Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea 1300-1800

Chapter 1: The Three Seas of the Southern Ocean

26 Singapore & The Silk road of The Sea 1300–1800 Southeast Asians did not restrict their exploration to the Pacific; they also voyaged west. By 300 BC, Southeast Asian mariners had crossed the Bay of Bengal to South Asia. In the centuries that followed, Southeast Asian sailors would discover Madagascar near the east coast of Africa and establish the first human settlements on that island. Malayo-Polynesian languages and cultures spanned more than half the globe as early as 1,400 years ago. No other language family matched this feat until the British established their empire in the eighteenth century. Neither Indian nor Chinese tongues achieved a comparably broad dispersal. prehiSToric TrAde in SouTheAST ASiA By the third or fourth centuries BC, Southeast Asians had developed a trading system stretching over a vast span of water, from the South China Sea to the Java Sea, and beyond, to the Spice Islands or Moluccas. This route is first detected by the vast dispersal of bronze artifacts of a style known as Dongson, made in north Vietnam, famous for their elaborate decoration and great size, which archaeologists have found as far east as Papua New Guinea (Figs. 1.01, 1.02). By the first century BC, Moluccan spices were reaching Xi’an (Chang’an), capital of the Han Dynasty in northern China. Late prehistoric artifacts in Sahuynh style found in southern Vietnam may represent the ancestral culture of Austronesian-speaking people later known as Cham. At the Sahuynh site of Hang Gon, archaeologists found beads of glass, carnelian, agate, olivine, and zircon, evidence for trade with south Asia between 400 and 100 BC (Higham 1989: 228–9). 1.01 Bronze drum in Dongson style from Chaiya, south Thailand. Several drums of this type have been found in the Siamo-Malay Peninsula, indicating that this region had been integrated into a network of trade and communication over 2,000 years ago. chapTer 1 The Three SeaS of The SouThern ocean 27 Who transported these drums and spices? Chams, Malays, and Javanese, members of the Malayo-Polynesian language family who inhabited most of the Southeast Asian coasts were the lynchpins of the system, obtaining spices from the Spice Islands Moluccas and voyaging north with them to the Red River area of north Vietnam, from whence they returned to the eastern archipelago carrying bronzes. Once the outside world acquired a taste for the Moluccas’ unique spices (cloves, nutmeg, and mace), an active trade in these commodities developed, passing through the Java Sea, from whence they were dispatched west to the Indian Ocean and east to China. By the fourth century AD, Moluccan cloves were used to pay rent in Roman-occupied Egypt (Warmington 1928: 200). The spice route was over 1,000 years old when it attracted the attention of Christopher Columbus, who, in an attempt to find his way to the Moluccas, accidentally discovered America. The oldest sites in Southeast Asia where archaeologists have found evidence 1.02 Sites where Dongson drums have been discovered 28 Singapore & The Silk road of The Sea 1300–1800 of contact with both China and India lie in the territory of modern Thailand. The oldest is in western central Thailand at Ban Don Ta Phet, where radiocarbon dates cluster in the period 390–360 BC. Khao Sam Kaeo, five kilometres inland from the east coast of peninsular Thailand in Chumphon Province, was inhabited between the early fourth and second centuries BC (Glover and Bellina 2011: 24). The most common evidence for early contact between South and Southeast Asia consists of beads, made of both hard stones and glass. Unfortunately, modern people also evince great interest in old beads, and when sites which contain them are found, they are quickly looted. Beads remain in circulation for long periods, so even if beads made at a certain time are reported from a site, the only way we can tell whether they were brought there soon after they were made or much later is to excavate them in a systematic manner and to find them. At Ban Don Ta Phet, for example, over 3,000 beads of agate, carnelian, and glass have been found in the same soil layer as carbon, which can be dated (Higham 1989: 207, Glover 1989: 25). Translucent pale green hexagonal beads found here are known from Oc-èo, in southern Vietnam, as well as Pasemah, south Sumatra (Glover 1996: 71). These artifacts were found in burials...