A Seventh-Century Chinese Visitor

The number of Indonesian kingdoms sending tribute to China declined in the late seventh century. This may have been the result of Srivijaya’s rise. Srivijaya first appears in a report by a Chinese Buddhist monk, Yijing.

Yijing wrote the only surviving eyewitness accounts of Srivijaya. In his Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (Nan-hai ji-gui nei-fa zhuan), he wrote that on his return to Srivijaya from India, Kedah and Malayu “had now become Srivijaya.” He referred to Kedah and Malayu by the Chinese term guo, which usually means a polity. In a third text, the Mulasarvastivada, he used more precise terminology, stating that Malayu zhou (a geographical rather than po­litical entity) “has now become one of Srivijaya’s many kuo [guo].”^[1123] He used the name Srivijaya (Shili foshi) to refer to most of Sumatra, and said it had 14 cities divided among two guo or kingdoms, Srivijaya in the southeast, and Barus in the northwest.

Most scholars infer that between Yijing’s first and second visits, Srivijaya incorpo­rated Kedah and Malayu into its political structure, creating an empire measuring 1,000 kilometers from north to south. This expansion perhaps had the purpose of creating a monopoly of control (and taxation) over international trade passing through the Straits of Melaka.