Early Southeast Asian rulers and elites borrowed from India,
above all, the means to legitimise and consolidate their power. These
included a system of writing and the language (classical Sanskrit) and
literature that went with it, principles of statecraft, and a set of reli-
gious beliefs that rested on the identity of local deities with gods of the
Indian pantheon. Kings ruled as representatives of a high god, their
right to rule reinforced by the central role they played in religious
rituals designed to ensure the prosperity of the kingdom through
control over cosmic forces. This Indian system of power relations did
nothing, however, to overcome the inherent political instability of
early Southeast Asian kingdoms. Instead it reinforced the segmentary
structure of Southeast Asian polities in the form of what have become
known as mandalas, in order to differentiate them from modern terri-
torial states.
To call a Southeast Asian kingdom a mandala is to draw
attention, metaphorically, to relations of power that connected the
periphery to the centre. The mandalasof Southeast Asia were con-
stellations of power, whose extent varied in relation to the attraction
of the centre. They were not states whose administrative control
reached to defined frontiers. Power diminished with distance from the
centre, frontiers fluctuated, and relations with neighbouring mandalas
tended to be antagonistic, as each attempted to expand at the other’s
expense. As a key Sanskrit text, the Arth a ́sa-straexplains, neighbour-
ing kingdoms should be distrusted as potential enemies, while the
enemies of enemies should be treated as friends.^3 A more different
world from that familiar to Chinese merchants and travellers would
be hard to imagine.
We should think of Funan, therefore, not as a centralised
kingdom extending from southern Vietnam all the way around to the
Kra Isthmus, but rather as a mandala, the power of whose capital in
southeastern Cambodia waxed and waned, and whose armed merchant
ships succeeded in enforcing its temporary suzerainty over small coastal
trading ports around the Gulf of Thailand. What gave Funan the edge
Early relations