Down the steep slopes from Dieng along trails beetling back and forth through the forest, under the ribbed flanks of the Sindoro and Sumbing volcanoes and southeast across smoky foothills and deep green ravines, a returning pilgrim would come to the lush levels of Kedu. This bowl of low, well-watered land was hemmed with forested hills. To the east rose the hulk of Gunung Merbabu and its mighty twin, Merapi, angriest of all the volcanoes of Central Java. To the north an easy route led between the mountains towards the ports of the north coast, and snaking over the plain came the Progo River, a band of pale water which ran southwards, out of Kedu itself and across a triangle of rich, level land spreading south from Merapi. This was all fabulously fecund country. Palms stood in long ranks and the hillsides were thick with forest. The Progo was fed by myriad smaller streams, churning around bleached boulders and driving deep clefts into the limitless black soil, and the well-watered plots gave out a ceaseless cycle of crops across the seasons. It was a true land of milk and honey, and it would soon become the enduring cradle of Javanese civilisation.
By the early eighth century the main political action in Java seems to have shifted from the north coast to Kedu and the wider basin of the Progo. In 732, a local raja had his craftsmen raise an inscribed stone on a hilltop south of Merapi. It told of his rule over ‘a wonderful island beyond compare called Yava’. This king was called Sanjaya, a title he would pass on to a storied dynasty, and the general term for the area of Java over which he claimed control was Mataram, a name that would come to have such a hold on the Javanese imagination that it would eventually be revived by a line of Muslim sultans nearly a thousand years later.
Unlike their Srivijayan contemporaries in far-off Sumatra, the royals of Mataram were not, initially, concerned with maritime trade. There were no safe anchorages on the southern shores of Java, and the ports of the north coast were some distance away. What was more, they had no particular impetus for internationalism at this early stage: the region produced all they could possibly need. Rice and pulses grew in the irrigated fields, and the forests turned out fruits and seeds and dyestuffs. There were mines for salt, fish in the rivers, and a solid tradition of craftwork. Much of the excess produce did, eventually, find its way out to the ports, but it travelled by way of middlemen in the markets that rotated through rural settlements on a five-day cycle, and the rulers probably had little direct involvement in the trade.
The power of these Javanese rulers was rooted in water of the fresh, rather than salt, variety. Any given tranche of farmland had to be irrigated to keep its soils turning out crops through the fiery dry months in the middle of the year. Complex networks of dykes and ditches criss-crossed the countryside, and keeping them all free from leaks demanded cooperation across any number of banyan-shaded villages. The councils and collectives that managed these water networks were the earliest forms of organised government, and from time to time the chief of a particular network would decide to extend his influence beyond the head of his longest irrigation trench.
Villages became small kingdoms, and something not unlike the Srivijayan hub-and-spoke model of power developed in Central Java. A king would have his own timber-built palace, known as a kraton, with a clutch of directly ruled fields and hamlets close by. Ranged at a distance around this fulcrum were the seats of other feudal lords, vassals of the central chief but each with its own spiral of subject villages. Still further afield would be other fiefdoms owing only the most notional allegiance to the centre. Across the network the rudiments of a tax system were already in place. Each village owed a certain time-honoured portion of their crops to the overlord, and each community owed a tranche of their time too, a fixed amount of man-hours to be given over to labouring on the landlord’s behalf. These obligations in time and kind might be owed only to the local village chief, or they might be passed all the way up the chain of command to the king himself.
The whole set-up allowed separate dynasties to travel side-by-side in the same region, vying for ascendency without annihilating each other. Over the generations the hub of the power-wheel might shift to some new village as a different dynasty won supremacy; the spokes leading to outlying vassals would realign, but the power structures and systems of tax and tribute would remain essentially unchanged. In Mataram there were two of these jostling lineages, twin clans which would leave the most monumental of marks on the Javanese landscape.
In 779 the son of the first Sanjaya king, Panangkaran, erected his own inscription amidst the green fields of Mataram. It was a rectangular slab, densely fenced with strips of Sanskrit, and it described his own realm as ‘the ornament of the Sailendra dynasty’. Forty-seven years earlier, Panangkaran’s father might have considered himself the biggest fish in the Mataram pond, but now the Sanjayas found themselves the underlings of the shadowy Sailendras, the ‘Kings of the Mountain’.
Everything about the Sailendras is enigmatic: we know nothing about their background and precious little about their culture. The source of their power is uncertain, and even their ethnicity is a bone of contention. But perhaps the most incongruous thing about the Sailendras is their religion. Four centuries earlier, the scholar-monk Faxian had dismissed Java as a realm of ‘Heretic Brahmans’, and though there was a garbled origin myth in Ho-Ling involving a wandering Buddhist prince—from Kashmir, of all places—for the most part Java seemed well established on the Hindu side of the coin. But then in the middle of the eighth century, a fully formed clan of orthodox Mahayana Buddhists materialised in Kedu and established supremacy over all Mataram. Their foreign faith clearly gave them a spiritual connection with Srivijaya, and it may be that the Sailendras had at least some direct familial link with Sumatra. That they used Malay instead of Javanese in some of their inscriptions certainly bolsters this idea. Some have even suggested that the Sailendras and the Srivijayans were one and the same, and that for some reason they had upped sticks in Palembang and headed south for an interlude in Java.
Whatever the case, within a few years of setting themselves up in Kedu the Sailendras had embarked on the most ambitious building project that Java had ever seen, an overwhelming undertaking that would leave the Shaivite sanctuaries of Dieng looking like the merest molehills. The structure—standing at the junction of the Progo and Elo rivers—amounted to 1.5 million blocks of chiselled grey andesite, and when it was finished it was the biggest Buddhist monument on earth. Its name was Borobudur.
Work on this epic edifice probably began around 760, and continued for some seventy years. The stone was quarried from the banks of the Progo, then hauled uphill to be set in the model of a monumental mandala. Nine concentric terraces were raised, the lower six square in form, the upper trio a set of shrinking circles culminating in a single stupa. The walls and balustrades of the lower terraces were covered with friezes in narrative order—more than 2,500 individual panels amounting in total to a strip of stories some three miles (five kilometres) long. They told tales from the massed library of Buddhist lore, along with snatches of local colour: a house built on stilts on the old Austronesian model with wooden plates on the supports to keep out clambering rodents; a ship running through a driven sea with straining outriggers and full-bellied lateen sails; weighing scales and earthenware water jars; pigeons on the rooftops and monkeys in the treetops.
The men who built Borobudur worked without a single blueprint, and each generation of Sailendra kings made their own modifications and innovations. Just how many people worked on the vast monument over the years is unknown—there are no contemporary inscriptions giving clear and practical details of its construction. Looking at the thing as it now stands it might be easy to conjure up images of Pharoanic megalomania, with legions of cringing slaves labouring under the lash