At the end of the eleventh century the centre of the dwindling power shifted north from the Musi to the hub of Srivijaya’s former vassal, Malayu, near the site of the modern city of Jambi. There was a last flurry of temple building, with an array of red-brick monuments thrown up on the banks of the Batang Hari, but the flame was guttering. Before long it had gone out altogether.
By the time the Muslim sultans of Palembang established their own riverine kingdom on the Musi in the sixteenth century, neither they nor their subjects had the faintest idea that the ruins of a mighty state lay buried in the thick black soil beneath the foundations of their own city. But the Palembang sultans were, in their own small way, inheritors of a tradition of semi-divine kingship that had originated in Srivijaya—as were all the other kings of the Archipelago. Their common subjects, too, owed a considerable debt, for their own mother-tongue was a language that had first emerged from Jayanasa’s realm. Southern Sumatra was the original wellspring of the Malay language, and it had been Srivijaya’s dominance of the shipping routes that had first fuelled its spread as the lingua franca of the Archipelago, a role that it still claims today in its updated form as Bahasa Indonesia, the national Indonesian language, and the near-identical modern Malay spoken in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.
In the thirteenth century China suffered one of its periodic catastrophes: the Mongols swept southwards and usurped imperial power, overturning the old systems of tribute and diplomacy. By the 1360s, however, Mongol power itself had dissolved. As the courtiers of the new Ming Dynasty attempted to rebuild the Middle Kingdom, someone had the bright idea of calling in overdue tribute obligations from the islands of the distant south. In 1370, a full seven hundred years after Yijing’s visit, an ill-informed Chinese diplomatic mission went looking for San-Fo-Qi.
Following the old monsoon trade winds, the officials eventually arrived in Jambi—to the astonished delight of the local rulers, who had long since gotten used to their own obscurity. They eagerly agreed to resume the tribute missions of old. Over the coming five years several embassies to China set sail from Jambi. The excitement rather went to the head of the local king, a man by the name of Wuni, and he began to believe that there might still be some flicker of life in the Srivijaya corpse. In 1376, he sent a request for Chinese acknowledgement as maharaja of a revived Srivijaya, and recognition as the greatest tributary chief in the Archipelago. In far-off Nanjing, the Ming officials had not yet grasped the real state of affairs in Southeast Asia, and the next year they sent a mission to acknowledge Wuni’s improbable request. Unfortunately for the Chinese, they had reckoned without Java, the real centre of power in the fourteenth-century Archipelago. Before the Chinese reached Jambi, the Javanese got wind of the affair. They dispatched their own fleet, which tracked down the mission ship and slaughtered all the Chinese diplomats, before descending on Sumatra to teach the upstart Wuni a pertinent lesson and to obliterate whatever modest trace might remain of the magnificent Srivijayan heritage.
When word of the incident reached China, the Ming officials reacted with remarkable pragmatism. Instead of attempting to extract some sort of revenge for the death of their diplomats they decided to forget all about Sumatra, and to award the exclusive status of tributary to the Javanese king who had ordered the killing from his seat on the island that would be the lodestar of the Archipelago forever more.
CHAPTER 2
EMPIRES OF
IMAGINATION:
HINDU-BUDDHIST
JAVA
The plateau lies in the belly of an old volcano, 6,500 feet above sea level in the heart of Java. This is a broken landscape under a cladding of cold soil and pine trees, and there is still a smell of sulphur in the damp air. The name of this strange place is Dieng.
Sometime in the seventh century the first Shiva-worshipping temple builders came struggling up through the tiger-haunted forests to reach this spot, dragging their stonemasons’ tools and their Indian-inspired blueprints. But they were not pioneers in an untrammelled world, for Dieng’s name—Di Hyang, often translated today as ‘Abode of the Gods’—is older than any Sanskrit-speaking arrival. Hyang is an ancient Austronesian concept of deity.
In far-flung corners of the Archipelago even today, away from the influences of India and Islam, mountains are the abode of ancestral spirits and fiery gods. From Gunung Dempo in Sumatra to the tricoloured crater lakes of Kelimutu in Flores, volcanic summits have always been sacred. As the seventh-century builder-priests paced out the plots for a new vision on Dieng’s marshy, sulphur-scented levels, they were walking over an ancient place of power and pilgrimage.
It would be easy to overlook Java. A slender slip of land, six hundred miles long and less than a quarter of that across, it rests beneath the equator at the point where the southern arc of the Archipelago bears away eastwards towards distant New Guinea. It is a fraction of the size of Sumatra or Borneo, and is some distance from the crucial shipping junction in the Straits of Melaka. At a glance, then, it is not the most likely candidate for the cradle of history. But peer more closely at Javanese geography, and something becomes apparent. The Archipelago-long string of volcanos that is moderately spaced down the length of Sumatra and scattered, island by island, through Nusa Tenggara bunches up dramatically here, with a legion of fiery peaks marching in tight formation along the entire length of Java. Dieng is just one of dozens of active or dormant Javanese volcanoes. They provide a spine for the island, and though their capacity for sporadic violence gives the place an uneasy edge, the eruptions have doused the soils with nutrients. The peaks snatch at passing weather systems and squeeze out their moisture, and the bowls of land between them are well-watered. Java is one of the most fertile places on earth. What’s more, its mellow northern littoral is indented with safe river-mouth anchorages and brushed by easy trade winds.
There were already Indianised states here well before the rise of Srivijaya in Sumatra. They are glimpsed in the passing comments of Chinese scribes and travellers. In 412 CE, Faxian—the wandering monk whose story would inspire Yijing almost three centuries later—stopped by on his return from India in a West Java state that seems to have been called Holotan. As a good Buddhist, Faxian was none too approving of the state of religious affairs he encountered in Java: ‘Heretic Brahmans flourish there, and the Buddha-dharma hardly deserves mentioning’, he noted.
Later another state—this one called Tarumanagara—grew up in the same place, and there were others, hinted at in Chinese chronicles and traced in scattered stone pillars, marked with the wriggling worm-casts of the Pallava script. But the relics of these earliest Javanese states are remarkably thin on the ground, for the inhabitants built their homes and palaces of wood and thatch, and in the hot, wet climate these materials would last little more than a single monsoon once a kingdom had collapsed.
But by the seventh century, a new state had appeared on the northern coast of Central Java. When the Chinese heard of this polity they noted its name as ‘Ho-Ling’. This may have been a corruption of ‘Kalingga’, or perhaps ‘Areng’, but whatever it was called it marked the beginning of a relay of royal realms in Java that has continued all the way to the present day. And under the Ho-Ling aegis an epic tradition began of religious architecture in a medium more permanent than mere wood.
Java’s earliest stone temples sprang up on the Dieng Plateau in the second half of the seventh century. People from the surrounding hills had probably been making offerings to ancestral