Southeast Asia developed sophisticated internal trading patterns, and throughout the seventeenth century- with perhaps the exception of Vietnam's forever awkward relationship with China-these commercial relationships remained more significant than outside influences. Those who were actively involved in trade, needed to be able to repeat each leg of their commercial circuit with confidence, and the images they developed of their itineraries influenced their view of the physical world.
Although the typical Southeast Asian village might be self-sufficient in its production of the all-important staple, rice, other commodities were typically traded up and down river. In many parts of Southeast Asia today, one can still see people from the mountains walking down to the rural markets to sell their modest pickings of odd mushrooms, spices, and other local exotica not found closer to the villages. In earlier times, such trade was an integral part of daily life. Commodities such as the dried fish, fish sauce, and lime produced in the lowlands would be traded for the highlanders' woods, bamboo, herbs, and perhaps lacquer. Most products that were traded across river or mountain did not travel great distances.
Salt was the exception. Of essential commodities in early Southeast Asia, only salt was not obtainable by most people via simple trading channels. Acquired from large pans built at appropriate sites along the coast, salt might typically be part of several trading routes before finally reaching villages far upland. In terms of the complexity and the length of its route from source to final recipient, this most-traveled of essential commodities was surpassed only by prestige goods like Chinese ceramics and other luxuries items.
Commercial intercourse in Southeast Asia received a boost in the first century when the newer Mahayana school of Buddhism, which looked more kindly upon trade than did either Hinduism or the older Theravada Buddhism, eased existing spiritual constraints in India and, in turn, promoted Indian commerce with Southeast Asia. At the same time, larger trading patterns were developing within Southeast Asia following the emergence of major states like Ayuthaya, which started exporting rice to Malacca in the fifteenth century. Southeast Asia also began to develop trade routes which facilitated commerce with India and China. In this instance the people of the region acted as trans-shippers rather than consumers, with Chinese texts recording Malay ships arriving at Chinese ports in the early centuries of the Christian era.
The trade route between Southeast Asia and India was serviced by Indian or Southeast Asian mariners, or a network of the two. Historians had traditionally assigned this role exclusively to Indian vessels, arguing that Southeast Asian peoples were not yet capable of such a voyage. However, scholars have more recently noted that any vessel and pilot capable of reaching Africa from Southeast Asia- as those of Sumatra and Java had done since the first century A.D. -could surely have reached India as well. Malay pilots learned to ride the monsoons, and Malay shipbuilders probably pioneered the balance-lug sail, which were square, pivoting sails set in the front and back of the ship that allowed pilots to sail into the wind by 'tacking'. The technology is related to (and may be the ancestor of) the triangular-shaped lateen sail of the Arab dhow, and was in turn borrowed by the Portuguese and Spanish in the design of the caravel.
Migration involved even longer voyages on the open ocean than did trade, and is a recurring motif in Southeast Asian history. During past millennia, groups of various Southeast Asian peoples island-hopped their way east into the unknown ocean sea, settling the various Pacific island archipelagos. Some of these emigrants developed their own cartographic tradition, such as the Marshall Islanders, whose 'stick charts' assisted in navigating the open ocean, or in the instruction of such navigational techniques.
Earlier Southeast Asian seafarers had headed west and south. Roughly two thousand years ago, when European sailors still confined themselves to making coastal passages that kept them within sight of land, Indonesian pilots mastered the long open-ocean voyage to Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope. Unlike the Southeast Asian settlers of Micronesia and Polynesia, these voyages were commonly made as a round trip. The Indonesian seafarers who settled Madagascar, kept the route between the two distant lands active until the fifteenth century.
Glimpses of craft that Javanese or Sumatrans might have used in the eighth or ninth century have been preserved in stone relief on the magnificent ruins of the 'temple mountain' of Borobudur (see fig. 11), built by the Sailendras of Sumatra. Of the many hundreds of scenes carved on its walls, there are several depicting sophisticated ocean-going vessels with balance-lug sails.
The kingdom of Funan, established on the Mekong River delta by about the first century A.D., is usually regarded as the first known state of Southeast Asia, though the only definite written record of it is from fragments of an account by two Chinese envoys in the third century.29 The economic success of Funan was largely a result of its strategic location between points east and west, since it was in an ideal position to service merchants and pilgrims who traversed the Isthmus of Kra, or shuttled between India and China by sailing around the Malay Peninsula. Archaeological finds excavated at the Funan port of Oc-eo, which include Roman and Indian artifacts believed to date from the second and third centuries, indicate that it was a bustling center of maritime trade.30
A monarch used maps to record his conquests and to impress upon his people the extent of his sovereignty, to record the lands under his jurisdiction for the levying of taxes from his subjects, and to facilitate the creation of roads and irrigation systems. Two thousand years ago- about the same time that Indonesian people pioneered the voyage to Madagascar and Funan was founded in what is now southern Vietnam- the people of Banaue in northern Luzon constructed monumental rice terraces which have remained largely intact to this day. These stone structures formed vast terraces rising nearly a mile from valley floor to mountaintop. A jewel of ingenuity and engineering, the design created artificial waterfalls, which gently irrigated the terraced crops below. Although the rice terraces in Luzon are the most spectacular of early irrigation systems, sophisticated irrigation complexes with rice-terracing are known throughout Southeast Asia. Funan, and the Cambodian kingdom of Angkor which followed it in southern Indochina, were both highly dependent on their extensive irrigation systems.
War was another situation that provided an incentive for creating maps. An early Western allusion to this kind of map-making comes from Mendes Pinto, who wrote of the queen of Prome (Burma) and her council "mapping out the way in which they were to proceed" with organizing a defense of their city.
Siam boasted about the many neighboring kingdoms over which it claimed suzerainty, and from which it exacted tribute. It was a literate society whose monarch was so attuned to the written word that Nicholas Gervaise, a priest resident in Ayuthaya from 1683-87, wrote that "there is no employment in the royal palace more exhausting than that of the reader" to the king. Although Chinese texts record Siamese geographic mapmaking by the year 1373, three centuries later, when Gervaise wrote of the Siamese king's "eight or ten warehouses, among several others, that are of unimaginable wealth," he made no reference to maps, but simply stated that "it is impossible to say how many precious, rare, and curious things" are in these warehouses.
Simon de La Loubère, who followed Gervaise in Ayuthaya (1687-88), specifically stated that he never saw a Thai map, yet he left us a tantalizing hint of a Thai geographic item of some sort. He wrote that he had hoped to secure a Siamese map of the kingdom, but had to settle for one done by a French engineer, M. de Ia Mare, "who went up the Menam [Chao Phraya), the Principal River of the Country, to the Frontiers of the Kingdom" (see fig. 128). But since La Loubère believed this map to be inadequate, he had Jean Dominique Cassini, the director of the observatory at the Academie Royale in Paris, "correct it by some Memorials which were given to me at Siam [Ayuthaya]." What were these 'memorials' given to him which helped improve his map of the kingdom? Apparently, they were geographic items of some sort- yet nothing which in his mind befitted the definition of 'map'. La Loubère did, however, offer an insight into Thai cosmography, having studied and recorded the "rules of the Siamese Astronomy, for calculating the Motions of the Sun and Moon."
Writings loosely attributed to Kosa Pan, a Thai emissary who traveled to France in 1686, reveal a conscious interest in maps.31 In these memoirs, Kosa Pan matter-of-factly requests plans of Chambord Castle and "the great temple Notre Dame". At the