Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea 1300-1800

Chapter 2: The Rise of the Island Empires

58 singapoRe & The silk Road of The sea 1300–1800 If one sails due west from the mountain known as Kedah Peak, one just misses the north tip of Sumatra and eventually reaches Sri Lanka. A basic navigational technique of ancient sailors was to sail due east or west along a fixed latitude. Without chronometers, sailors could not establish their position in an east-west direction, but could detect their north-south position by stellar observation. Several stones inscribed with Sanskrit texts in a script used during the late fourth and fifth century have been discovered near the foot of Kedah Peak (Christie 1990: 45) (Fig 1.05). Three of them bear an identical ritual statement about the Buddhist law of cause and effect (karma) that conforms to Buddhist philosophy, but has not been found in India or Sri Lanka. This statement seems to have been composed in the Malay Peninsula, indicating the sophistication of the local Buddhist community. One of these stones, discovered in the ruins of an ancient structure on the south side of the Muda River in 1848, bears an additional section that says, “of the great sea-captain Buddhagupta, a resident (?) of Raktamrrtika [Red Earth Land] . . . by all means, in all, in all respects . . . all . . . be [they] successful in their voyage!” (Christie 1990: 48). Where was the Red Earth Land where Buddhagupta lived? Chinese sources of the early seventh century refer to a country with this name (Chi tu, literally “Red Earth”). It was sufficiently important that envoys Chang Jun and Wang Junzheng from the Sui Dynasty visited it in 607–609 and wrote a report of it. Their original report has not survived, but quotes from it are found in later Chinese dynastic histories. This kingdom located on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula south of Langkasuka (Wheatley 1961: 26–36, 105) was Buddhist and, according to the Chinese, formed part of Funan. Hendrik Kern and several other authors inferred that this Red Earth Land was the same one found in the Kedah inscription (Kern 1883, 1907; Wheatley 1961: 32). S. R. Das (Rājbāḍīdāṅgā: 1962, cited in JacqHergoualc ’h 2002: 216) has argued that it actually refers to a location in Bengal, but the hypothesis that Buddhagupta was a native of the Malay Peninsula cannot be discounted. SungAi mAS, kedAh The area between the Merbok River and the Bujang Estuary seems to have been rather densely inhabited by AD 500. Research in a modern village in this area named Sungai Mas (“Golden River”) has yielded key sites of the first millennium AD, including one of the three inscriptions bearing the local statement about karma. One of these, Site 53, covers at least 20 hectares. A soil profile from an excavation at Site 53A displayed three cultural layers [Allen 1988: app. F soil profile Z (a)]. Ceramics include locally made items, Chinese, and West Asian products, as well as glass beads and fragments, mostly of West Asian origin, including eight probable reject beads. The presence of reject beads supports the suggestion of archaeologist Ivor Evans (1912, 1925) that glass beads were made here from imported glass for the site of Kuala Selinsing, Perak (see also Francis 1996, Nik Hasan Shuhaimi bin Nik Abdul Rahman 2011). A large quantity of carnelian ChapTeR 2 The Rise of The island empiRes 59 beads, probably made in India, was also recovered (Jacq-Hergoualc’h 2002: 298). A team from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and the Malaysian National Museum in 1980 discovered brick foundations in the village, six of which were excavated. Finds included several Buddhist artifacts of the fifth or sixth centuries AD: an inscription with a Buddhist prayer in Pallava script; the head of a Buddha image of approximately the same date, found by chance by villagers; and an image of a woman carrying a child, which has been tentatively identified as the Buddhist deity Hariti (Nik Hasan Shuhaimi bin Nik Abdul Rahman and Othman Mohd. Yatim 1990: 52–60). Other excavations took place between 1980 and 1991 at a location designated Site 32. A total area of 368 square metres was excavated to an average depth of 40 centimetres. Within this area, a large quantity of artifacts was recovered, including locally made earthenware, Chinese porcelain of the Tang and Song, West Asian ceramics of the eighth to tenth centuries, a wide range of beads, and fragmentary foundations of buildings, some of which may...