Crossroads region: Southeast Asia

MICHAEL LAFFAN

Southeast Asia is home to a diverse array of peoples whose livelihoods once revolved around combinations of shifting swidden cultivation in highland areas, wet rice production on the lowland plains, and the harvesting of rare forest and sea products - many of which were destined for the world market.

By the opening of the fifteenth century, many Southeast Asian peoples - from the Tibeto-Burman, Tai, Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer speakers of the mainland, to the Austronesians of the archipelago - had long been involved with a vibrant inter-regional trade that networked their polities together. This trade furthermore established them as key waypoints between the ports ruled by the successive Chinese empires and the constellation of entrepots that made up the Indian Ocean World.

Such globally networked transactions, necessitated by the prevailing monsoonal systems that forced traders to break their journeys between oceanic zones, engaged Southeast Asians as much beyond their home world as within it. They moreover empowered numerous dynasties - both agrarian and trade-focused - such as those based around the central plains of Pagan in Burma, Angkor in Cambodia and the Mekong Delta, the volcanic heartland of Java and even the coastal polities of Champa in what is now Central Vietnam.

Islam and Buddhism between China and India

All the aforementioned kingdoms and their many subordinates and potential rivals, which were often located within relatively easy reach of the region's permeable estuarine and coastal systems, had long prided themselves on offering a standing welcome to sojourners bringing not only goods, but expertise and prestige. For in a world that was far less populated than today, the comparative ability to attract or (as was often the case) capture people through warfare marked polities as successes. In the process, too, the visitations and peregrinations of key foreigners generated and then reinforced a commitment to the religious traditions of the subcontinent.

Such was symbolized most powerfully by the impressive monuments of the charter states, many of which, such as Angkor Wat and Borobudur, were consecrated for Hindu or Mahayana Buddhist purposes, although Theravadan Buddhism, long identified with Sri Lanka, was also present in Burma.

But even if these states demonstrated their ideological commitments to Indic modes of governance, scriptures and scripts (usually of some form derived from the Pallava script of Southeastern India), it was long recognized that the greatest source of political power lay to the north. Indeed, it appears that early Buddhist and, later, Muslim trading networks were actively facilitated by the opportunities afforded by the successive dynasties of China. Certainly, Chinese patronage was often sought by the states that contested the Southeast Asian mainland and archipelagic regions.

This is not to say that such relations were unproblematic, or yet that Southeast Asian states could only profit from their position as mediators between east and west. While some parts of what is now Southeast Asia were claimed at times as fractious “tributaries” of China, others, such as the Red River basin of northern Vietnam, were deemed integral to it and treated accordingly. And from the West, too, the Chola rulers of Southern India and Sri Lanka (at their peak between the ninth and thirteenth centuries) even staked a claim to the route to China in the first quarter of the eleventh century by sacking numerous ports along the coasts of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.

Even so, the Tamil incursions of the eleventh century were an exception, as the major political impulses continued to flow south. The extension of Mongol (Yuan) rule and ambitions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, followed by the establishment of Ming authority in 1368, would herald major changes in the interconnected insular and mainland worlds. On the mainland, a new set of states would coalesce in the southern reaches of the major river basins, enjoying access to significant arable land and forest resources, and links both upriver to Yunnan and downstream to the Indian Ocean.

It was these polities, dominated at the end of the sixteenth century by the aggressive rival states of Toungoo Burma and Tai-dominated Ayudhya, which would increasingly identify with a revived Theravadan Buddhism sourced to the coastal states of Sri Lanka.

This turbulent period moreover saw significant shifts in the island world away from older Hinduized state religious practices. But rather than embracing Theravadan Buddhism in the manner of the Burmese and Tai dynasties, by the end of the thirteenth century the rulers of the interlinked ports of northern Sumatra had begun to adopt another faith whose exponents had global ambitions. For Islam had by now become the majoritarian faith of much of the Middle East, where many of island Southeast Asia's products - particularly its spices, aloes and aromatics - had long found a market. Indeed, seen from a global perspective, Islam had also become the dominant state faith of the coasts from East Africa to northern India, much as it had emerged as a ubiquitous presence in the southern littoral of the subcontinent.

Islam also had its representatives in China, and Marco Polo, sailing from ports long familiar with that faith, made reference to communities of Muslim merchants in northern Sumatra when returning from Yuan China in the 1290s. Some fifty years later, the Tangiers-born Ibn Battuta (1304 to 1369) would also attest to the presence in the same area of scholars from Central Asia and Iran. Certainly, Southeast Asia was becoming more familiar to Arab traders based in Yemen by this time, given the increasing mention in their sources of the toponymic term Jawa (used as a coverall for all of Southeast Asia), with the added sense of there no longer being merely Jawi products, such as camphor, but (sometimes Muslim) Jawi peoples.

In short, by the fifteenth century, Southeast Asia was in the process of affirming a majoritarian commitment to two key traditions that would ultimately define much of its mainland and insular zones: Theravadan Buddhism and Sunni Islam.

Yet, the region can hardly be said to have consisted merely of two distinct spheres during this time, as would be apparent to the chroniclers of the Ming Voyages led by Zheng He (1371 to 1433), whose overlords ordered the re-annexation of the heavily Sinified territory of Annam after some four centuries of independence. Moreover, with the direct entrance of the Iberians into the region in the sixteenth century, this interlocking inheritance of Buddhist, Muslim and Sinic cultures would be further complicated by European engagements and Christianity.

Ming impacts, archipelagic Islamization, mainland Buddhist consolidations

Perhaps the greatest single external impact on Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century was the series of armadas dispatched by the Ming state between 1405 and 1433. While hardly the first case of intensive sojourning to Southern Asia by the Chinese - bearing in mind that Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta had both reported Chinese junks on their travels - the account derived from three of Admiral Zheng He's missions to the region gives a sense of a maritime world that was at once filled with similarities and profound differences. Cataloguing the findings of these missions, Ma Huan (1380 to 1460) referred to many shared Austronesian practices and beliefs (such as that of vampiric spirits or an aversion to the touching of another's head), the chewing of betel, and a general distinction between apparently cosmopolitan, if small, port polities and their often-forested hinterlands that were believed to be teeming with cannibals. Certainly, a tone of condescension, and even revulsion, pervaded such accounts when they turned to the indigenous populations of the coasts, while being little aware of the major states further upriver. For example, Ma Huan mocked the kingly pretensions of some Malay rulers, and claimed that the Javanese were dirty and ate all manner of things deemed unclean to the Muslim minority living among them. For their part, these Muslims were described as ‘foreigners' coming from all corners of the world, although this designation was applied as much to the many Chinese said to have migrated or fled to the region in previous eras.

It is thus clear that Islamic and Chinese sojourners were already an integral part of the fabric of maritime Southeast Asia. Given that Zheng He and many of his officers, including Ma Huan, were themselves Muslims, it makes sense to see some synergy in terms of Islamicate and Sinic civilizations. It is conceivable that the foundation and subsequent development of the entrepot of Malacca may well have been spurred on by this very relationship, with a Hindu prince from Palembang adopting Islam at the moment when the Ming were eager to re-establish the older tributary relationships, and perhaps even customs collection points, at either end of the crucial strait. Clearly, the Ming were happy to reach out to other newly Islamized polities such as Brunei, on the great island of Borneo, much as there is favourable reference in the Ming Annals to the Indic ports of Champa being host to Muslims too.

It also appears that communities of these Muslims in what is now central Vietnam had dealings of some sort with the then Islamizing towns of the northeast salient of Java. And, after the absorption of their territories by the Vietnamese in the 1470s, many Muslim Chams would go on to play a role in the establishment of the north Sumatran state of Aceh, in addition to making their naval expertise available to the hegemonic Tai state of Ayudhya, which had come to dominate the southern sections of the Chaophraya River.

The strongly Islamic tinge to the global conjuncture of the first half of the fifteenth century is also in evidence in the stele that Zheng He ordered to be erected at the Sri Lankan port of Galle in 1411, given that a third of its face was covered by a statement in Persian. At the same time, however, one still need not claim Islam as the hegemonic faith, for the Galle stone gave as much space to Tamil and Chinese declarations; all of which detailed the offerings made by Zheng He to whichever deity might grant protection and favour. This repertoire of recognizably transcendent languages of power might readily be compared to the previous colocation of Chinese and Persian statements with Tai and Khmer analogues on Wat Ratchaburana, a Buddhist temple constructed at Ayudhya soon after 1424.

Ayudhya would enjoy fame among Persian traders, although ever since the foundation of their city in the mid-fourteenth century, the multi-ethnic rulers of that polity had directed their mercantilist ambitions towards China and the approval of its resolutely non-Muslim rulers.

Ming activities in Southeast Asia were hardly intended to expedite the process of Islamization, even if one curious legend from Cirebon, on Java, makes this very claim, and goes well beyond the normal legends of a linkage between a Muslim Cham princess and a Javanese sovereign. Rather, the Ming state sought both direct rule and the renewal of older patron ties, whether in enforcing regime change in the port kingdoms of South Sumatra and Sri Lanka, or by occupying Annam in 1407.

Whereas the Le dynasty would eject their Ming occupiers in 1428 and reassert Vietnamese independence under the name of Dai Viet, they would nevertheless remain enthusiastic emulators of Sinic models of kingship and Confucian bureaucracy as they expanded their own influence over the Chamic central plains and the Khmer-speaking Mekong Delta - seeding the Chamic diaspora referred to above. Equally, the moribund kingdom of Angkor would provide the model, and then the physical space, for the expansion of Ayudhyan (and other Tai) influence beyond the Chaophraya basin, with the former jostling with Java's rulers for influence over the straits.

Being strategically placed between the Siamese and Javanese spheres of influence, Muslim Melaka would emerge at any rate as the primary trading node of the region. Even if the Malay chronicles retrospectively depicted Melaka as the military equal to Java and Ayudhya, the city was as dependent on the trade of the Sino-Muslim ports of the former and the supply of rice from the latter as it was on Chinese approval and the regular visits of Gujarati, Tamil, Peguan (Burmese) and other merchants.

Abetted by such recognition and connections, by the end of the fifteenth century the rulers of Melaka could even claim territory, or at least the fealty, of many of the predecessor Muslim ports of Sumatra. Melaka's foundational myths would ultimately enfold those of the port of Pasai, on north Sumatra, which spoke of dream communications between an ancestor king and the Prophet, as well as the visits of Arab and southern Indian teachers. Once

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15.i South and Southeast Asia

again, though, it is worth emphasizing that Islam in Southeast Asia was not monopolized by any one ethnic community, nor yet did it dominate. At its height, Melaka attracted the regular attentions of peoples from all across maritime Afro-Asia, including Abyssinia and the Ryukyuan archipelago. And much as Arabic sources could now speak of a zone known as Jawa, Persians, such as the fifteenth-century ambassador Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi, could speak in 1442 both of Jawi people abroad in Bengal and a region known as Zirbad, seemingly a calque from the Malay term for Southeast Asia as a set of lands ‘below the wind' (bawah angin).

With time, the coasts of these lands below the winds, accessed through the Malay language - now rendered in Arabic rather than Indic script - would expand to include the restive north coast ports of Java, which were linked in turn to the freshly Islamizing polities of the Moluccas; the source of many of the costly spices still sought after by Chinese and Western traders alike. It was these ports, above all, whose Muslim captains would slowly erode the authority of the lingering Indic power of Java.

The spice wars

Much as medieval Arab geographers and chroniclers had begun to pay closer attention to the sources of a great array of Southeast Asian products, from the fragrant aloes of the mainland to the highly valued spices of the Moluccas (principally cloves, mace and nutmegs), by the end of the fifteenth century the Iberians would seek out a more direct route to the wealth of Asia, whose cities were simply more unreachable than mysterious. While hardly the ‘Arab Lake' that some historians have chosen to see as a precursor to the later ‘British' one of the late nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean's well- connected Muslim communities were perhaps the ones to suffer most from the incursions of the Portuguese. Still, it is worth noting that some local Muslim polities saw the Portuguese as forces to be used through alliance rather than feared. Such were the respective experiences of the rival ports of East Africa, which either cooperated with or resisted the advances of such captains as Pedro Alvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama, who infamously put a boatload of pilgrims to the torch off the coast of Kannur, in southern India.

Equally, after initial encounters in 1512, the rulers of the volcanic island of Ternate, one of the principal sultanates of the far-removed Moluccas, would form an alliance with the Portuguese, expecting not domination, but material aid in their long-standing rivalry with the neighbouring (and equally Muslim) polity of Tidore. The Tidorese, for their part, tried to enlist the support of the Spanish after a small party of survivors of the Magellan expedition washed up on their shores in 1521.

Playing such oppositional politics was not, however, an option open to Melaka, which had been swiftly identified by the Portuguese in 1509 as a key site of acquisition. Despite its capture in 1511, however, the port faded in importance as the many traders who had once thronged there, and especially the Gujaratis and southern Indians, headed for rival, and even more avowedly Islamicate ports. Of these, the most prominent were Aceh, at the northern entrance to the Malacca Strait, and, soon after, Banten, on the western end of Java. Aceh in particular seems to have reached out, by way of Gujarat and Egypt, for the expanding imperium in the West, being well aware of the recent Ottoman conquest of Cairo and its dependencies in 1517, as well as the rise of Turkic power in Gujarat itself.

The old contest of Cross and Crescent seems to have played out afresh in the sixteenth century, although it is worth bearing in mind that some Muslim polities, including such peninsular successors to Melaka as Johor, could be allied at times with the Iberians rather than their co-religionists. This was especially the case when the Acehnese, under such rulers as Ala al-Din Riayat Shah (r. 1537 to 1571) and Iskandar Muda (r. 1607 to 1636), would martial their war galleys in the hope of securing regional hegemony at the expense of Melaka and Johor alike.

The western archipelago was not the only site of contestation. With their foothold in Ternate, and a more tenuous presence in the tiny Banda archipelago further to the south, the Portuguese laid claim to some of the richest sources of wealth in their day, even as they struggled to enforce any monopoly over the extraction and export of those riches in ships other than their own. Theirs was also a claim that was contested in Europe, given that the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas was unclear as to where Portuguese and Castilian claims met on the other side of the globe. Further to the north, the insular region we now know as the Philippines was increasingly the site of Spanish incursions stemming from Mexico, with an abortive attempt made to colonize the area in the 1540s. This eventually led to the foundation of a post in the bounds of the then Muslim-ruled bay of Manila in 1571, a post subsequently declared as the capital of a new colony and increasingly fortified thereafter, with its main gate even being dedicated to StJames ‘the Moor killer'.

Despite the union of Spain and Portugal in 1580, the eastern islands of Southeast Asia can hardly be said to have fallen completely under the sway of Habsburg authority. Still, with the aid of such mendicant orders of friars as the Augustinians, Dominicans and Franciscans, the lowland regions of the Philippines were marked out for campaigns of proselytization and incorporation, while Manila served as a crucial way station for the galleon trade between China and the New World. In many senses, the exploitation of Manila and its environs, which offered few of the mercantile benefits of the Moluccas, was long seen as a subsidiary project to an engagement with China and the long-dreamed conversion of its population. But while St Francis Xavier (1506 to 1552) had once enjoyed some successes in the Moluccas in 1546 to 1547, and then briefly in Japan thereafter, lasting conversions to Christianity would really only take place in Southeast Asia, and often among the mestizo Chinese. There, they continued to form the key mercantile community that arguably sustained the European presence, though not without friction, as the 1603 massacre of Chinese within the walls of Manila portended.

Further complicating matters in the island world, and following on from its final conquest by the north coast sultanate of Demak in 1527, central Java had begun to revive under the now Islamic dynasty of Mataram, while the eastern Muslim ports of Giri and Tuban would make renewed efforts both to secure the share of the spice trade and encourage the Islamization of the many islands and communities that surrounded the Portuguese. Once again, this is not to say that this heralded a moment of pan-Islamic unity in the archipelago. Mataram's rulers would look to subdue the north coast port polities and engage more directly in regional power struggles. And among its most important rivals into the seventeenth century was another product of Demak's expansion - the leading west Javanese port of Banten. Captured and Islamized in 1526, and thus foiling Portuguese plans for a factory (much as Aceh's capture of Pasai had scotched similar plans in 1524), Banten attracted southern Indian, Peguan and Chinese traders to its harbour, laying the basis for one of the more powerful sultanates of the region by the century's end.

It could be argued that by the close of the sixteenth century, the Christian presence in Southeast Asia was a marginal one, being confined to Melaka, Timor and the eastern spice islands, and governed from Goa far to the West. By contrast, many Islamic polities were ascendant and making good use of vital connections with the now Ottoman- and Mughal-dominated west to ship high-value spices, especially pepper, and to increase their treasuries and arm themselves for further expansion at the expense of their non-Muslim hinterlands and their Muslim neighbours alike. Aceh's rulers, for example, were particularly aggressive in taking over the mantle of Pasai and Malacca, raiding their Batak interior and inviting an array of foreign experts to their Malay-speaking court, be they gunners, sappers or religious scholars from Egypt and Arabia to Abyssinia and Anatolia.

Such was the world that the mariners dispatched from the rising Protestant states of England and the Netherlands would encounter by the end of the sixteenth century. Sir Walter Raleigh (1554 to 1618) would sail to the Moluccas soon after the ruler of Ternate, Babullah (r. 1570 to 1583), had made use of Turkic and Abyssinan auxiliaries to expel the Portuguese in 1575, causing them to regroup in Ambon. Equally, the first Dutch expeditions to Aceh and Banten would be met with a mix of suspicion and hostility, made all the more potent by the intemperate acts of commanders like Cornelis de Houtman (1565 to 1599), who committed outrages of similar ferocity to Cabral and Gama nearly a century beforehand.

VOC arrival and engagement

Even with early failures at Aceh and Banten - where the Dutch met with unexpectedly high prices and detentions - the wealth brought back to the West was far too great to ignore, especially after the so-called ‘second voyage' of 1598 to 1600 under Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck (1564 to 1638) brought the Dutch to the Moluccas, where they were even welcomed by a local Turkish trader. By 1602, and echoing efforts made in London in 1600, Dutch mercantilists would form the ‘United East India Company' or VOC, a joint-stock company whose emissaries were empowered to act under the Dutch flag to establish forts and raise armies in Asia. And this they did with alacrity, targeting and then displacing the Portuguese in the key island of Ambon in 1605. Equally, they directed their attention to making exclusive treaties with the region's sovereigns, and especially at the cost of rival English factors in the ports of Banten, Ambon and Banda.

By 1619, the Dutch fort of Batavia, located at the former Bantenese port of Jayakarta, would become the capital of VOC operations, with the Dutch having bested their Atlantic rivals for control of the estuary. In 1621, and in the wake of their daring to continue trading with rival parties, Dutch Governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587 to 1629) would order the wholesale massacre and deportation of the population of Banda, a process carried out by the VOC's force of Japanese mercenaries. Then, in 1623, nervous Dutch merchants in Ambon would execute Japanese and English merchants alike for fear of a conspiracy against themselves.

The Amboyna Massacre, as it was known, was a major cause of hostility between the English and the Dutch, although the former were arguably bested in the seventeenth century by their continental rivals. This is not to say that all went easily for the Dutch at Batavia, who had to weather two major sieges of their new capital by Mataram's Sultan Agung (1613 to 1645) in 1628 and 1629. Still, Agung was really turning his attention to the Dutch somewhat belatedly, having suppressed the north coast ports, culminating in the sack of Surabaya in 1625. In time, he was compelled to leave the Dutch in place as something of a buffer, emulating his Bantenese rivals by sending missions to Mecca in the quest of legitimacy granted by the descendants of the Prophet.

None of this is to say that in sending their delegates and scholars to Mecca, the rulers of Mataram, Banten or Aceh, for that matter, ever imagined themselves as anything less than the equals to the rulers of ‘Rome' (as the Ottoman Empire was termed) and China. Moreover, as scholars have demonstrated, the undeniably Islamic court of Mataram would foster a synthetic understanding of Javanese texts, seeing mystical value in its Indic-infused literary inheritance, and situating Sultan Agung as the harmonizer of the external and internal worlds. Naturally, such perspectives were not always embraced, nor were the north coast ulama necessarily enamoured of their overlords, with their recalcitrance being infamously rewarded when Agung's successor, Amangkurat (r. 1646 to 1677), had several hundred massacred in 1647.

The Dutch, meanwhile, would face major challenges from the very active rulers of Gowa (Makassar), on Sulawesi, who had adopted Islam at the opening of the seventeenth century, and then suppressed and forcibly converted their local Bugis rivals. To add to their challenges, the Dutch were forced in 1662 to surrender their principal fortress on Taiwan to the Sino-Japanese Ming loyalist Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong, 1624 to 1662), whose expanding sphere of influence even caused the Spanish to worry about the fate of the Philippines. Yet, despite the loss of Taiwan and their apparent inability to stem the tide of Islamization, VOC fortunes were on the rise globally, with the Dutch company boasting a chain of possessions from the Cape of Good Hope to Sri Lanka, Java and Japan. And with the final conquest of Gowa and the conclusion of a treaty with its rulers in 1669, the Dutch had seemingly bested the last of their archipelagic rivals, although such actions would seed the region with small bands of Bugis fighting men, who would become crucial players in the Malay courts to the west, and even deep into the mainland.

Mainland ambitions

While the story of Christian-Muslim confrontation tinged by Chinese or greater Eurasian influence is one that is readily told for the island world, the increasingly Theravadan mainland would itself be the site of globally imbricated intrigues and contestations. There would be attempts by Spanish missionaries, Muslim traders and even Japanese mercenaries to influence or overthrow the kings of Cambodia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet it was arguably an aggressive Ayudhya to the west and the fast-expanding Sino-Vietnamese presence in the Mekong Delta that was spelling the final demise of the ancient line of Angkor, whose capital of Lovek, founded in 1431, was taken by the Siamese in 1594.

This is not to say that the Siamese had enjoyed unbroken hegemony since the foundation of Ayudhya in the mid-fourteenth century. Its rise as the premier disseminator of metropolitan Tai-ness in the sixteenth century was a role won as much through the domestication of Portuguese military expertise against rival Tai centres such as Lan Na from the 1530s as by the trade- supported religious patronage that had already led to the creation, between 1500 and 1503, of the largest-cast standing Buddha ever known. Even so, after clashing repeatedly with the northern Tai polities that sought Burmese aid, and then conceding territory and several royal hostages to the Burmese in the mid- 1550s, Ayudhya would itself fall in 1569 to its western Theravadan rival. More particularly, it would fall into the direct orbit of King Bayin-naung (r. 1551 to 1581), the paramount ruler of Pegu, whose campaigns, launched in the name of the restoration of Sinhalese religion, led to major Burmese territorial gains - first within what is now Burma, and then across the mainland.

At his death, Bayin-naung, whose victory had depended in no small measure on the efforts of his Tai allies, could claim the allegiance of sovereigns inhabiting the Muslim coastal polity of Arakan, in the Bay of Bengal, to the Lao highlands bordering Vietnam. His was thus a reign of truly regional, and perhaps even greater, pretentions. After the siege of Ayudhya, Bayin-naung's armies had made sure both to kill the recently arrived Dominican missionaries sent from the Philippines in 1567, and to remove regalia and statuary captured from Angkor by the Siamese in the fifteenth century. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Bayin-naung, though, was the (final) incorporation of the Tai-speaking Shan principalities that had alternately thwarted and aided Burmese and Siamese ambitions as they sought to maintain their independence in the teak- and gemstone-rich hills. At the same time, the presence of so many Tai captives, including artisans and royal performers, ensured that Burma would itself become thoroughly steeped in Tai culture.

Bayin-naung's hold over Southeast Asia would not endure long after his death and Ayudhya's rulers, from Naresuan (r. 1590 to 1605), would long be engaged in fierce contest with their erstwhile overlords for suzerainty over the environs of Tavoy. Born in 1555, Naresuan had been taken to Burma in 1564, although he was returned in 1571 in exchange for his sister's marriage to Bayin-naung. The rulers of Pegu named him as heir-apparent in Ayudhya, and he was careful to pay his respects to them, but he nonetheless sought a new seal of office from China in 1575. Relations between Pegu and Ayudhya deteriorated in the 1580s and Naresuan refused to appear at court in Pegu, leading to Burma's sending of several punitive missions. These culminated in the key battle at Nong Sarai in January 1593, at which the heir to the Burmese throne, Bayin-naung's grandson, was killed.

Having previously offered aid to China against Japan, Naresuan safely turned his attentions to the Khmers in 1594, and used his Cham-infused navy to range widely, confirming treaties with Ryukyu and the Spanish in the Philippines and Cambodia in 1598. Even so, the Dominicans would lose their mainland base at Phnom Penh in 1599, when local Cambodians made common cause with Malayo-Muslim mercenaries in a coup attempt, after which time the Siamese began to make western Cambodia a Tai protectorate.

While the western edge of Siam itself quieted after the death of Burma's King Nanda-bayin in 1599, the Isthmus of Kra would be a site of ongoing contestation. For here the situation was further complicated by the fact that the local Muslim sultanates (linked as they were to the archipelagic trade) would, like the Tai polities of the north, seek some form of autonomy from their looming neighbours, whose rule was justified with reference to Buddhist codes and voluble support for Theravadan monasticism.

With the benefit of recognition from the Qing dynasty and visits from traders from across the region, the rejuvenated Siamese capital continued to gain the upper hand into the seventeenth century and became a focus for the attentions of an even broader range of players. By the 1680s, Ayudhya even had a Greek prime minister, Constantine Gerakis (1647 to 1688). Born in Ottoman territory, he had found his way to Mergui aboard an East India Company ship in 1675. That said, Gerakis had plans for Siam that would have pleased neither Atlantic traders nor Islamicate adventurers, as he encouraged the attentions of French missionaries and the French state alike, which sent a large-scale mission up the Chaophraya in 1688 expecting to gain exclusive trading privileges and the final conversion of the seemingly curious King Narai (r. 1656 to 1688).

Indeed, Narai, who had come to the throne at the expense of his uncle in a coup involving local Persian and Japanese merchants, had long been able to domesticate global forces. For their part, the French had been given to expect much, given that there had been successful Siamese embassies to Paris, and the previous year had seen the Siamese expel various privateers from Mergui and install a French governor, leading to war with England. What the French rather found in 1688, however, was a kingdom in crisis, for the Anglo-Siamese War had damaged Gerakis and the now ailing sovereign, after having also faced down an uprising by the substantial Muslim Cham and Bugis community in 1686.

Siam was not, then, for turning to Christianity or yet Islam, a fact noted with some disappointment by one disdainful Persian emissary, who had waxed lyrically about Narai's seeming proclivity towards Persian food and dress. Indeed, the Persians had been a key community marginalized by the rise of Gerakis, and they were thus more than happy to see their traditional role facilitating trade and governance restored once the French had sailed away empty-handed and a fresh coup brought Phra Phetracha to the throne. Moreover, the ascent of Phra Phetracha saw a return to the more traditional Chinese trading linkages that would sustain his successors until the cataclysmic Burmese invasions of 1766 to 1767.

The fast shifting Will of Heaven

Just as what might be called the Tai world was riven by the great power rivalries of Ayudhya and Burma, which both shaped and shared Theravadan state culture on the mainland, the long expanse of increasingly Vietnamese territory was the site of constant contestation between rival clans (the Trinh and the Nguyen) that upheld Confucian models and the Will of Heaven. Both moreover claimed, particularly in the case of the Trinh, to represent the Le Dynasty ensconced in Hanoi (1533 to 1789): first against the Mac clan and then, after the defeat of the latter in 1592, against each other. With the conclusion of hostilities in 1672, after over four decades of war, the eastern coast of mainland Southeast Asia could be said to have crystallized as two kingdoms. The more Sinophilic Trinh, still committed to a Confucian examination system like that of China, ruled over the northern environs down towards present-day Hue, while the Nguyen expanded both into the central highlands and the Mekong Delta, and their territory was additionally marked by the presence of many adherents of Mahayana Buddhism.

Arguably the key to ongoing Nguyen expansion lay, as for the rulers of Ayudhya, in their greater contact with, and domestication of, outside forces. Such domestication could take the form of Portuguese gunners and engineers, or one could point to the inflows of wealth coming into the port of Hoi An (Faifo), a major destination to the south of Da Nang that would see significant trade with Chinese and Japanese shippers deep into the eighteenth century.

However, while the Southeast Asian mainland powers - now ever-more clearly Burmese, Siamese and Vietnamese - would experience a period of relative confidence and consolidation for much of the first half of the eighteenth century - whether serviced by relationships with a diverse array of foreign partners, and most especially the Chinese shippers and English country traders - the once hegemonic archipelagic states of Aceh, Banten and Mataram would fall into a more exclusive relationship with the VOC (and its unofficial Chinese partners). But while the VOC depended in no small measure on the labours of Chinese mercantilists, millers and sharecroppers, especially in the private estates that surrounded Batavia, and much as many of the smaller sultanates of the archipelago encouraged Chinese tillers and miners to enrich their treasuries, the relationship was increasingly uneasy.

By 1740, the Chinese had come to vastly outnumber their anxious European hosts in Batavia and the rumour took hold that the VOC had plans to expel, and perhaps even murder, large numbers of them. Hence, when the Chinese community began to arm in anxious preparation, the Europeans and their clients panicked in their turn, unleashing nearly two weeks of violence that October and reducing some of the wealthiest parts of the city to ashes. This wholesale slaughter of the Chinese population within and around the walls of Batavia - estimated by some to have been around 10,000 prior to the massacre - was only the beginning of what was in many senses a major tipping point in Javanese history. During the ensuing conflict that erupted from the other north coast ports over the next two years, starting with antiChinese pogroms in Semarang, Surabaya and Gresik, the inland court of Mataram under Pakubuwana II (r. 1726 to 1749) opted to side with the Chinese, seeing the opportunity to take up arms with the particular encouragement of a clique of key figures with connections to an emerging network of Sufi activists.

As scholars have shown, there had been increasing debate in courtly circles concerning the mystic synthesis that had emerged over the previous century, and Pakubuwana would gamble on the teachings of the mystics with connections to a wider Indian Ocean network of scholars and emissaries. Even if the aftermath of the war saw the political defeat of the Chinese and Pakubuwana's mystical allies, one can say that the eighteenth century would continue to witness the rising influence of Sufi-inspired reformism across island Southeast Asia. Now, whether supported by pepper sold at the rising sultanate of Palembang in Sumatra, or yet by the tax-free gleanings of an expanding network of religious schools on Java (where coffee was often grown to help finance their activities), a new cadre of scholars would return to preach against the perhaps too-liberal practice of Islam in the region. Hence, from the still vital courts of coastal Sumatra to those of the Malay Peninsula, Sulawesi and Banjarmasin on Borneo, greater attention would be focused on emulating the traditions and practices of the western Muslim world. But even if the particular teachings of Sufi orders seem to have been embraced by the elite, there was hardly one united programme, nor were the calls of recent returnees from Arabia taken up without contestation.

Such new modes continued to be of interest among the expanding body of religious schools in a more politically fractured Java. And while such rising Islamic influence was not exactly akin to a new spirit of anti-colonialism, nor yet nationalism, it was increasingly a success story to be contrasted with the relative failure of Christianization, even within VOC-ruled enclaves. For despite official proscription, the environs of Batavia sheltered sites of prayer for the significant population of Muslims and the many Chinese who had returned to service the colonial economy alongside so many locals, enslaved or free, whose fate was still determined by the VOC.

Still, like the by now disease-ridden canals of Batavia, the VOC was hardly a fit master. Having invested in a series of interventions in Java's numerous wars of succession (1704 to 1708, 1719 to 1723 and 1747 to 1757), in addition to fighting a losing battle against the English, then rising to supremacy in Bengal, the VOC was in decline. The once priceless spices were now found elsewhere, and the passage home of key Dutch cargoes - principally coffee and sugar - was often interrupted by war with the English. By the 1790s, a French invasion of the Netherlands and the installation of a new republican regime would spell the end of the company and the commencement of a new mode of metropolitan rule, or at least the aspiration for it. Equally, the Bourbons of Spain would try to implement reforms to open the Philippines to more direct metropolitan control, although with little success in the face of entrenched opposition from the friar estates run by the mendicant orders, long used to governing for the Church. An attempt to establish a Spanish joint-stock company in 1785 for trade in Asia that was analogous to the Atlantic East India companies would also fall victim to the vicissitudes of the Napoleonic era. The time of trading corporations other than the British East India Company was at an end, and new states were rising to face the challenge of metropolitan colonial ambitions in the nineteenth century.

Taksin, the birth of the Chakri dynasty and the cession of Penang

While initial attempts to establish an enduring presence had failed at Mergui in the seventeenth century, the East India Company and their country trader kin would enjoy greater success at the end of the eighteenth century, and in the shadow of turmoil between the Siamese and their southern Malay vassals. For its part, the Siamese state was commencing a new phase of consolidation after enduring the total destruction of Ayudhya at the hands of Burma's newly established Kon-baung dynasty in 1767.

After relative peace in the 1750s, which had even seen the interior Kingdom of Kandy, in Sri Lanka, send missions to Ayudhya to gain aid in restoring Buddhism among the Sinhalese, conflict flared between the Burmese and the Siamese over the control of the Tenasserim Coast, of which Mergui was a key port. And while the Burmese would not long remain in the Chaophraya basin, facing a Chinese invasion during the very months in which they had besieged the Siamese capital, 1767 marked the final victory of the Burmese down to the Isthmian coast and their lasting ascendancy over the Mon minority population.

In the wake of the Burmese withdrawal, there were several factions duelling for control of Siam. During three ensuing years of chaos, it was a Sino-Thai general, Taksin (r. 1767 to 1782), who was able to vanquish the other contenders for the throne and establish a new capital at Thonburi, at the opening of the Chaophraya across from the fort of Bangkok. As a ruler, Taksin not only restored Siamese prestige, but he actively extended Siamese claims on Lao and Cambodian territory. But while he was initially popular, opening the treasury to the population during the post-invasion famine of 1767 to 1778 and restoring order, his tenure was increasingly unstable - he even insisted on the obeisance of the monkhood in an inversion of established practice that had traditionally seen Siamese kings defer to the monastic clergy (sangha). By 1781, the elite had determined that Taksin had to be removed. Hence, with his forces actively engaged in Cambodia, Taksin was killed, clearing the way for the ascension of General Chakri, who, as Rama I (r. 1782 to 1809), inaugurated the dynasty that remains on the throne of modern Thailand.

Whereas Rama I took off where Taksin had left off - emphasizing trading and diplomatic relations with China and encouraging the immigration of Chinese (especially ethnic Teochiu) into his realm - the capital was moved across the estuary to Bangkok and deliberately enlarged with boatloads of material from the ruins of Ayudhya. Further, after a full coronation in 1785 and his successful repulsing of a Burmese invasion, Rama I restored the ceremonial linkage between royalty and the monkhood, and in 1788 to 1789 established a grand council to establish the definitive Pali text of the Tripitaka.

Having lost access to Mergui, the new state was naturally in need of access to the Bay of Bengal through other vassals. To that end, the Malay polities of the south were encouraged to offer tribute and allegiance with practical business handled by Chinese intermediaries. In the face of such challenges, Sultan Abdullah Mukarram Shah of Kedah (r. 1778 to 1797) sought to hedge his bets by reaching out in 1786 to the English in Bengal, represented locally by Francis Light (1740 to 1794). The sultan would be sorely disappointed by the results of this deal, and watched as his new English tenants smiled on the Chinese mercantilists and sought good relations with Bangkok, while their trade ate into his own earnings. Indeed, the East India Company even repulsed the Malays in 1791 when they attempted to regain possession of the island, and compelled their erstwhile hosts to renounce all claim on the slip of land that Light had renamed Prince of Wales Island.

The Tay Son period, 1771 to 1802

The instability born of the Burmese invasions and Taksin' s subsequent incursions into Cambodia had direct repercussions on the Nguyen rulers of Cochin China, who were themselves actively engaged on Khmer soil. Indeed, the Nguyen polity was by this time overextended, and the constant levying of troops, coupled with corruption and rampant devaluation of the currency in circulation, hit many sectors of the economy and laid the ground for the emergence, in 1771, of a new force stemming from the hamlet of Tay So'n, near the old Cham heartland of central Vietnam.

Led by three siblings with connections to the Nguyen court and the betel trade, the Tay Son ‘revolt' would eventually unify the highly diverse territory of Vietnam. Certainly, the famous ‘hissing armies', which initially attained something of a Robin Hood-like reputation for robbing the rich and leaving the poor unmolested, claimed to act in the name of Heaven. Initially, they claimed to act in the name of their Nguyen enemies, seeking to marry into the elite and even to make use of one prince, Nguyen Anh, who later fled to Siam.

The Tay Son brothers also enjoyed the support of Chinese traders and the Cham minority, whose surviving royalty they courted with the aim of making use of their sacred regalia, in addition to making the old Cham city of Vijaya their capital. Yet, civil war was the main result of Tay Son depredations, and the Chinese would be alienated by such acts as the massacre of the Han population (and much of the Nguyen royal family) following the siege of Gia Dinh in 1776. Indeed, the brothers often disagreed on the treatment of ethnic minorities and the many southerners who had by this time converted to Catholicism. Over the following decade, the Tay Son would reinforce their control over the south, continuing to fend off the Siamese and then facing invasion from the Trinh in 1774 to 1775. Hindered by disease and the monsoons, by 1786 the Trinh were themselves invaded, having lost the services of a key general.

Despite being offered positions of rank by the Trinh, the Tay Son were determined to defeat their northern rivals, which was achieved by 1787, leading to a punitive expedition from China in 1788. That attack would also founder, and the Qing opted to recognize the most active Tay Son brother, Nguyen Hue (1753 to 1792), as a vassal ruler who now claimed the empire of Dai Viet in his name. For his part, Nguyen Hue, who took the regnal name Quang Trung, had ambitions on southern Chinese territory, but his aims would remain unrealized at his death in 1792. Divided as they were over the territorial extent of their territory, the heirs of the Tay Son brothers (who were all dead by the end of 1793) presided over a much weakened expanse of territory that would eventually be conquered by Nguyen Anh when he returned with more determined Siamese aid in 1802 and established the dynasty that would remain in place until the abdication of Bao Dai in 1945.

Conclusion

Seen from a longue duree perspective, the four centuries after 1400 saw the lasting bifurcation of Southeast Asia into its island and mainland components, and away from a once shared commitment to Buddhism and/or Hindu models of kingship. This bifurcation was especially marked by the adoption of explicitly Sinhalese-style Theravadan Buddhism in many of the polities above the Isthmus of Kra and monotheism below and to the east of it. While the presence of Christianity in the archipelago was clearly a result of the interventions of Western states, or their clerical agents whose presence served as a counterpoint to the increasing numbers of Muslim sojourners and returning pilgrims, the ongoing role of Southeast Asian dynasties in directing or encouraging particular doctrines is not to be disregarded in the face of seeming Iberian and then VOC dominance.

And there were other constants, too, with the continual presence of Asian (particularly Chinese) sojourners, the export of key spices and, increasingly, cash crops destined for the world market. Such engagement, coupled with the rise of larger, more hegemonic states, also helped to feed the expansion of populations with less and less recourse to flight into under-populated spaces, whether claimed by traditional Southeast Asian rulers or their Western rivals and sometime patrons. In short, Southeast Asia was a far busier and much more contested space by 1800. Certainly, the mainland bore special witness to ever-more violent and absolutist claims made by Burmese, Tai and Vietnamese sovereigns who made effective use of a wide variety of outsiders and universal doctrines in the quest for enduring hegemony.

Still, one must bear in mind that universal claims were as yet unmatched by ethnic homogeneity. Kon-baung Burma continued to rule over Shans, Mons and Muslims, much as the Siamese state engaged with Laos, Malays and Khmers, and Vietnam struggled with Khmers, Laos and Cham. Even Java included non-Muslim populations whose cultural horizons stretched to still Hindu-ized Bali, while Sumatra's hinterlands remained occupied by swidden farmers and gatherers with little desire to be absorbed by the lowland kingdoms, whose peoples remained anxious about tales of cannibals and wild animals lurking in the forests.

Crossroads region: Southeast Asia

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