by Tim Hannigan
Whatever the case, within a few years of setting themselves up in Kedu the Sailendras had embarked on the most ambitious building project that Java had ever seen, an overwhelming undertaking that would leave the Shaivite sanctuaries of Dieng looking like the merest molehills. The structure—standing at the junction of the Progo and Elo rivers—amounted to 1.5 million blocks of chiselled grey andesite, and when it was finished it was the biggest Buddhist monument on earth. Its name was Borobudur.
Work on this epic edifice probably began around 760, and continued for some seventy years. The stone was quarried from the banks of the Progo, then hauled uphill to be set in the model of a monumental mandala. Nine concentric terraces were raised, the lower six square in form, the upper trio a set of shrinking circles culminating in a single stupa. The walls and balustrades of the lower terraces were covered with friezes in narrative order—more than 2,500 individual panels amounting in total to a strip of stories some three miles (five kilometres) long. They told tales from the massed library of Buddhist lore, along with snatches of local colour: a house built on stilts on the old Austronesian model with wooden plates on the supports to keep out clambering rodents; a ship running through a driven sea with straining outriggers and full-bellied lateen sails; weighing scales and earthenware water jars; pigeons on the rooftops and monkeys in the treetops.
The men who built Borobudur worked without a single blueprint, and each generation of Sailendra kings made their own modifications and innovations. Just how many people worked on the vast monument over the years is unknown—there are no contemporary inscriptions giving clear and practical details of its construction. Looking at the thing as it now stands it might be easy to conjure up images of Pharoanic megalomania, with legions of cringing slaves labouring under the lash to build the insane follies of a despotism. That there was no entrenched Buddhist culture out in the countryside of Central Java surely supports this notion—the labourers lugging two hundred-pound (one-hundred-kilo) blocks up from the Progo lived in a land where the elite had practiced Shaivism for centuries and where the rural peasantry concerned themselves with their own local spirits and deified forebears. All this business of Bodhisats was, quite literally, a foreign language.
But this may not be the full story: given the seven-decade timeframe of Borobudur’s construction, a couple of hundred men, working when harvest cycles allowed, could have achieved a very great deal. The Sailendras in all likelihood simply called upon that traditional obligation to offer part-time labour to the overlord. Men who were used to giving a portion of their working life to building roads or roofs for the ruler, or helping in the planting of royal rice fields, found themselves deflected in the direction of the andesite quarries on the Progo River. And given the remarkably catholic approach to alien belief systems that Java has displayed over the centuries, they probably simply shrugged when presented with yet another outlandish pantheon, and got on with the business in hand.
Nowhere else in the Archipelago could have supported a project on this scale. Away to the north in Sumatra the Srivijayans might have had maritime mastery, but seated amongst the swamps they had to import much of their own rice, and they had direct rule over only a small population of traders and fishermen. They could hardly have conceived a project on the scale of Borobudur, let alone brought it into being.
The Sailendras vanished almost as abruptly as they had appeared. By the early decades of the ninth century their dynasty was in decline, and that other regal lineage, the Sanjaya, was making a comeback. The Sanjaya scion of the day, a man by the name of Rakai Pikatan, embarked on a Sailendra-slashing rampage through the rice fields, and the last Sailendra king, Balaputra, turned tail and fled to Sumatra to seek refuge with his co-religionists in Srivijaya. All that remained was the recently completed Borobudur, coated now with white plaster and glowing like a single molar in the green jaw of Java. This spectacular architectural legacy of the departed Buddhist overlords seems to have rather rankled with Rakai Pikatan. If the Sailendras could build something as remarkable as Borobudur, then so could he: to mark the Sanjaya resurgence, in 856 he ordered the building of Prambanan.
If the Buddhist interlude under the Sailendras had been an aberration in the Javanese narrative, then Borobudur itself was an anomaly in the local architectural tradition: squat and square and quite unlike anything that went before or after. The resurgent Sanjayas, however, went back to the architectural form pioneered in Dieng two centuries earlier. The Prambanan temple complex, built on the banks of the Opak River close to the spot where Rakai Pikatan had his palace, featured a trio of towering temples in the classic three-tiered Javanese style, but expanded on a monstrous scale. The central temple was 154 feet (47 metres) tall.
Over the coming half-century Central Java developed an unfettered addiction to temple building. In almost every potentially auspicious spot, every pleasing plateau or conspicuous confluence, a column of carven black stone was thrown up by the masons. The plains and hills around Prambanan are thick with these temples. Some are dedicated exclusively to Shiva; a few are given over to the Buddha. But something significant was underway at the time: Java, it seems, was chewing up and digesting these once divergent Indian traditions and turning them into something of its own—a syncretic faith in which worship of Shiva dominated, but into which a Vaishnavite thread was also woven along with all sorts of local strands, and where the Buddha was a paid-up member of the pantheon. This tradition, which first took shape in Sanjaya-ruled Mataram, is best described as ‘Hindu-Buddhism’.
They heyday of Sanjaya-ruled Mataram lasted a mere fifty years. What brought it to an end is unclear, but the unconstrained royal passion for temple building may have eventually put an unbearable strain on the old systems of labour obligation. Here and there a family might have quietly decided to strip the rattan walls of their hut, load their buffalo, and head east to a new country where there were no temple-mad kings. Such a process would only have accelerated in the third decade of the tenth century, when a massive eruption of the Merapi volcano devastated Mataram and caked the countryside with cloying grey ash. It was certainly at around that point that the elite itself decided to pack up and move out, leaving the temples to the birds and shifting the centre of royal power in Java some four hundred miles to the northeast. The move would bring an unexpected boon: the two distinct power sources that had fuelled the previous polities in the Archipelago—the maritime advantages of Srivijaya and the agricultural wealth of Mataram—were about to intersect with spectacular consequences.
The mountain rises sheer from the sweltering coastal plains of northeast Java. It is modest compared to the monsters of the interior—a mere 5,240 feet (1,600 metres). And it is long-dead: no sulphurous smoke issues from its crown and the water from its springs is icy cold. But it is perfectly formed. Its crown bursts through the blanket of forest, marked with deep grooves and catching at the running cloud, and lower down, each of its cardinal points is marked by a smaller outlying summit. Sailors passing along the channel offshore can see it even on days when the bigger peaks behind are cloaked in cloud. It is a mountain that has been catching the eye and the imagination for millennia, and there were surely sacred sites on its forested flanks long before Indian, Arabian or European traditions washed ashore here. Its name is Gunung Penanggungan.
Penanggungan is the northernmost sentinel of the Arjuno-Welirang massif, a hulk of high ground with a river basin opening on either side. To the east lies the Malang plateau, drained by the Kali Welang River and with the huge Bromo-Tengger massif rising beyond. To the west, meanwhile, a much broader river basin opens—the floodplain of the Brantas, East Java’s longest river.
It was in these basins on either side of Penanggungan that royal power reconfigured in the tenth century, and the mountain became the sacred mascot of the new realms, claimed to be the tip of the mythical Mount Mahameru, home of the Hindu pantheon, broken off when the gods transported it from India to Java. This new, volcano-guarded wellspring of history still o
ffered all the rich returns of field and forest which had fuelled the ruling dynasties of Mataram. But the Brantas delta also emptied into a sheltered sea with safe anchorages and steady trade winds. If a single centre point of the Archipelago can be identified, then this is probably it. The region was equidistant between the Straits of Melaka and the Spice Islands of Maluku. Makassar, the major gateway to eastern waters, was an easy sail away across the Java Sea, as were the river mouths of southern Borneo.
The various kingdoms and dynasties that bubbled up on the Brantas and around the flanks of Penanggungan over the centuries were essentially reincarnations of the same polity. But with each rebirth the power grew—shipping lines crept further across the Archipelago and beyond, and new vassals were collected on far-flung shores. The capital of these East Java kingdoms was usually somewhere around the point where the Brantas splits into its delta, approachable by boat from the sea and in full view of Penanggungan. This political hub was twinned with a port at the mouth of the Kalimas distributary, the site of the modern city of Surabaya. Trade goods of all kinds passed through this harbour, but the greatest boon was spices—for nutmeg and cloves from Maluku had already become a major global commodity. Soon, East Java kings were collecting tribute from distant islands, and even beginning to challenge the Straits of Melaka as the focus of Archipelago trading power.
The first truly great king to rise out of this bubbling cauldron—and, indeed, one of the first historical figures in the Archipelago to have a character and a narrative still clearly discernible today—was a man by the name of Airlangga.
Airlangga was the son of Javanese princess called Mahendradatta and a Balinese king called Udayana. Bali was a remote and rugged place that had kept its old Austronesian traditions strong. Its own chieftains had probably had little contact with royal Java in the days when the Mataram region was the centre of the local universe. But once Javanese power had reconfigured closer at hand on the Brantas delta, the trajectories of Java and Bali had become increasingly intertwined—as Airlangga’s ancestry so clearly shows. There was, however, already the potential for neighbourly ill-feeling, and Airlangga’s Javanese mother Mahendradatta would eventually be reincarnated as the most grotesque of all Balinese horrors—the mythical witch-widow Rangda.
Airlangga was born around 991, quite possibly in Bali itself, and his name meant ‘Jumping Water’, presumably as a nod to his strait-spanning ancestry. He would not be the only great Indonesian leader of mixed Javanese-Balinese ancestry—though it would be a full nine hundred years before his successor appeared.
He came to power in the early eleventh century after his father’s kingdom had been destroyed in a conflict with Srivijaya. According to legend, the teenage Airlangga was the sole survivor of the old court, and after its destruction he sought refuge with a community of ascetics in the karst hills near the south coast. This motif of a youthful king-in-waiting serving out a period of exile amongst the jungle mystics would repeat over and over down the course of Javanese history, and would even find echoes in the political exiles of the twentieth-century independence struggle. In Airlangga’s prototype tale the prince was tracked down to his remote retreat by a gaggle of dissolute Brahmans, who beseeched him to take up the royal mantle and resurrect the East Java polity. By the second decade of the eleventh century he had done their bidding and was back on the Brantas delta, ruling from a capital called Kahuripan and labouring under the spectacularly grandiose title of ‘Sri Maharaja Rakai Halu Sri Lokeswara Dharmawangsa Airlangga Anantawikramottunggadewa’.
After Airlangga’s death in 1049 his kingdom was divided between his sons. In the received version of events the old king himself had ordered the partition in an effort to stave off a civil war upon his demise. In truth, however, the split may have been the result of just such a war, rather than a preventative measure. It wasn’t until the middle of the twelfth century that a king called Joyoboyo managed to put the divided realm back together. He ruled from a capital at Kediri on the middle reaches of the Brantas and had a sideline in popular prophecy. Joyoboyo codified the concept of the Ratu Adil, the messianic ‘Righteous Prince’ who would periodically emerge from the ether to save Java from catastrophe. Apocryphal versions of his predictions are still doing the rounds today.
In 1222, yet another new king forged yet another new royal capital at Singhasari, in the basin of the Kali Welang River, close to where the city of Malang stands today. If Airlangga and Joyoboyo had provided the model for righteous princes and mystic kings-in-waiting, then this man, Ken Arok, offered an altogether less admirable prototype. He has gone down in legend as an orphan thief who wheedled his way into a vassal court of Kediri, killed the local lord, and then set about overthrowing Kediri itself. He was, in short, a jago—a term that literally means ‘fighting cock’ but which encompasses rebels, gangsters, upstarts—and the epitome of exactly what happens when a righteous prince goes wrong.
While power was ping-ponging back and forth between the jagos and the just, ever larger volumes of spice were being transhipped through the Brantas ports. Java’s renown as a bustling hub of tropical trade soon spread throughout Asia, and even wandering Italians would pick up snatches of conversation about its riches. Marco Polo, travelling to China in the second half of the thirteenth century, reported that Java ‘is of surpassing wealth… frequented by a vast amount of shipping, and by merchants who buy and sell costly goods from which they reap great profit’.
The pot of power in East Java was already coming up from a slow simmer to a rolling boil, but the fuel that would see it bubble right over came from an unexpected angle—a diplomatic mission despatched by a warrior king from the Mongolian steppe.
They could see the cone of Gunung Penanggungan from their ships, with the line of the Javanese coastline dark beyond a steel-grey sea. It was early 1293 and the Mongol commanders must have wondered what exactly they were doing in this strange place.
Three decades earlier, the Mongols had descended on China and set themselves up as celestial emperors in the form of the Yuan Dynasty. As Yuan Emperor, Kublai Khan—in between decreeing stately pleasure domes and trying to rein in the rampaging Golden Horde—set about sending missions to demand acknowledgment from the Southeast Asian vassals of the previous Chinese dynasty. He was particularly concerned about the Singhasari kingdom which, by the late thirteenth century, had its own vassals in Bali and Borneo, and which was even developing diplomatic ties with the Champa kingdom of Vietnam. Worried about what looked like a sort of proto-hegemony in the Archipelago, Kublai Khan despatched three missions to seek tribute from Singhasari. He sent the first in 1280, with another the following year. Neither met with much success, so in 1289 yet another diplomatic fleet departed on the monsoon trade winds, anchored off the Brantas delta, and sent a party ashore to negotiate with the then Singhasari king, a decidedly headstrong man by the name of Kertanagara. The visitors soon discovered that Kertanagara was not in the business of taking orders from anyone, not even the ruler with the best claim to the title of most powerful man on earth. What exactly he did to Kublai Khan’s principal diplomat, Meng Qi, depends on who is telling the tale, but the unfortunate envoy certainly lost face, so to speak—Kertanagara either cut off his nose, branded his visage with a red-hot iron, or sliced his ears off. Naturally, the Great Khan did not react mildly when his humiliated ambassador came home: in 1293 he sent another fleet to seek revenge.
The avenging armada was enormous. Around a thousand vessels had come lumbering across the South China Sea from Canton under the command of a trio of multi-ethnic admirals—a Mongol, a Uighur and a Han Chinese. They extracted submission and tribute from petty polities along the way, and when they swung to anchor off the mouth of the Brantas delta and looked out on the distant outline of Penanggungan, they must have felt that they were undefeatable. However, the first local messengers who paddled out to meet them let them know that things in the region had changed since the departure of the red-faced envoy four years earlier. The troublesome king K
ertanagara was dead and Singhasari itself had been toppled by a rebel prince called Jayakatwang, who had installed himself at the earlier capital of Kediri.
The Mongol commanders would later realise that at this point they ought to have swung their ships around and crept off as quietly as they could. Instead, they allowed themselves to be convinced by a son-in-law of the deposed Kertanagara to take part in a counter-revolution against Jayakatwang at Kediri. This sonin-law—whose name was Raden Wijaya—had a small fiefdom on the Brantas downstream from Kediri, and since the fall of Singhasari he had been quietly playing the role of malleable vassal. Now, however, he led the Mongol army up the river, overwhelming outlying Kediri garrisons. In April, with the last of the monsoon rains, the invaders surrounded the Kediri capital and forced an easy capitulation out of Jayakatwang.
Raden Wijaya very clearly carried the same jago genes as his Singhasari forebear, Ken Arok, for he now embarked on the most spectacular piece of treachery. Instead of politely thanking the baffled Mongols who had just done his improbable bidding, he turned against them and conjured up a country-wide uprising. The Mongols did their best to resist, but this land of rice fields and palm groves was no place for men of the open steppe, and they had no real idea what they were doing in Java in the first place. After two hard, sweaty months of guerrilla warfare up and down the lower Brantas, they scuttled back to their ships and fled.
The Mongols, who had sacked Baghdad and stormed all the way to the borders of Christian Europe, had been chased out of Java by a junior prince of a toppled dynasty. Raden Wijaya had good reason to feel proud of himself. He went back to his little capital—a village about twelve miles west of Gunung Penanggungan—and turned it into an empire called Majapahit.
The word ‘Majapahit’ rings like a bell through the halls of Indonesian history. The name of no other realm before or since resounds as this one does. This is, in part, down to the way in which it has been used and abused in the long centuries since its fall. Later Javanese kings, nineteenth-century European orientalists, and strident Indonesian nationalists have all retooled its reputation to fit their own prejudices and purposes. But despite the static of later fantasy that crackles around it, the historical Majapahit really was very impressive indeed.