was more important than that with China. The motive for such contact
usually given in Indian texts is commercial gain: the Indians were out to
make a profit, although once goods arrived in Southeast Asia and the initial
exchange was made, they were often distributed internally through some
mechanism other than strictly commercial-driven trade. The Indians were
likely searching for a new source of gold after the Siberian route became
defunct, as witnessed by the name they gave to the place. Significant gold
deposits existed in central Sumatra, where it was mined in the hills or sieved
from river sands, and Champa in central Vietnam, a few places on the
southern part of the Malay peninsula, and the island of Sulawesi also had
gold although it is difficult to determine how much was being extracted at
this time. People of status in the region were noted for wearing jewelry made
from a very pure, soft gold. However, Southeast Asia was not the pot at the
end of the rainbow, and the early perception offinding a bonanza at the edge
of the world was mostly wishful thinking. Nevertheless, once there, the gold
seekers found other products, and the trade was on.
Another possibility sees India’s link to Southeast Asia as a spin-off of
India’s tie to the Roman Empire. Southeast Asia contained many of the
products the Romans sought in India, including spices, aromatic woods, and
resins, and could serve as a reservoir for augmenting Indian supplies. A third
possibility also sees the trade as resulting from spin-off but this time from
the India-to-China trade in silk. Southeast Asia was a place Indian and
Chinese merchants had to pass through to get to each other, and eventually
they discovered that it contained valuable commodities and could be devel-
oped in its own right as a market for their products. Probably all three pro-
posals played some role although it should be noted that both the second
and third suffer to varying degrees from the problem of backward projection,
that is, taking the consequence of a historical action and making it the cause.
To use proposal three as an example, it is true that what came to be known
as the maritime silk route through Southeast Asia eventually became
important. But quite a lot of silk was already arriving overland from China
into India at the time Indians were venturing into Southeast Asia, and there
is no evidence that they were searching for a water passage to China.
Indians may have begun arriving as early as the mid-first millenniumBCE.
Excavations at an ancient cemetery in western Thailand from a fourth cen-
turyBCEcontext have recovered over 3,000 beads, mostly glass, which were
made in India for the export market. Six hundred were drilled carnelian and
agate beads, including 50 of the etched variety. Other Indian imports were
decorated bronze ritual bowls and a carved carnelian lion. Similar products
have also been found in sites in coastal Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia.
Excavations on the north coast of Bali have unearthed large quantities of
Indian goods, including pottery shards from Poduca. Farther afield etched
agate beads of a Bengali type have been found in the Philippines, but an
even more interestingfind from a jar burial in a cave in the Talaud islands in
The all-water route 113