The Srivijaya Empire — Maritime Sovereign of Southeast Asia

Introduction

For more than six centuries, from approximately the middle of the seventh century of the Common Era to the late thirteenth century, a great maritime empire rose and flourished in the waters of Southeast Asia, shaping the flow of world trade, spreading one of the world's great religions, and creating the cultural foundations of an entire region whose legacy is still felt today. This empire was called Srivijaya. Its name in Sanskrit means glorious victory, and the name was fitting, for Srivijaya achieved a kind of triumph unlike most empires: not by the massed force of infantry and cavalry across broad plains but through mastery of the sea, control of the channels through which the wealth of Asia flowed, and the magnetic attraction of a cosmopolitan Buddhist civilization that drew monks, merchants, and pilgrims from across the known world.

Centered on the island of Sumatra, in what is now the province of South Sumatra in the Republic of Indonesia, the Srivijaya Empire at its height controlled the two great maritime chokepoints through which virtually all sea trade between the civilizations of East Asia and those of South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean world passed. The Strait of Malacca, lying between the southeastern coast of the Malay Peninsula and the northeastern coast of Sumatra, and the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, were together the gateways through which Chinese silk and porcelain traveled westward to meet Indian spices, cotton, and precious stones, and through which Arabian horses, glass, and metalwork moved eastward. To control these straits was to hold the arteries of the Asian world in one's hands, and for over six hundred years, Srivijaya held them.

What makes Srivijaya unusual among great empires is the nature of its power. It was not, at its core, a territorial state in the way that the Maurya Empire or the Tang dynasty of China were territorial states. It was a thalassocracy — a sea-empire — whose authority rested not on the governance of contiguous land masses but on the command of the maritime routes that connected them. It was organized not as a centralized bureaucratic state but as what scholars, following the work of the American historian O.W. Wolters, have termed a mandala state: a web of relationships between a powerful center and a constellation of subordinate rulers, port cities, and local polities bound together by oaths of loyalty, tributary relationships, and the mutual benefits of controlled trade.

Srivijaya's story is also, in a profound sense, the story of the spread of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. The empire's capital at Palembang in southern Sumatra became one of the greatest centers of Buddhist learning in the world, attracting scholars and pilgrims from as far away as China and Tibet. The Chinese Buddhist monk Yi Jing, who visited Palembang around 671 CE on his way to India to study the Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit, was so impressed by what he found there that he recommended all Chinese monks traveling to India spend at least a year in Palembang first, to study Sanskrit grammar and Buddhist philosophy under the more than one thousand Buddhist scholars he found in residence. This was not a peripheral outpost of Buddhist learning but a central node in the international Buddhist world of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Srivijaya was largely forgotten by the outside world after its decline in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Unlike the Maurya Empire, whose pillars and edicts remained visible in the Indian landscape, and whose memory was preserved in the religious traditions it had shaped, Srivijaya left no enduring monumental legacy above ground, its wooden structures long since rotted away, its archives unrecovered. It was only in 1918 that the French scholar George Coedes, working from stone inscriptions preserved at scattered sites across Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, identified Srivijaya as a distinct historical entity and reconstructed the outlines of its history. This rediscovery made Srivijaya one of the great archaeological and historical revelations of the twentieth century.

The Kedukan Bukit Inscription and the Founding of an Empire