382 Part V: Southeast Asia
cases of “secondary burial,” a practice still widely followed in island Southeast
Asia. The dead are first cremated or allowed to decay rapidly; then the cleaned
and “processed” bones are placed in a small jar inside a large jar that also con-
tains grave goods of iron and bronze. (A very important contemporary case is
discussed in box 10.2.)
All of these developments were indigenously Southeast Asian. However, in
the last few centuries of the first millennium B.C.E., a scattering of intriguing
foreign objects make their appearance. In the Sa Huynh (southern Vietnam)
site, objects from China and India are found. In burial jars in Java and Bali,
there are glass beads from India. In the late prehistoric period, there are trading
centers in the Philippines where Chinese traders came, and most intriguing of
all is a site at Sembiran on the coast of Bali that appears to have been a trade
station with ties to Arikamedu, on the Indian coast near Pondicherry, which
was an Indo-Roman trade station. “When all these finds are put together they
hint very strongly of the oldest direct evidence from Southeast Asia for the
trade in spices that linked the Roman Empire, India, and Southeast Asia in the
first centuries of our era” (Bellwood 1992:133).Period of Indian Cultural Influence 100 C.E.–1300 C.E.
In May 1992, newspapers and televisions around the world flashed an
indelible scene from Bangkok: King Bhumibol seated on a sofa while two men
in suits, the prime minister and the leader of the democracy movement, are on
their hands and knees before him. There had just been a violent showdown
between a military-dominated government and democracy activists in which
soldiers had opened fire on civilian protesters, killing dozens of them. The sub-
mission of the prime minister and the leader of the opposition brought an
immediate end to the confrontation, and shortly after, the prime minister
resigned. A prominent Thai said of the king: “He is the unifying force of Thai
society. He is the one who is a check on the system. He can tell us whether we
are going in the right direction or the wrong direction. He is the standard of
morality, of righteousness” (Shenon 1995). That is, the king is a dharmaraja.
Like Ashoka, he is a “righteous king.”
How did kings of Thailand gain such immense moral power? How did they
come to constitute themselves dharmarajas, modeling their kingdoms after
those of ancient India?
When Europeans began arriving in mainland Southeast Asia in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they were surprised to find, so close
to China, cultural practices that seemed more Indian than Chinese. Peasants
wore wraparound sarongs in the South Indian fashion rather than the trousers
of the Chinese peasant. They wore turbans, not straw hats. They carried their
goods on their heads, as in India, not on the two ends of a pole, as in China.
They ate with their right hands, not with chopsticks. They played musical
instruments very similar to the Indian sitar. They wrote their languages in
scripts clearly related to the South Indian scripts and ultimately descended