This, then, was a city on the water, a city with length but no breadth whose raison d’être was water traffic. Yet the river poses a problem: a significant objection to tales of the great glories of Palembang is that the site lies some way inland, beside a river, in what was a marshy area – the distance from the coast is eighty kilometres, but more if river traffic had to wend its way upriver – and arguments that the coastline lay much further inland in the early Middle Ages have not won universal approval.34 Still, a major oceanic port can develop some way inland. Seville is a perfect example, and neither Canton nor London stands on the coast. The shores of Sumatra were no doubt dotted with settlements that provided ready services to shipping that did not come all the way up to Palembang itself. Śri Vijaya was not a myth, but that does not mean that its period of efflorescence was as long as has often been assumed. Palembang was at its peak in the seventh to ninth centuries. Later, competitors in Java, Malaya and elsewhere blunted the power of the maharajah.
That is to assume the power of the maharajah was in some sense ‘imperial’. Here too care is required. Rather than thinking of a centralized empire stretching over hundreds of islands and as far as the Malayan peninsula, one should think of a commercial hub at Palembang, a wealthy and militarily powerful city ruled by a widely respected king; but whether, as the oriental scholars who first translated Sanskrit, Chinese and Arabic texts concerning Śri Vijaya assumed, these texts speak of empire and provincial governors is a moot point. Maybe the term vanua Śri Vijaya on one of the Sanskrit inscriptions from Palembang was intended to convey the impression not of an ‘empire’, as once translated, but of a much more modest region under the direct authority of the maharajah. Maybe too the idea that this inscription talks of ‘provincial governors’ is a misconception, and it really describes autonomous regional lords who, given half the chance, would reject the authority of the maharajah, but were kept under sufficient pressure to maintain their ambiguous and insincere loyalty. The Javanese rulers also received tribute from lesser rulers in Borneo, the Moluccas and eventually Malaya and northern Sumatra, while not neglecting the usefulness every now and again of sending an embassy to the Son of Heaven in China and acknowledging his remote and very loose overlordship.35
Sometimes, as in 853 and 871, embassies from Indonesia to China came not from Śri Vijaya but from rival states, suggesting that Śri Vijaya did not enjoy a total monopoly on trade with China. Malayu, later known as Jambi, fell under the control of Śri Vijaya, according to the monk Yijing; and yet it had earlier sent its own embassies to the Tang court. On Java, a number of rulers did the same, and occasionally fought wars against Śri Vijaya.36 And then there were parts of Sumatra and lands nearby that became rich because of their association with the ruler of Palembang. Barus stood on the opposite side of the island from Palembang, facing the Indian Ocean. Here, as at Palembang, archaeologists have begun to unearth goods brought from as far away as Egypt, Arabia, Persia and India, including not just ceramics but pieces of glass in nearly all the shades of the spectrum, precious stones and other beads, as well as coins, not forgetting 17,000 fragments of Chinese porcelain from the late tenth century up to about 1150. The character of the ceramics found at one of these sites in Barus is remarkably similar to the character of the ceramics accumulated by the inhabitants of Fustat, or Old Cairo, in the same period. So we could think of Barus as one of the links in the chain connecting southern China to the capital of the Fatimid Empire on the River Nile. Barus was also a centre of production, where one could buy bronze caskets and statuettes, made locally from Sumatran copper and tin. As for the inhabitants, they must have been a varied bunch of people, Sumatrans alongside Arabs, Nestorian Christians from Persia and Tamils from India, though many merchants and other travellers were temporary residents, waiting for favourable winds. It would be good to know how Barus was linked, politically and commercially, to Palembang; and the obvious, simple answer is that ties varied in intensity as the power of the maharajah waxed and waned.37
All this begins to make the ‘empire’ of Śri Vijaya look rather like a loose feudal relationship, when it worked at all. It was a political network generally dominated by Śri Vijaya, in which the maharajah had to accept the autonomy of his neighbours, who for the most part recognized his general claim to be their sovereign, but carried on as far as possible without allowing him to interfere, and were perfectly prepared to challenge his authority at the first sign of weakness – hence, indeed, his large armies and navies. In return, these neighbours were allowed to take part in the trade that linked Śri Vijaya to India and China, but in a subordinate role. And this explanation of how Śri Vijaya functioned also makes sense because it shows how the greatest resource of the maharajah, his prosperous riverside port at Palembang and the region close by, kept him afloat politically and financially – it was an enormous source of strength, backed up by his armies and, as will be seen, his navies too. In this view, Śri Vijaya flourished and survived precisely because it was not an empire, and not even a centralized state, but the focal point of a trading network with offshoots around the southern edges of the South China Sea and even as far west as Kedah on the Indian Ocean shores of Malaya.38
III
This uncertainty about whether the Arabic and Chinese accounts of the empire of Śri Vijaya are grossly exaggerated (for they are certainly exaggerated in some degree) does not compromise the basic argument: that Śri Vijaya flourished as a mid-point between China and India, looking in both directions and servicing the trade of both great landmasses; and in doing so it functioned both as an entrepôt where the goods of India and China could be exchanged by visiting merchants, and as a place to which to turn in search of the spices and perfumes that were native to Indonesia and Malaya. Yet there is still an important element missing. Who were these merchants? Some were clearly Indian and Arab, and Chinese also arrived as knowledge of these waters grew. References in Chinese writings to the Bosi led the pioneers of the history of south-east Asia to conclude that they were Persian, which is the literal meaning of the Chinese term. Some certainly were Persian like Yazd-bozed, a late eighth-century merchant whose name appears on a jar found in a shipwreck off Thailand in 2013. But identifying merchants is never simple. Cargoes of Bosi goods were carried across the Indian Ocean, and the term in that context evidently meant not just the exotic produce of Persia and the Persian Gulf, but goods from the Muslim world as a whole. Bosi was a generic term for Arabs as well, since the Chinese often failed to distinguish between these two sets of people, even though the Arab lands were also known as Dashi and there were large settlements of Muslim merchants within China itself.39
Ethnic muddles of this sort are exceptionally common, and the earnestness with which scholars of the Orient have chased these will-o’-the-wisp terms round and round provides more entertainment than enlightenment. However, accepting that the term Bosi refers to Western goods, one then needs to ask who actually carried them towards Śri Vijaya; and here, alongside Indian and Arab merchants, a prominent place has to be found for Malays or Indonesians who, as has been seen, ventured as far as Madagascar and east Africa at this period, and were also found in China – in AD 430 an Indonesian embassy took ship for China with gifts of cloth from as far away as India and Gandhara. The king of Java wanted the emperor to promise not to interfere with his ships and merchants.40 Indonesian and Malay sailors looked in the other direction too, and the crucial link between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, fell for a time at least under the sway of the ruler of Śri Vijaya.41 Although it is not possible to describe the Malay and Indonesian ships in any detail, it comes as no surprise that the inhabitants of the peninsula and islands around the South China Sea should have taken to the water, first to exchange goods among themselves, and then to range much farther afield.42
Several shipwrecks discovered at the end of the twentieth century in Indonesian waters have, in a very short period of time, massively enlarged knowledge of how the connections betw
een China, Indonesia and India worked. The word ‘massively’ is doubly appropriate, since the quantity of finds is staggering: 55,000 ceramic objects were recovered from the Belitung shipwreck out of an estimated cargo of 70,000 pots weighing twenty-five metric tons; and roughly half a million pots were raised from the Cirebon shipwreck found off the north-west coast of Java. The estimated weight of the cargo carried by this ship is as much as 300 metric tons.43 The shipwrecks of the South China Sea compensate handsomely for the lack of finds on land, especially at Palembang itself.
The Belitung shipwreck was found off the coast of an Indonesian island midway between Sumatra, Borneo and Java.44 The wreck took place not far from Palembang, but due east of the town; it is more likely, as will be seen, that the ship was Java-bound. Its date can be established without much difficulty: there is a mirror that carries the Chinese date equivalent to 759, a bowl from Changsha in central China that carries the date 826, and there are coins of a type minted from 758 to about 845.45 It lay in shallow waters, where it was discovered by divers looking for sea cucumbers, and it had apparently struck a reef about three kilometres offshore; since no human remains were found in the shipwreck, it seems that the crew and passengers managed to escape to dry land.46 It had not suffered violent damage; its cargo of pottery was nearly all intact – the pots and bowls had been carefully packed in larger storage jars by people who knew how to protect fragile ceramics from the turbulence of the sea.47 It was constructed out of a variety of woods, but some of this material came from east Africa, and the planks were lashed together in the traditional Indian Ocean way.48 The ship was not Chinese, but one passenger must have been Chinese, and perhaps a monk, for an inkstone, engraved with the image of an insect, of the sort used in Chinese calligraphy, was found in the wreck. Something too can be said about life on board: bone dice and a board game filled idle hours.49
As revealing as the ship itself are the goods carried on board. The first item to bear in mind is one that is too fragile to have survived centuries of immersion in seawater, but one that is known from Chinese and Arabic writers to have been a favourite import from China into the Indian Ocean: silk cloth. An inscription from a Buddhist monastery at Nakhom Si Thammarat, an ancient city in Thailand on the shores of the South China Sea, refers to ‘banners of Chinese silk’, and dates from a period when the region was under the influence, or possibly dominion, of Śri Vijaya; but Chinese silk travelled much farther afield, and on occasion the covering of the Ka‘aba in Mecca was made from Chinese silk.50 Turning to what has actually survived on the site, the ceramics command immediate attention. The early ninth century saw a vigorous expansion of trade in Chinese glazed ceramics, both from northern China (whence they were ferried by river and canal down to ports in the south, especially Guangzhou), and from Changsha in central China, a city located a long way from the sea, but famous for its quite massive industrial output of pottery. Demand for good-quality ceramics was closely linked to the spread of a new and important fashion: tea-drinking.51 The Belitung wreck contains the largest collection of late Tang pottery ever found: white pottery from northern China, green wares from southern China, as well as gold and silver vessels and bronze mirrors. A single blue and white bowl is the ancestor of the blue and white porcelain that came to dominate the external trade of China over many centuries, and was imitated centuries later in Portugal and Holland.52 Another unique bowl shows a ship being attacked by a massive sea monster; this is the earliest depiction of an ocean-going ship in Chinese art.53 The wreck contained several beautiful examples of the Chinese goldsmith’s art, unquestionably objects of high luxury.54
The cargo is so impressive that it is easy to conclude that at least part of it consisted of the return gifts sent by the Chinese court upon receipt of tribute from the ruler of Śri Vijaya or from one of the Javanese kings – there were at least six embassies to China from Java between 813 and 839. A Javanese gold coin was found in the wreck. The ninth century was the golden age of Java, the period during which the great temple complex at Borobodur, decorated with more than 500 statues of Buddha, was constructed under the Sailendra dynasty; it is the largest Buddhist temple anywhere.55 The exchange of gifts, as has been seen, provided the official and very formal framework for bilateral trade overseen by the imperial court, also intended to demonstrate the submission of lesser rulers to the imperial throne. But the quantity of goods, especially pottery, on board the Belitung wreck was so vast that it is clear other interests were also involved: merchants, whether Malay, Indian, Persian or Arab, who sent their orders for fine pottery to the kilns of distant Changsha by way of agents in Guangzhou, and who took advantage of the sailing of an important cargo vessel to book space on board for their own consignments.
This vast cargo of Chinese ceramics has prompted the question whether the ship was bound for the Indian Ocean, rather than Java or Śri Vijaya, particularly since it is quite likely the crew was from there. Moreover, demand for Chinese ceramics had reached such a fever pitch that Abbasid potters in Iraq in the age of Harun ar-Rashid, the period when this ship sank, began to imitate what they saw arriving from the Far East. Still, there was no substitute for the real thing.56 Some of the pottery found on board was clearly for everyday use, by passengers and crew, and is similar to the turquoise glazed wares produced at this time in Iraq and Iran, which might suggest that the ultimate destination was Siraf deep within the Persian Gulf. Examples of this pottery have been found not just at Siraf but at Barus in Sumatra and at Guangzhou, so it certainly travelled along the entire sea route.57
The Belitung shipwreck is not unique. The Intan wreck, found off south-eastern Sumatra, was probably heading to Java, laden with pottery and metal goods, which included many tin ingots, which are likely to have originated in Malaya. Coins found in the wreck date its voyage to between 917 and 942. The combination of Chinese ceramics and Malayan tin suggests that the goods were loaded in some great emporium that gathered together goods from all around the South China Sea, or that the ship itself tramped around the same sea. The variety of the cargo has been described by one of its excavators as ‘astounding’: small bronze staffs that Buddhist monks used as symbols of a thunderbolt; bronze masks representing the Demon of Time, sometimes used as door fittings; some gold jewellery. It was common practice for merchants from Śri Vijaya to bring copper to China and to have temple decorations cast in bronze there. The presence of tin, the other ingredient of bronze, in the hold of the Intan ship confirms the importance of this movement of raw metal back and forth until it was transformed into gleaming objects in bronze or other metals. For the ship also carried iron bars and silver ingots, plus as many as 20,000 pots and bowls, some of a high quality, and much of it from southern China. Fragments of resin indicate that the ship had called in at a port in Sumatra, while the presence of tiger teeth and bones suggests an interest in rare medicines. The ship itself was not Chinese; but its construction differed from that of the Belitung ship, and it is thought to have been Indonesian, with a displacement of roughly 300 tons and a length of about thirty metres.58 Its circuit was most likely limited to the South China Sea, whereas the Belitung ship, smaller in size, was better suited to the long voyage that had brought it all the way from Arabia or Persia. Yet another wreck, discovered in Chinese waters, is the so-called Nanhai I, a very large vessel that contained 60,000–80,000 pieces of pottery, mainly porcelain from the Song dynasty, as well as 6,000 coins, the latest of which date from the early twelfth century, although some may be as old as the first century AD. The impression given by the wreck is that this was a Chinese ship and that it was bound from Guangzhou or another port in southern China for a destination in the South China Sea.59
This evidence for goods being collected from different corners of the South China Sea on sizeable ships affects how one might think about this space. It has often been compared to the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean is not an ideal model, for three large continents meet there, while the southern and eastern rims of the South China, Sea a
re chains of islands separating the sea from the open spaces of the Pacific; and the mainland to the north has always been dominated by China which, even when fragmented, has possessed an economic and political weight far in excess of anything that rulers over Śri Vijaya could hope to achieve.60 Yet the South China Sea has also been an area in which the great power to the north has taken a relatively passive role in the conduct of trade, compared to the inhabitants of Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand and Vietnam. China, with its massive continental concerns, often looked away from the South China Sea, and yet its rulers valued enormously the produce of far-off lands that came through that sea. And this provided the perfect opportunity for Malay, Arab and other traders to take charge of the maritime trade routes. These, by the seventh century, were routes that spanned vast distances, from the coasts of Arabia and Africa to southern China, bringing together the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific more intimately than had been the case even in the days when Greco-Roman traders penetrated to India and transmitted some of their goods to the Far East. In the era of Śri Vijaya, a network had come into existence that linked together half the world.
9
‘I am about to cross the Great Ocean’
I
Śri Vijaya lay at one end of a route that stretched from Alexandria through the Red Sea and around Arabia and India to the Spice Islands. The Red Sea lost and gained primacy during the early Middle Ages, because a rival passageway, the Persian Gulf, also flourished for a while. Which of the two narrow seas was the more important depended on the political convulsions that were taking place within the Middle East, but the really significant point is that the sea route, whether it passed Aden bound for Egypt or the Strait of Hormuz bound for Iraq and Iran, remained busy, functioning not just as a channel along which fine goods from East and West were passed, but as an open duct along which religious and other cultural influences flowed: Buddhist monks, texts and artefacts; and Muslim preachers and holy books. Islam was a new arrival, but Buddhism too intensified its contact and influence in south-east Asia during the early Middle Ages, as it became increasingly fashionable at courts in India, Sri Lanka, Malaya, Indonesia and, along the shores of the Pacific, in China, Korea and Japan. The crisis of the Roman Empire within the Mediterranean during the fifth to seventh centuries, even if it shrank the market for eastern perfumes and spices in the West, did not fatally damage the networks that had come into being in the days of Pliny and the Periplous, and the overall sense is of continuity of contact across the seas.
The Boundless Sea Page 23