Sculptures at Borobudur, central Java, Indonesia.© simon gurney/Fotolia
Pagan, MyanmarRuins of ancient Buddhist shrines and pagodas, Pagan, Myanmar.© © hadynyah/iStock.comStill, Chinese and Indian influences were anything but superficial. They provided writing systems and literature, systems of statecraft, and concepts of social hierarchy and religious belief, all of which were both of intrinsic interest and pragmatic significance to Southeast Asians of the day. For elites seeking to gain and retain control over larger and more complex populations, the applications of these ideas were obvious, but it would also seem that the sheer beauty and symbolic power of Hindu and Buddhist arts tapped a responsive vein in the Southeast Asian soul. The result was an imposing array of architectural and other cultural wonders, at first very much in the Indian image and hewing close to current styles and later in more original, indigenous interpretations. The seriousness and profundity with which all this activity was undertaken is unmistakable. By the 7th century ce, Palembang in southern Sumatra was being visited by Chinese and other Buddhist devotees from throughout Asia, who came to study doctrine and to copy manuscripts in institutions that rivaled in importance those in India itself. Later, beginning in the 8th century, temple and court complexes of surpassing grandeur and beauty were constructed in central Java, Myanmar, and Cambodia; the Borobudur of the Śailendra dynasty in Java, the myriad temples of the Burman dynastic capital of Pagan, and the monuments constructed at Angkor during the Khmer empire in Cambodia rank without question among the glories of the ancient world.
Rise of indigenous states
In the realm of politics, Indian influence accompanied the rise of new political entities, which, since they do not readily fall under the Western rubric of “states,” have been called mandalas. The mandala was not so much a territorial unit as a fluid field of power that emanated, in concentric circles, from a central court and depended for its continued authority largely on the court’s ability to balance alliances and to influence the flow of trade and human resources. Such a conception of political organization already had surfaced among Southeast Asians, but Indian civilization provided powerful metaphors for the change underway and for ways of extending it. The mandala was the predominant form of the Southeast Asian state until it was displaced in the 19th century.
Between approximately the 2nd century bce and the 6th century ce, mandala polities appeared throughout Southeast Asia in the major river valleys and at strategic landfalls for sea traffic—generally, locations where routes for local and international trade crossed. These communities took different forms, depending on their physical setting. For example, walled and moated settlements predominated in much of the mainland but do not seem to have been constructed in insular Southeast Asia. Yet they served similar purposes to and frequently shared characteristics with mandalas in the same immediate region. Mandala sites have been located in the Mekong, Chao Phraya, and Irrawaddy river valleys; along the coasts of central Vietnam, western and northern Java, and eastern Borneo; and on the Isthmus of Kra. One of the most intriguing sites, called Oc Eo, is in the Mekong delta region of southern Vietnam. This port settlement, which flourished between the 1st and 6th centuries ce amid a complex of other settlements connected by canals (some up to 60 miles long), was not only an extraordinarily rich emporium dealing in articles from as far as Rome and inner Asia, but it was also a local manufacturing centre producing its own jewelry, pottery, and other trade goods. Almost certainly it also fed itself from wet-rice agriculture practiced in the surrounding delta. Little is known, however, about the nature of state structure in Oc Eo, although it seems to have been one of—and perhaps was prime among—an assemblage of local mandala-type principalities.
After the 6th century there emerged a number of larger and more powerful mandala states, principally in Cambodia, Myanmar, Sumatra, and Java. Often designated kingdoms or empires, these states nevertheless functioned and were structured upon the same principles that had governed their predecessors. They were, in some respects, unstable and prone to fluctuation because of shifting relations with outside powers and constant internal struggles for the position of overlordship, but they also were remarkably durable. No two states were exactly alike, each occupying a particular ecological niche and exploiting a particular combination of opportunities to survive by trade, agriculture, and war. The cultural impact of their courts long outlasted their political grasp and continued to inform their societies until modern times.
Perhaps the outstanding example of this durability is Srivijaya, the great Sumatran trading empire that dominated much of Southeast Asian commerce from about the 7th to the 13th century. Srivijaya does not appear to have been heavily urbanized or to have had a continuously occupied capital during its roughly 700 years of existence, nor does it seem to have possessed boundaries and clearly delineated territories. Its armies, while they could be mustered and quickly dispatched overseas, were weapons of limited use. Instead, Srivijaya maintained its authority in a shifting and extremely varied trading world largely by means of a shrewd brand of cultural and economic politics that involved, among other things, offering a protective and mutually beneficial trading environment to all comers and maintaining a courtly culture from which the idiom of overlordship issued grandly and convincingly. Srivijaya was ruled by a formula supple enough to attract trade from all quarters and to exploit it at the same time.
Ruined temples at the Angkor Thom complex, Angkor, Cambodia.© happystock/Fotolia
Whatever the achievements of Srivijaya, the Khmer (Cambodian) state that flourished in the Tonle Sap region roughly between the 9th and mid-13th centuries is widely regarded as the most impressive of the concentrically arranged ancient Southeast Asian states. This admiration largely stems from the state’s extensive architectural remains, including the renowned Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat temple complexes. In many respects, however, the Angkorian imperial achievement was singular. Though informed by the mandala paradigm, the Khmer carried it further and shaped it more distinctively than other Southeast Asians before or since.
At its zenith, Angkor may have supported a population of one million in a relatively small area, with an elite apparatus and a population of bondsmen far greater than any of Cambodia’s neighbours. In achieving this, however, the Khmer state surrendered the flexibility and balance critical to the mandala pattern and eventually fell victim to its own brittleness. Other concentric states in early Southeast Asia rose and fell; the Khmer proved unable to revive theirs once it had fallen.
Khmer empire c. 1200.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The classical period
Components of a new age
By about 1300 much of Southeast Asia had entered a period of transition from ancient times. No single factor can account for the disruption, which lasted longer in some places than in others. The Mongol attacks of the second half of the 13th century and the disintegration of Khmer and Srivijayan power undoubtedly were of significance, but less dramatic changes, such as slowly changing trade patterns and political competition, may also have played an important role. Whatever the case, the shifts were not of a type or severity to bring about major disruptions; they instead paved the way for the coalescing of what can best be termed a classical age. In this period the major civilizations of Southeast Asia achieved a broader influence and greater coherence than before. They integrated rival political and cultural forms into their own, and the patterns they established were widely imitated by smaller powers that were drawn into their orbit. Regional and international trade reached a high level of development, bringing greater well-being to larger numbers of Southeast Asians than ever before. It also was an age of great change and challenges—especially in the form of new and often foreign religious, political, and economic influences—and one of constant warfare. But it was a measure of the confidence and balance of the era that these influences were absorbed and digested with little difficulty, leaving more than a millennium of creative synthesis essentially undisturbed until as late as the end of the 18th century. Many Southeast Asian civilizations can be said to have reached their definitive premodern shape during this “golden” age, which also is modern scholarship’s best source of information on the classical cultures of the region before the ravages of 19th- and 20th-century colonialism. State and society