The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  A place of this significance could not be missed by commentators even as far away as the Roman Empire. When Ptolemy mentioned Kattigara in south-east Asia, visited by the Greek sea captain Alexander in the second century, he may have had one or all of the ports of Funan, including Oc-èo, in mind, but he set off a debate about where Kattigara lay that was to fascinate scholars and explorers in sixteenth-century Europe. However, Ptolemy confidently placed Kattigara on the Indian Ocean rather than near the South China Sea.60 For Kattigara may well have been a name created by Greco-Roman merchants out of a misunderstanding. An eleventh-century Brahmin collection of tales is known as the Kathāsaritsāgara, meaning ‘ocean of streams of story’, and an earlier version of that word, or Kathāsāgara (‘oceans of story’) may well have been heard as ‘Kattigara’; the name would then signify something like ‘fabled place across the seas’.61 Oc-èo and Funan remained prosperous until the fifth century, with the peak of their prosperity probably in the second century, under the warrior king Fan-man. During the fourth century, the growing attractions of spices and resins from the Moluccas and other parts of Indonesia gradually rendered the south coast of Vietnam less interesting to sea traders; and this change in direction had major consequences not just for the history of the region but, as will be seen, for the history of the oceans and of the entire world.

  Fan-man’s wars of conquest resulted in the creation of a land and sea realm that encompassed large areas of Indo-China. His empire spilled over into the Bay of Bengal after he led victorious armies into the Kra Isthmus, conquering a Malay kingdom called Tun-sun (in Chinese); it lay in the innermost north-west corner of the South China Sea, at the top of the Malay peninsula, where it joins Thailand. Chinese commentators were impressed by this victory, because they knew that the Malay peninsula was an inconvenient barrier to access to India. Once Tun-sun was in Funanese hands, the journey to the Bay of Bengal became a little easier; one could arrive in Tun-sun’s main port by sea, and then trek across the isthmus through lands that were now all under the sovereignty of the king of Funan. The Chinese were also impressed that the main city of newly conquered Tun-sun was a port where ‘East and West meet together so that every day great crowds gather there. Precious goods and merchandise – they are all there.’62 There were 500 Indian families in the town and 1,000 Brahmins, who were encouraged to marry local girls, ‘consequently many of the Brahmins do not go away’. Chinese observers were dismayed by these parasites, as they saw them: ‘they do nothing but study the sacred canon, bathe themselves with scents and flowers, and practise piety ceaselessly by day and night.’63 The Indianization of Vietnam meant, therefore, not just the presence of Indian traders and settlers, but the arrival of Hindu and Buddhist cults, which spread in Indo-China from this time onwards. An early Sanskrit inscription from Funan dates from soon after Fan-man’s death, showing how the sacred language of India was beginning to take root in Indo-China.

  IV

  Trade and religion were closely intertwined. Beyond Funan, the Brahmins had their rivals. From the first century AD Buddhism began to take a strong hold on China, and Chinese Buddhists regularly travelled to India to study Sanskrit texts and acquire mementoes of the life of Buddha. Faxien (or in older spelling Shih Fa-Hsien) was a Buddhist monk who spent about fifteen years away from China at the start of the fifth century; he took an overland route to India, and returned to Guangzhou by sea from some place in India.64 By now mariners were not interested in hugging the coast of Indo-China, and Faxien was forced to confront the terrors of the open sea. His description of how he reached China by sea from India is full of the dramatic images that so many pilgrims included in their travel diaries. But, even allowing for exaggeration, it offers precious details: there were 200 people on board what he calls a large merchant ship, ‘astern of which there was a smaller vessel in tow in case of accidents at sea and destruction of the big vessel’. That, at any rate, was the theory. But after two days of good sailing eastward, propelled by fair winds, they ran into a severe gale in the Bay of Bengal, and the main ship began to take on water.

  The merchants wished to get aboard the smaller vessel; but the men on the latter, fearing that they would be swamped by numbers, quickly cut the tow-rope in two. The merchants were terrified, for death was close at hand; and fearing that the vessel would fill, they promptly took what bulky goods there were and threw them into the sea. Faxien also took his pitcher and ewer, with whatever he could spare, and threw them into the sea; but he was afraid the merchants would throw over his books and his images, and accordingly fixed his whole thoughts on Guanyin, the Hearer of Prayers, and put his life into the hands of the Catholic Church [i.e. his Buddhist sect] in China, saying, ‘I have journeyed far on behalf of the Faith. O that by your awful power you would grant me a safe return from my wanderings.’65

  It took thirteen days for his prayers to be answered, whereupon they reached an island, probably one of the Andamans, and were able to plug the leak in the ship. Even so, he says, pirates abounded in the vast sea, for ‘the expanse of ocean is boundless’, and navigation by the sun or stars was only possible when the skies were clear; ‘in cloudy and rainy weather our vessel drifted at the mercy of the wind, without keeping any definite course’. The sea was too deep to cast anchor; and it was full of threatening sea monsters that showed themselves, somehow, in the middle of the night.

  Finally, after ninety days, the ship arrived in a land known as Yepoti, thought to have been northern Borneo, or possibly southern Sumatra, which was not bad navigation; they had evidently passed through the Strait of Malacca and had followed the broken south and east coastline of the South China Sea. Yepoti disappointed Faxien, because it was full of Hindus and ‘the Faith of Buddha was in a very unsatisfactory condition’. He did not notice any Chinese merchants in this land, which suggests, yet again, that the trade of the South China Sea was dominated by other peoples.66 Despite his misgivings about this place, he stayed there for five months, and then boarded a different merchant ship that was large enough to carry 200 passengers. They sailed for Guangzhou, but after a month they encountered another tempest, and Faxien immersed himself yet again in prayer. This nearly became Faxien’s involuntary Jonah moment. The Hindu Brahmins on board (whose purpose in travelling to China can only be guessed at) decided that it was precisely because a devout Buddhist was on board that the gods had sent storms against the ship. They did not suggest throwing him overboard, but had a more humane solution: ‘We ought to land the religious mendicant on some island; it is not right to endanger all our lives for one man.’ But Faxien had a protector on board who promised to report the Brahmins to the ruler of China if they treated him this way; Faxien’s friend insisted that the Chinese ruler was also a devout Buddhist who favoured Buddhist monks. ‘At this the merchants wavered and did not land him just then.’67 In any case, they were lost in a typhoon in the middle of the South China Sea, so there cannot have been any islands upon which to abandon the poor monk. For seventy days they wandered, even though they had provisions for only fifty, the normal amount of time required to reach Guangzhou. They had to cook their food in seawater. And when they reached China it was far to the north of Guangzhou, way beyond Taiwan, closer to Shanghai and Hangzhou than to the Wu domains in the south.

  The stories of Faxien and other monks who followed the same route are not just picturesque accounts of the terrors of the open sea. They are also valuable testimony to the way the opening of sea routes stimulated the spread of cultures and religions. Later, there will be a chance to examine how Buddhism jumped across the relatively narrow space of the Japan Sea to challenge and then co-exist with the native cults of ancient Japan. The seaways from India eastwards played a particularly important role in the spread of religious ideas, and the art associated with them, as Hindu texts and practices struck roots in Indo-China and Indonesia (so that Bali remains an isolated Hindu island to this day); and after that Buddhism and eventually Islam spread eastwards along the trade routes, refertilizing Chi
na, which had also received Buddhist texts along the Silk Road. In the third century over 500 monks lived in twenty or more temples by the Red River delta in Vietnam, and this spot became a favoured halt for pilgrims and merchants bound for and from China. Statues of the Buddha as Dīpamkara, ‘calmer of waters’, have been found on many sites in south-east Asia, often dating from this time.68 Chinese writers also spoke of the ivory images, painted stupas and even a Buddha’s tooth, all of which arrived from the Malay peninsula and the islands, notably from the land of Panpan in what is now southern Thailand.69 These are excellent testimony to the spread of Buddhism along routes favoured by the merchants.

  V

  By the sixth century the fortunes of Funan now began to turn dramatically: a neighbouring ruler, the king of Zhenla (in whose temples human sacrifice was said to be practised), invaded Funanese lands and shoved the local economy further into decline; at its greatest extent Funan had exercised suzerainty over Zhenla.70 Even allowing for the disappearance of Funan, the increasingly important ties between India and China transformed the role of Indo-China, Indonesia and Malaya in the maritime networks of the first half of the first millennium. Their role was not reduced but enhanced by the gradual decline of Roman trade in the Indian Ocean. Others began to enter the ocean, notably the people the Chinese called the Po-ššu or Bosi, subjects of the Sasanian emperors of Iran, who sailed down the Gulf and were present in Ceylon, or Si-tiao, by the sixth century; their main interest was the trade in silk. A Chinese text avers that ‘the Bosi king asked for the hand of the daughter of the king of Si-tiao and sent a gold bracelet as a present’. Yet the Persians did not penetrate further than this, and sense can only be made of their undoubted success in Ceylon by deducing that others brought Chinese silk to the island; and those others were, or included, the mariners of Malaya, Sumatra and Java. This is apparent from the comments of Chinese writers about the constant arrival at Guangzhou, several times a year, of foreign ships, while the Chinese sent their own ships no further than western Indonesia. These Indonesians managed at last to intrude their own produce into the trading network between India and China that they so effectively serviced; the first Indonesian product to be rated highly was camphor, used as a perfume at the Sasanian court (rather an overpowering one, perhaps) and later as a drug. Some unfortunate Arabs who were celebrating the sack of a Persian-held city on the Tigris in 638 sprinkled camphor on their food, thinking it was salt, and were taken aback by the taste.71

  What might seem to be a curious footnote to the history of food takes on a much greater significance when the gradual adoption of camphor by merchants and their wealthier customers is seen as the first step in the emergence of south-east Asia as the home of most of the world’s finest spices. Already expert in the handling of pepper and other spices from the coasts of India, and even perhaps the spices they garnered in Madagascar and east Africa, the Malays and Indonesians were becoming the true masters of the international spice trade. In the centuries that followed, they would substitute their own resins and flavourings for those that had been handled by the Greco-Roman traders. This would be the foundation of the wealth of the great maritime trading kingdom of Śri Vijaya, with its capital at Palembang on Sumatra. The ripples of its influence reached not just China and India but the heartlands of Islam and even medieval Europe.

  8

  A Maritime Empire?

  I

  At the eastern end of the Indian Ocean and in the South China Sea, the sixth and seventh centuries saw transformations that turned the spasmodic contact between lands bordering the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean into a two-way traffic lane. This brought prosperity to lands on the southern fringe of the South China Sea that had previously lain on the outer margins of the trade routes. The kingdom of Śri Vijaya, based around Palembang in Sumatra, has been mentioned already. Early in the twentieth century French archaeologists and orientalists were convinced that they had brought to light a great trading empire of the early Middle Ages, whose impact could still be felt in the fifteenth century when the founders of Melaka (Malacca) traced their descent to the ancient rulers of Palembang.1 The difficulty was that material remains were few; on the other hand, literary references were rich, allowing for the constant problem of the Chinese transcription of foreign place names. Compared to Oc-èo, the physical evidence for a great trading station at Palembang was virtually non-existent.2 It is therefore no great surprise that more recent research into the history of early south-east Asia has cast doubt on the very existence of this trading empire, which has been described by one of its detractors as a ‘vague supposed thalassocracy’.3

  That a kingdom existed in Sumatra, flanking the South China Sea, is not in doubt; but how long it flourished, and whether it achieved such great wealth as has been assumed, is now less certain. One of its first historians, Gabriel Ferrand, admitted that ‘one will search in vain for the name of Śri Vijaya’ in books of geography and history, while he also argued that the empire enjoyed no less than seven centuries of prosperity; its reputation was carried across the South China Sea to the Heavenly Kingdom. This place was visited by Chinese travellers such as Da Qin, described as a master of legal study, who followed in the tracks of a Chinese ambassador in AD 683, to reach the island of Shili foshi (a Chinese attempt to transcribe Śri Vijaya), where, interestingly, he immersed himself in Sanskrit books. Only six years later the Buddhist monk Yijing (or I-Ching) set out from Guangzhou on a merchant vessel, and coasted along the shores of Annam, eventually reaching Foqi, evidently the same place, as is the Sanfoqi mentioned by a historian writing for the Song dynasty between 960 and 1279.4 According to the Chinese geographer Zhao Rugua, writing in the thirteenth century, this land lay between Cambodia and Java, which fixes its location in Sumatra, the great island to the south of the Strait of Malacca. Moreover, when he wrote of Arab lands, Zhao Rugua noted that ‘the products of this country are for the most part brought to Sanfoqi, where they are sold to merchants who forward them to China’, making this place the intermediary between the trade of the Indian Ocean and that of the South China Sea.5

  Nor was this a remote place of mystery, to judge from continuing evidence for the exchange of ambassadors, though we can be sure that the Chinese treated the envoys of Śri Vijaya as supplicants. These embassies came laden with gifts from Sumatra and further afield.6 In 724 the Śri Vijayan ambassador brought two dwarves, a black African slave, a troupe of musicians and a parakeet with feathers of five different colours. He received in exchange a hundred bolts of silk, as well as a title of honour for his master in Sumatra. Yet there were occasions when the Śri Vijayans made demands of the Chinese authorities, and got their way, which was unusual in these unequal relationships. Around 700 the Śri Vijayans ‘sent several missions to the court to submit complaints about border officials seizing their goods, and an edict was issued ordering the officials at Guangzhou to appease them by making enquiries’.7 The Chinese authorities clearly valued their relationship with Śri Vijaya, then. Nor were the contacts solely with the Chinese mainland. An account of a voyage from Sri Lanka in 717 suggests that the traffic heading back and forth across the Indian Ocean was also regular. The monk Vajrabodhi arrived aboard a fleet of thirty-five ships, and then stayed in Fo-chi for five months, while awaiting favourable winds.8 Śri Vijaya benefited directly from the monsoons: the north-east monsoon that blew throughout the winter prevented travel back from there to China for several months, but the south-west monsoon that blew in the summer rendered the journey swift and direct. Coming from China, equally, one had to take advantage of the winter winds to head south and then west. As a result, journeys towards Malaya and India were slow; there was little chance of returning in one year if one wanted to do business in remote markets, and a trip from India to China and back was a three-year affair; however, the monks who took this route were in no hurry to return – Yijing spent eighteen years in India.9

  This had important cultural repercussions. Not just a certain amount of trade but the desi
re of Far Eastern Buddhists to gain access to fundamental texts brought India, China and even Japan into regular contact. Lengthy stopovers by Buddhist monks in Śri Vijaya as they moved back and forth between China and India meant that their religion became well established in Śri Vijaya; Yijing proudly recalled that the kingdom contained a thousand monks who followed Indian Buddhist rituals to the letter. He also remarked that the political reach of Śri Vijaya extended along the east flank of Sumatra, even reaching Kedah in western Malaya. Kedah was by now an important and prosperous link on the trade route tying India to the Strait of Malacca, which, as will be seen, was one of the main props of the Śri Vijayan economy; and Yijing had enough experience of the open sea not to take it for granted; he described a voyage by another monk that took him down from Hanoi or Guangzhou as far as Sumatra, where the overloaded ship sank in a tempest.10 Much is known about these ships, as a result of underwater excavations, and the remarkable evidence from their cargoes will be examined shortly.