Nan Zhao and its capital, Dali, were in a well-defended region, and the land route of the Indochina trade passed through their realm.

When the Nan Zhao throne passed to Pi Logo's son, Go Lofeng, the Chinese had second thoughts about the kingdom they had helped create. Four Chinese armies invaded between 752 and 754, but Nan Zhao defeated them every time. Then Nan Zhao took the offensive, conquering all of eastern Yunnan, Guizhou and even Guangxi. Nan Zhao's best years were in the 9th century, when the previously mentioned raids into Burma and Vietnam were made. After this China and Nan Zhao agreed that friendship was the best policy. They got along fine after that until the Mongol Empire conquered both nations in the thirteenth century. Ever since those days the Thais have been masters of diplomacy, a skill that helped them keep their independence when the West conquered their neighbors.

2. The capital of Nam Viet was present-day Guangzhou (Canton). The tomb of Nam Viet's second king, Van Vuong (137-125 B.C., called Zhao Mei in Chinese), was discovered there in 1983. Built to resemble an underground palace, it contained a fine collection of artifacts, including ten swords, a suit made of jade pieces tied together with silk thread, and a supply of pills made of sulphur, crystal, arsenic, calcite and alunite. Van Vuong believed this drug would keep him from growing old, but archaeologists now think the king poisoned himself with his own "pills of immortality."

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball