The South China Sea (4 page)

From the little we know, the dominant power in Southeast Asia in the first centuries CE seems to have been a place that Chinese records call ‘Funan’. Funan was based in the Mekong Delta, straddling what is now southern Vietnam and Cambodia. Through a combination of fortuitous geography and political cunning it built an empire from its crucial position on the trading routes between Europe and India to the west and China in the east. It grew rich as Rome developed tastes for Chinese silk and Southeastern Asian spices, as the Chinese sought frankincense and myrrh from
Arabia and as glass, pottery, metalwork, ivory, horn and precious minerals flowed between all of them.

The pioneers were the Nusantao, moving from place to place, exchanging goods and profiting from the proceeds. Chinese texts describe Malay ships (known as
kunlun bo
) arriving as early as the third century
BCE
. Gradually others from the Indian and Middle Eastern coasts joined them. There's no archaeological evidence that any Chinese ships made trading voyages across the South China Sea until the tenth century
CE
. This would seem to undermine many Chinese claims to the contrary, such as the assertion of the Foreign Ministry's website that ‘Yang Fu of the East Han Dynasty (23–220 A.D.) made reference to the Nansha Islands in his book entitled Yiwu Zhi (Records of Rarities)’.
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The available evidence suggests Yang Fu's research is more likely to have involved questioning foreign traders arriving at ports than independent voyaging. Although some Chinese did travel abroad on other people's ships, the inhabitants of what is now southern China seem to have been content to let others take the risk of going to sea and then manage the trade at the point of arrival.

Funan's position was literally pivotal because trade in this period was a relay. Few, if any, ships made the entire journey. Instead, traders probably carried goods over the part of the journey they knew best: from Europe to India, from India to the Malay Peninsula, then by land over the Isthmus of Kra at the narrowest point of the Malay Peninsula (where a 40-kilometre portage avoids a 1,600-kilometre sea voyage), by sea again to Funan and finally from Funan to southern China. To be successful, a trader needed to master the rhythm laid down by the annual pattern of winds that we now know by the Arabic word for season –
mawsim
or monsoon.

During the northern hemisphere's summer, continental Asia heats up. The air over it rises, drawing in more air from the seas to the south, creating strong and sustained winds towards the continent: the southwest monsoon. As Asia cools during the autumn and winter, the air over it sinks and is pushed out from the continent: the northeast monsoon. Sailing from the Malay Peninsula to Funan was easiest between December and January because of winds blowing away from South Asia but there was then a long wait, until June, before the journey from Funan to southern China could begin. Ships needed to be in port before the start of the typhoon season in mid-July. Travelling in the opposite direction, the easiest time to sail
from China to Southeast Asia is in January and February, when winds and currents flow from the northeast. There's then another pause before the South Asian monsoon pattern makes its safe and convenient to sail on to the west.

This period of unfavourable winds and currents, from February to June each year, provided prosperity for the coast of what is now Vietnam for centuries. Back then, it obliged traders to pause in Funan and resupply from local sources. A Chinese account from the third century describes what these ‘Malay’ ships might have looked like: over 50 metres long with as many as four sails and able to carry 700 people and 600 tons of cargo.
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The large numbers of ships, and their passengers and crew, provided a healthy market for local farmers and commodities dealers and a steady flow of duties and taxes for rulers and their courts to live from. It also made Funan a great place to do business and by the second century
CE
it was an entrepôt for Persians, Indians, Chinese and traders from all round Southeast Asia. Although China's influence was substantial, it was India that provided Funan's cultural and political inspiration. Its rulers adopted Hinduism, took Indian names and borrowed political ideas from their Indian counterparts. Even its town planning appears to have followed Indian lines.

Funan was only one of many empires, chiefdoms and fiefs around the South China Sea that emerged, thrived and faded into obscurity during the first millennium
CE
. Their histories are still being unearthed: both literally from archaeological digs and metaphorically from the pages of Chinese and other texts. Often we see them only in reflection, as they were recorded by others. And too often we view them through our present-day preoccupations: trying to trace the pedigrees of modern states through the shifting borders and migrating peoples of earlier centuries. But our present borders and identities would have made no sense to people actually alive in this early period. The historian Michael Churchman has shown that texts written in the Han–Tang period (from 111
BCE
to 938
CE
) made no linguistic distinction between ‘Chinese’ and ‘Vietnamese’, for example. It was nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians who forced modern national identities upon these ancient peoples.
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During the period when the French imperial administrators were trying to define a clear border between their realm and ‘China’, French historians were simultaneously
dividing ancient people into different categories by transcribing their names in either ‘Chinese’ or ‘Vietnamese’ styles.

What is now China looked very different two millennia ago. Peoples referred to as Yue or Viet in Chinese texts lived all along the southern coast, including the Red River Delta in present-day Vietnam. They were briefly conquered by the Qin Dynasty in 221
BCE
but within 15 years the Qin had collapsed and the south coast regained independence for about a century. It wasn't until 111
BCE
that the south fell to the Han Dynasty – and even then the region remained largely autonomous for another century. In the early years of the Common Era the Han imposed more direct rule, prompting occasional revolts and punitive military campaigns, and this state of ambiguous control persisted until the collapse of the Han in 220
CE
. When the Han finally fell, their empire fractured into three, with the Wu Dynasty taking over much of the area south of the Yangtze River. But the Wu state only lasted until around 265 when it was defeated by its northern rivals, the Jin. Then, just 80 years later in 316, the Jin were forced out of the north and became a southern-based state until they too collapsed in 420 and were superseded by a series of other southern-based states.

Where then is ‘China’ in this era? Historians of China have tended to describe ‘a civilization pretending to be a state’, to use Lucian Pye's formulation, a continuous culture that has controlled the landmass of East Asia for millennia.
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This is not how it appears from the perspective of the South China Sea. For many centuries, the dynasties and peoples who controlled the Sea's northern shore were different from those controlling the inland areas of ‘China’. While the northern-based kingdoms looked inwards, those of the south looked outwards. They were directly connected to the maritime trading networks and through them to Funan and the rest of the region.

Throughout most of this period, Funan possessed two things that have proved to be crucial for every successful Southeast Asian trading centre since: beneficial relationships with whoever was ruling India and southern China. In times of crisis, and particularly after political changes, Funan would send ‘embassies’ to China seeking to preserve its position as preferred trading partner. Its representatives would make ‘tribute’ offerings to facilitate the discussions. Much has been made of these tributary relations.
Some nationalist Chinese historians argue that they prove Southeast Asian societies were vassals to Chinese emperors. This is how old Chinese texts tend to record them. However, contemporary Southeast Asian accounts suggest that ‘tribute’ wasn't viewed as some kind of feudal relationship between master and servant but simply as a trading partnership. Chinese rulers welcomed this ‘tribute’ as foreign recognition of their right to rule. Tribute ensured good relations abroad and symbolically reinforced the domestic power of rulers against potential rivals. For the ‘tributaries’, it was just the formality required to gain access to the ports. It was this status as a ‘tributary relation’ that made Funan a gatekeeper both to the riches within its sphere of influence and to those over the far horizon.

For almost three centuries Funan seems to have dominated the South China Sea trade, despite competition and attacks from its rivals. It used both diplomacy and force to maintain its position, coping with the ups and downs of the long-distance sea trade until the middle of the fourth century
CE
. Around that time high tolls and corruption in Chinese ports depressed business, out-of-work merchants turned to piracy and competing traders learnt to navigate their way around the Malay Peninsula, ending Funan's grip on the Isthmus of Kra. Merchants from other parts of Southeast Asia started to bypass Funan and deal directly with other ports further up the coast. Gradually Funan was eclipsed by its rivals. By the time sea trade revived again, after the fall of the Jin in China in 420
CE
, it was other ports that would reap the benefits, in particular those further up the coast, in Champa.

In contrast to Funan, where little remains, Champa has left massive monuments: great red brick towers dotted across what is now central Vietnam. Their Indian imagery is obvious; indeed even the name ‘Champa’ seems to have been borrowed from an Indian kingdom. Champa's roots lie in the Stone Age Sa Huynh culture that Wilhelm Solheim identified as part of the Nusantao network and its prosperity was built, like that of Funan before it, on a marriage between sea trade and the export of inland commodities: elephant ivory and rhino horn were two of the more exotic products which its forests could provide. Champa was not a centralised state, more a collection of settlements based in river valleys along the coast that recognised a main ruler. Throughout its thousand-year history, power frequently moved between the different valleys.

Champa was rarely peaceful. It emerged out of the piracy that followed the decline in legitimate trade with China at the end of the fourth century. After the fall of the Jin, overland routes from China to the west were closed to southern China's new rulers, the Liu Song. As a result, they became dependent on maritime trade – which was being damaged by Champa's piracy. The threat was so bad that Liu Song forces invaded Champa in 446 and destroyed its capital. But they also declared themselves open to trade and Champa became an entrepôt – while continuing to tolerate, and sometimes encourage, piracy. At about the same time, Guangzhou on the Pearl River Delta became the main port of southern China and trade between the two – linked by the annual monsoon cycle – became highly profitable.

But although Champa dominated maritime trade with China, it did not have a monopoly. Other trading ports began to develop relations too. The kingdom of Taruma in western Java and other rulers in Sumatra had sent embassies by 460. One thing all these places had in common was their adoption of elements of Indian religious and political culture: Hinduism at first and later Buddhism. Kingdoms referred to themselves by the Sanskrit term
mandala
– wheel – and the rulers as
cakravartin
– wheel-turner. They saw themselves as centres of networks, rather than states with defined borders. Their legitimacy came less from physical control over territory and more from recognition by other rulers. Relations between them were fluid and less powerful centres might have allegiances to more than one
mandala
. But this legitimacy needed to be backed up by military power. To maintain their centrality
mandalas
needed to be able to force subordinate polities into line when necessary.

The use of ‘Indian’ ways of governing and the continuing spread of Indian religion in the region is evidence of the strong trading links between Southeast Asia and places to the west throughout the rest of the first millennium. Aromatic woods, resins, gold, spices and sometimes slaves were all in high demand. The evidence is not clear-cut but it seems that commerce with Indian kingdoms was more significant than with China for most of Southeast Asia in this period. There was a particular slump in trade with China at the end of the sixth century. However, once the Tang Dynasty had taken power in China in 618 and unified the lowlands for the first time in 200 years, the South China Sea trade seems to have taken
off again. Conditions were ripe for the emergence of other
mandalas
to take advantage of it. This was the era of the great ‘Indianised’ civilisations: Champa, Srivijaya and Angkor: the builders of the monuments which so excited European colonists and continue to fascinate us today.

While Champa was still engaging in occasional acts of piracy, a more reliable trading partner emerged much further to the south, on the southeastern coast of Sumatra. For a long time, almost all that was known about Srivijaya came from Chinese descriptions. Even its location was a mystery. It wasn't until 1993 that the French archaeologist Pierre-Yves Manguin was able to confirm earlier suspicions that Srivijaya was located along the banks of the Musi River in what is now the Indonesian city of Palembang. Sadly, it seems that most of the remains of one of the most important Southeast Asian civilisations now lie beneath the PIHC fertiliser factory. The company used to be called PT Pupuk Sriwijaya but even that vestigial trace of the ancient city has gone, just like the ruins the company unknowingly obliterated in the 1960s.

Srivijaya was a classic
mandala
– the dominant power among a group of trading settlements along the main east–west trade route. From its base it controlled access through both the Straits of Malacca to the north and the Sunda Strait to the south. By 683 it could command a military force around 20,000 strong – many of whom were probably nomadic Nusantao who could both trade and fight on behalf of the ruler.
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East–west maritime trade was practically impossible without Srivijaya's consent. It was such a significant power that in 683 the Chinese Tang court sent its first embassy to what it called the Nanyang – island Southeast Asia – in order to seal the relationship between the two.
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Srivijaya became, in effect, the Tang Dynasty's gatekeeper in the region.