The South China Sea (3 page)

But where had these proto-Austronesian speakers come from? The Australia-based archaeologist Peter Bellwood believes that they were descendants of the farmers who had first mastered the art of rice-growing in the Yangtze Valley around 8,500 years ago. In this period ‘China’ was home to many different language groups apart from proto-Austronesian including Sino-Tibetan (from which evolved Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese), Austroasiatic (from which Vietnamese and Khmer developed) and Tai (Thai). In addition to growing rice, these peoples also kept pigs and poultry, made pottery and used stone tools. Over the following millennia, pressures at home and opportunities abroad caused these groups to move across East and Southeast Asia. In Bellwood's account, the
proto-Austronesian speakers gradually spread east and south, eventually reaching the Chinese coasts by around 5,500 years ago.

So far, these migrations had travelled over land. But the next phase of the Austronesian odyssey was radically different. Sea levels 5,000 years ago were pretty much the same as they are now, making the Taiwan Strait about 130 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Yet this hurdle appears to have been overcome, because archaeologists have recovered evidence of rice-growing dating from around this time on Taiwan. Over the next thousand years or so, enough Austronesian speakers had arrived or reproduced on the island to overwhelm any remnants of previous migrations and their language had already begun to split into dialects. In Bellwood's model, the next step was ‘out of Taiwan’.

The first step was the journey southwards across the Luzon Strait. By hopping to the Batanes Islands, the longest single stretch was about 80 kilometres. Further hops would have brought the voyagers to Luzon, the main island of the Philippines, where, again, they would have encountered humans from much earlier migrations. The new arrivals, with their more advanced technology and culture, established settlements, prospered, grew in number and moved on again. Bellwood argues that from about 4,000 years ago (2000
BCE
) the people who came ‘out of Taiwan’ spread throughout the rest of the Philippines and then west into present-day Indonesia. Others went east. By 1500
BCE
, some had reached the Mariana Islands, 2,500 kilometres from Luzon and then carried on to Fiji. By 800 BCE Tonga had been settled, by 300
CE
Hawaii, and by 1200 New Zealand.

It's a dramatic story and there is plenty of evidence to support it: the languages themselves, archaeological finds and genetic research. But there are also several problems with it. Some finds in the Batanes Islands are newer than those in Luzon, suggesting people moved there from the south, not the north. Burial techniques found in southern Vietnam are older than similar ones found in Taiwan and Luzon. Evidence for early rice-growing in Taiwan is rare, suggesting it was not widespread there before about 4,000 years ago; genetic analysis of rice suggests that different strains – from India and Java – may have travelled through the region from south to north before ‘Chinese’ varieties travelled in the opposite direction. Genetics also shows that the Pacific pig and the Pacific rat came from Indochina, not Taiwan. The objections have mounted up.

As a result, a rival explanation for the spread of language and culture around the South China Sea has emerged. Rather than stressing a flow of people ‘out of Taiwan’, it proposes a constantly communicating network transporting information and technology in many directions. It also makes coastal China both a recipient and a transmitter of this culture, but not its sole source. And that is why Bill Solheim found himself celebrating the discovery of a grave in northern Palawan.

Solheim had begun his search for the origins of Southeast Asian civilisations more than half a century before, studying at Berkeley and Arizona and digging in the Philippines in the 1950s. It was his work on pottery that drew him to develop a very different model to Peter Bellwood's. He argued that similarities between 2,500-year-old pots he found in Kalanay on the Philippine island of Masbate and others recovered in the 1920s from Sa Huynh on the coast of southern Vietnam were not coincidental. Many of them were marked with very precise geometric patterns – triangles, zigzags, parallel lines and hatchings – cut or pressed into the clay. Some of the pots had sophisticated shapes and many were coloured with a distinctive red slip. From this beginning, Solheim's perspective widened to include pottery from other sites spread around Southeast Asia, other kinds of objects – in particular tools and jewelry – and then other time periods, both later and earlier. Many of his colleagues disagreed, arguing the definition of ‘similarity’ had now become too vague to be useful. Nonetheless, Solheim pressed on. His next task was to try to explain how these similarities had come about.

One crucial insight was that although similar objects could be found in many places, they appeared there at different times. So while the ‘stepped adze’ (an early cutting tool) was developed in southeastern China about 5,000 years ago and spread to Taiwan and Vietnam over the following millennium, burial jars found in Vietnam and Palawan date from 4,000 years ago but only 1,000 years ago in Luzon and Taiwan. Similarly, the curious jade ear pendant known as the ‘lingling o’ (shaped like a circle, broken near the top and with points facing down and to the sides) has been dated to 4,000 years ago in Vietnam but to more recent periods in Taiwan and the Philippines. To Solheim, this meant that objects, knowledge and culture had developed in different places and then spread backwards and forwards over huge distances around mainland Southeast Asia and the islands, evolving as they travelled.

So he began to develop the idea of a maritime network: semi-nomadic communities travelling by sea and river and living by hunting, gathering and trading. The problem for Solheim was that these people, if they existed, left little trace: no permanent settlements, no monuments and no written records. It required a leap of imagination to believe in their existence. But then he realised that the evidence was actually still around. As late as the 1950s the American anthropologist Alexander Spoehr encountered women from the Samal people on the Philippine island of Mindanao who had never been on land and were convinced they would be attacked by evil spirits if they ever did so. Even today, many of the Badjao ‘sea gypsies’ of the Philippines, the Bajau of Malaysia, the Orang Laut of Indonesia, the Tanka of southern China and the Dan of Vietnam continue to live in and around the sea, surviving by fishing and trading. Indeed, all around the region, from China to Vietnam and Thailand, there are still communities of maritime peoples carrying on a form of life that, in essence, began many thousands of years ago. Solheim coined a word for these people derived from the Austronesian words for ‘south island’ and ‘people’. He called them the Nusantao.

To really understand them we have to invert our ideas about land as a place of safety and the sea as a place of danger. Land can be hostile, home to dangerous creatures, thieves and tax collectors. The sea is full of food and, for the most part, easy to travel on. Supplies of fruit and vegetables can be harvested from river banks or traded and, as the New Zealand anthropologist Atholl Anderson has explained, even the problem of fresh water can be overcome.
¹
Large quantities can be carried inside stoppered lengths of bamboo. It's robust, easily packed and, when emptied, the bamboo can be used to repair the boat. Add in some rainwater and fluid from raw fish and sea journeys of up to three or four weeks become unproblematic.

The beauty of Solheim's model, which he called the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network, is that it doesn't require any major rupture with the past, or any single great act of migration. It doesn't rely on, or exclude, any particular ethnic group. Technologies and cultures evolved gradually. Some Nusantao speak Austronesian languages, others don't; some are semi-settled, some are entirely nomadic; some live on the sea, some in river mouths, others far inland. They interacted with settled people and the populations must have mixed. They never consciously acted
as a team and their technology was simple, yet by small acts of travelling and trading the Nusantao created a vast network of sail and paddle power which could transport sea slugs from northern Australia to the dining tables of southern China and banana trees from the forests of New Guinea to the gardens of Madagascar. And on each journey goods, knowledge and culture passed back and forth.

It's a wonderfully haphazard model and joyously
human
. It means that the people who really discovered the islands of the South China Sea had no ethnic identity that we would recognise today and certainly no attachment to anything like a state. As political units developed on land, the Nusantao would try to live beyond their clutches. The distinction between trading and smuggling, piracy and sedition was blurred. It's ironic that when modern-day states make territorial claims in the sea, they often base them upon the activities of people whom, in previous eras, those states tried to restrict or even eradicate.

The Nusantao aren't an ethnic group, so it makes little sense to ask where they came from. However, Solheim argues that a key hub of the Nusantao network was the area of coast between central Vietnam and Hong Kong. From here it reached all the way to Madagascar in the west and Easter Island in the east, Australia in the south and Japan in the north. We know that Indian glass beads were brought to China by people described, in Chinese texts, as ‘Malays’ around 400
BCE
and that distinctive bronze ‘Dong Son’ drums, made in northern Vietnam around 2,000 years ago, have been found in burials all around Southeast Asia and southern China. This was a time of rapid development, when complex societies and empires began to emerge in many parts of the world – and linking them all was a maritime network.

For if there were maritime communities trading up and down coasts and communicating over long distances then it's ridiculous to think that these links would have stopped at boundaries between what we now call ‘East Asia’, ‘Southeast Asia’, ‘India’, ‘Arabia’ or ‘Europe’. Coastal traders would have had contacts with their fellows to the north, south, east and west. Both information and goods would have flowed across these networks, people in one place would have been aware of ideas and materials from elsewhere; folk memories about visitors from afar would have endured and exotic heirlooms would have been passed down between generations. The
maritime route wasn't the only way to travel, of course. Others went by land but sea could be quicker and safer.

In 1939 an Indian ivory figurine was found under the ash in Pompeii and archaeologists began to accept that long-distance trade between Rome and South Asia had been well developed by the time Vesuvius erupted in 79
CE
. It wasn't just statues that arrived from the east. A Roman document, the ‘Periplus of the Erythraean Sea’ dated to about 63
CE
, mentions a place called ‘Thina’ well known as a source of silk. It seems that 2,000 years ago some Europeans were aware of a maritime route to China. There's debate about whether the Roman historian Pliny really described cloves in the first century
CE
but they are listed as imports to Egypt about 180
CE
. There was only one place in the world where cloves were then grown: the northern Moluccan Islands, in present-day Indonesia. And by 284
CE
, the eastern Roman Empire had sent its first envoys to China, via the coast of Linyi in what is now Vietnam.

* * * * * *

Dotted across Southeast Asia, from Champa in Vietnam and Angkor in Cambodia to Borobudur and Prambanan in Indonesia, are dozens of immense towers and temples that appear utterly alien to their surroundings. Their obvious Indian styling, ripe with voluptuous maidens and blessed with altars to bejewelled gods, seems like flotsam now, left by a receding Hindu tide. Smothered in jungle for centuries, they were discovered by Europeans once colonialism had matured to the extent that it could pay for archaeologists to go poking around the imperial recesses.

And these archaeologists quickly jumped to conclusions about who had built these great structures, and why. Eager to justify their own societies’ presence in these foreign lands, they imagined that the temples were the work of an earlier generation of outsiders. Just as Europeans had brought civilisation and progress to the natives, so too had the builders of these monuments, centuries before. The builders must have come from India, imposed their language and way of life on the benighted inhabitants and lifted them up several rungs on the ladder of civilisation in the process. It meant European colonialism was merely the continuation of a long-established pattern of behaviour in Southeast Asia.

These ideas endured a long time. As late as 1964, the French historian George Coedès could write that ‘the peoples of Further India shared a late Neolithic civilization when the Brahmano-Buddhist culture of India was first brought into contact with them’. In other words, the region had been stuck in the Stone Age until around 400
CE
when it was colonised by Hindus and Buddhists from the west. The peoples of Southeast Asia had been written out of the story; history was just something that happened to them, rather than something they shaped. It's taken a half-century of digging, translating and thinking to overturn that view.

As a result, we can now see a direct link between the builders of the great temples and the Nusantao nomads who had plied the waters to the east and west for centuries. Indeed, it now seems that Southeast Asians were trading with India centuries before Indian culture took root in Southeast Asia. Products and knowledge moved backwards and forwards across the trading networks. Austronesian speakers had passed their names for boats into southern Indian languages by the first century
CE
. Indian techniques for manufacturing glass beads had been transferred around Southeast Asia even earlier.

Between the first and fifth centuries
CE
the coasts of Southeast Asia grew rich on the proceeds of trade with the various Indian civilisations: sandalwood, cardamoms, camphor, cloves, jewels and precious metals. Indian writings refer to the ‘Islands of Gold’ – Swarnadvipa – and the ‘Land of Gold’ – Swarnabhumi. With the trade travelled elements of the different cultures: from pottery designs to religion and then philosophy and politics. It seems that rather than being colonised by South Asians, Southeast Asian rulers chose to adopt South Asian ideas about kings, priests and power to reinforce their hold over their populations and hold onto territory against rivals.