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Further India / Indo-China - History

For the most part histories of Indo-China are little more than disjointed assemblages of country histories. This is unfortunate, because upon closer examination it becomes clear that it is nearly impossible to write a history of one of these countries without writing a history of all of them. The modern "nation" states of Indo-China remain works in progress, with core dominant nationalities surrounded by peripheries of minority nationalities. Today's borders are of quite recent origin, and unlike those of a France or Spain, reflect little enduring historical reality. While there has been a tendency for states to arise along the Irrawaddy, Chao Praya, Mekong, and Red Rivers, as these states expanded into empires they knew no such natural or national boundaries.

The prehistoric period of Further India is shrouded in gloom, though a few vague and general indications may be derived from the sciences of comparative philology and anthropology. Past cultural development occurred in settlements that were usually located in river basins and estuaries, especially along the Great Mekong River. Different ancient tribes and nations also settled and developed their cultures along other river branches in the plains flanked by mountain ranges running from north to south. Since the region borders India and China, the original cultures in this area were influenced by both Indian and Chinese civilizations.

From the earliest times the great peninsula which lies between India and China and is known as Further India, has been peculiarly subject to foreign intrusion. Successive waves of Mongolian humanity have broken over it from the north, Dravidians from India have colonised it, Buddhist missions from Ceylon have penetrated it and buccaneers from the islands in the south have invaded it. Race has fought against race, tribe against tribe, and clan against clan. Predominant powers have arisen and declined. Civilisations have grown up, flourished and faded.

The most important source of knowledge upon the affairs of Further India in those ages is Ptolemy's description of the world, dating from the first half of the second century AD. Ptolemy reports that in his time the coast-line of Further India was inhabited throughout its length by the Sindoi (Hindus). As their importance in IndoChina was at that time great enough for the Alexandrine geographer to describe as a race of wide distribution, the advance of Hindu civilisation must have taken place at least some centuries previously. The Gulf of Ligor and the banks of the great rivers of Cambodia seem to have been the central points of Brahmanical influence. From Upper Burmah to Cochin-China countless temple-ruins are to be found at the present day, with rich ornamental sculptures and Sanskrit inscriptions, bearing evidence to the force of the Brahmanical influences in earlier ages.

The kings and kingdoms of Indochina were culturally and politically influenced from India. Tenets of religion and structures of governance flowed from India into the settled agricultural states along the great rivers of the region. Indian culture came across the seas, borne by the monsoons, as early as the 6th century BC. Hindic culture‘s developed medical arts and abundant trade provided access to leaders and communities along the coasts and river ways of Southeast Asia. Hinduism influenced the arts, commerce, and law. Brahmans brought Sanskrit texts on ritual and government, introducing Southeast Asia‘s first written language. Yet Hinduism‘s charac-teristic social constructs of caste and the subordinaterole of women were not adopted in Southeast Asia.

Buddha started the enlightenment of India and his emissaries were spreading over the east of Asia. Buddhism advanced to Indo-China by two routes. The first led straight from India and Ceylon to the opposite coast in the 5th century AD. Subsequently, however, the Northern or Sanskrit developments of Buddhism had advanced to Further India by way of Central and Eastern Asia. Their advance of the Thai peoples (Laos, Shans and Siamese) about the end of the first and second centuries AD implies a definite retrogression on the part of Brahmanism in IndoChina. Buddhism added additional layers of meaning, social structure, and links to India. The exchange of missionaries, pilgrims, and teachers brought Buddhist thought which overlay the Hindu foundations. The scripts of the Southeast Asian languages (except Vietnamese) were all derived from the Indic family of Brahmi scripts.

As early as the sixth-century BC, Indian traders, driven by monsoon winds, traveled to the coasts of the Shrikshetra (Burma/Myanmar), Dvaravati (Thailand), Funan (Cambodia), and Champa (central coastal Vietnam). These contacts brought Sanskrit as the language for ritual and learning. For 600, years the Indic world brought a holistic structure of social and political life that foundroot in the growing Kingdoms of the realm. In Cambodia alone did Brahmanism maintain its position for a time, as is evidenced by the buildings and inscriptions from the 6th to the 13th centuries.

Chinese historical records of the Chin Dynasty (221-207 BC) related that armies, merchants, and colonists pushed south into today‘s Vietnam with enduring cultural impact. Northern Vietnam remained a Han Chinese colony for a thousand years. No other area of the region saw this degree of Chinese dominance, yet, as early as the first century AD, the interplay of India and China within the Kingdoms of Southeast Asia was evident. Known as the kings of Funan by the Chinese, the earliest recorded Mekong Kingdoms traded goods and envoys with the two great civilizations of Asia. Chinese merchants established trading communities throughout the region. The overlay of Chinese culture was restricted by topography and imperial interest to the valley ofthe Red River (Tonkin) and to enclaves along the South China Sea coast of Vietnam.

Thus out of many and diverse elements a group of nations evolved, the individuals of which, Mons, Kambodians, Annamese, Burmese, Shans, Lao, Siamese and Malay, fundamentally much alike but differing in many externals, have striven during centuries for mastery over each other and incidentally over the countless minor tribes and clans which maintained a precarious existence in their midst.

Buddhist potentates of Indo-China agreed upon settling a dispute by a pagoda building competition. Victory was to belong to the party who succeeded in erecting one of such structures within the shortest time. This was often resorted to by the in order to avoid the useless destruction of life entailed by war. The worst feature of it is, however, that it appears to have been in most instances unfairly carried out, trickery being usually employed on either side by erecting a sham structure of bamboos and wickerwork, covered over with mats, and neatly plastered and painted so as to look, when viewed from the opposite camp, every bit like the genuine article. Victory was thus secured by little exertion.

The fundamental idea of this sort of competition was — in those happy days when intelligence departments were things undreamt of — that the parly who succeeded in completing the structure before the other must be the more numerous and stronger; the uselessness of fighting against such heavy odds was thereby made evident. In the extracts from the Lamp'hun chronicles there is an instance of a competition, in which the Lavo King is successful by resorting to the sham-structure trick. Here history repeats itself. And a third instance of such bloodless contests is recorded in the semi-historical literature of Pegu. This time, however, it is the Peguans—according to their own showing—who get the best of the Siamese.

The first synchronized consolidation saw extremely rapid demographic and commercial growth across much ofSoutheast Asia, began in the 10th or 11th centuries and concluded with a generalized political and social crisis extending from the late 13th to the late 14th or early 15th centuries. Political integration resumed in the mid- or late 1400s, but between c. 1540 and 1610 new states in Burma, Siam, Vietnam again succumbed, this time to a combination of novel cultural and political tensions, overly rapid territorial extension, and/or renewed ecological strains. Reforms in the early to mid-1600s inaugurated a third phase of state consolidation.

The earliest depictions of the political borders of the states of Indo-China appear to be in Henricus Hondius' map of Southeast Asia, based upon Blaeu's map of 1635. This important Dutch map of South East Asia is also noteworthy for being the first map to include, albeit incompletely, the discoveries made by the Dutch vessel Duyfken in 1605-06 in the Gulf of Carpentaria, an expedition which made the first recorded European contacts with Australia. The Australian discoveries of the voyage are not recorded, only the survey along the coast of New Guinea. The map includes South East Asia in general with all of Malaysia, the East Indies, the Philippines, Indonesia, Indochina and southern China with the Pearl River Delta, Taiwan, and part of Japan. One of the most important figures of the Dutch Golden Age of Cartography, Henricus (Hendrick) Hondius (1597-1651) was the younger son of mapmaker Jodocus Hondius Sr. He assisted his father and brothers in the family map business. In 1604, Jodocus purchased the engraved plates of Mercator's Atlas. Many of the maps had been drawn by the highly esteemed Dutch cartographer Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) whose contribution to the history of map-making was immense. Hondius' family continued the business of map making and rose to the popularity comparable to the Blaeu family.

Another early depiction of state borders is a French map of 1686 published by Placide. The ‘Carte Du Royaume De Siam et des Pays’ shows the arrival of the first French embassy to Thailand led by the Chevalier de Chaumont on its approach to the Sundra Straits and the route of that mission to Ayutthaya. The Dutchman, Herman Moll (1678-1732) was a bookseller, geographer and engraver. He moved to London around 1678, and for a while continued as an engraver before starting his own business as a map publisher. By the turn of the century Mall was the most prominent map publisher in the country. Moll patronised Jonathan's Coffee House, in Cornhill in the City of London, where traders and speculators met and discuss matters of importance. Other patrons included Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, the seafarers William Dampier and William Hacke, the scientist Robert Hooke, and the piratical Woodes Rogers. Moll had access to very privileged knowledge that he put to excellent use in his maps and charts. Moll's "A New and Compleat Atlas" of 1719 depicts the most up-to-date information and understanding of the world until the early eighteenth century. Moll's single sheet "A Map of the East Indies... With many remarks not extant on other maps...", published in the same year, appears to be among the earliest English language depictions of the political borders of the states of Indo-China.

Between 1752 and 1786 the Burmese, Siamese, and Vietnamese kingdoms all disintegrated. In each realm, a new, more dynamic leadership then succeeded in quelling the chaos, increasing the resources and local authority of the state, and enlarging its territorial writ. The ensuing wars between reinvigorated empires in the late 18th and early 19th centuries accelerated competitive reform while diminishing the number of independent polities across mainland Southeast Asia. Between 1340 and 1820 some 23 independent Southeast Asian kingdoms collapsed into three.

Into this melee of warring factions a new element intruded in the sixteenth century AD in the shape of European enterprise. Portuguese, Dutch, French and English all came and took part in the struggle, pushing and jostling with the best until the two last, having come face to face, agreed to a cessation of strife and to a division of the disputed interests among the survivors. Of these there were but three, the French, the English, and the Siamese, and therefore by the time of the Great War Further India found herself divided, as was once all Gaul, into three parts. To the east lay the territory of French Indo-China, embracing the Annamese and Kambodian nations and a large section of the Lao; on the west the British Empire had absorbed the Hons, the Burmese and the Shans, while wedged between and occupying the lower middle part of the sub-continent, with the isolated region of British Malaya on its extreme south border, lay the kingdom of Siam itself.