Early Mapping of Southeast Asia. Thomas Suarez

Siamese embassy's audience at Versailles, Ambassador Pan "made no secret that our most desired objects were maps of the country, plans of palaces and fortresses [and military images]." A contemporary account of Kosa Pan's visit to France contained in the Mercure Galant supports the spirit of these quotations. Independent confirmation of his keen interest in maps and the fact that he did indeed obtain various examples from European sources came four years later, in 1690, when Engelbert Kaempfer visited the ambassador, who was now 'High Chancellor' in charge of foreign affairs, at his home in Ayuthaya. Hanging in "the hall of his house," wrote Kaempfer, were only "pictures of the royal family of France, and European Maps.

      Fig. 11 This stone relief is one among many depicting native, ocean-going vessels on the walls of the great temple complex of Borobudur in Central Java, built ca. 800 (see fig. 8). Borobudur was first brought to light in 1814 by Thomas Raffles, who ordered the ruin be cleared of under-growth and thoroughly surveyed. [Photograph by Richard Casten, 1994]

      The Thai poet Sunthorn Bhoo (1786-1855) speaks of maps quite naturally, writing in a work of fiction that a "ship went out of the way and drifted to an unknown place where nobody could tell where the spot was located on any map."³²

      Extant Southeast Asian Maps

      The corpus of extant early maps from Southeast Asia is limited to a relatively small number of geographic and non-geographic maps dating from the past few hundred years, and cosmographic edifices dating as early as the seventh century. Although traces of the missing history of geographic maps can be filled in from references to early Javanese, Vietnamese, and Thai maps in Vietnamese and Chinese chronicles, and from the records of early European explorers, most of Southeast Asia's earlier cartographic history remains mysterious.

      Some clues to the very beginnings of humankind's mapmaking have been found in the durable medium of rock, but although proto-cartographic motifs in the form of rock art, or petroglyphs, are extant in neighboring India and China, as well as in Europe, no such record is known in Southeast Asia. Several rock art sites of an uncertain date have been discovered in the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, Flores, and Timor, but none are known to contain any cartographic elements.³³ Nor do we learn more by moving forward thousands of years to consult ancient texts. Although there are an abundance of geographic and cosmographic descriptions in many old Hindu and Buddhist texts, oddly enough there is no known reference to a 'map' per se, or at least not to what we can now discern as such. The earliest extant textual records of Southeast Asian geographic maps are found in Chinese texts of the fourteenth century (recording a Javanese map of 1293) and fifteenth century (recording a Thai map of 1373). The Europeans who began scouting Southeast Asia at the turn of the sixteenth century were map-conscious explorers; yet even their record of Southeast Asian maps is frustratingly scant and inconsistent.

      Cosmologically-oriented stone structures survive in Cambodia, but no geographic maps. In the middle of the third century A.D., Funan, which was the most important state in southern Indochina before the rise of the Khmer empire, was visited by envoys of the Wu dynasty of China. The Chinese ambassadors described Funan as a place where the people "live in walled cities, palaces, and houses" and have "books and depositories of archives and other things".³⁴ We do not learn, however, whether or not the 'other things' in their archives might have included maps.

      A thousand years later, in 1296-97, the Chinese ambassador Chou Ta-Kuan carefully described many facets of Angkor and Khmer culture, but never mentioned maps. He did, however, provide definite measurements regarding various features of the city, which covered an area of about one hundred square kilometers, making it one of the largest cities in the world at that time. Chou also speaks of astronomers in Cambodia, though does not specifically mention the charting of celestial objects.

      "In this country," writes Chou, "there is a hierarchy of ministers, generals, astronomers, and other functionaries"; other passages in his chronicle describe the prediction of eclipses as being among the astronomers' duties. Indeed, some modern researchers have theorized that the making of astronomical observations was part of the purpose of the great temple of Angkor War. The building of Angkor War in itself might reasonably have involved maps or plans; the height and direction of the edifice's walls, which cover substantial distances, deviate from a theoretically straight line in height and direction by less than one-tenth of one percent. Evidence of the careful recording of the positions of celestial objects has also been noted in Pagan.³⁵

      Many of the undertakings which modern sensibilities would associate with the making of maps, were accomplished by Southeast Asian peoples without leaving any evidence of mapmaking. There is no indication that charts of any type were made by early Indonesian sailors to assist their monumental voyages. Nor do the Funanese, who must surely have been well-aware of the importance of their pivotal location for trade between the China Sea and Indian Ocean, seem to have created any kind of graphic representation of their land-in-the-crossroads. Nor are there any known plans for any of the ancient irrigation systems or temple complexes of Southeast Asia.

      The absence of any evidence of Philippine mapmaking, or even any clear mention of them by early visitors, is perhaps the greatest enigma. There is nothing to show that maps played any role in the bustling intercourse that had developed between the many islands of the Philippines, even though entrepreneurs from Luzon were adventurous enough to have established a trading colony in Malaya before the Portuguese burst on the scene at the turn of the sixteenth century (see page 138). When Thomas Cavendish returned to England in 1588 he brought a map that he had acquired in the Philippines, but it was of Chinese, not Southeast Asian, origin. In the mid-eighteenth century Alexander Dalrymple, the first head of the British Hydrographic Office, reported that a servant from Luzon had given him a map whose bearings generally agreed with Dalrymple's own, but we do not know whether this 'indigenous' map was ultimately based on Filipino or Spanish information.

      Whether this silence represents the lack of any substantial geographic tradition in these regions, or simply the failure of local maps to survive the centuries, is disputed. None of the spatial imaging involved with travel, construction, the levying of taxes, or other endeavors necessarily required the making of maps. Various classes of people ranging from nomads to pilgrims to traders and caravaners, routinely traveled confidently without maps. Experience taught the traveler the nature of a route and its itinerary.

      Printing, Binding, and the Survival of Early Maps

      Indigenous Southeast Asian maps were not, as far as is known, reproduced via printing methods. To put this into perspective, we can note that all but a minute fraction of the impressively large inventory of extant early European maps owe their survival to their mass-production by woodblock or copperplate, which began in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and (to a much lesser extent) to the establishment of chart-producing houses, which made multiple manuscript copies of a given map. Nor did Southeast Asian peoples bind their maps into atlases or other book forms, save for certain, Chinese-influenced, Vietnamese works, and the Traiphum and other cosmographic or itinerary-related manuscripts from Thailand. A comparison of extant copies of European maps bound into books as compared to maps produced in similar numbers but sold as loose sheets will demonstrate the enormous effect this has on survival rate. If we were to subtract from the surviving corpus of European maps, those reproduced by printing or by chart-copying houses, and those preserved in books, then the history of European mapmaking would hardly be less mysterious than that of Southeast Asia.

      Other factors also limited the chance of a document's survival to our time. In the first place, the climate in most parts of Southeast Asia promotes the decay of organic materials. Vast archives were also lost in war; most famously, the Burmese sacking of Ayuthaya in 1.767 is said to have destroyed most contemporary Thai records. The people themselves may have been unconcerned about preserving such documents for the distant future, seeing them simply as temporary creations- the most extreme example of this is in Tibet, where cosmographic mandalas are painstakingly created from powdered sand only to be swept away after brief ceremonial use, symbolizing the Buddhist concept of the impermanence of life. Lastly, they may have been deliberately destroyed there is speculation that Siamese authorities may have periodically purged their archives of older