Early Mapping of Southeast Asia. Thomas Suarez

generalizations even held for the common people of Vietnam, who are so often the exception to the rule in Southeast Asia.¹³

      In about 750 A.D., a Mon princess named Jam Thewi became the first ruler of Lamphun (then Hariphunchai), which was the first literate, sophisticated kingdom of Lan Na civilization (in what is now northern Thailand). Tradition records that Jam Thewi was selected by a rishi (hermit); when the rishi founded Lamphun, he wanted its first ruler to be an offspring of the ruler of Lop Buri but was indifferent as to the person's gender.¹⁴ The civilization of Champa, in the centeral region of what is now Vietnam, was a matriarchal society. The major entrepot of Patani on the east coast of the Malayan Peninsula was under the sovereignty of successive queens for over a century (1584-1688), and Bugis kingdoms were often ruled by women, as was the important north Sumatran kingdom of Aceh.

      Europeans also noted gender deference. The first Dutch expedition to Java (1596) reported that if the king of Ban ten sent a male messenger to request the presence of "any subject or stranger dwelling or being in his dominions," the person "may refuse to come; but if once he send a woman, he may not refuse nor make no excuse." When the Portuguese traveler Mendes Pinto was in Ban ten in 1540, a woman of nearly sixty years of age arrived on a diplomatic mission. According to Pinto, she was paid the highest honors, and it was "a very ancient custom among the rulers of these kingdoms, ever since they began, for matters of great importance requiring peace and harmony to be handled through women. " In the seventeenth century, Simon de La Loubère, a Frenchman resident in Siam, reported that "as to the King of Siam's Chamber, the true Officers thereof are Women, 'tis they only that have a Privilege of entering therein", and many Southeast Asian countries celebrated female war heroes in their histories.¹⁵

      Many visitors commented on the authority of women in matters of trade. Chou Ta-Kuan, a Chinese envoy who visited Cambodia in the late thirteenth century, recorded that foreign men who set up residence in Angkor for the purpose of business would find themselves a native spouse as quickly as possible to assist in their commercial affairs. William Dampier, resident in Tongkin (Vietnam) in the late seventeenth century, noted that it was the women who managed the changing of money, and that marriage would establish an alliance between foreign merchants who returned annually and local women with whom they entrusted money and goods.

      The Geography of Kingdoms and War

      Whereas the modern nation-state is defined by its borders, the traditional Southeast Asian kingdom was defined by its center. This philosophy of geo-political space parallels the mandala, or 'contained core', a sacred schematic of the cosmos in Indian philosophy.¹⁶ The kingdom was the worldly mandala, defined by its central pivot, not its perimeter. By moving closer to the center of the mandala, that is, to the center of the kingdom, one moved closer to the sacred core, traditionally a central temple complex, where spiritual powers and the fertile earth joined. This central "temple mountain" was analogous to a sacred mountain believed to form the center of the world, Sumeru (or Meru), and thus the kingdom was, in effect, a miniature cosmos.

      As in feudal Europe, a Southeast Asian kingdom was an array of imprecisely defined spheres of influence, typically consisting of the king's immediate territory, over which he had total control, followed by a succession of further and further removed regions from which he might exact tribute and over which he exerted varying degrees of authority. Beyond these would be outlying regions that had their own monarch but which were not entirely autonomous. These regions might be accountable to one or more larger kingdoms, being obliged to pay tribute and never to act in a manner contrary to the large kingdom's interests.

      The further one traveled upriver or upcountry from the pivot-point of power, the more authority faded to various shades of leverage, cooperation, tribute, and influence. There were usually patches of light and dark in the shading; a small, peripheral kingdom might have a particular reason to partially submit to a more distant superpower, most commonly for the protection such an arrangement might offer the petty state against a closer, less benign, power. Insular Southeast Asia's heavily mountainous topography undermined the ability of lowland polities to control upriver regions even more than on the mainland. Perhaps as a result, early insular Southeast Asia was typified by a spread of societies which were roughly 'equal', while the mainland kingdoms tended to see dominant majorities ruling over minorities.

      Rulers secured a gradually diminishing degree of hegemony and influence over the upland regions by controlling the lower reaches of river arteries (this was especially true in the case of insular Southeast Asia) or the rice-fertile lowland regions (more so in the mainland than among the islands). A map of the river was, in effect, a barometer of sovereignty. Historians have drawn clear parallels between the control of rivers and irrigation canals, and the rise of despotism in Southeast Asia.

      Southeast Asian peoples retained this classical concept of political space until profound European influence on their internal affairs required them to abandon it in the nineteenth century. Sometime prior to this, a new, radical concept of political space and boundary had evolved in Europe in which nations were defined by their perimeter, kingdom x lying on one side of an authoritative imaginary line, kingdom y on the other. In this new geo-political mind-set, all areas of a kingdom were equally part of that kingdom; the final grain of dirt before the border was as much the property of its kingdom as was its center.

      Whereas European eyes presumed that a country's possessions extended as far as its border with its neighboring country, in Southeast Asia there were usually spaces in-between, 'empty' land, which was not part of any kingdom and which sometimes served as a neutral buffer. And while the European boundary formed an invisible wall that was to be guarded lest anyone attempt to violate it, the Southeast Asian border was porous, and was not intended to keep people either 'in' or 'out'. Even a wall built in Vietnam in 1540 to separate rival factions of that country, like the Great Wall of China, was doubtfully perceived as demarcating a precise division of territory.

      These differences in the concept of statehood confounded political understanding between Southeast Asian kingdoms and encroaching European powers. Since Thailand alone was never colonized, and therefore Thailand alone negotiated as a sovereign kingdom with the West, clashes of these opposing concepts of political geography are revealed best in nineteenth century British-Siamese relations.

      In determining their own political geography, the people of Southeast Asian were, sadly, no different from the rest of mankind. Cultural differences certainly existed−the Hindu-Buddhist Pyus, who lived in the region of what is now Pro me (Burma) between the fourth and eighth centuries, appear to have created a truly pacifist society- but, in general, a map of the power struggles in early Southeast Asia would show an ever-changing kaleidoscope of kingdom pitted against kingdom, with fickle alliances of convenience, and the scars of warfare distributed equally among the many nations vying for possession or tribute. The situation was exacerbated by the swords of foreign nations, which altered the map both by outright conquest as well as by manipulating local rivalries between native kingdoms and their neighbors. Contemporary descriptions of local warfare could not be more horrific. So ghastly was inter-kingdom violence that one nineteenth-century British observer commented (though disingenuously) that it was "the absence of pity, which distinguishes the Oriental as opposed to the Occidental."¹⁷

      Religion

      Southeast Asian religions represented various combinations of animism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, with Islam reaching many coastal regions by the time the first Europeans arrived. The supplanting of indigenous animism and ancestor worship in Southeast Asia coincided with, and facilitated, the rise of larger social organizations and states. Hinduism, the dominant religion in Southeast Asia until roughly the twelfth century, spread through civilizations along the Gulf of Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam, and parts of indonesia beginning about the first century A.D., and gradually permeated inland. Ancient edifices in Java and Bali, the most extraordinary of which is Borobudur in central Java (ca. 800 A.D.), demonstrate how far east Indian influences reached. The beginning of Hinduism's decline coincided roughly with the completion of Angkor Wat in the first half of the twelfth century, being gradually supplanted by Buddhism.

      The successive waves of religions that came to Southeast Asia never entirely replaced those which preceded them, but rather built layers of combined beliefs. Indigenous animism and ancestor worship can still be discerned throughout