alliance with a major rice-producing state in Java, dominated long-distance
trade in Southeast Asia for the next seven centuries. The big losers in the
shift to an all-water route were the Kra and Mekong delta ports and parti-
cularly Funan, whose fragile economy depended on ships that no longer
arrived by the sixth centuryCE. When ships going between the Straits and
China did stop along the coast, it was to take on products of the hinterland,
which could be obtained more cheaply and in larger quantities on the Cham
coast provided the local pirates were under control. Eventually Oc Eo was
abandoned, and the local center of power moved up the Mekong River into
the Cambodian interior.
By thefirst millenniumCEnorthern Europe was linked to the islands of
eastern Indonesia by a series of interconnected routes secured by emporiums
all along the way. The Eurasian world had become a unified commercial zone
dwarfing all earlier exchange systems. If there was anything that could be
considered as the center of the maritime portion of this zone, it was India
with the Mediterranean and China anchoring each end. But maritime trade was
only half the system; the other half went overland across deserts, mountains,
valleys, rivers, steppelands, and forests, in and out of cities, countries, and
badlands. The backbone of this overland system was the great Silk Road.
120 The all-water route