Chapter 10 Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia 383from Ashokan Brahmi. The elephant was the sign of royalty, as in India, not
the dragon, as in China. They worshipped Indian gods like Shiva and Vishnu;
they had a version of the Ramayana called in Thailand the Ramakien; and they
venerated the Indian teacher, Buddha (Chandler 1992). Above all, Southeast
Asian states were clearly Indic states, legitimated with an Indian cosmology
and enacted with Indian symbols of authority.
The archaic states of Southeast Asia had an envisioned territoriality—a
vision that was one of two principal models: The first model is a vision of a
state with distant lines, often demarcated by walls that are always defended by
troops. This is the model of Hadrian, building and defending a wall across cen-
tral Britain. It is also the model of Qin Shihuang, an expanse of wall to bound
off the Middle Kingdom from the lands and peoples beyond. The second
model, the mandala, is a vision of the state as a circle with a center of concen-
trated power, virtue, and sanctity, a pivot not only on the terrestrial plane, but
on an axis linking earth and Heaven, at whose center dwells a figure of
supreme power, at once warrior, king, and god. Ultimately the model of the
state as distant lines to be drawn and defended prevailed, but the latter vision of
the state had hundreds of approximations over a 1,500-year period in Southeast
Asia, both on the mainland and in the islands.
The state as mandala was an Indian conception, as was the widespread
word for such a state, nagara. Nagara, in India, is a perfectly ordinary word for
“town,” but in Southeast Asia for two millennia it was the very word for civili-
zation, a “sacred city,” the powerful central energy node of the archaic state, the
mandala. Clifford Geertz (1980) claims there were hundreds or thousands of
nagaras in Indonesia alone in a continuous process of state formation and disso-
lution, and as many more on the mainland of Southeast Asia. But we will focus
on the most successful ones, those known to us through Ashoka-like inscrip-
tions on columns by which kings proclaimed their authority; through accounts
of travelers, most often Chinese; through stupendous archaeological remains,
some of the most fabulous on earth; and through texts, though fewer than histo-
rians would wish, left behind on vulnerable palm leaves and parchment.
A long-debated question has been: How did Southeast Asia come to be
“Indianized”? Were Indians responsible for Southeast Asia’s Indianization? Did
they operate like the Chinese, who annexed territories further and further south,
establishing a military post north of the Tonkin Delta in 214 B.C.E. and by 111
B.C.E. controlling most of the north? For 1,000 years, Vietnam’s northern region
was China’s southernmost province, known to them as Giao Chi. But the
answer is “no”; Indians never set out on any expeditions of conquest in South-
east Asia, and there was never any political connection between the two regions.
Indians did, however, go to Southeast Asia to trade. They called Southeast
Asia Suvarnabhumi, the Land of Gold, and the Indonesian islands, which
Europeans called “the Spice Islands,” Indians called Suvarnadvip, the Islands of
Gold. Indian traders were also trading to the west with Rome, as the Arika-
medu site, excavated by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in 1955, has shown. But when