Volume 2 of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, Circa 800-1830 is out. Volume 1 is one of the most extraordinary books of historical scholarship I have ever read. It builds upon and expands vastly theoretical and conceptual approaches pioneered by Anthony Reid. It’s been too long since I have read volume 1 to review it here. Lieberman’s ‘strange parallels’ are resonances between ‘east’ and ‘west’, the evolution of the state, trade, political and cultural centralization during the period when these two regions of the world are supposed to be undergoing separate and unequal development. When I was doing a lot of reading, years ago, (renewed recently), I started to feel that the European reformation, and nascent capitalism, and changes in the European state paralleled similar changes in Southeast Asia, and that developments in world trade might be the stimulus common to both. The rise of a neo-Confucianist state in Viet Nam following the defeat of the Ming (15^th century, see John K. Whitmore’s The Development of Le Government in 15^th Century Vietnam, his Cornell dissertation, and Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming (1371-1421)), the rise of the Islamic trading states in Malaysia, and similar changes in Thailand and Burma suggest that there were global events before global conquest. Modernity is not just indigenous to the west but the result of an interaction which at times took the form of competition. William McNeill in his books pursued this idea some, especially his world history and The Pursuit of Power, the follow up to the eccentric and brilliant Plagues and Peoples.

Lieberman is much more in the world systems school of meta or global history than McNeill, who is no Marxist and doesn’t go in for theory so much as a mapping out global environmental constraints and stimuli to history. But Lieberman brings the empiricist’s eye to the proceedings, and his background is in Burmese history. He is able to focus simultaneously on the details of local histories and the vast conceptual abstractions of world system theory.  I can’t wait to read volume 2 and would urge the first volume on anyone who wants to get both a granular and global perspective on Eurasia from 800-1830.

Hubert Humphrey
A Biography

By Carl Solberg

1984, Norton & Norton, New York
Borealis Books edition, 2003

 The Vietnam Project began with a simple desire to know what happened during the Vietnam War. By the time I got around to writing this blogh, to formalizing it as a ‘project’, my interest had run riot to include the entire history of the region, and I felt morally obligated to counter-balance the events of 1965-1975 not only with the immediate context of French and Japanese colonialism, but with Vietnam’s history. So I have been posting reviews of books that relate the history of the region from pre-historic times. This requires a multifaceted approach, for the Vietnam of 900AD is not the Vietnam of 1425, 1787, 1805 or 1945.

That said, I am still fascinated by the American War, and The Vietnam Project includes as one of its panels a political and cultural history of the United States from 1960-1975 or so. For if Vietnam has fascinated me so has the presidencies it so strongly marked, those of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. If a war that killed millions of people and crippled (perhaps terminally) a superpower can be said to have single victims (and of course, morally, it only has single victims), then one of the saddest stories is that of Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

Hubert Humphrey was a hero in my family, of sorts. I was too young to understand that his position on the war had ruined his reputation. I just knew he wasn’t Richard Nixon, and that my uncle was his friend and associate. On November 22^nd, 1963, Humphrey and Mondale were at my uncle’s house plotting DFL [Democratic-Farm-Labor Party] politics. And another uncle, a stalwart CPA member in good standing, tells me that Humphrey once said, ‘there will always be room for Communists in the DFL.’ In 1968 I went to school on election day with a hand-lettered cardboard sign for Humphrey. On election night I stayed up past midnight in my parents’ bed watching the returns. Humphrey’s loss was shattering. I had followed the race since the spring, been for RFK despite my mother’s McCarthy for President straw hat and my father’s inexplicable dislike of the Kennedys. I hated George Wallace. By the fall, even to an 8 year old, it seemed like the world was ending, and Richard Nixon was the final disaster.

Hubert Humphrey is best known for his soaring and triumphant speech in favor of Civil Rights at the 1948 Democratic Convention. He was the 37 year-old mayor of Minneapolis and a rising star in the Democratic Party. His politicking and rhetoric resulted in the adoption of a minority, pro-civil rights plank in the party platform, which set the course for Democrats for decades to come. That year he became the Democratic senator from Minnesota.

He is also notorious for his purge of Communists from the Farm-Labor Party, which he then merged with the Democratic Party, and for introducing a bill in 1954 outlawing the Communist Party. His bill was merged with another bill and passed as The Communist Control Act of 1954. Even J. Edgar Hoover opposed it.

Humphrey’s struggle with the Communist Party dates back to the 1940s when he was mayor of Minneapolis and a fiery progressive. At that time the Republican Party dominated Minnesota politics. Its main rival for power was not the Democrats but the Farm-Labor Party, a radical progressive party with a strong and militant Communist membership. In the thirties, Communist dominated labor unions waged pitched battles with police on the streets of Minneapolis, with the tacit support of the colourful, brilliant Farm-Labor governor of the state, Floyd Olson. Olson was elected in 1930. To Farm Labor Delegates he said, “I am not a liberal, I am…a radical….I want a definite change in the system.” His party’s platform began with the statement: “We declare that capitalism has failed.” Soldberg writes of Olson, “[he] could deliver stump speeches in Yiddish as well as Swedish and Norwegian…” Olson passed an income tax, mortgage moratorium and food relief. He formed an alliance with Roosevelt.

One of the virtues of Solberg’s biography is that it reminds the reader how close to the radical left Democratic politics was in this country in the 30’s and 40’s, before Truman and the Cold War ‘consensus’ decisively divorced the two. Like Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey’s father was a Progressive, deeply involved in politics, and a Socialist, at least in orientation, if not affiliation. The Minneapolis truckers’ strike of 1934 was led by the Dunne Brothers, former Wobblies who had become Communists and sided with the Trotskeyites when they split from Stalin. They were opposed by The Citizen’s Alliance, financed by Republican millionaires, the Pillsburys among others. Some of the agri-business interests would later finance Humphrey. There was at the time a Silver Shirts group of fascists, associated with Republicans. These were the contenders for political power in the upper Midwest in the 1930s. Elected officials, union bosses, gangsters, business men, workers and farmers were waging political war and the whole ideological rainbow of that time was unabashedly on display.

Humphrey never lost his connection to the left, despite his Anti-Communist passions. In the fifties he was a member of a group of Euro-Socialists, with whom he had much in common. If he opposed Communists he was on easy terms with them. His meetings with Kurschev and other Soviet officials make fascinating reading. In domestic policy he favoured a form of liberalism that is all but dead in this country. Though few bills appeared with his name on them he was instrumental in the passage of every piece of major social legislation during his time in the senate, including especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicaire, and Food Stamps. He was in favor of arms control agreements and initially opposed Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. That opposition cost him dearly. Johnson froze him out of all policy decision for a year as a result and it was only through self-abasement that he crawled back into Johnson’s lap. Johnson pinned Humphrey down and Humphrey allowed it, seemed to crave it. His relationship with Johnson is so disturbing it makes me question what kind of president he would actually have been.

Humphrey grew up not in poverty as LBJ had, but on the edge of it. His father was a pharmacist (as was my grandfather) and Humphrey acquired his extraordinary gift of gab and listening working the counter of a drugstore from childhood through his twenties. He had to struggle to go to school, and like Nixon might have made a fine professor. But his talent for speech making was evident to everyone who met him. Unlike Nixon he craved the approval and company of others. He lacked Johnson’s paranoia and Machiavellian instincts. Like Brutus he trusted the integrity of others far too much. He was disorganized and didn’t stand a chance against the Kennedys. Humphrey’s appeal was always that he understood the ordinary working man, the farmer, the union worker in a factory. There is a famous story that in West Virginia an old coal miner said to JFK, “They say you were born a rich a man and never did a hard day of work in your life.” JFK had to admit that this was true. “Well,” the man said, “you didn’t miss a thing.”

Against Nixon he might have won had he had the ability to oppose Johnson earlier. When Humphrey first started running for president he did so by entering primaries. It was his only chance to rack up enough delegates to prove himself to the party hacks who would pick a candidate. Humphrey knew the back room as well the stump. It is an unfortunate irony that by 1968 he was reduced to running the insider’s campaign. McCarthy and RFK battled it out in primaries while Humphrey sought the endorsements of Mayor Daley and the likes of Mr. Crandall from Erie County. Humphrey was a dinosaur, but never as bad as the left made him out to be. Today Tom Hayden says the left’s biggest error in the 60’s was sitting out the ’68 election. But Humphrey’s brand of politics in 1968 was badly out-dated. Today Humphrey’s politics would be impossible. A man who knows the difference between a Stalinist, a Trotskeyite and a Socialist has to pretend he’s an idiot if he wants to be elected. Our professor president has not taken the time to explain the differences to the morons who call him a ‘Communist Fascist’. It wouldn’t be worth it. He would be crucified.

Humphrey died at the age of 67, of bladder and stomach cancer. Seeing him thin and wasted by illness was striking and sad. What America lost we seem to have lost for good. The Cold War and Cold War politics eventually defeated the progressive left political tradition in this country. Humphrey and Johnson had roots in the 19^th century. Their game of being international hawks and domestic liberals failed. It would be Wallace and Nixon and Reagan who would map out the political future of America, and the fruit is the GOP of today, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay, as well as the losers: Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry. It seems at least possible that RFK had a different map. Certainly the McGovern/McCarthy map was a losing one. Humphrey’s life brings up all the ‘might have beens’. What if Humphrey had won in 1968? Could RFK have won?

Humphrey’s proteges included George McGovern, Fritz Mondale and Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy and McGovern both stabbed him in the back, as many of his friends had done. Humphrey never held it against any of them, including Johnson.

Johnson died at the age of 64. JFK was 46. Nixon out-lived them all.

THE 7^TH-8^TH CENTURIES

BY MICHAEL VICKERY

The Centre For east Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco,

the Toyo Bunko, 1998

Michael Vickery is foremost an historian of ancient Cambodia. But he has also written about modern Cambodia. He is a Marxist, and his writing has a strong polemical current running throughout it. Even when he is agreeing with another historian it sounds like he is disagreeing. He is not afraid to take on the titans of his field. Thus, he has few good words for Oliver Wolters and is generally disdainful of Wolters’ mandala theory of Southeast Asian politics or his Big Man theory. Wolters, after writing on early Indonesian commerce, that is work as an economic historian, became increasingly interested first in sociology and later in literary criticism. Vickery shares these passions and concerns but as an avowed historical materialist he is distrustful of anything that smacks of idealist history. (“The reader will find nothing here about ‘mandalas’, ‘galactic polities’, ‘discourses’, or ‘resonating’). Moreover, while retaining a general theoretical orientation that is Marxist, he seeks for evidence in the actual epigraphic record of Cambodia, particularly those inscriptions written in Khmer, as opposed to Sanskrit. Thus he is critical of any effort to tie Cambodian historical development to India. He not only rejects strong versions of Indianization, but weaker ones too. It is his thesis that Cambodians adopted Indian titles, deities and culture as a way to establish new patterns of power and domination. His book covers the period of transition from traditional, dispersed, discreet Khmer polities to a unified state, with an inherited kingship passed down from father to son (as opposed to uncle to nephew).

Vickery has alienated a lot of people with his forays into contemporary Cambodian politics and society. This is where his Marxism has gotten him into trouble. His book Cambodia, 1975-1982 has been denounced as a denial of the Cambodian genocide. Partly this has to do with tone. Vickery is tone deaf. He seems almost gleeful in his debunking of the 2 million deaths and opts instead, based on a very close reading of diverse data, for a figure of 700,000. In his defense, he is clearly horrified by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. What he is out to debunk is not the assertion that they were a viscous and mutant form of leftist regime, but rather the distortions about what actually happened there. For Vickery, history should be based on an interpretation of verifiable fact. Hence, he counts the number of doctors in the country before Pol Pot came to power, estimates how many left the country, and then disputes the claim that Pol Pot murdered all of the doctors. What he does is contextualize the events of Pol Pot’s reign with ancient and contemporary Cambodian history. It is an unsettling picture, quite at odds with the image of Cambodia as a sleepy, peaceful, pastoral country destroyed by steely-eyed Communist sociopaths. Unfortunately, he was wrong about the death count. By he is not and was not a genocide denier, in the same sense that Gareth Porter and Noam Chomsky were. There is a fine book that was written to refute Vickery but which, in the end, recalculating the same data, came to similar conclusions. This is R.A. Burglar’s The Eyes of the Pineapple, a much more ‘pleasant’ book to read, in that the author is less combative and more humane in his treatment of the material. Both works are, apparently, dated. Those interested in the Cambodian Genocide should read widely if they wish to understand what really happened, and they will not come away with a rehabilitated Pol Pot, just a feeling of disgust for the United States, China, Lon Nol, Sihanouk and the other actors who made Pol Pot possible, going back to the 1950s. Ben Kiernan, Burglar and Vickery are all good, but there is more recent stuff out there.

Don’t let his tone or his work on Democratic Kampuchea put you off. Once you have waded through the tedious theoretical arguments about the Asiatic Mode of Production, Asiatic Despotism (and I wonder why Wittfogel and Marx and Engels, at this late date, need such a thorough washing). What he is doing is clearing the air for his detailed, close reading of the Khmer inscriptions, which he says have been misinterpreted or even ignored in favor of the Sanskrit. His engagement throughout is primarily with Coedes, who published the first translations of the corpus, and Claude Jacques, a French historian.

To give the flavour of the work as well as its intentions and some conclusions, here are some quotes:

“In the following chapters I shall study pore-Angkor Cambodia within the temporal limits of its contemporary records, the inscriptions—in particular, those in Khmer—from the early 7^th to late 8^th century. My preconceptions are consciously historical-materialist, and I seek to derive inferences useful for a study of modes of production, in particular the ‘Asiatic’, early state formation, and comparative social structure of ancient societies.

“I intend to explain how textbook pre-Angkor Cambodia came about, the preconceptions behind it, the sources on which it was based, what is wrong with it, and what a more satisfactory history should be.”

“This study is not a history of pre-Angkor Cambodia in the sense which most students of Southeast Asia have understood history. There is no narrative, and it is certainly not histoire evenementielle, history of events, or king-and-battle history, for there are hardly any events recorded in the contemporary record.  We do not know what any particular individual did at any particular time. There is not even a dated installation a ruler, nor a dated construction of an edifice. In the 7^th-8^th century inscriptions no battles are recorded nor decisions about justice, nor foreign relations. What is recorded are assignments of land, animals, and categories of people at specific times and places, or interactions between persons of rank and foundations, and these records taken together and studied in sequence reveal not events, but processes. They lend themselves to macro-history; in fact, that is all they are suitable for.”

“During the last millennium B.C supravillage communities, with populations of 500-2,000, had developed in areas of modern Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam’ and social stratification had occurred to the extent that there were at least chiefs and ordinary people. Among the inland communities there was overland trade in valuable and rare commodities, and the ships of coastal communities sailed at least as far as India.

“The first supravillage socio-political organization attested in the Cambodian area is known as ‘Funan’, the center of which appears to have been near the southern coast in what is now Cambodia or in adjacent areas of Vietnam. Most of this coastal region, except the Mekong and Bassac valleys in its eastern sector, and extending around the coast to what is now southeastern Thailand, is cut off from the Cambodian central plains by mountains, without any river channels to the coast. Level land suitable for agriculture is also sparse, and in its geography this coastal area bears much resemblance to Champa—a long, narrow coastal plain with scattered small areas of fertility.

“Funan controlled the coast and riverine outlets from the plains of southern and central Cambodia; and it was a maritime society along a trade route lining China, Southeast Asia, and India. Funan was probably not a unified polity, let alone an empire, but a group of allied ports, like Srivijaya, of which the most important was on the Cambodian or adjacent Vietnamese coast. It was a stratified society whose population practiced advanced techniques of water control and rice agriculture….

“A…hypothetical model…is that Funan and Chenla were never separate states. They may have represented different centers, even congeries of centers, within Cambodia, linked in loose political relationships, and at times rivals. The Chinese view of them as separate states, one vassal of the other, and ultimately conquering its suzerain, is inaccurate, a result of imposing Chinese political theory on an alien polity.

“With that assumption, of course, an explanation must be sought for the impetus to the Funan > Chenla shift….

“As the maritime trade of the coastal areas (Funan) had developed and declined in the 5^th-6^th centuries, they lost whatever political hegemony had prevailed to inland centers….The most powerful lineages [of ruling families or clans]and the kings whom they served and may have been family members, merely shifted the focus of their economic and political activity from the seacoast to agricultural areas inland. Class and state development which had begun in international and maritime trade continued in the exploitation of land and labor and the extraction of surplus from the agrarian heartland.”

“Whatever the Cambodian interests in the Mekong delta may have been, they were thwarted in the mid-8^th century, when the political centre of Champa shifted to the south, to Panduranga near modern Nha Trang….

“The shift in Champa to the south, which apparently meant Cham neglect of their old northern capital, facilitated Cambodian expansion into that area through Cambodia’s Northeast, …a region rich in products important fin the international trade of the time…..

“Jayavarman II…migrated with his followers into the Northwest, where there was apparently no strong political center…while the Northeast was secured by allies….Then the capital of the new, much larger polity was established at Angkor, midway between [the two regions] and in a key location at the apex of the Tonle Sap, permitting control of the Tonle Sap, the Mekong, and the Northwestern riverine system linking Cambodia’s Northwest with the Gulf of Siam.

“Further expansion toward the Northeast was probably blocked when northern Champa became once again the Cham, political center in the 870s, just at the time when inscriptions begin to appear at Angkor in the reign of Indravarman. Thereafter, the dispersal of inscriptions indicates almost total disinterest in southern Cambodia and its coast, and concentration on exploitation of land and labor.”

Perhaps in the next post I will try to indicate what was happening in Vietnam, Champa and Srivijaya at this time. Vietnam was of course still under Chinese rule, and this is the height of the Srivijaya trading ‘empire’, the rise of which marginalized both Funan and Champa, as ships could sail directly between Sumatra and southern China without landing in Malaysia or coastal Southeast Asia. The Cham shift to the south was the result of being routed by the Vietnamese and Chinese, but the details of this will have to wait another day.

By Keith Taylor

Berkeley : University of California Press, c1982.

xxi, 397 p. : maps ; 24 cm.

http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Vietnam-Keith-Weller-Taylor/dp/0520074173

The Civilization of Angkor

By Charles Higham

London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.

xv, 192 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Angkor-Charles-Higham/dp/0520242181/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262619216&sr=1-1

In my last South East Asia post I subjected the reader to a lengthy complaint with illustrations from illustrious texts. I wish now to reverse that complaint, at least in the sense that I am going to suggest two books for those interested in the history of the region that do precisely what I dreamed a book on the ancient and lost kingdom of Champa would do. They are narrative histories that synthesize information provided by ancient inscriptions and histories with archaeology, linguistics, sociology, geography and anthropology. Both books rely upon a groundwork of studies provided by others, along the lines of Wheatley’s historical geography of the Malay peninsula and Wolters’ work on Srivijaya. In the case of Charles Higham, he is indebted to his own archaeological work and the epigraphic studies of Michael Vickery, among others. Taylor’s work is indebted not just to his own studious reading of French, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese sources (as well as European) but to Jennifer Holmgren’s Chinese Colonisation of Northern Vietnam: Adminstrative geography and political development in the Tongking Delta, first to sixth centuries A.D. (Australia National University Oriental Monograph Series; number 27, 1980). In her words:

‘This work covers the administrative, social and political history of the first five hundred and fifty years of Chinese occupation in the Red River delta of northern Vietnam….

‘Until now, European, Chinese, and Vietnamese scholars have made very little effort to investigate this period of Sino-Vietnamese history….very little is known about the relations between Chinese and Vietnamese during this period….Early this century, several French scholars attempted to pinpoint the locations of Chinese administrative centres in the Red River Delta during the earliest and latest phases of the Chinese occupation. Nothing, however, has been done since then to follow up their work.’

A familiar lament!

Taylor’s scholarship is scrupulous, and there is no other book like it that I know of. The writing is purely functional, but this is no impediment, especially to those of us who are frustrated by the 10-20 pages accorded this thousand year period by general histories and surveys. A review of the book by Truong Buu Lam frankly describes the period as being ‘dry’, but then, so did CS Lewis label the poetry of early 16th century England ‘drab’. I’m sorry, but there is nothing drab about Skelton, nor is there anything dry about the long evolution of Vietnam from a collection of culturally related clans and villages, farming and trading along the Red River, to a unified polity with a distinct self consciousness. How aware a people are of their own difference, their own uniqueness as a people (which can be easily confused with nationalism), is a fraught subject. One of the fascinating things about Vietnam is that it is a clear example of a nation created by colonization. That is Taylor’s narrative, though the end point of the book is really the beginning of what we call Vietnam. At that point, in the late 900’s A.D., the Vietnamese had not yet written their own histories. They had not yet created a Confucian state, or developed beyond its embryonic beginnings the native script, or Chu Nom.

The story of state formation on the South East Asian mainland is also told by Higham in his book. This process, which is to be seen everywhere, takes many distinct forms. My reading has been shaped by a desire to know the total history of Vietnam. Early on in my research I became fascinated by the Cham, a people conquered by the Vietnamese. Their history has barely been written in a western language, though it may lie locked in their as yet untranslated and studied inscriptions. But the Cham lay between two states, Angkor and Vietnam, and the land that is today Vietnam extends down to territory covered by Higham in his book. Indeed, the earliest independent, urban polity in South East Asia lies south of modern day Saigon, in the ancient ruins of Oc Eo. Oc Eo was a trading state, totally unlike Angkor or Vietnam. It was perhaps the capital of the polity known to the Chinese as Funan, though the idea of a capital is wrong. The Funanese were probably Khmer speaking people.

The story of the rise of Vietnam as an independent entity has a context, and it is a complex one that includes not just China and the areas of southern China not yet Chinese (especially Yunnan, but also as far north and east as modern-day Canton), but the Khmer in Cambodia, the Cham in central Vietnam and farther abroad, the evolving trading kingdom of Srivijaya. Srivijaya, Funan and Vietnam were directly involved in the India/China trade from Han times on. And this list excludes the many related peoples living in the hills and mountains between China, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Funan, like Srivijaya, was a trading ‘kingdom’, located in scattered polities along the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia. Vietnam itself was engaged in foreign trade and a source of exotic forest materials and luxury goods. This is what attracted the attention of the Chinese. It was certainly not the climate or the people, which disgusted most elite Chinese and frightened them. To be stationed in Vietnam was to suffer isolation, disease, and death.

By the end of Chinese colonization Vietnam was becoming an ‘inland polity’, a state based not on foreign trade but on wet rice agriculture. Higham’s book, like Taylor’s, charts a similar trajectory for Cambodia, as the Khmer move slowly up the Mekong River, building and digging monuments, canals and reservoirs. ‘Chenla’ succeeded Funan. Power becomes centralized. By the 13th century they had built a monumental civilization that rivals that of Egypt and accounts for the enduring interest in the region.

Today Cambodia is known chiefly for a its recent auto-genocide. It is a small, powerless nation which has for hundreds of years been the pawn of powerful neighbors (Vietnam and Thailand) or colonial aggressors (the French and the Americans). Oddly, France’s colonization of Indochina may have preserved Cambodia as an independent country. Vietnam on the other hand is a regional power, an economic player, a nation that has defeated China, France, Japan and America in successive wars and preserved its language, history and culture for thousands of years. Yet there are more books written about the early history of Cambodia than Vietnam and that is certainly because of the monuments they left behind. In the end, Vietnam’s monument was its political acumen.

Not long ago I finished William Southworth’s two volume dissertation on Champa. Since there is very little written in English about Champa I was excited to find it, and I was not disappointed, really, or at least, I had no right to be. I have also just finished reading Georges Maspero’s (1872-1942) The Champa Kingdom.

The Champa Kingdom : the history of an extinct Vietnamese culture

Georges Maspero ; translated by Walter E.J. Tips.

Bangkok : White Lotus Press, c2002.

x, 226 p. : ill., map ; 30 cm.

http://www.whitelotuspress.com/bookdetail.php?id=E22285

The book is the only available general history of Champa, at least in English, and it is badly outdated. But outdated as it is, there are long passages based on Vietnamese and Chinese history that make exciting reading, where the glimmer of the blood and steel flashing on fields of battle, of junks laden down with gold and rhinoceros horn, of court intrigue come alive. Almost all of Southworth’s dissertation is dedicated to establishing that histories like Maspero’s are virtually useless. He goes through every argument advanced by every historian of Champa, narrates their disputes with each other, advances and then debunks or revises their theories. He has done a great, post-modern demolition job. The problem is when he goes on to write his own history of events. The fact is there isn’t much to narrate, because you are restricted to Vietnamese and Chinese histories, and these are what Maspero bases his history on. After that, it’s archaeology, art history and paleography. These are where the disputes lie. The inscriptions, and the temples, are among the oldest on peninsular South East Asia. Southworth’s main thesis is that Champa wasn’t a kingdom at all, and that most of the dating, based on styles of script and decorative motif’s, combined with a suspect theory of Indianization, was erroneous. He does reconstruct sequences of temple complexes, and by jettisoning the timelines of dynasties and the succession of capitals of kingdoms he can reevaluate when monuments were built. All of this is valuable. But he does not do what Wolters expressly set out to do: reconstruct a mentality related to a material culture, in this case, what it was like to live in Champa, whatever, wherever, and whenever that was. What I am looking for and not finding is an Annales style history. Southworth cannot be blamed for this, and as I re-read sections I can see he really does address matters of history and development, or change. But because of the paucity of contemporary scholarship, he must necessarily be tentative and inconclusive about everything except his assertion that prior scholarship is faulty, and give the reasons why. Of course, before you can write a synthetic, narrative history of a place and a people you do need to establish and analyze the material facts at hand. Before Wolters wrote about culture he spent enormous time on the proper translation of words, the meaning of toponyms and the nature of products being traded. The deconstruction business in history is tedious, necessary work, at least when it restricts itself to the writings of other historians (as opposed to the more usual deconstructive work of destabilizing meanings and calling into question the possibility of history itself: the inane hall of mirrors students of former acid heads so gleefully build). 

This situation has been going on for a long time. There is a multi-volume set of papers published in 1961 by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, entitled Historical Writings on the Peoples of Asia. DGE Hall edited volume 2, Historians of South East Asia. The last article in the book is The Application of a South East Asia-Centric Conception of History to Mainland South East Asia, by A. W. MacDonald. I’m going to quote at length from this paper, with the idea that you can compare some of MacDonald’s statements with Michael Vickery’s research proposal linked to below, as well as the links to the Ohio Universities Library SEA Blog, and some other texts. Mind, this was 2 years before Wolters’ published Early Indonesian Commerce (which was a doctoral dissertation written at SOAS) and around the time of Wheatley’s The Golden Khersonese, nearly 50 years ago. Vickery’s proposal was written in 2005.

“Professor D.G.E. Hall in his recent work, A History of South East Asia, remarks that European scholars concerned with these regions feel today that their previous approach to their subject ‘has been too much influenced by certain preoccupations inherent in their own training and outlook’ (pp. vi-vii). He quotes with approval M. de Casparis’ criticism of a ‘Europe-centric’ approach to these studies and notes that ‘Indian writers who, largely through the work of the French and the Dutch have come to discover Greater India may be accused of an India-centric approach.’ Professor Hall himself has sought ‘first and foremost to present South East Asia historically as an area worthy of consideration in its own right, and not merely when brought into contact with China, India or the West.’ I do not intend to discuss here the extent to which Professor Hall has succeeded in his task. [there is a footnote: I must, however, note that professor Hall has been accused in turn of an ‘Anglo-centric’ approach to his material by F.N. Trager….] His book, despite its popular character, marks a date in our studies inasmuch as it is the first full-scale History of South East Asia in the English language….

“Those interested in the civilization of China, like those interested in present-day tribal cosmologies, know that self-centered conceptions of history are as common in the Far East as in the West and are certainly as ancient as these latter. Cultural superiority in all latitudes is defined primarily by disparaging comparisons with the habits of each civilization’s barbarians. But the first point to be made is that the kind of overall vision of South East Asian history implicit in Professor Halls book is itself a product of Western thinking, although not entirely based on results achieved by Western scholars….It is interesting to note that professor Hall, in his own words ‘came to realize the need for some such book’ as his ‘through contacts with students and teachers in South east Asia.’ In fact there exists no book by a South East Asian national, either in a local or a foreign language, which covers the field. This fact is obviously not the consequence of a lack of general education among South East Asians….

“In the West we have certainly tended to write South East Asian history as we see our own. Perhaps I should say as we used to see our own. For we are still, in the South East Asian field, concerned primarily with the correct determination of genealogies in the ruling families, with the life of the court and palace, the tenure of office and the policies of important ministers of state, the aesthetic or museum value of religious architecture and other works of art, the big battles, etc. The structure of society, of the very many different societies in the past and present of South East Asia, has not yet been analyzed….Archaeological interest having been centred mainly up to now on town-sites, we know deplorably little about life in the past of South East Asia, outside of its towns and small villages. And until we know more of present-day conditions in the country-areas all serious social or economic analysis, of mainland South East Asia as a whole, seems frankly impossible. It goes without saying that in the West only those who have written, whether on manuscript, fibre, wood, or stone, or have erected durable monuments, occupy an important place in the history books….Because, in the past, they have not made use of solid building materials nor employed writing to extol their exploits or explain their political and religious systems, we tend to ignore their history. But the fact that it is very difficult for us to get to know their history does not mean that they have none. For instance, the historical role of the Karens, Kachins, Chins, Nagas, Kukis, and other groups of more or less illiterate inhabitants of North Burma was, during the 1939-1945 war, of considerable importance. It is not mere supposition to state that the role of mountain-dwellers in the past history of these regions has been underestimated….

“….But if we can never fully free ourselves from the influences exercised on us by our own background and training, and if, despite all that anthropologists may say, we must persist in the West in subscribing to a linear, evolutionist concept of history, it is none the less possible, by studying our source materials in their particular cultural contexts to improve our understanding of their value….

“I certainly do not for a moment think that we should abandon the study of South East Asian history, envisaged en bloc, ‘in its own right’. We cannot have too many well-documented synthetic class-books, and I would like to see many more, written by South East Asians. For they would tell us more about what a South East Asian-centric conception of history really means. But if we are going to make real scientific progress in this field, if we are to deepen our knowledge of particular problems in their cultural contexts…we must abandon any hope of covering the whole field. The range of knowledge required to use at first hand all the sources which concern South East Asian history is in any case beyond the ambition of the most gifted and laborious among us…For there are other ‘preoccupations in our training and outlook’ than those which result from our purely geographical position. If South East Asia was first divided between three main colonial powers, Britain, Holland, and France, it has suffered a further dismemberment at the hands of Historians, Anthropologists, Linguists, Philologists, Epigraphists, etc., which has not always resulted in a corresponding and manifest increase in our general knowledge of the whole area….”

MacDonald makes clear that, as of 1961, there was a need both for detailed, empirical studies of specific times and places that are conversant with contemporary theory (psychological, anthropological, sociological, economic, etc, a stew of social science speculation), and for general synthetic works of narrative history. He, or she, has some hope that good scholars will be able to balance the twin extremes of tunnel vision and meaningless generality and, through a modicum of self-awareness, avoid or reduce cultural bias.

This is a quote from a fascinating series of blog posts I found on the Ohio Universities Library SEA Blog:

“It is not hard to imagine why Western scholars find it temptingly easy to ignore or gloss over Southeast Asia in their surveys of world history. For one thing, the history of Southeast Asia is still little known in the West. Other standard explanations include good old-fashioned Euro-Americo-centrism, which persists, in no small measure, up to the present-day (Lockard noted this in his Occasional Paper, The Rise and Changing Status of the Southeast Asian History Field in the United States: an Analytical Study, 1989). This being the case, what can we say about world histories published in Southeast Asia? That is, if Southeast Asia has been largely neglected in Western-language world histories, how is it presented in world histories written by Southeast Asians? How do Southeast Asian scholars view their history in the broader  global context? With these questions in mind, I retired to my office, dusted off a copy of  volume one of Luang Wichit Wathakan’s Prawattisat Sakon (Phranakhon: Samnakphim Phloenchit, 1932), and sat down to read. It was illuminating, and troubling.”

Follow these 4 links to the complete posts:

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=494, http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=553,

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=607,

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=630

Now, here’s an excerpt from a proposed research project, written by Michael Vickery (to read his entire research proposal go here: http://www.iias.nl/vickery-michael) :

“Both for Angkor and Champa my project starts from the presupposition that their histories as written are defective, and that even when the important sources, the local inscriptions, have been competently translated (in the case of Cambodia) their information has been interpreted and synthesized with other sources of information based on assumptions which are no longer acceptable.

“Revisions of the standard history depend very much on new ancillary work in archaeology, prehistory, historical ethnology, linguistics, and historical interpretations of ancient South and Southeast Asia, which, living in Thailand and Cambodia for several years, I have not been able to access, and for which my time at IIAS, with the libraries of Leiden and Amsterdam, will be particularly valuable. For Champa, the situation is worse than for Angkor, because serious historical work on Champa ended, with one significant exception, before 1930, and the Cham-language inscriptions have never been subjected to expert translations like the work of George Coedès for Khmer. That particular problem will not be solved in my work either, for I am not a Chamist, and so far as I have been able to determine, there is no competent translator of Old Cham working today. Nevertheless, the translations which were done between 1904 and 1915 by Louis Finot and very recently on the inscriptions of the Po Nagar temple in Nha Trang, are probably 80-90% reliable and may be confronted with the interpretations of other sources which are gaining currency.

“In addition to trying for better understanding of the inscriptions, further work on Champa must take into account certain new conceptions about the history of the Champa-Cambodia region (and indeed of all of Southeast Asia). First is awareness that from late prehistoric times until into the second millennium AD, the great navigators in the region were neither Indians nor Chinese, but Southeast Asians, in particular those belonging to the Austronesian language family, whose distribution from Taiwan to the Philippines and Indonesia and from the Pacific Ocean (Polynesia) to Madagascar proves their seagoing skills. Among these Austronesians were the Cham, and it is now accepted by interested scholars that contrary to the standard conception of the time of Maspero and Coedès, the Cham were not one of the hypothesized ‘waves’ of overland population movement out of China and through the mainland peninsula to Nusantara, but latecomers from Nusantara, probably Kalimantan, arriving by sea on the eastern and southeastern coasts of Indochina in the last centuries B.C.

“The main purpose of my paper, “Champa Revised”, cited above, was a critical analysis of Georges Maspero’s Le royaume de Champa (1928), which was accepted literally by George Coedès in his Etats hindouisés, and thereafter was a dominant component of all discussions of Champa. I show in that paper, which will be revised and extended at IIAS, that Maspero’s history of Champa was faulty both in conception and detail, and his syntheses of Champa inscriptions with Chinese and Vietnamese sources led to inaccurate conclusions about major events throughout, in particular, the 10th to 15th centuries after Champa was faced with an independent Viet Nam and an aggressive Cambodia. The history of those 500 years must be completely rewritten, for Champa internally, and for its relations with both Viet Nam and Cambodia.

“The new consensus on the Austronesians and their maritime skills suggests that it was probably Southeast Asian Austronesians, and not people from India, who were responsible for the first imports from the latter to Southeast Asia, such as beads, pottery, and small luxuries, which long antedated any signs of Hinduism/Indianization. As Pierre Manguin has written, “The archaeological research of the last 30 years has proved that this ‘Indianization’ [of Southeast Asia] during the first centuries A.D. happened after about a millennium of steady exchanges with India, in which certain populations of Southeast Asia, who were beginning to organize themselves within political systems of increasing complexity, played a decisive role, particularly in the setting up of seafaring merchant networks exporting gold and tin” [to India]. Accepting this makes it easier to explain the rapidity with which new developments in India, such as styles of script, sculpture, and cult conceptions were transmitted almost immediately to Southeast Asia. It was because Southeast Asians had long been in maritime contact with India, and they immediately took home whatever novelties appeared. Once this much is admitted, the next logical supposition is that it would have been Southeast Asians, and not Indians, who brought the first elements of Hinduization/Indianization to Southeast Asia, integrating them selectively, and with adaptations, into their own structures of complex societies. I believe this idea is quite new among historians, and I intend to argue strongly for it with support from the new work in ancillary fields noted above.” Michael Vickery, Research Proposal, International Institute for Asian Studies

The situation, at least for Champa, doesn’t appear to have changed much in 45 years. Things move slowly. But note too that he says the theory that Austronesians were in control of shipping through the straights and were responsible for bringing Indian religion, script and statecraft to the region is new. Wolters towards the end of Early Indonesian Commerce suggests as much, and I have certainly read versions of this thesis in books published in the 80’s, so I’m not sure what’s so new about it. Perhaps it is a question of degree. But at this point, ‘Indianization’ is hardly a controversial subject, it is rather a matter of complexity. Undoubtedly Hindu and Buddhist culture came to the region. If it wasn’t through direct colonization, and it wasn’t a case of parallel, autochtonous duplication, then clearly there was an ongoing process of cultural exchange. I am more interested in reading the details of that exchange rather than polemics as to whether it occurred or not and what it means about you as a scholar and person if you believe it occurred in one way as opposed to another. I suppose in 500 years scholars will wonder how it came about that the dominant religion among American poets of the 20^th century was Buddhism, or why Americans came to cook Chinese food in their homes when people of Chinese descent represent such a small proportion of the population. But the potato, the chili pepper and the tomato are all new world crops that spread around the globe much faster than the people from these places. Has anyone suggested that the Incas colonized Ireland? I remember once eating in a little Chinese takeout joint in Port Huron, MI with my then little children. We were starving and furiously tucked into our Lo Mein with chopsticks. The woman who gave us our food stared at us with astonishment. When we were done she asked, “You are from New York?”

Everyone who makes their mark in SEA history does so by denouncing previous efforts. Many of the established historians working in the field today, Vickery not excepted, cut their teeth on the Cold War, its politics, its distortions. They are given to polemic, if not diatribe, and they have the habit of moral superiority and indignation. While engage and en garde this is exciting, but it can distract.

This is from Robert Brown’s 1996 The Dvaravati Wheels of the Law and the Indianization of South East Asia (Volume 18 of Studies in Asian Art and Archaeology, Jan Fontein ed., E.J Brill, 1996) http://www.amazon.com/Dvaravati-Wheels-Indianization-Studies-Archaeology/dp/9004104356 :

“Dvaravati is a culture that lasted some 400 years, from the seventh through the tenth century C.E. It encompassed most of present day Thailand and is associated with extensive artistic and architectural remains. Yet, it is almost totally without a history. Not one monument or art object is dated. There are no indigenous texts associated with Dvaravati. While there are a few Dvaravati, these are almost exclusively religious, consisting mostly of quotations from standard Indian texts. The only other written information regarding the culture comes from some brief references in Chinese histories….”

“The way in which Indian culture moved into South East Asia and the process by which it was adopted and changed by the local population has been the focus of extensive research for a century. This scholarship lies at the very heart of our understanding of South East Asian civilization, particularly up to 1000 C.E. The general shift over this period of scholarship has been from regarding South East Asia as an extension of Indian culture to viewing it as strongly autonomous, with its own indigenous and well-developed, pre-Indianized culture. I will argue that it is both and thus neither. Indian culture was not transplanted to grow uninfluenced by the South East Asian soil in which it was planted. Nor is it quite right to envision India as supplying the forms in which South East Asian concepts could be clothed, new wine in old bottles. The distinction between form and content was never that distinct. There was almost always a mixing of both Indian form and content with indigenous form and content….”

“….My assumption that early South East Asian culture is best understood in interdisciplinary and intercultural terms leads me to cross disciplinary borders—history, urban and state development, textual and inscriptional analysis, religious studies—using these not as subsidiary areas to that of art history, but as central arguments….

“Two themes that arise consistently in my analysis are a blurring of categories and an attempt to define a non-Western psychology. Both themes are reactions to typical Western reductive or universalizing analysis based on dichotomous polarities. Interdisciplinary and intercultural understanding is rather in the direction of honoring otherness rather than in universalizing and totalizing narratives. Otherness here means either pre-Indian influenced or localized (local meanings formed using Indic notions) South East Asian meanings.

I’ve just started to poke around this book. It was written 9 years before Vickery’s research proposal, and his project seems to be dictated by the concerns expressed by MacDonald back in 1961. The literature is replete with such musings. It is what interests me I suppose. This territory, so well-charted by all the world’s empires, is still terra incognito. But if I may be permitted a personal plea (and I mean NO disrespect): Messrs. Southworth and Vickery, and all you others, please, write a work of general, detailed history about the lives and languages of the areas you study. Not just wars and lists of ‘Indianized’ Kings, of course; but not just revised sequences of pottery shards and petrified pollen either. What goop was in the bowl? Were there markets? Why did the Rhade crown the King? Who rode the war elephants? Why did the Chinese Emperor release the parrot? Why the hell are some of those pottery shards Graeco-Roman? Were Graeco-Romans hanging out with the Possu and the Arabs in Zabag? Did they stop off at Oc Eo, visit Funan, dine with the Dons of Champa? If they weren’t this then what were they? Were they That? It is a general problem: the problem of antithesis. It is not enough to end with what things were not.

1. The brief re-conquest of Vietnam by China under the MIng and Vietnam’s successful rebellion in 1428, leading to the establishment of the Le Dynasty and a meritocratic, bureaucratic state rooted in Neo-Confucianist doctrine. This ideology existed often and mostly as an ideal, competing with the realities of land-based, aristocratic military rule.
2. The Ha Tien, or Vietnamese March South. The Vietnamese government began the practice, which would continue into the late 20th century, of settling demobilized soldiers and criminals as well as outlaws and people looking to escape from the villages of the north on ‘frontier’ lands of the south. The Le dynasty became a shell, behind which two families contended for power, the Trinh and the Nguyen. The Cham retreated farther and farther south, losing one battle after another. Eventually there are two Vietnamese courts, one in Hanoi, controlled by the Trinh, and one in Hue, established by Nguyen Anh, who feigned madness to avoid being murdered by his uncle. In elicits punning (to be exploited later, and shamelessly) on Strategic Hamlets.
3. The Tayson Rebellion of 1771, when the Tayson brothers rose up to defeat both the Trinh and the Nguyen. The rebellion lasted 30 years and ended in defeat for the Taysons, but many events and ideas of the time provide tantalizing glimpses of the future. The Taysons were commoners and nationalists and conceived of modernizing schemes. One of them was to make Chu Nom, the Vietnamese invented alphabet, based on Chinese characters, the national language. They also employed Chinese pirates to be their official navy, about which one of the most fascinating studies I have ever read was written, by Diane H. Murray, Pirates of the South China Sea.
4. With the defeat of the Taysons begins the Nguyen Dynasty, based in Hue, which for the first time rules over not just a united Vietnam, but a Vietnam that includes the Mekong Delta. This area had before the Taysons been dominated by the Khmers and the Cham, though it was sparsely populated. (Li Tana has several books about the 18th and 19th centuries in the southern part of Vietnam). It’s at this point, in 1834, that Vietnam becomes a genuine colonial power in its own right, invading Cambodia and imposing upon it Vietnamese customs, using the same language of cultural superiority the Chinese (and later, the French) used of them. In 1851 the Cambodians overthrew the Vietnamese with French assistance. Had the French not intervened Cambodia most likely would have been divided between Thailand and Vietnam.

Wheatley, Paul.
The Golden Khersonese; studies in the historical geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500.
Kuala Lumpur, University of Malaya Press, 1961.
xxxiii, 388 p. illus., maps (part fold.) 23 cm.

Wolters, O. W.
Early Indonesian commerce: a study of the origins of SriÌvijaya.
Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press [1967]
404 p. maps. 24 cm.

Wolters Obituary link: http://einaudi.cornell.edu/SoutheastAsia/outreach/SEAPbulletin/bulletin_sp02/SEAPBulletinSpring2002.pdf

Before Paul Wheatley’s The Golden Khersonese there was Wang Gungwu’s The Nanhai Trade. Following these works was O.W. Wolter’s Early Indonesian Commerce. These three works, written between 1958 and 1963, are pivotal in the evolution of South East Asian Studies away from Sino- and Indocentric, Great Civilization histories and towards what would become Area Studies, histories written from the perspectives of the various peoples of South East Asia.

Beginning in the 1930’s, writers like JC van Leur, 1908-1942, (On Early Indonesian Trade, and other writings, translated into English and compiled under the title, Indonesian Trade and Society in 1954) and Paul Mus, 1902-1969 ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mus, and: http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/pdf/10.1525/vs.2009.4.1.145 ), were exploring Southeast Asian history and society from the point of view of those countries themselves. Van Leur is said to have introduced sociological and economic theory into his studies, whereas before most writing had been confined to descriptive art history and archaeology. At the same time, Georges Coedes (http://www.nla.gov.au/asian/form/coedes2.html ), with his paleographic and multi-linguistic researches into Angkor, Funan, Chenla, Champa, Majapahit, Srivijaya etc., was laying the groundwork for his, and other traditional historians (like DGE Hall, to whom Early Indonesian Commerce is dedicated), later syntheses, resulting in books like the monumental (and for 40 years, standard textbook on the region) Les états Hindouisés d’Indochine et d’Indonésie (published in French, in Hanoi, in 1944, and translated into English in 1968).

Coedes and Hall and others of their generation thought and wrote, like the Chinese historians, in terms of empires, kings and capitals. Coedes advanced the thesis that India and China brought civilization to this part of the world by directly colonizing it, a view expanded upon by Indian historians like Majumdar. Before the Indian colonization of the Austronesian world, according to this line of thinking, people there were ruled by petty chieftains who had no ability to organize beyond tribal affiliation, and were certainly not capable of the advanced art, architecture, trade and learning that were in slight but undeniable evidence in Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia. And there were grounds for thinking this. The earliest remains of writing in the region are either in Chinese or Sanskrit-based scripts. The religions were Buddhism and various forms of Hinduism and related tantric traditions. Government structure, law, mythology, literature, court dress and decorative motifs were seen as being inferior derivatives of Indian originals, brought by Brahmin colonizers. Coedes et al were merely writing about that part of the world the way any sane person would have written about Europe: the history of the spread of great civilizations out of Greece, Rome and, later, Christendom.

But India and China were also the engines of trade, and it is easy to see events in the South China Sea as being shaped by the needs of these two giants. In 1958 Wang Gungwu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Gungwu) published The Nanhai Trade, which charts the early history of trade along the South China Coast, from the area of Canton down through Vietnam and the Cham lands. He relates events in this region, which was colonized and dominated by China to varying degrees from the Han Dynasty on, to the major events affecting the empire to the north, and explains the development of the sea trade as being an indigenous activity that expanded and contracted in response to courtly demand and conditions on the overland route, the Silk Road. By indigenous he means people who were not yet Chinese. He defines a cultural region, locates it on the one hand at the periphery of the Chinese world, and on the other as being at the center of a world of commerce, radiating out towards the Philippines to the east and Vietnam, Linyi and Champa to the west and south. The Canton region comes alive with Persian and Arab traders, Yueh ships engaged in short term trading and raiding. What he describes is a freewheeling, rebellious and cosmopolitan world in constant flux. The Nanhai Trade is a short, perfectly narrated history, suggestive of much detail but disciplined in its refusal to speculate.

Wang (who is still alive) was born in Indonesia of a Chinese family and has spent his entire career teaching in Malaysia and Singapore. He is the first major native historian of the region I’ve read. His later work has been about overseas Chinese, not the early history of Asia. This sets him apart from the other authors here, and it perhaps accounts for both the perspective and importance of his book. When The Nanhai Trade was reprinted in 1998 he decided it needed no revision, though he did not agree with everything he had written. It is a testament to his good judgment, then and now. The book’s strengths of adherence to fact, of modest interpretation and of breadth of conception in such a short space remain, and Wang’s book, like the others I’m considering, appears in nearly every bibliography I have read relating to the period and subject. It is still impossible to write intelligibly about the region and trade without reference to this book.

I have written about Wheatley in another post, so I will only say here that his work of historical geography followed some years later and established the toponyms, at least provisionally, that had been argued about for a century. He built on Coedes extraordinary scholarship and through scrupulous and close reading proposed locations along the coasts of the Malaysian Peninsula, Java and Sumatra that could be reconciled with the practical exigencies of a flourishing sea trade. This act of naming is essential in establishing a local and regional history. It restores the names to the land, a land that due to climate consumes so much that in other places would remain to tell the story of its people. It takes what had become a dry and contentious argument among amateur and professional scholars about the meaning and pronunciation of words into the real world. It set the ground for what would become a boom in Area Studies, an increasingly particular, granular study of the region, with local language and custom moving to the fore. And it allowed Wolters to locate Srivijaya in the 7th century on the coast of Sumatra, in the modern cities of Palembang and Jambi.

In 1918 Coedes proposed that the toponym Srivijaya, found on stone inscriptions, was the same place as the Chinese San Fo Chi. But where Srivijaya actually was, was in dispute. Wolters sets out to describe what was happening on the other end of the Nanhai trade. What was being traded to China and by whom? The answer is that the natives of the river mouths and harbours of Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Malaysia, the Malays and others, were storing and transporting goods that at first came from India, Persia and Arabia: frankincense, myrrh and other pine resins in particular. Later, they began substituting exotic forest products of their own, which the Chinese in turn began to demand in their own right. And the first polity to really seize control of this trade was Srivijaya. He traces the rise of Srivijaya by closely reading Chinese medicinal writings in addition to the usual dynastic histories, with their tribute missions and brief anthropological descriptions of exotic natives. And he also draws heavily on I Tsing’s account of living in Palembang in 671, which was at the time a lively center of Buddhist learning.

Wolters was a remarkable man, and I have included a link to a lengthy obituary in the online publication of the South East Asia Program (SEAP) at Cornell, where he taught from 1964 till he retired in the late 80’s. I did not know him or meet him but every day he arrived here at Olin Library, his hat mashed down on his head. Wolters, like Paul Mus, George Coedes, and JC Van Leur, was a civil servant. In his case he was stationed in Malaysia from 1937-1957 when he retired and returned with his wife to England. He was interred by the Japanese during the war and after the war was deeply involved with the Malayan Emergency, a communist insurgency that the British spent 10 years fighting. That war has been often cited as the model for a successful anti-insurgency campaign, most recently in discussions about Iraq. Wolters was fluent in Malaysian and Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin). He had studied the early history of the region, such as it was known, in the 1930’s. All of this indicates that regardless of how one views the politics of anti-insurgency, the success of such a policy depends upon having civil servants and military leaders who are knowledgeable and sympathetic to the culture, history, language and concerns of the people. Mus, for instance, lived through the Japanese occupation of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life after the war as a fierce opponent of French Colonial rule. Van Leur was killed in the Battle of the Java Sea.

Wolters went on to do much more important work. After writing a second book on Indonesia, The Fall of Srivijaya and the Malay World he made a major theoretical contribution to Asian Studies with his concept of the mandala state and charismatic leadership. He then went on to literary-historical studies, reading Vietnamese poems written by court officials in 13th century, Tran Dynasty Viet Nam. Anyone interested in his later work will be able to read it in publications of Cornell’s SEAP, where you will also find posted a downloadable PDF of an incomplete, unpublished manuscript on Tran Vietnam he left. I will of course discuss his work on Viet Nam later.

The movement towards specific, local histories and the endless debates about Orientalism that have characterized the past 30 years of Asian Studies opens up the question of parochialism and nationalism taking the place of the big and meaningless generalities, the Super Power centrisms of the past. A later generation of researchers has and is discovering broader, more unifying concepts, again focusing on trade and state formation. Anthony Reid and Viktor Lieberman come to mind. They are bringing a world systems perspective to the empirical findings earlier writers, expanding the regional context to include events in Africa, Europe and the Americas, only this time as an actor and contributor to world culture and not just as a passive recipient of more advanced technologies and ideologies developed elsewhere. But that statement in itself is an abstraction and gets me away from the primary concern here, the history of Vietnam and Champa. About which, more later.

THE STONES OF AUSTRONESIA

Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula

By Paul Michel Munoz

Editions Didier Millet

Singapore

2006

Southeast Asia

from prehistory to history

Edited by Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood

RoutledgeCurzon

New York and Oxford

2004

I have been reading in Bellwood and Glover’s book Southeast Asia: From Pre-History to History and in Paul Munoz’s Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula about the migration of the Austronesians out of southern China and across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Austronesian speakers dominate islands from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east. They left their homeland about 4 or 5 thousand years ago and their first stop was Taiwan, where there is still a small Austronesian population. From there they went to the Philippines, Borneo, and the Indonesian Archipelago. In 500 BC or so they landed in Central Vietnam, where they would become known as the Cham. The Cham were isolated in a sea of Austroasiatic speakers. To the south and east the Austronesians met the larger indigenous populations of Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands, where they had less of an impact.

The Austronesians brought with them rice agriculture, building with stone, head hunting, superior seafaring abilities, matrilinear descent and a loose political organization. Of these, rice is by far the greatest inheritance, though all of the latter are in evidence in one place or another.

There is far more to rice than the social sciences suggest; there is the taste of rice. We not only eat Arborio rice from Italy (a medium-grained variety with more gluten than the usual long grained rice, hence the oozy, creamy texture of risotto) but Spanish Callaspara and Bomba rices for paella, jasmine rice from Thailand and basmati rice from India. My food coop also carries small packets of Bhutanese rice, red rice and black rice.

When I was in Asia, each of these types of rice was unique to a region. I only ate black rice in Bali, where there was a small wayung in the town of Ubud run by a woman who made black rice pudding with fresh papaya and mango for breakfast. Now this appears on the menus of many different Asian restaurants, and you can buy purple or black sticky rice in any Asian grocery. Like snow in Ireland, black rice is general all over Asia. Sticky rice was common in Thailand as a sweet snack, wrapped in a bamboo or banana leaf, secured with a toothpick, but it was only eaten with a meal in mountainous areas of the north and northeast. (While tripping on mushrooms in Koh Samui I stepped on a sweet rice confection and couldn’t get it off of my foot. Later that day, sitting on the beach, I felt a hot burning liquid pour down my back and was sure I had been shot, but it turned out to be a German Shepard taking a piss on me).

Red rice I had in the Philippines, while staying in an Ifugao village. The Ifugao are a fascinating people. As I said in an earlier post, they live among stone rice terraces built three thousand years ago, in the remote mountains of northern Luzon. They have been raising rice there for millennia. Just as the Andes serve as a genetic bank for wild and domestic potato varieties, so does this part of the Philippines for rice. The Ifugao have traditionally lived on rice and whatever they could hunt, but there is nothing much left to hunt, so that leaves rice, sweet potato and tinned fish.

The Ifugao use of stone is amazing. Their villages are paved with stone, there are sacrificial stone circles of stone, and there are those amazing stone rice terraces. And there is the rice. Our guide promised to feed us, but when it came to meal time there wasn’t a whole lot to eat. A local (and horrible) American missionary explained that they (missionaries) had tried to get people to raise and eat chickens, pigs and goats. These animals were certainly everywhere, as was their fecal matter. The village we stayed in was beautifully laid out in stone, with thatched roof dwellings on stilts, a lovely shallow river for bathing. But the ‘sidewalks’ were treacherous, and the pigs would literally try to eat the shit as it dropped from your ass to the ground. The customs of the people made it almost impossible for them to kill and eat these animals. They would not eat the eggs even because the chickens were so valuable. They were saving the animals up for feasts. Or so the missionary explained. Peter Gatig, our guide, simply opened cans of sardines and put them on to rice. But oh, the rice! Each evening he would have brought to us a large basket of fresh, perfectly cooked rice. He was extremely proud explaining to us what type of rice it was and when it was harvested. Each night it looked and tasted different. The meal I remember most was of red rice, which was pinkish red when cooked and had an incredible nutty, sweet flavor. To accompany this fine rice Peter brought us a special treat, pickled pork. He described how this pork, which was reserved for important occasions, was placed in an earthenware jar and buried in the ground with salt and spices. He opened the jar and gave each of us a small piece the meat. The Ifugao lands are located in the valleys of a large mountain chain and the air is chilly and damp in the evening. It took a while for the odor of the pork to diffuse but when it did it turned out to be the most foul smelling thing imaginable; a sharp, nose piercing stench that soon covered the tongue (without having taken a bite) with a slick of rot. We were too polite not to try a bite, though I am sure Laura and Shelly only brought it to their mouths and pretended to chew, whereas Bob and I actually ate it. Or so I thought. I ate it. It tasted as bad as it smelled and when I was done I smiled at Peter. He said, “Wasn’t that good?” I assured him that it was. Despite the fact that I was the only one to actually eat a chunk, I was the only one who could speak enough to pretend it was delicious. “Would you like another piece then?” He smiled sheepishly as he said this; it was after all very special. “OK,” I said, and to this day I can taste it going down with all of that wonderful rice.

Glover and Bellwood’s Southeast Asia is a collection of scholarly articles written by archaeologists and anthropologists, but is intended for all sorts of readers. It reaches no stylistic heights nor is there a single unifying perspective. It moves from an area perspective to studies of specific regions and its chief virtue is that in a constantly changing field it is new and thorough. The entries on Vietnam are somewhat limited by the ideological framework of Vietnamese social science. The chapter on the Chams, written by William A. Southworth was quite good, as is his dissertation, which I will write about in a later post.

Paul Michel Munoz’s Early Kingdoms is the opposite of the above work. Munoz is an autodidact and his book is a synthetic, narrative history of a region, centered on Srivijaya. This is not an easy history to tell, and he draws heavily on the work of Bellwood and Glover, as well as other authors from that volume. The English could have benefited from a little editing, but I enjoyed reading the book and again, because it is up to date, it is a little less nerve-wracking than older works.

Austronesian is, in the end, a language group. Studying ‘Austronesians’ is a bit like studying ‘Indo Europeans’ say. It is too general. But like the Turks of Central Asia, or the people of the Steppes who periodically swept across Europe to become Celts, Vikings etc. they are a fascinating people who have shaped the modern world, and yet there are few people, outside of specialists, who know anything about them. Of course, I should say that there are few Americans, because those who make up Austronesia or live on its borders know their own history.

STUDIES IN THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE
MALAY PENINSULA BEFORE A.D. 1500

By Paul Wheatley

Kuala Lumpur
University of Malaya Press
1961

An historical geography, in the hands of the right author, is an instance of what I would call the poetry of fact. Most poets are attracted to nonfiction. Blaise Cendrars, the great French writer, traveler, rogue, raconteur, said somewhere (I’m guessing his Paris Review interview, but who knows) that if a person reads for two hours a day and writes for two hours a day he will be able to read most of the great works and will certainly leave behind a substantial body of work. The rest of the time he is free to be a vagabond, or jewel thief, or commissioner of agriculture. He also said that among his favorite works were shipping logs. Cendrars was a poet in love with travel, with absurd journeys, with treks and adventures. He was quite young when he traveled through Siberia and wrote a poem about it in the lilting rhythm and clack of the Tran Siberian railway. He also lied quite a bit, or fabricated. His real adventures, in the Amazon, in America, in Russia, are as fantastic as his invented ones. This is the way it goes.

I’ve never had the patience for ships logs, but Paul Wheatley does and in his Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 we have before us a beautiful book of translated quotations from Chinese encyclopedias; traveler’s accounts written by itinerant would-be Arhats, roving the seas between China, Sri Lanka and India, resting for a while in the city states of Srivijaya to soak up the local store of Buddhist text and wisdom; of Greek shipping guides, Roman geographies, Indian inscriptions and Arabian pilot manuals. Many of these give longitude and latitude figures as well as detailed sailing instructions which bear no immediate relationship to current notions of geography. Place names must be transliterated and reconciled. Verbally described land and sea features visualized and mapped. It is painstaking work in a half dozen languages describing a world that did not describe itself till late in the period, and where few archaeological remains survive.

A geography such as Wheatley’s forms the analytic basis for later syntheses. It exists to be corrected and even refuted, but it exists, logical, precise about its imprecision, dispassionate and objective. Here is the second paragraph of his preface:

“In Malaya the face of the country is a far less valuable document than in some temperate lands such as Europe or North China. The ravages of climate, insects and moulds and the erosive power of equatorial rainfall combine with the phenomenally rapid deposition of alluvium to obliterate the imprint of man’s occupance almost at the moment when he relinquishes his tenure of the soil and go far to thwart the subtlest investigation of the archaeologist. There are no features in the Malayan landscape comparable, for example, with the lynchets of the European chalklands, the ‘lost’ villages and fossilized shots of the English Midlands or the abandoned settlements of eastern Siam, while there are no ecclesiastical or administrative units from this early period to manifest Malay preoccupation with soil and landform such as is betrayed by the shape of the English parish, or, from a later date, the seigniories of Lower Canada.”

Here is a description of the terrain, from the introduction:

“The exceptional strategic advantages of the Peninsula during the early period were hardly matched by its intrinsic resources so that the rulers of the city-states which grew up there were seldom able fully to exploit their nodality in regard to South-East Asia. The tectonic skeleton of the Peninsula consists of a series of coulisses, arranged in echelon and in an arcuate form convex westwards. In the narrow isthmian tracts the topography is moulded by a succession of low corridors running between ridges which are set obliquely to the trend of the coasts, so that easily traversable trans-peninsular routes have been channeled towards well-marked foci…. In the southern and broader half of the Peninsula the coulisses develop into a mountain system in which eight sub-parallel ranges can be distinguished. The main watershed lies nearer the west coast than the east and includes five of the six highest peaks of the Peninsula. Towards the south the coulisses are progressively less emphatic and present fewer obstacles to trans-peninsular communication…. In the northern two-thirds of the peninsula massive limestones present typical karstic scenery with caves and rock-shelters, swallow-holes and serrated pinnacles. In the isthmian region isolated limestone cliffs, preserved by some accident of denudation not yet elucidated and rising sheer from the ground sometimes for several hundred feet, are characteristic features of the landscape. These mountain ranges, then, constitute the bones of the Malay Peninsula, but the starkness of the skeleton is mitigated to a very considerable extant by a mantle of alluvium which, ranging in width from a few hundred yards to forty miles in parts of the south, extends from the coast in an almost unbroken belt and tongues up the valleys far into the foothills of the central ranges. On such alluvial plains as these grew up the isthmian city-states of the first millennium A.D…, but the scattered and discontinuous arrangement of the lowlands prohibited the emergence of a central power controlling the whole area.”

Wheatley is fundamental to a basic understanding of how the material conditions of South-East Asia shaped the destiny of its people. His prose is the opposite of Schaefer’s, which is infused with the languid, decadent rhythms of English Romanticism, and yet it soars above the functional analysis of Bray’s. The objective, descriptive prose of the scientist in his hands is transformed into the poetic, which of course demands its own precision.

The Malay Peninsula lies midway between India and China. The next port of call is the south central coast of modern day Viet Nam, where the ancient kingdom of Champa lay, also subject to a scattered and discontinuous topography.

The Rice Economies

By Francesca Bray

Basil Blackwell Ltd 1986

http://www.amazon.com/Rice-Economies-Francesca-Bray/dp/B001Q1YHAG/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233256698&sr=1-6

Just as any study of Vietnam in some way begins with Chinese written sources, any understanding of Vietnam must begin with rice. And the book on rice I started with is Francesca Bray’s The Rice Economies. Bray is not a great stylist or anything, but she is concise and interesting enough to hold my attention. Now, I must own up to be the kind of person who experiences great joy at the prospect of a short (but thorough) book on a major grain. I read with rapt attention the New Yorker articles on the world’s major food crops published decades (I assume, but it may be years) ago. In narrating the history of rice she narrates the history of all the civilizations it fed and gave rise to. She takes you to the dry, upland fields in Shan Burma and to the Mekong Delta where 19^th Century technology made poldered fields and hence, drainage, possible in environments where it wasn’t before. She gives you rice in all of its varieties, long, medium, short, sweet and glutinous, japonica or indica. Her bibliography alone is a cornucopia of obscure and moving works relating to risiculture. We are treated to vanished inland empires, civilizations that rise to construct elaborate irrigation systems, maintained by corvee labour, only to fall apart into isolated, sedimented networks of paddy fields ruled over by petty chieftans.

Bray wrote the volume on agriculture for Joseph Needham’s god-like endeavor, The History of Science and Technology in China:

http://www.amazon.com/Science-Civilisation-China-Biological-Agriculture/dp/0521250765/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233256655&sr=1-2

so this volume is her brief epoch, her Milton not her Jerusalem.

She begins her story of rice with petrified grains and pollen found in archaeological sites in South China and a broad swath of mountainous terrain stretching from Assam to Hanoi, and ends with the super crop devised in the Philippines and disseminated by American Agri-bureaucrats. (I have omitted her notes in the following).

“The origins of domesticated Asian rice are still undetermined, but the distribution of wild rices…suggest a centre, or centres, of domestication somewhere in the piedmont zone of Assam, Upper Burma and Thailand, Southwest China and Vietnam. There is linguistic and ethnographic evidence to suggest that the earliest staple foods grown in monsoon Asia were tuber crops and millets…The earliest archaeological finds of domesticated rice to date come from China…[and]…has been carbon-dated to about 5000 BC; the sheer volume of rice remains shows that the villagers were not proto-farmers but relied heavily on cultivated rice as a food supply….

“…Gorman suggests that the domestication of rice began in naturally marshy areas in upland Southeast Asia about 9,000 years ago and that, as their skills improved, early rice-farmers were able to occupy non-marshy sites….Such an hypothesis seems consistent with the evidence from China and Thailand, and from Vietnam, where wet-rice cultivation was established in the red River Delta by the mid-third millennium BC or perhaps earlier….”

The Natural Characteristics of Rice:

“Rice is by nature a swamp plant, and by far the greatest number of varieties are grown in standing water, but there are also dry rices which are grown on steeply sloping hillside fields. Generally speaking, dry or hill rice varieties will not grow in wet fields, nor can wet rices be grown in upland fields….It has been suggested that dry-rice cultivation developed earlier than wet, on the grounds that the techniques involved are less complex, but most botanists reject this on morphological grounds. Hill rice can only be grown by systems of shifting cultivation and does not, therefore, provide a suitable base for the development of complex technical systems or of the related social and economic organizations….”

This is an elegant demonstration of materialist history, the poetry of fact.

“Rice is an extremely adaptable plant, with an efficient system of air passages connecting the roots and the shoot which enables it to grow in dry upland soils, in irrigated fields, or along flooded river-beds. It is largely self-pollinated, but cross-pollination does occur…and a very large number of wild varieties exists.”

Like so much in the story of Vietnam (like its language) and Southeast Asia in general, rice is not easily categorized:

“Among the Asian domesticated rices, Oryza sativa, two sub-species are commonly distinguished, indica and japonica, both of which include glutinous and non-glutinous varieties…..The contrasts which most immediately strike the non-specialist are that indica rices have longer, more slender grains which usually remain separate when cooked, while japonicas have shorter, rounder and more translucent grains which quickly become slightly sticky….But some Asian rices, notably those of Indonesia, do not seem to conform to either category, and in 1958 a third sub-group named javanica was proposed to designate the bulu and gundil varieties of Indonesia.

“In China both indica and japonica varieties have been grown since Neolithic times. The earliest Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi of AD 100, was the first work to contain the terms geng and xian which have been used to designate japonica and indica rices in Chinese ever since.”

“Rice has a number of advantages compared with many other food crops. First, it is very palatable, and is the only cereal which can simply be boiled and eaten without disintegrating into mush.”

The wide variety of rices (the ripening period varies from 90 to 260 days!) allows poor farmers to spread their risk out by planting different types. Some varieties ripen quickly with light rain, others take a longer period of time. Moreover, in tropical climates it is possible to get 2 or 3 crops a year. Farmers can assist each other in the harvest as different paddies reach maturity at different times, and in the off-season work to keep irrigation ditches and canals in good repair. Rice agriculture as it has been practiced over the millennia has not only encouraged cooperative labour practices but also sound organic practices: “If the field is continuously planted with wet rice its fertility, unlike that of dry fields, will not diminish over time even if few or no fertilizers are used, for the nutrient content of the irrigation water, together with the nitrogenising power of the naturally occurring algae, are sufficient to maintain regular returns from traditional rice varieties.” And it is also versatile: sometimes rice paddies are drained for part of the year and planted with wheat, vegetables or tobacco.

I spent some time in Asia in the early eighties and saw plenty of rice paddies. In Bali our boiled drinking water was drawn directly from the irrigation canals and the bottom layer of each bottle had a sludge of dead insects. There is a story told in some book that in the 50’s agricultural experts persuaded Balinese peasants to abandon their traditional cultic methods of planting and harvesting rice (the ritual calendar determined every stage of agricultural production) and adopt modern, scientific methods. Their yields declined. What the experts failed to notice was that Balinese ritual encoded millennia of empirical data for the planting and maintenance of wet rice agriculture.

Wet rice agriculture is one of the great, monumental achievements of human beings. At its height, the Chinese system was an integrated organic social construct: fish, ducks and water buffalo (used for ploughing) nourished the paddies with their manure and kept them free of insects. Mulberry trees retained the walls and provided silk. Peasants could eat the ducks and paddy fish. It was a self-sustaining system, the intentional creation of humans working over generations at selecting varieties, developing small hand operated pumps and water wheels, at organizing labour, at maximizing yield without destroying the environment.

On that trip to Asia I visited one of the rice marvels of the world, the Ifugao rice terraces of northern Luzon. They were built by people 3,000 years ago out of stone. The terraces hug emerald mountains in concentric bands that mirror the sky and sun. To gaze from a height into a valley of these terraces was to be lost in the vertiginous vision of fused geometric form and organic function. Moreover, the Ifugao live in a remote and rugged part of northern Luzon, accessible only by foot. The villagers at that time were badly degraded, humiliated by all the horrors of the modern world without the benefits. The Ifugao were warriors and hunters, but alas, there were no more wars and nothing to hunt. Women did most of the work while men watched the children in villages made of stone paths and walls with traditional thatched huts on stilts. The most depressing thing of all was entering a village of several hundred people only to discover that 4 different christian sects and their pernicious missionaries were warring over the souls of people with their own gods and beliefs, who had tilled the land starting a thousand years before christ was a whisper in mary’s ear.

I have only quoted a little from The Rice Economies. But as I have suggested, the book is rich in content and moves beyond the analytical description of rice and the history of risiculture towards the sociology of rice and how the rice economies have features unique to them that are of more than historical interest. Rice both supported and required large populations and this affected the technologies, techniques, and social structures of rice based civilization. Problems that had technological solutions in the west had sociological ones in the east. It is a cliché that the west and east are fundamentally different, and this cliché has spurred from the earliest days of contact an interest, a fascination in the west with what is perceived to be a superior civilization in China, India and Japan. Whether it is The Art of War, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Tao of Physics or Dharma Bums, whether it is Leibnitz or Emerson, Plato, Alexander, Marco Polo or Macrobiotics, the Japanese Way of management, the Kama Sutra, or the Baghavad Gita quoted in the first bloom of nuclear war, we have gone to the east for compensatory wisdom, and found it. The story of rice is fraught with the story of tyranny and I don’t think we will discover virtues on the other side of the Urals and Himalayas that are not to be found here. But as a practical matter, the conservative land based civilizations of Asia have preserved until recently one of their many great accretative monuments, just as we have done here with the scientific revolution, and that is Rice Agriculture as an environmental, economic, social and spiritual phenomenon. Food is the spirit, and how that food is produced and consumed feeds the daily toil of life in every way. Today, after so much else in all of our worlds has fallen to the for-profit-only guillotine, the rice paddies remain, but they are embattled. Bray’s book tells this story much better than I can.

So, how does all this relate to Vietnam? All in good time, all in good time.

For more about rice, go here: http://ricewisdom.org/