Southeast Asia's history of shaping its own civilization from imported influence is evident in the tradition, recorded by a Chinese ambassador, K'ang T'ai, in the middle of the third century, of the founding of the first known Southeast Asian state, Funan (the name being a Chinese transliteration of the old Khmer bnam, modern phnom, which means 'mountain').5 Funan, centered along the Mekong River delta, was said to have been born from the union of a local ruler with a Brahman visitor. The foundation myth records that in the first century A.D., there was a people whose sovereign, a woman named Soma, was the daughter of the water spirit (naga), who lived on a mountain. One day a merchant ship arrived from a country which lay 'beyond the seas', carrying a man by the name of Kaundinya. After the man came into the woman's realm and symbolically 'drank water from the land', the two married. While the historical basis of the story will remain a mystery, the legend accurately records two of the most basic truths about the Southeast Asian psyche and Southeast Asian history: firstly, that water and mountains are a basic fabric of Southeast Asian life (the woman was the progeny of the ruler of the water realm, who lived on a mountain); and secondly, that Southeast Asian civilization, while remaining autonomous (she was the land's sovereign ruler), borrowed freely from external influences (the marriage with a foreigner), though always in its own way and on its own terms. In some versions of the story, Kaundinya was said to have been guided by a dream to board the merchant ship, and to have brought with him a magic bow taken from a temple. The naga's daughter was sometimes said to have attempted to raid the visiting ship, but failed. Kaundinya's 'drinking the water of the land' may have also symbolized his importing the technology for Funan's extensive irrigation systems.6
The mythology of the civilization that evolved in the north of what is now Vietnam tells a similar tale, acknowledging Vietnam's debt to Chinese civilization, while defying Chinese domination. The myth traces Vietnamese roots to the union of a Chinese woman and a hero, the 'Lac Lord Dragon'. Lac came from the sea to the Red River Plain of what is now northern Vietnam, rid the land of demons, and taught the people "to cultivate rice and to wear clothes."7 He departed, promising to return if he was needed. When a Chinese monarch came south and tried to subjugate the people, Lac was summoned. He kidnapped the invader's wife, whose name was Au Co, hid her atop a mountain overlooking the Red River, and the Chinese monarch, unable to find her, returned home in despair. A son was born to Au Co and Lac Long Quan,, thus beginning a new dynasty.
A story recorded in Chinese histories originating in the early seventh century records Indian influence by royal marriage in the kingdom of Langkasuka (Patani, southern Thailand). During a period of Langkasuka's decline, a virtuous man loved by the people but exiled by the king fled to India, where a king gave him his eldest daughter in marriage. When the king of Patani died, the exiled man, accompanied by his Indian wife, was welcomed home as the new sovereign.8
Fig. 4 The bow being held by this mythical viol player is an early example of a South or Southeast Asian invention being recorded on a European map. The bow reached Europe via the Islamic world and the Byzantine empire in about the tenth century. Although its ultimate Asian origins are not known, the 'spike fiddle' (Indonesian gending) was known in Java no later than the eighth century. From a map of the north Atlantic by Ortelius, 1570.
Fig. 5 Javanese musicians at the Banten market, Lodewyckszoon, 1598 (Theodore de Bry, 1599). Lodewyckszoon explains that the gongs are used "to sound the hours, and play their music... as well as to summon people in the king's name, which they did when we arrived, to announce that anyone could buy and sell with us." (14 x 17.5 cm)
Arts and Daily Life
Many generalizations about early Southeast Asian peoples have been made from contemporary accounts left by visitors and from the ethnographic evidence. Most people of Southeast Asia built their houses elevated on posts, whether it was to seek protection against floods, insulate themselves from predators, or to benefit from the body warmth of their livestock, which were stabled underneath during the cooler nights.9
Broad generalizations can be made regarding food. Rice was the fundamental ingredient upon which the Southeast Asian diet was based. Throughout most of Southeast Asia, rice was harvested with a finger-knife by women. Fish was a staple, with coastal and inland peoples trading their salt-water and river fish with each other for greater variety. Neither meat nor milk products were substantial parts of the Southeast Asian diet. Fondness for chewing betel nut, which required the areca nut itself, betel leaf, and lime, was universal in Southeast Asia, and remains so in many areas today.
The music, dance, theatre, and other arts of Southeast Asia are all part of one extended family. That song was a part of everyday life, with the common people singing during their daily tasks, was striking to Europeans. Francisco Alcina, visiting the Philippines in the seventeenth century, claimed that "rarely can a Visayan man or woman be found, unless he is sick, who ceases to sing except when he is asleep." Basic similarities between their musical instruments, the masks and puppets of their theatre and rituals, and in the body movements of their dance were noted, though there were marked regional distinctions in all of these, for example in the scale structure of their music. The gong-chime was common to all peoples of Southeast Asia; neolithic stone slabs, tuned to a seven note scale, have been unearthed in Vietnam, and bronze kettle-drums date back at least two millennia in Indonesia. Although throughout Southeast Asia scales were usually based on a five or seven note system, the actual tuning varied between ensembles, with groups accurately maintaining their own individual calibration as if it were their distinguishing signature.10 In Indonesia, a particular tuning could be considered rightful property and could not be used by other musicians.
Fig. 6 Javanese dancers, Lodewyckszoon, 1598 (Theodore de Bry, 1599). Lodewyckszoon described how the dancers gently swayed their bodies to the rhythm of the music, their arm and leg movements synchronized, the dancers never leaping in the air. The Europeans also noted dancers' subtle finger movements which are captured in the engraving. The man on the right accompanies them on a metal xylophone or demung. (14 x 17.5 cm)
Along with theatre, dance, and music, people's bodies were a medium of art, the splendor of which was an important aesthetic preoccupation. Up until the modern era, a person's hair was felt to be an integral part of his or her physical and spiritual self, and hair styles varied little between the sexes.
Such practical arts as pottery and textile production were at once fairly uniform throughout Southeast Asia in terms of the technologies employed, but individual in terms of specific artistic treatment. Both these viral industries seem to have been exclusively the domain of women and, as with early cultures nearly everywhere, are examples not of sexual inequality in the modern Western notion, but rather of a division of labor and responsibilities according to gender.11
Gender
Early European observers did, in fact, remark on common traits regarding the relations between men and women in Southeast Asia and perceived gender roles and relationships−albeit often over simplified and sometimes even patronizing -have been a defining aspect of the region's image in the eyes of European observers.12
Southeast Asian daughters were generally welcomed into the world as happily as sons, and were for the most part more empowered than their European, Arab, or Asian sisters, enjoying a status which rivaled, if not directly equalled, that of men. Europeans were surprised to find that Southeast Asian women were assertive in seeking partners, openly enjoyed sex, and even expected men to endure considerable fuss to fulfill their sensual pleasures (most famously the practice, apparently unique to Southeast Asia, of men undergoing the painful implantation of metal or ivory balls into their genitals for the benefit of their partner). Men, rather than women, presented dowries to their fiancees' parents, and newlyweds commonly went to live with the wife's, rather than the husband's, family.