The Xenophile Historian

800 to 1500

	Pre-Moslem Indonesia
	The Khmers
	Pagan
	Dai Viet vs. Champa
	The Birth of Siam
	Ava and Ayutthaya
	Lan Xang
	The Long Road from Mecca to Manila
	Malacca
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Srivijaya never forgot that its prosperity came from abroad. The Srivijayans kept the Chinese friendly with diplomacy, sending merchants to the Chinese court in the guise of vassals offering tribute. To supplement their income as middlemen, local industries were developed in pepper, nipa mats, tortoiseshell, beeswax, aromatic woods, and camphor. The Orang Asli (Forest People) were hired to gather the wood and locate the diseased trees that are the source of camphor, and the Malaccan pirates (Orang Laut or Sea People) were recruited into the Srivijayan navy, to defend the straits rather than plunder them. All of their vassals and allies, on land and sea, were taught that the Srivijayan kings were sons of the gods, and that they had the power to strike down anyone guilty of treason. This idea soon became so widely believed that servants of the monarch routinely committed suicide upon his death.

Despite all this, Srivijaya did have to deal with competition, and the most aggressive competitor was the kingdom of Mataram, in central and eastern Java. Mataram's first important king was Sanjaya (732-750), who went forth with his fleet to raid everyone within reach, including Srivijaya, Chenla, and even China. At first the Srivijayans could not resist this threat, but a few years later a second dynasty, the Sailendras, arose in Java. Because the Sailendras were Buddhists, while Sanjaya and his successors were Hindus, Srivijaya and the Sailendras quickly became friends. The Sailendras probably received aid from Srivijaya when they overthrew their rivals in 775. Then Srivijaya and Mataram's new ruler cemented good relations with a treaty and a royal marriage. By 860 the ruler of Srivijaya was also a Sailendra, boasting of his Javanese ancestors.

Whereas Srivijaya depended on trade for its wealth, Mataram was an agriculture-oriented society. Its monarchs showed their devotion to Buddhism by constructing the Borobudur temple in the center of Java. Immense by any measure, Borobudur is a five-layered step pyramid containing two million cubic feet of stone, 73 bell-shaped shrines ("stupas"), and 1460 bas-reliefs. Srivijaya, by contrast, was so preoccupied with commerce that it built no enduring monuments of any kind.

Borobudur was not meant to be a place of worship, but a guide to enlightenment. Going around the rim on each level is a sunken pathway, lined on both sides with reliefs showing scenes from the Buddha's life. Each stage up, the Buddha becomes less involved with the things of this world. The pilgrim who follows all five corridors (a 3-mile walk) emerges on a platform open to the sky, leaving the earth behind. On this platform are three smaller platforms, circular to represent perfection. This is where the stupas stand; each shrine contains an image of the Buddha, partially obscured by stone screens because a mortal can only half understand the Buddha. The highest and largest shrine has solid walls, because the image inside is beyond human understanding.

Despite all this effort, devotion to the Buddha was on the way out, just as it was in Champa, Cambodia, and post-Gupta India. By 850 the Sailendra monarchs of Mataram had converted to the Saivite sect of Hinduism, which teaches that the king is an avatar or living incarnation of the god Shiva, and they started building Hindu temples to match Borobudur, 50 miles away. Because the Srivijayans were still Buddhists, the alliance cooled. When Mataram was overthrown by a rival, the prince of Kediri (a city near Mataram), in 928, the Javanese went back to their old habit of raiding. So hostile did relations become that Srivijayan ambassadors went to China in 992, pleading for aid against the Javanese pirates. The Chinese declined to intervene.

More trouble was coming. Srivijaya's principal customers, China and the Abbasid Caliphate, went to pieces in the early tenth century, causing an economic slump. Then in 1030 came a devastating raid from the Chola Empire of south India; Srivijaya was forced to pay tribute to the Cholas until 1190. There was some recovery in the 12th-early 13th centuries, but the country never prospered the way it did before. The Orang Laut became pirates again, since they could no longer make an honest living. The end came sometime after 1230, when Srivijaya lost control over the all-important waterways. No details are available, but when Marco Polo visited Sumatra in 1292, he found the island divided into eight states, none of them claiming to be the old trading empire.

Meanwhile Java was undergoing problems of its own. In 1016 Kediri was destroyed; no details are available to describe what happened, but an inscription written in 1041 called it "the destruction of the world." The kingdom was restored by the dead king's son-in-law Airlangga, but he then undid his achievement by dividing his kingdom between his two sons to keep them from quarreling over a single throne. Nearly two centuries of strife followed.

Conditions began to improve at last when an adventurer named Angrok overthrew the last Kediri prince in 1222, founding a new kingdom called Singosari. At this time a political and economic vacuum existed in Indonesia, and the new Javanese kings eagerly filled it. The most powerful Singosari king, Kertanagara (1268-92), imposed his authority on the nearest islands: Madura, Bali, the lesser Sundas, and the southern half of Sumatra. But he went too far in 1289, when he mistreated Kublai Khan's envoy, who came from China to demand submission to the Mongol Empire. The Mongols organized a punitive expedition, but Kertanagara was killed by a Kediri rebel, Jayakatwang, before they arrived. Jayakatwang in turn was quickly thrown out by Kertanagara's son-in-law, Kertarajasa, who used the Mongols to defeat Jayakatwang and then turned against them and drove them back into the sea. A new capital city was established at Majapahit. The new king spent the rest of his reign putting down rebellions, with the help of a fine general named Gajah Mada. His reign came to an untimely end, however, when he took Gajah Mada's wife and put her in his harem; the next time the king needed an operation Gajah Mada made sure the doctors cut too deeply. Gajah Mada was the prime minister during the reign of Kertarajasa's daughter (1329-1350), and in these years Majapahit became the center of an empire. Historians have debated the actual extent of Majapahit's empire; some say it encompassed all of modern Indonesia and Malaysia, while others say it only ruled a few key islands directly (Java, Madura, and Bali?) and merely dominated the seas around the rest.

Hayam Wuruk's reign (1350-1389) was the most glorious period in Java's history, thanks in part to the power behind the throne, Gajah Mada. Most of Hayam Wuruk's reign was a time of peace and cultural development, but it began with a dramatic incident. In 1351 Hayam Wuruk asked the still-independent king of Sunda for a daughter to marry. Delighted at the prospect of becoming father-in-law to Indonesia's most powerful monarch, the king agreed. He came with the princess and a splendid retinue to a Javan city named Bubat, where both kings agreed to have the wedding. But Gajah Mada did not approve of the marriage. Just before it was to take place, he intervened and told the king of Sunda that the bride was not the object of a political alliance, but an object of tribute being given by a vassal to his overlord. Realizing that he had been neatly trapped, the king tried to back out of the marriage with the help of his guards, but the Majapahit guards were prepared for this. The king of Sunda and his retinue were overpowered and slain. No record tells us whether the bride lived through the massacre to take part in the marriage. If she did, she must have died soon afterwards, for she is never mentioned in later inscriptions.

The "Bubat bloodbath" ended the period of conquest. Hayam Wuruk devoted the rest of his reign to building new temples, as evidence that a new period of history had begun. Gajah Mada hired a poet named Prapanca to compose an epic poem, the Nagarakertagama, in praise of the "misunderstood empire-builder." In addition to this, Gajah Mada kept busy with so many other activities that when he died in 1364, a state council decided that no one could replace him, and divided his functions among four ministers. Java enjoyed trade and good relations with every part of the Far East except Sumatra, which launched a short-lived rebellion to restore Srivijaya in 1377.

Java promptly crushed the rebellion, but then declined rapidly. Hayam Wuruk left no son by his queen, so he divided Java between two sons of concubines. As might be expected, a civil war broke out between them, and unity was not restored until 1406. In Sumatra a Chinese pirate named Liang Daoming took Palembang and made it his base of operations, raiding local shipping until a Chinese fleet came and removed him in 1407. The Chinese returned Palembang to Majapahit, but according to their own records the empire now existed in name only. Almost no records exist to tell us about Indonesia's history in the 15th century, but what we have suggests that there was civil strife in every reign. Javanese tradition asserts that Moslems overran all of Java in 1478, but this is not entirely true; an inscription mentions a Hindu king named Ranavijaya as late as 1486. When the Portuguese arrived in the area, they wrote that the coast of Java had a number of petty Moslem states, while a heathen named Pateudra (Pati Udara?) ruled the interior. Pateudra's reign ended in 1518 (or 1527?) when he was overthrown by a nearby sultan, and with that event Indonesia's pre-Islamic history comes to an end. The culture of Majapahit, however, is still alive on Bali, an island of ancient traditions in a Moslem sea.

The Khmers

The incident that caused the Javan conquest also started the Khmers on the road to greatness. It involved a rash young king, whose name we do not know. According to the Arab traveler who provided this account, one day the young king and his prime minister were discussing what to do about Java, the strongest naval power in the region. The king said, "I have one desire I would like to satisfy."
"What is this desire, O King?" his councilor asked.
"I want to see before me on a plate the head of the king of Java."

When the king of Java heard about the Khmer monarch's wish, he led a fleet of a thousand ships up the Mekong River and routed the Khmers defending the capital. Capturing the young king, he said, "You have manifested the desire to see before you my head on a plate. If you had also wished to seize my country or only ravage part of it, I would have done the same thing to Khmer. As you have expressed only the first of these desires, I am going to apply to you the treatment you wished to apply to me, and I will then return to my country without taking anything belonging to the Khmers . . . My victory will serve as a lesson to your successors." He then lopped off the king's head and said to the Khmer prime minister, "Look now for someone who will make a good king after this fool, and put him in the place of the latter."

The new king picked by the prime minister was an excellent choice: Jayavarman II, a distant relative of the late king who had been living in Java to escape the troubles at home. In the course of his long reign (795?-850), he reunited Water Chenla and gave it a new name: Kambujadesa (the origin of the modern names Cambodia and Kampuchea). Despite his success he seems to have been an insecure monarch; he waited until 802 to have his coronation, and before 819 he changed the location of his capital no less than five times. At his last capital, he finally found peace of mind by taking part in a sacred Hindu ceremony that consecrated him as an avatar of the god Shiva and declared him and his kingdom independent of any foreign power, especially Java.

The next important Khmer king was Yasovarman I (889-900). A few miles north of the Tonle Sap he built a new city, called it Yasodharapura, and it became Cambodia's capital for the next five centuries (now it is called Angkor, meaning simply "city"). Most of Angkor's impressive buildings were built later on, but Yasovarman left his mark by constructing an excellent system of canals and reservoirs around the city, using the technology perfected in the age of Funan. Those canals would later be used to feed the large number of laborers used in Angkor's massive building projects. Fortunately for historians, Yasovarman was a great braggart (all Khmer monarchs were), and he left numerous inscriptions boasting of his achievements: "The best of kings . . . unique bundle of splendors", and "In all the sciences and all the sports . . . in dancing, singing, and all the rest, he was as clever as if he had been the first inventor of them." Then came the ultimate boast: "In seeing him, the creator was astonished and seemed to say to himself, `Why did I create a rival for myself in this king?'"

For the 10th and 11th centuries our only source of information is the inscriptions, but it was a time of growth, in size, power, and cultural sophistication. Land Chenla submitted peacefully to Angkor's rule, and it appears that the states in Thailand and Malaya did the same, during the reign of Suryavarman I (1002-50). Suryavarman's son, Udayadityavarman II (1050-66), fought an inconclusive war with the Burmese, who thought the Khmers were getting too close to Thaton. Suryavarman II (1113-50) conquered Champa and campaigned against the Vietnamese; at one point there was a Khmer army in Thanh Hoa, just 80 miles south of Hanoi.

Back at home Suryavarman II built the masterpiece of Khmer civilization. This was a temple to the Hindu god Vishnu so enormous that it was known as Angkor Wat, the "temple city." Using an estimated 455 million cubic yards of stone, this structure was built with five gilded peaks to resemble the mythical Mt. Meru. The entire structure was covered with endless reliefs showing battles, scenes from Hindu epics, and events in everyday Khmer life. The central peak of the structure was also a mausoleum, where Suryavarman's ashes were placed when he died.

The cost of building Angkor Wat and fighting wars abroad drained the treasury. After Suryavarman II was gone the Chams successfully revolted, and in 1177 they sailed up the Mekong River and plundered Angkor itself. Four years of anarchy followed, but remarkably, the best years of Cambodia's history were yet to come. Royal authority was reestablished by Jayavarman VII, a middle-aged prince who had refused the throne when it was first offered to him years before. Jayavarman routed the Chams, drove them back to their home, and was crowned the new king of Angkor. Champa would be a Khmer vassal, not the other way around.

A man of uncommon vigor, Jayavarman spent the rest of his reign (1181-1219, he lived into his 90s) building more monuments than all of the other Khmer kings put together. Chief among these was a remodeled capital city, now called Angkor Thom ("big city"), which was so big and elaborate that only nearby Angkor Wat could rival it. A convert to the Mahayana Buddhist sect, he erected Buddhist shrines and images all over the city (the sculptors used Jayavarman as the model for statues of Buddha), and converted the temples of his Hindu predecessors into Buddhist ones. Around the country he built and maintained 102 hospitals because, as one inscription put it: "He suffered from the sickness of his subjects more than from his own; for it is the public grief that causes the grief of kings, and not their grief."

Some historians believe that Jayavarman's building projects exhausted the kingdom. None of the kings after him built anything important; they lived in luxury, performed their god-king rites, but accomplished little. Champa declared independence as soon as it heard the news of Jayavarman's death, and in the west the Menam River valley was lost to newcomers in the region, the Thais. At the same time Theravada Buddhism became the most popular religion, undermining the god-king cult. In the middle of the 13th century the Khmer king himself converted to Theravada Buddhism, perhaps because of the success of the Thais, who were Theravadists already. In 1296 a Chinese visitor, Zhou Daguan, visited Angkor and took home a glowing report of the city; to him Cambodia was still the strongest state in Southeast Asia. Angkor remained Cambodia's glittering capital until 1431, but long before that time the political initiative passed to its neighbors.

Pagan

Kyanzittha and his successors built more than 2,000 temples and thousands of lesser shrines in a 25 square mile area around Pagan. Today most of these temples still exist, just a few miles upstream from Mandalay. Some have crumbled due to time and earthquakes, others are maintained by today's faithful. Together these buildings are an architectural masterpiece; the Khmer temple of Angkor Wat, built at the same time, is the only Southeast Asian monument that is more impressive.

The pagodas were important because every king was expected to be an extravagant patron of religion, to show his concern for the spiritual welfare of his people. In fact, a king who did not build new temples risked being viewed as unfit for office, inviting a palace coup. And a lot of kings came to untimely ends; we noted in Chapter 1 that Burmese kings have a tradition of sorts for going out both strangely and violently (see the "Cucumber King"). One king was killed after a dispute over the price of war elephants. Another died when his elephant fell on him. Alaungsithu (1112-1167) was smothered at the age of 101 by a son impatient for the throne. Despite these intrigues, the country as a whole remained peaceful.

The martial spirit that drove Anawrahta to conquer most of the lands that make up present-day Burma was not practiced by his successors. The reason is unclear, but probably connected with Buddhism. The growth in the number of monks, the allocation of resources for their support, and the construction of pagodas may have taken away enough revenue to weaken the government. On the other hand, Buddhism's emphasis on brotherly compassion and cooperation may have made the economy efficient enough to pay its way, and its teachings on peace may have been what actually stopped the conquests. Whatever the reason, the country prospered until an abominable king sat on the throne. His name was Narathihapate (1254-87), and his pagoda, which took six years to build, was so expensive that it inspired a Burmese proverb: "The pagoda is finished and the great country ruined." In inscriptions on the pagoda he bragged about having 3,000 concubines, 36 million soldiers, and that he ate 300 dishes of curry daily. He killed the ambassadors of Kublai Khan when they came demanding tribute for the Mongol Empire. The result was quite predictable--an enormous Mongol army came and ravaged the country, though Pagan itself was spared by the Buddhist Kublai. The king fled and was poisoned by one of his sons. Since that time the Burmese have called him Tarokpyemin, "the king who fled from the Chinese."

With Narathihapate's death the kingdom disintegrated. An extremely long-lived Arakanese king, Min Hti (1279-1374?), declared independence. The Mons reestablished their old kingdom in the south, and Pagan's mercenaries, a Thai tribe called the Shans, set up three city-states in the east. The Mongols tried to incorporate what was left of Burma into their empire as two provinces, but in 1299 the Shans burned Pagan and killed the last member of the Burmese royal family. That brought about a final Mongol invasion, which ended when the Mongol commander accepted a heavy bribe from the Shans to turn around and go home. The excuse that he gave for calling off the campaign was not accepted by his superiors back in China, and he and his staff were executed. After that the Mongols lost interest in Burma, and never came back again. It was the end of Burma's golden age, but the culture established at Pagan lasted with few changes until the twentieth century.

Dai Viet vs. Champa

The Ly monarchs called their country Dai Viet, but the Chinese name of Annam ("The Pacified South") was used everywhere else. The country prospered, and the government encouraged cultural progress by vigorously promoting literature, art, and Mahayana Buddhism. But Dai Viet's growth was always threatened by external wars. A second Chinese invasion was defeated after a four-year war (1057-61). And the long feud with Champa was renewed. The Chams moved their capital south to Vijaya to keep it out of Vietnamese hands. But in 1044 the Vietnamese sacked Vijaya and killed the Cham king again. Vijaya was sacked a second time in 1069. This time the Cham king, Rudravarman III, was chased into Cambodia, captured, and deported to Dai Viet. He had to surrender the three provinces taken in 780 to regain his freedom.

The Chams made two attempts to recover the lost provinces (1128 and 1132), but another war with the Khmers at the same time reduced Champa to impotence. Then Cambodia took on Champa's role in the Vietnamese-Cham scrap, and the three disputed provinces ended up under Khmer rule.

The Khmer victories finished off the Ly dynasty, which was already in decline. After many years of civil strife, it was replaced by the Tran dynasty (1225-1400). The Tran monarchs pursued the same policies that had worked for the Ly dynasty. But now Champa was independent again, and wanted a rematch over the disputed border provinces (they went to the Vietnamese by default when the Khmers withdrew from the area in the mid-12th century). This time, however, the feud barely got started when the Mongol Empire appeared on the scene. Vietnam and Champa quickly put aside their squabble to meet the Mongol threat. The Mongols attacked and took Hanoi three times (in 1257, 1284, and 1287), but the combination of Vietnamese army and Cham navy inflicted unacceptable losses each time. Eventually the Mongols gave up and evacuated the country. The Vietnamese general who defeated the Mongols, Tran Hung Dao, is still venerated as one of the great heroes of Vietnamese history.

Once Kublai Khan was gone, the king of Champa tried to make the new friendship permanent by asking for a Vietnamese princess in marriage. After negotiations that dragged on until 1306, the Vietnamese said they would allow the marriage if Champa gave up the provinces of Quang Tri and Hue. Surprisingly, the Cham king, Jaya Sinhavarman III, accepted. But he died less than a year after the wedding, and his successor started a new war to take back the two provinces. This time the northern kingdom won again; by 1312 the Cham king was a prisoner in Hanoi, and Champa paid tribute to Dai Viet.

In 1326, after several rebellions and an appeal to China, Champa regained her independence. The Chams tried to take back Hue in 1353 but failed. Then came Che Bong Nga (1360-90), Champa's most outstanding king. The series of well-planned raids he made against Dai Viet kept the Vietnamese in a state of terror during his reign. In 1371 he even pillaged Hanoi. All the disputed territory came under Champa's rule. As soon as he was dead, however, the Vietnamese conquered everything as far south as Da Nang, and in 1398 the capital was moved from Hanoi to Thanh Hoa so that the king could be closer to the action.

Then a crisis at home halted Vietnamese progress. A general named Ho Qui Ly usurped the throne. He was a capable and bold reformer, but the supporters of the Tran dynasty called in Chinese aid, and in 1407 a Chinese army removed the usurper. Instead of re-establishing Tran rule, China's new rulers, the Ming dynasty, made the country a Chinese province. It didn't work; the Chinese imposed their language and customs so severely that the Vietnamese revolted almost immediately. In 1418 the rebels found a capable leader named Le Loi, a wealthy landowner from Thanh Hoa. His guerrilla campaign was successful, and ten years later the Chinese abandoned Hanoi. Le Loi proclaimed himself king, changed his name to Le Thai To, and founded the second Le dynasty. After the war the Vietnamese sent gift-bearing emissaries to China to apologize for the "irresponsible behavior" of their guerillas who had ambushed the Chinese (they also sent embassies to apologize for Vietnamese victories in the 10th and 13th centuries). This was in accord with the teachings of Confucius, preserving harmony and saving the Chinese from too much loss of face. The Chinese always appreciated that; the Vietnamese, even when independent, did have Chinese culture.

In 1441 the feud with Champa started up one more time. Five years later the Vietnamese occupied Vijaya, but not for long, for the Chams soon recovered it. It was Le Thanh Tong (1460-97), Vietnam's greatest king, who ended the conflict once and for all by conquering all of Champa in 1471. The land was given to masses of landless soldiers and peasants. The Chams converted to the Shiite branch of Islam and withdrew to the area between Cam Ranh Bay and Saigon, but they were never given a chance to re-establish their kingdom. By 1697 Saigon itself had become a Vietnamese city. In 1720 the remaining Chams migrated into Cambodia and Siam to escape Vietnamese persecution. The last king of the Chams died in 1822, and there are only 150,000 Chams left today.⁽¹⁾ Some Vietnamese believe that the problems their country suffered in the twentieth century are divine retribution for what their ancestors did to Champa.

The Birth of Siam

As long as Southeast Asia was ruled by strong empires like Pagan and Kambujadesa, the Thais were no threat. But when those empires weakened in the thirteenth century the Thais found a vacuum they could fill. In several places along the Menam River Thai mercenaries revolted, setting up independent muang or city-states in place of Khmer rule. The most important of these was Sukhothai, founded around 1238 on the upper Menam, and Lan Na ("One Million Rice Fields"), farther north on the same river. Lan Na's first ruler, Mangrai (1259-1318), was an excellent monarch, who defeated and conquered several rival muang around him and made his kingdom both civilized and powerful. He even defeated the Mongols when they invaded Lan Na in 1296 and 1301. After making a few counter-raids of his own into China, Mangrai sent elephants and other gifts to the court of the Great Khan, and Sino-Thai relations were fine after that. In 1296 he founded an impressive new capital, Chiangmai, and the kingdom of Lan Na is usually referred to as Chiangmai after this.

Mangrai's successors quarreled over the Chiangmai throne for eleven years (1318-29), and by the time stability returned the southern kingdom of Sukhothai had clearly become the leader among the Thai states. Sukhothai's first two kings are obscure, but the third was a multi-talented monarch called Rama Khamheng, or Rama the Brave (1279-1317). Under him Sukhothai grew from just another muang into a "super-muang"; most of Malaya, Laos, eastern and central Thailand came under his rule, and he also made vassals of the Mons in Burma. Rama Khamheng was a fearless warrior, but most of the time he did not have to fight; his reputation went ahead of him and caused most enemies to submit without a battle. He made two trips in person (1294 and 1300) to pay tribute at the court of the Great Khan, thereby escaping the Mongol raids that fell upon the rest of Southeast Asia.⁽²⁾

On top of other things, Rama Khamheng claimed to be the inventor of the Thai alphabet. Whether or not this is true, the oldest known Thai inscription was written by him. Dated 1292, it portrays Sukhothai as a rich and happy state, active in trade, and governed by a paternal monarch; taxes were modest, all citizens (both Thai and non-Thai) were treated with equal justice, and everyone followed Buddhism. Allowing for some exaggeration of the country's virtues, the picture presented still shows a remarkable contrast to life under the Khmer god-kings, who demanded much in labor and taxes to support themselves and a religion that had little relevance to the commoner's life.

King Rama Khamheng was able to be a good ruler, warrior, diplomat and patron of Buddhism and the arts--all at the same time. His successors were not so talented; his son, Lo Thai, devoted his energy to Buddhism and neglected everything else. Under him it became difficult to rule the kingdom from a capital that was far removed from the centers of agriculture and population. Many muang on the kingdom's periphery seceded, claiming that their submission to Rama Khamheng was now null and void. One of these local princes, Rama T'ibodi I, revolted and founded a new capital, Ayutthaya (also called Ayuthia or Ayudhya), on the lower Menam. Sukhothai's fifth king, the monkish Li Thai, recognized superior leadership and abdicated to him. That marked the beginning of Siam's Ayutthayan era, a time future Thais would regard as a golden age.

Ava

At home there was an almost constant struggle for control of the throne. Without an established formula for succession, any member of the royal family could become king. Many of the early Ayutthayan monarchs were deposed or murdered as a result.

The next important king, Boromoraja II (1424-48), was the third son of the king before him; he never expected to inherit the throne himself, but both of his elder brothers killed each other in a duel fought on elephants. Boromoraja finished the long war with the Khmers that his ancestors had started, by capturing Angkor in 1431. The Khmers abandoned their capital to the jungle and moved their court to the neighborhood of Phnom Penh. A Khmer king continued to rule from there, but tribute was paid to Siam for most of the next four centuries. Never again would Cambodia be more than a third-rate power.

Sukhothai was next on Boromoraja's list. When he took the city, he made its submission permanent by making his son, the future king Trailok, governor of the city. But by no means was the northern conflict ended. Now Sukhothai became the object of aggressive attacks by its former ally Chiangmai. The Siam-Chiangmai conflict persisted, with a few breathing spells, for the rest of the 15th and early 16th centuries, a stalemate because Siam had the advantage of numbers while rugged Chiangmai had extremely defensible terrain.

The greatest ruler of 15th-century Siam was Borommatrailokanat (1448-88), usually called Trailok for short. He completely overhauled the government, dividing the central administration into five departments (interior affairs, the capital city, the royal household, finances, and agriculture), with appointed, not hereditary officers in charge of each. New laws determined the social status of everyone and the amount of land that could be owned, ranging from 4,000 acres for the highest official to 10 acres for the ordinary free man. Since government workers were not paid salaries, this system also designated how much income they could receive. There was plenty of land for everybody at this time, so nobody was in danger of starvation. In the courts, fines and punishments were made proportional to the status of the plaintiff. The purpose of the whole system was to regulate natural human inequality for the sake of the proper functioning of society.

Court ceremonials were greatly expanded, borrowing some ideas from the Khmers; these ceremonies were described in a 718-page book, The Royal Ceremonies of the Twelve Months, written in the late 19th century. To resolve the question of succession, every member of the royal family was ranked by his relation to the current king; if a family member was removed from royal descent by more than five generations, he was declared a commoner and no longer eligible for the throne. King Trailok also appointed a second or vice-king, called an Uparat (heir apparent), so the people would know who their next king would be long before he actually took the throne.

Lang Xang

Fa Ngum's successors brought peace & prosperity to Laos by political marriages with Siam and Chiangmai. The long period of calm lasted until 1478, when a Vietnamese invasion captured Luang Prabang, forcing the king to abdicate and flee. The unfortunate king's younger brother, Souvanna Banlang (1479-86), stayed behind to regroup the scattered Lao forces and liberate the country. The Vietnamese were defeated badly enough to follow a policy of good relations with Lan Xang for the next two centuries.

Another period of calm followed until the Lao king Phothisarat (1520-47) got involved in the on-and-off war between Siam and Chiangmai. The last king of Chiangmai died childless in 1543, and Phothisarat, whose mother was a Chiangmai princess, promptly claimed the empty throne. So did Siam and a Shan prince named Mekut'i. Laos won the first round, and Phothisarat placed his son, prince Setthathirat, on the Chiangmai throne. However, the Laotian king died only thirteen months later, and Setthathirat had to hurry to Luang Prabang to claim his father's throne before somebody else did. That gave Siam and the Shans a second chance. All three kingdoms were fighting over Chiangmai when a revitalized Burma appeared on the scene.

The Long Road from Mecca to Manila

When Islam did make converts, the natives were not willing to give up the Hindu-Buddhist-animist combination they had practiced previously, since their whole heritage was tied up in it. Instead, in typical Oriental fashion, they modified Islam to fit into the way of life that already existed. For example, Indonesia is 90% Moslem today, but on holidays they still have plays which re-enact stories from Hindu myths such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The whole country was also proud of a United Nations-led project in the early 1980s that rescued the ancient Borobudur temple from the ravages of time and the jungle. Clifford Geertz, a British journalist who visited Java in 1960, recorded a typical prayer given by a Javanese villager to begin a feast. The prayer honored the guardian spirits of the village and of the master of ceremonies, the household angel of the kitchen, the ancestors of all the guests, and the spirits of the fields, waters, and a nearby volcano. The prayer ended piously with "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet."

The first predominantly Moslem state appears to have been Acheh, located on the northwestern tip of Sumatra. The two outstanding travelers of the Middle Ages, Marco Polo and his North African counterpart, Ibn Battuta, visited Acheh in the course of their journeys, and both stated that it was converted to Islam around 1250. Next Islam spread along the trade routes, establishing numerous enclaves on the coasts of the islands. Often the natives converted so that they could get a share of the lucrative Indian Ocean trade, since now that there was a choice between doing business with Moslems and non-Moslems, the Arabs naturally felt more comfortable buying and selling to the former. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were particularly good years for Islam, because during this time Islam also became a way to express political opposition, first against Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit, and later against the Christian Europeans.

From Java and Sumatra it is quick and easy sailing to Borneo, and the same can be said of the trip from Borneo to the Philippines. The expanding commerce of the Moslem traders encouraged the peoples east and north of Java to convert. In the Philippines the nearest islands to Borneo, like Jolo and Basilan, were converted first, followed by the tribes on Mindanao. As in Indonesia, the missionary traders converted the coastal communities of Mindanao but completely bypassed the stone-age tribes living in the interior, since they were almost inaccessible and played no part in the commercial network. Like the Chinese and the Europeans, they were eventually attracted to Luzon, since Manila Bay is one of the finest harbors in Asia. A Moslem sultan named Suleiman established himself in Manila just before the Spaniards arrived there in 1571.

Malacca

By the time the Chinese naval expeditions stopped coming (1433), Majapahit was no longer a threat, and Malacca had grown rich enough to hire the mercenaries needed to keep Siam at a safe distance. Malacca was now Southeast Asia's busiest port, receiving ships from the Middle East, India, China and Indonesia. The Indonesian ships were the most important in the long run, because they brought spices from the Moluccas islands, near New Guinea. These islands, soon to be called "the Spice Islands" by Europeans, are the world's largest source of black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, mace and camphor. The demand for spices in the West was at an all-time high, because European and Middle Eastern diets at this time were terribly bland without them; moreover, they helped make spoiled meat tolerable, which made a difference in the era before refrigeration was invented. Spices were also widely used as medicines, and merchants considered them to be the ideal cargo: a nonperishable commodity that can be worth a lot of money without taking up a lot of cargo space. Unfortunately for Western Europe, the spices were brought west by a relay of merchants (Indonesians, Chinese, Indians, Persians, Arabs and finally Italians) and every time the cargo changed hands the price went up. A bag of cloves selling for three ducats (almost $150) in India could cost almost fifty times as much by the time it reached Venice. Obviously, whoever could get the spices without dealing with middlemen would make a huge profit, and the high price of spices prompted one of the countries farthest away, Portugal, to regard them in much the same way modern nations regard oil; the nation that controlled pepper could control the world! In the early fifteenth century Portuguese sea captains started sailing far into the Atlantic, looking for a way to reach the Orient by sailing around Africa. Thus the Age of Exploration got started, culminating when a sailor named Christopher Columbus tried an alternative route to Asia and discovered America.

2. It was around this time that the Chinese started calling Sukhothai "Xian," and neighboring states like Vietnam called it "Syam." From these names we get "Siam," Thailand's official name until 1939.

3. The Plain of Jars got its name from the huge, ancient burial urns that dot the landscape. It has strategic value for its tin and iron deposits, and because it is the only significant piece of flat land in northern Laos. Many battles were fought over it in the Second Indochina War.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball