Piecing Together Early Sumatran History: The Pearl Route
The genesis of Srivijaya may have occurred around 2,500 years ago. Large ornate bronze drums made in north Vietnam of a style called Dongson made their way across the South China Sea, down the Straits of Melaka via the Siamo-Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and across the Java Sea to the Spice Islands (Moluccas).
This sphere of interaction was based on the exchange of east Indonesian spices for metal items; this mechanism has been one of the major drivers of trade in world history.The overland Silk Road from the Mediterranean to China is well-known. The existence of an alternative sea route (which we might call the Spice Road) is less well- known, but was arguably much more influential economically and ideologically (i.e., in the fields of politics and religion). Chinese and Indian artifacts first appear together 200 years bce in the central portion of the Siamo-Malay Peninsula in what is now in southern Thailand.13 By the beginning of the Common Era, a major international emporium had formed at the southwestern edge of the Mekong Delta, in a place now called Oc-eo, probably known to the Chinese as Funan. Chinese records contain much detail on this polity, which they considered an empire, between the third and early seventh centuries.
In the mid second century ce, cosmographer Klaudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria knew of emporia in Southeast Asia, and large ships called kolandiaphonta which carried commodities from Southeast Asia to India.14 Oc-eo may have been the
10 Bonatz et al. 2009.
11 Wolters 1967.
12 Rathje 1972.
13 Bellina-Pryce and Silapanth 2006.
14 Wheatley 1961. place which Ptolemaeus knew as Kattigara. Four other places listed in Ptolemaeus' corpus lay in the Malay Peninsula.
During the period from 1 to 500 ce, Indonesian sailors were spreading their language around more than half the entire circumference of the globe, from Madagascar to Hawaii.
The factors which drove this extraordinary exploration are unknown, but it is possible that the search for rare and unusual items to bring back as status symbols played a major part in this incredibly adventurous expansion of human settlement of thousands of previously uninhabited islands.[1118] During the period between the third century bce and the sixth century ce the major ports on the international network lay along the southern coast of the Southeast Asian mainland. It seems that the locations of these ports were determined by the use of an overland portage across the Siamo-Malay Peninsula to connect the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. A major shift of these ports to the southward began when Malays developed a route from the Straits of Melaka to south China in the third and fourth centuries ce.[1119] In the fifth century, kingdoms in the Malay Realm began to send missions to China. In the guise of presenting tokens of submission, foreign kingdoms were able to exchange luxury items and other goods with the Chinese elite.[1120] The system was founded on several factors, the main ones being: Chinese Confucian disdain for commerce, the need for Chinese elites to obtain foreign status symbols, and the willingness of Southeast Asian rulers to declare their fealty to the Chinese emperors in exchange for diplomatic recognition and access to Chinese goods. Southeast Asians were willing to go through the pretense of declaring themselves Chinese vassals, which was not burdensome; in fact, the system was partly based on Chinese willingness to fete visiting envoys and to lavish “gifts” on them in return for the show of paying tribute to China. There was never any attempt by China to rule their Southeast Asian vassals. Chinese interventions in Southeast Asian politics were limited to ineffectual letters of protestation when her ostensible subjects fought among themselves. The system essentially benefited both sides by reinforcing their political positions internally.By the seventh century, there already existed a millennium of experience in sustaining long-distance maritime trade over a vast network reaching from southwest to northeast Asia. We know little about the internal structures of these ports and their associated kingdoms. The Chinese thought that Funan was an empire based on military conquest, mirroring the Chinese view of themselves, but evidence on the ground in Southeast Asia for this is exiguous. Funan was more likely to have resembled a chiefdom than an empire or state.[1121]
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