Early Mapping of Southeast Asia. Thomas Suarez

far displaced from the Nicobars' true location to the north of Sumatra, mapping it as the final island on the extreme right firs logically into the Traiphum's fluid scale and panoramic orientation.

      Figure 22 illustrates a markedly contrasting Traiphum map, now located in Berlin. More geographic than cosmographic, it depicts Asia from Japan to India, with east and south at the top. The map's scale and orientation is wildly inconsistent, beginning with China and Japan on the left, and ending with Ceylon (the yellow, triangular island) on the right. The latter clearly lies off the coast of India here, lacking the ambiguity of the previous Traiphum. The six white islands and the white corner of the adjacent foreshore are all Japan, with China occupying the rest of the lefthand mainland. The cluster of eight islands to the right of Japan are the 'black farang islands, farang meaning both 'foreigner' and 'guava'. The fat peninsula is Indochina and the river presumably the Mekong; the long peninsula is Malaya; and the peninsula on the extreme right is India. Lastly, the square box at the bottom center is Ayurhaya, though the city already lay in ruins when the map was made. A ship enters the Gulf of Siam above it.

      Chapter 3

      Asian Maps

       of Southeast Asia

      Southeast Asia had a place in much of the literature and cosmography of her continental neighbors. Some of these references were direct cartographic records, while others were cosmographic concepts in which Southeast Asia played a significant role. Most often, however, Southeast Asia is found in textual entries. These include literary allusions, and the substantive content of travel records, as well as the itineraries of the pilots who sailed to the 'lands below the winds' or the 'southern ocean'.

      Arab and Indian pilots relied on itineraries and sailing directions rather than charts. Although Marco Polo and other early European travelers in the Indian Ocean mentioned their pilots' 'charts', no such Arab or Indian navigational maps of the region are known. Detailed lists of places, latitudes, and relative compass bearings contained in some Arab navigational texts could in theory be used to construct maritime maps of the seas and oceans, but there is no firm evidence to suggest that any such charts were ever employed.

      Marco Polo, making the trek westward across the Indian Ocean in the latter part of the thirteenth century, twice mentioned seeing maps. Once, in an apparent reference to sea charts and pilots' books used by his vessel's pilots, Polo stated that "it is a fact that in this sea of India there are 12, 700 Islands, inhabited and uninhabited, according to the charts and documents of experienced mariners who navigate that Indian Sea."

      Polo's other testimony to his Indian Ocean pilots' use of maps is especially important, because in it he unknowingly left us one detail which corroborates his story. He explains that although Ceylon has a circumference of

      2, 400 miles... in old times it was greater still, for it then had a circuit of about 3, 600 miles, as you find in the charts of the mariners of those seas.

      Polo's explanation of the size accorded Ceylon on the chart was that the chart's geography originated at an earlier time before much of the island had been submerged. In fact, what this passage indicates is that the chart followed the Ptolemaic model with its characteristic reversal of the relative proportions of Ceylon and India. Yet Ptolemy's Geographia, and maps constructed from it, were virtually unknown in Europe at this time, even among academics, and remained so until a century after Polo's return. Thus Polo clearly did not fabricate this key Ptolemaic error, which he himself did not understand. Ptolemy's Geographia was, however, known to Arab scholars, and had profoundly influenced the Arab conception of Southeast Asia. But the fact that the map seen by Polo retained such an incorrect dimension for Ceylon supports the view that native pilots guided their vessels by navigational texts, and did not refer to the charts themselves.

      Another important European witness to south Asian sailing was Nicolò de' Conti. In the first half of the fifteenth century, Conti mentioned that Arab and Indian sailors steered their vessels for the most part by the stars of the southern hemisphere, and made a statement which has commonly been interpreted as meaning that they were not acquainted with the use of the compass. In fact, he merely said that they did not rely on the needle for navigation.⁶⁸

      At the very end of the fifteenth century, Vasco da Gam a was purportedly shown a chart of India by a 'Moor of Guzarat', just before his crossing of the Arabian Sea, but this is only mentioned retrospectively by João de Barros in the 1540s, and is not reported in earlier accounts of the voyage. Barros wrote that this chart was "of all the coast of India, with the bearings laid down after the manner of the Moors, which was with meridians and parallels." This is reminiscent of Ludovico di Varthema's claim that his Southeast Asian (presumably Malay) pilot consulted a chart marked with coordinates (1505). Barros described the map seen by da Gama as containing "bearings of north and south, and east and west, with great certainty, without that multiplication of bearings of the points of the compass" which typified Portuguese charts.

      India

      India's record of Southeast Asia is an enigma. Despite the profound influence of Indian civilization on much of Southeast Asia, there remains hardly any trace of Indian voyages to the east. No Indian maps of Southeast Asia whatsoever are known, nor geographic treatises detailing the itineraries and commerce of Indian sailors and traders. How is the contradiction between the undeniably extensive Indian presence in Southeast Asia and the utter void in cartographic and historical evidence reconciled?

      India never 'colonized' Southeast Asia. Contact was not organized on any large scale, nor did Indian culture have the sense of posterity which led the Chinese to keep meticulous records of the world as they knew it. With the exception of military expeditions sent by the Chola emperors to Malaya and Sumatra in the eleventh century, India did not undertake a conquest of Southeast Asia. Rather, Indian influence was probably the result of successive individual initiatives as merchants sailed east to find their fortunes among the fabled isles of gold. No doubt many perished, but others established themselves in coastal communities where they married the daughters of local chiefs and assumed some degree of influence. These same local rulers, noting the legitimacy to a king's power afforded by Indian religion and political thought, were receptive to adapting the foreign ideas for their own ends, and similarities between indigenous and Indian traditions made this assimilation all the more natural and fluid. Indians who became respected citizens on Southeast Asian soil eventually returned to their homeland, where others in their family or village, on hearing their story, elected to join them when next they ventured east.

      Although the sort of small-scale peregrinations which seem to have characterized Indian contact with Southeast Asia did not leave any formal histories or maps, what they did foster were references to Southeast Asia in Indian literature. Early traces are found in India's jataka fables of popular Buddhist lore, which originated well over two thousand years ago but assimilated stories about Southeast Asia as Indians returned and shared their adventures. These tales became associated with Mahayana Buddhism and its affini ty for common folk, for trade, and in turn, travel.

      Some of the legends describe Indian merchants who sailed to Southeast Asia on trading expeditions. We hear, for example, of a Prince Mahajanaka, who joined a group of merchants bound for Suvarnabhumi, the Land of Gold, representing either Sumatra or Southeast Asia as a whole. Similarly, in the tale of Kathasaritsagara, a Princess Gunavati, while en route to India from Kataha (possibly Kedah, Sumatra), is shipwrecked on the coast of Suvarnadvipa (Golden Island or Golden Peninsula). Clear references to Southeast Asia are also found in the Ramayana, the classic epic poem about the abduction of Rama's wife by the king of Ceylon and Ram a's attempts to rescue her. These stories record seven kingdoms on the 'Gold and Silver Islands' beyond Ceylon.

      China

      Chinese cartography, which dates back to ancient times, influenced Vietnamese mapmaking, but was not a major cartographic influence in the rest of Southeast Asia (and the West, in turn, was not as much of an influence on Chinese mapmaking as once was assumed).⁶⁹

      In China, as in Southeast Asia, the earth was generally believed to be flat. Chinese cosmography, however, held that the flat earth was not level. The plane of the earth was believed to be tilted, that is to say, inclined to the mountainous northwest and falling away to the southeast.