Five thousand years ago, enclaves of foreign traders existed in Southwest Asian kingdoms (Veenhof 1972, 270-88). These are examples of early systems for facilitating and regulating trade between people of different ethnic and linguistic groups, which have formed in most parts of the world. Ancient Greek and Latin sources mention emporia (coastal settlements where foreign trade was administered according to a common set of institutions) in India. Classical Greek and Latin sources prove that a common set of commercial and legal institutions throughout the South Asian Ocean (incorporating the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the Java Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Sea of Japan) already existed when people from the Mediterranean joined the network 2,000 years ago.

After Octavian (who later changed his name to Augustus) defeated Cleopatra in 31 BCE, the Roman Empire gained its first foothold on the Indian Ocean. “Within a decade there were over a hundred Roman ships sailing to India[,] and the Mediterranean markets were suddenly inundated with goods from across the Eastern world” (McLaughlin 2014, xviii–xix). By the first century CE, the tax on Indian Ocean imports contributed 30 per cent of the Empire’s income. Augustus used the revenue to fund Rome’s first full-time professional army (Latin sources for this conclusion include Suetonius; Augustus 49.2; Res gestae 17; Diocletian 54.25). Thus Roman power was economically linked to trade with India and China.

Modern geographers use such terms as “gateway cities” or “ports of trade” to refer to these places. Within this general category, “sea states” form a special case (Darby 1932). These have been found from the North Sea to the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia. Well-known examples are Venice and Srivijaya. Unlike agrarian states, which sought to control land, sea states endeavoured to exert control over networks of ports. They usually formed in areas where sea lanes converged, such as the Adriatic Sea or the Straits of Melaka.

In China, ports of trade can be traced to the Tang Dynasty, when the empire established enclaves where foreign merchants enjoyed internal autonomy, but were not allowed to interact with the local population. Inscriptions from precolonial Java and India suggest that similar systems formed in those places.

The founding of the British trading station in Singapore in 1819 was part of the process of port of trade formation, but Singapore differed from Macau and Hong Kong in that the island never belonged to China; it was part of a Malay kingdom until the British unilaterally asserted sovereignty over it in 1824. The British attempted to impose the traditional system of ethnic enclaves on Singapore, but ironically, the local population ignored the boundaries proposed by Sir Stamford Raffles. The area set aside in his town plan for the Chinese was also inhabited by Indians who built Hindu temples there. Chinese lived in the area called Little India. Europeans lived in the area called Kampong Gelam, where the Malay sultan and other Muslims from the Near East resided. This integrated pattern and hybridity may have already existed in 14th-century Singapore (Miksic 2004).

In the 20th century, Macau and Hong Kong were reabsorbed by China. Singapore is thus the last surviving example of the “sea-state.” “Free-trade zones” have been established in various countries to offer some of the same attractions that sea-states formerly possessed, but without the political autonomy of the ancient maritime kingdoms.

In 2019, Singapore (or Singapura in Malay from Sanskrit) reached the 200th milestone of its modern existence, having survived and prospered after it was ejected from Malaysia in 1965. At the same time as this anniversary was commemorated, the history of pre-British Singapore became a popular topic for discussion. Rather than a celebration of British colonialism, the anniversary was exploited as an opportunity to contemplate the significance of the events of 1819 in a deeper historical perspective.

When Singapore became independent in 1965, a decision was taken to identify Sir Thomas S. Raffles as Singapore’s “founder,” in order to avoid friction between members of Singapore’s three major ethnic groups (Malay, Indian, and Chinese) (S. Rajaratnam, in a speech given at a seminar on “Adaptive Reuse: Integrating Traditional Areas into the Modern Urban Fabric” held at the Shangri-La Hotel on April 28, 1984; quoted in Kwa Chong Guan 2006, 250). In 1965, no archaeological excavations had yet been undertaken in Singapore, so it was possible for historians to dismiss Malay texts referring to a great port in ancient Singapore as the stuff of legend (e.g., Wolters 1970). This situation changed when archaeological research on Fort Canning Hill in 1984, followed by excavations at other sites, revealed abundant evidence of a prosperous port that imported merchandise from India, China, and many areas of Southeast Asia.

Archaeology has shown that Singapura formed in the early 14th century and flourished for 300 years before it was largely abandoned during the unsettled period of the 17th and 18th centuries, when several local and foreign powers contended for superiority in the Straits of Melaka. Different generations of Singaporeans have been taught different stories about Singapore’s origins. Those educated before 2010 learned that Singapore was the creation of a British official of the East India Company, and Sang Nila Utama’s Singapura was a myth; those who entered secondary school after 2010 were taught that Singapore had formed 500 years earlier, and that it was still well-known among Southeast Asians in the early 19th century as the site of an ancient commercial centre. Raffles was well aware of Singapore’s renown in Malay literature; it was one of his main reasons for choosing the island for his new base. (Miksic 2019)

Singapore is still in the process of adjusting its view of its identity to accommodate the 500 years of its history before the arrival of the British. This process has reached the secondary school curriculum, but it will take decades for the implications of this new vision to percolate through the general population. The commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the British arrival was treated by the Singapore government as a golden opportunity to invite Singaporeans to contemplate and discuss the importance of the year 1819 in comparison with 1299, the year when Singapura was founded, according to a text known as the Malay Annals. The authors and editors of this book are grateful to Dr. Maliki Osman, then Senior Minister of State, for his willingness to open a conference on the subject of “Singapura Before Raffles,” which was held at the National University of Singapore in April 2019, and to allow us to publish the speech with which he launched the conference.

This book is focused partly on Singapura and partly on the maritime network of which ancient Singapura was a member. It is self-evident that ports cannot exist as isolated entities. Their survival depends on links to other ports. Ports form part of a sphere of interaction that includes people who do not live in ports but who provide commodities that pass through ports, and who receive goods imported from them. One of the main themes of this book is the effort to develop a conceptual framework with which to study the evolution of spheres of interaction in the waters that extend from East Africa to the east coast of China. Not everyone likes acronyms, but for the sake of convenience, I propose to use the term Southeast Asian Maritime Interaction Sphere (SAMIS) to refer to a network that began to form around 3,500 years ago.

Interaction Spheres

Archaeologists in North America coined the term “interaction sphere” to describe a geographical area where copper artefacts were traded between different tribes separated by long distances (Caldwell 1964; Struever 1972). Archaeologists now use the concept to refer to exchange networks operating on different levels from local to long-distance, and on different temporal scales from short to long-term. The concept of the interaction sphere has numerous advantages over others such as “world-system” (Wallerstein 1974–89) or “global culture” (Jennings 2011, 2) (see Miksic and Goh 2017 for discussion).

Southeast Asian archaeologists have employed the interaction sphere concept because it helps them to define networks of communication and trade for which no historical sources exist. One example is the spread of prehistoric knowledge of copper-working within a “Southeast Asian interaction sphere” (Pryce et al. 2014). In a study of late prehistoric communities in the Chao Phraya valley of Thailand, an archaeologist distinguished several types of interaction spheres: one defined by the economy, another by the circulation of prestige goods, a third by political exchange, and another by information flow (Eyre 2011, 73). Vishnu statues of the fifth to early seventh centuries found in the lower Mekong valley and adjacent areas of southern Vietnam, peninsular Thailand, South Sumatra (Bangka Island), and West Java have been considered as another example of a “prestige goods” interaction sphere (Dalsheimer and Manguin 1998).

The term “interaction sphere” is often applied to ports or markets that exchange goods, people, and information with one another. The group of ports through which Chinese ceramics were traded during the Tang through early Ming dynasties (9th through 15th centuries) can be considered an interaction sphere. A complex combination of geographical and temporal networks can be depicted by a map of interaction spheres in maritime Asia showing overlapping distributions of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Burmese wares from the 10th to 15th centuries (Miksic and Goh 2017). In the first millennium CE, China viewed the waterways of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean as “a single ocean, united by a series of inter-port sailing communications” (Wolters 1967, 319 n. 65).

Historians have long discussed the Mediterranean Sea as an interaction sphere (although they do not all use this term). The analogy between the Mediterranean and the South China Sea has attracted numerous scholars, but they do not agree on the exactness of the parallel (Subrahmanyam 1998; Sutherland 2003).

The Mediterranean covers 2.5 million square km; the South China Sea, at 3.685 million square km, is 40 per cent larger; it is, in fact, the biggest sea in the world. The Mediterranean is, as its name implies, surrounded by land. The South China Sea, in contrast, is linked to the Indian and Pacific Oceans via numerous waterways: the Straits of Melaka, Sunda, Karimata, Taiwan, Luzon, and Balacbac. The Mediterranean was a circumscribed world, whereas the South China Sea has been a thoroughfare for commerce between east and west for millennia.

The Utility of the Interaction Sphere Model for Understanding Singapore’s History

We lack sufficient information to describe the fabric of relations that made the southern end of the Straits of Melaka a hinge on which swung the door between the markets along the shores of the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and Java Sea. Singapore’s rise to prominence among the ports in this area in the 19th and 20th centuries was not a foregone conclusion. The Malay Annals depict Singapore as the first great Malay trading port, but historical and archaeological evidence contradicts this notion. Singapore was actually one of the last major Malay ports to emerge before the conversion to Islam and the arrival of Europeans.

The Malay Annals depict Singapore’s formation as the result of a search for a suitable place to establish a city by a prince who was born under the waters of the Singapore Main Strait. According to the story, an Indian conqueror, while on his way to China, arrived at a place called Temasek and decided to explore the underwater world around it. He discovered a kingdom on the sea floor, married its princess and had three sons. Subsequently, he returned to India, leaving behind an inscription on a boulder at the mouth of the Singapore River detailing his submarine exploits, beneath which he buried treasure for his three sons to find.

When the three princes came of age, they appeared on Seguntang Hill in Palembang, South Sumatra. Palembang was the actual site of one of the greatest Malay port kingdoms of all time, Srivijaya, which prospered as the centre of a league of ports from the mid-7th through early 11th centuries before the league was shattered by an invasion from South India in 1025. The Malay Annals only briefly refer to Palembang’s ancient glory as a “great city with many ships.” The youngest of the three princes, Nilatanam, was crowned by general acclaim as the Maharaja or “great king” of Palembang and took the Sanskrit title Sri Tri Buana, “Lord of the Three Worlds” (Brown 1970; Miksic 2013). Sri Tri Buana decided to look for a better place, so he set out to sea with a great fleet. The text does not say how Sri Tri Buana chose his route, but in effect, he retraced his steps to his birthplace by sailing toward Singapore. On the way, he called at the island of Bintan, which is three times the size of Singapore, where he was adopted as a son by the queen who ruled the island.

Sri Tri Buana was not satisfied with Bintan, so he continued his search. Catching sight of the south coast of Temasek, and attracted by its beautiful white sandy beach, he decided to explore the island. There he encountered a strange creature that he thought might have been a lion, and decided to found his city there, which he called Lion City (Singapura in Sanskrit). This city became a great port.

The Malay Annals do not tell us about Singapura’s trading partners except in general terms. The text mentions the kingdom of Majapahit in Java and the countries of Tanjung Pura (Borneo), Minangkabau (West Sumatra), Perlak, Samudera, and Pasai (North Sumatra), Siam (Thailand), Vijayanagara, and Kalinga (India), but it does not describe commerce. The text was not composed to provide a factual account of the history of Malay kingdoms but to publicise the genealogy of the Malay kings (and therefore their legitimacy) as it was understood in the early 17th century.

The compiler of the oldest surviving manuscript of the Malay Annals drew upon earlier texts that have been lost. Known as Tun Sri Lanang, he was born in Johor in 1565, and was bendahara (an important official) of the Malay court that was located at Batu Sawar. He began composing his text in 1612 in Pasir Raja/Pekan Tua in Johor, but after the kingdom of Johor was crushed by an attack from Aceh, he was given the same title by the district of Samalanga in Aceh and finished his manuscript there in 1614 (Hadijah Rahmat 2020, 371-373; A. Samad Ahmad 1979; Muhammad Haji Saleh 2008). Aceh wished to assume the mantle of the paragon of Malay identity (Andaya 2008, Chapter 4, “From Malayu to Aceh”), so the court there would have supported his work. We can only speculate on his reasons for preserving (or creating) knowledge of Singapore’s past after the island had been largely depopulated as a consequence of warfare between the Portuguese, who then ruled Melaka, the newly arrived Dutch, and various Indonesian groups, including Aceh, all of whom were competing to control the Singapore area. Obviously, the court and the society to which he belonged had no qualms about accepting the notion that Singapore had been an important pre-Melakan part of the Malay interaction sphere at the crossroads of maritime traffic between the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and Java Sea.

Phases of Singapore History

Singapore’s history as a port can be divided into four phases. The first phase lasted from around 1300 to 1400. During this phase, Singapore was a medium-sized port with only one important local commodity: the crests of hornbill cranes, which were sought after in China to make small carved objects. A 14th-century Chinese merchant, Wang Dayuan, called it Temasek. He mentioned two groups of people there. One was a piratical group who were apt to murder Chinese and who lived around modern Keppel Harbour; the other was a community of honest traders with a stable government who lived along the Singapore River. Wang also mentioned that Chinese lived in Temasek (Wheatley 1961, 82). He only referred to one other Chinese community: a group of soldiers who had been put ashore on a small island off West Borneo in 1292 by a Chinese fleet on its way to invade Java. They were thus not involved in trade (Rockhill 1914, 261).

During this phase, Singapore was probably attacked from two directions, north and south. In the north was a group called in Chinese Xian, equivalent to the modern “Shan” or “Siam” (Wheatley 1961, 82). In the south was the kingdom of Majapahit, which in 1365 claimed Temasek as a vassal (Robson 1995). Both parties probably appreciated Singapore’s location, which was strategic in several respects. It lies at the southern entrance to the Straits of Melaka; it is on the way to the Java Sea from both India and China; and it had a reliable source of fresh water, a key consideration. Many groups collectively termed “Sea Nomads” inhabited the Singapore area. In ancient and early modern times, they were important for several reasons, including their ability to gather marine products in demand in foreign markets, their knowledge of local navigation routes, and their fighting skills. They played important roles as messengers and craftsmen in the service of Malay aristocrats and were skilled in such trades as the production of weapons (Sopher 1977; Andaya 1975). Temasek probably paid tribute to both Xian (which after 1351 was ruled by the kingdom of Ayutthaya) and Majapahit (Java).

The second phase lasted from 1400 to 1600. This period began with the founding of Melaka by none other than a prince from Palembang who had probably been driven away from there by a Majapahit attack. The prince, known by the title Parameswara, came to Singapore as a refugee, where his followers soon killed the local king, and Parameswara took his place. In around 1396, he was expelled from Temasek by an attack, probably by the Malay kingdom of Patani, to whom the murdered Temasek ruler was related by marriage. After a few years in the wilderness, a group of Sea Nomads brought him to a location in the Malay Peninsula where he founded the port of Melaka. This port quickly grew prosperous. It became a regular port of call for imperial Ming fleets under Zheng He, who provided some theoretical protection, but Melaka still had to pay tribute to Ayutthaya. There is no indication that Chinese merchants lived in Melaka at this time; Chinese were forbidden to leave China between 1367 and 1568. This ban was strictly enforced during the 15th century. Melaka’s major foreign merchants were Gujarati Muslims. The Chinese still called Singapore Temasek in the 1430s. It is not known when or why the island’s name was changed to Singapore, but by 1511 the old name was no longer used.

In 1511, the Portuguese conquered Melaka; the ruler fled to the area near the place now called Singapore, and for the next century, Singapore formed part of the Johor kingdom. It still had a harbourmaster during the 16th century, signifying its role as a port where foreign trade was conducted.

The Portuguese attacked Singapore in the early 17th century; Johor was also attacked by Aceh, north Sumatra, which was then vying for control of the south Melaka Strait. Soon after 1600, the port of Singapore was abandoned. The coast of the island was still inhabited by Sea Nomad groups ruled by chiefs, but no formal port or government existed. From 1600 to 1811, Singapore played no role in the Southeast Asian Maritime Interaction Sphere (SAMIS). This blank era forms the third phase of Singapore’s history.

The fourth phase began in 1819 and lasted until Singapore attained independence in 1965. During this phase, Singapore faced competition from various ports, especially Batavia (now Jakarta) in Java, Bangkok in Thailand, Saigon in Vietnam, Manila in the Philippines, and Rangoon (Yangon) in Burma (Myanmar). Competition between ports was limited by colonial constraints on trade, but Singapore benefited from its ability to attract trade from the Dutch-ruled areas of Sumatra, Java, and western Borneo, and from independent Siam (called Thailand after 1932).

Singapore’s future was called into question at the transition from each phase to the next. Singapore’s descent into obscurity from 1600 to 1800 might have been a permanent state of affairs had Raffles not been a student of Malay history and literature. It was his discovery of a manuscript of the Malay Annals that gave him the idea of establishing a British base in Singapore, according to his wife Sophia (Raffles 1991/1830). During the early 19th century, news of Singapore’s rapid ascent to prominence spread all the way to the young United States of America. A proverbial boom town on the east shore of Lake Michigan was named Singapore in 1838, and for 50 years thereafter, the town was relatively prosperous, with a bank that issued its own currency. When timber, the source of the town’s main income, was exhausted, the population ebbed away. Remains of what is now a ghost town are half-covered by sand dunes on the outskirts of Saugatuck (though a Singapore Yacht Club still exists there).

Singapore itself might have gone the way of its Michigan namesake. Piracy was such an issue that Chinese merchants threatened to leave if the scourge was not eradicated. In the 1850s, blight killed the nutmeg trees that made a major contribution to the island’s economy. Singapore was saved by new technology: the telegraph and the Suez Canal. From being a distant outpost far from the centre of decision-making, Singapore suddenly became a centre of commercial information sent directly from London, and the voyage to Europe was cut in half. Coincidentally, the telegraph wires were waterproofed with a substance called gutta percha, otherwise known as India rubber, made from the sap of a tree that was commonly found in Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. New fortunes were made from this substance, and when gutta percha trees were gone, Brazilian rubber trees were found to grow well in Singapore and surrounding countries. The expansion of steamship construction made Singapore another fortune as a coaling station, using coal mined in nearby Sumatra.

Singapore maintained its position as one of Asia’s premiere ports through the mid-20th century. In 1963, it became part of newly independent Malaysia but was ejected two years later. It was quite possible that Singapore would have failed as a nation and would have been reabsorbed on inferior terms by Malaysia, but instead, Singapore exploited such advances as containerisation and investment in the electronic revolution of the early 1970s. The development of advanced port technology since independence has gone hand in hand with Singapore’s success in developing its role as a centre of maritime law, as part of alliances with hundreds of ports around the world, and as a neutral arbitrator of disputes and negotiations such as the creation of UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, under a committee chaired by a Singaporean, Tommy Koh.

Coincidentally, UNCLOS drew on a precedent set 400 years earlier, on the basis of an event that took place within what is now Singapore’s territorial waters. In 1604, a Dutch squadron ambushed a Portuguese fleet sailing from Macao to Melaka in the stretch of water very near Singapore’s modern Changi Airport (which stands on reclaimed land). The Portuguese accused the Dutch of piracy. The Dutch appointed a lawyer named Grotius who developed the legal concept of Mare Liberum, “freedom of the sea,” which has been influential in drawing up maritime law since.

One general lesson to be drawn from this investigation of Singapore’s rise, fall, and rise is that certain factors have facilitated the success or failure of ports for centuries. The character of the societies where the ports are located, and their leadership and governance, are important variables, but much depends on developments in the broader networks to which ports are connected. This complex ecosystem still operates in the modern world. In many ways, it can be assumed to have operated in an analogous fashion in ancient times. In order to understand Singapore’s rises and falls, it is necessary to understand the SAMIS as a whole and to explore its shape at different phases. It is important that scholars collaborate to flesh out knowledge of the patterns of interaction upon which the individual ports depended (and the threats which parts of the networks could also present).

Singapore and the Southeast Asian Maritime Interaction Sphere (SAMIS)

Historical sources consisting of Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian documents from the period between 2,000 and 500 years ago hint at the existence of a complex sphere of maritime interaction in Southeast Asia in which change occurred but was morphostatic in the sense that ports rose and fell, but the institutions and customs that bound them together remained the same. An important new element was added in the 13th and 14th centuries when the Chinese began to reside in Southeast Asia. The relationships between the ports in SAMIS were not significantly affected by this phenomenon, which lasted only about 100 years before the new Ming Dynasty banned foreign trade. This ban continued for 300 years, during which SAMIS continued to prosper despite the depredations of the Portuguese beginning in 1511.

Now that the main outlines of the new narrative of Singapore’s rise, decline, and re-emergence have been established, the next objective for this study of Singapore’s role in the long durée of global maritime trade is to raise the level of attention from the local to the regional. To do this, comparable information is needed from other ports in the entire Southeast Asian Maritime Interaction Sphere. It can be claimed that Singapore has set a benchmark for depth of coverage in terms of the amount of archaeological information available for ports in the SAMIS. A summary of this information has been published (Miksic 2013). Detailed site reports for different sectors of Singapore in the 14th through 20th centuries are in the process of compilation and publication (http://epress.nus.edu.sg/sitereports).

In 2004, a conference on ancient harbours in Southeast Asia was held in Singapore with support from the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and SEAMEO-SPAFA, at which participants discussed the potential benefits of coordinated archaeological research on SAMIS and obstacles to its attainment (Miksic and Goh 2013). In 2019, another conference was held, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Singapore’s resurrection. This book presents the latest reports on the current state of research on the emerging picture of SAMIS, including new information on the characteristics of ancient Singapura. Most research on relevant topics is still designed and interpreted from the perspective of the individual site. This is a necessary preliminary stage in order to compile the data needed to raise the level of interpretation to the interaction sphere. Without understanding the sphere of interaction in which ports functioned, it is impossible to understand the dynamics of the rise and decline of individual ports, since all parts of the interaction sphere were dependent on each other. However, without a common objective, it will not be possible to combine local studies at various parts of SAMIS to create a matrix in the form of a regional synthesis, which would provide the context for the understanding of the evolutionary trajectories of individual sites in the sphere.

Archaeological research on SAMIS accelerated between the 2004 and 2019 conferences. The current volume presents the results of recent research projects conducted in India, China, and Southeast Asia. This chapter will provide an overview of research that provides the context in which the specific studies found here can be appreciated, both for their unique data and for the increasing convergence of opinion among scholars regarding the types of information and the research questions that deserve to be prioritised.

SAMIS: General Features and Unique Characteristics

The thousands of islands scattered over the waters of the South China Sea, the Java Sea, and the Straits of Melaka formed a nearly impenetrable maze for foreign ships in the age of sail. Winds and currents were unpredictable, and detailed local experience was needed to enable ships to pass safely through them. This situation explains why the seafaring populations indigenous to the Singapore area must be regarded as key participants in the development of the South Asian Maritime Interaction Sphere (SAMIS). Recent studies are beginning to rectify old assumptions regarding the importance of foreign (Indian, Chinese) ships and navigators in the development of SAMIS. Yet even now, historians still often fall into the familiar trap of treating Southeast Asians as passive middlemen who mainly existed to serve people merely passing through the area. The reality is that Southeast Asians were the creators of SAMIS, the actors who extended the sphere to incorporate Indian and Chinese waters into their commercial activities. Historical sources show that the first Indian and Chinese visitors to SAMIS travelled on Southeast Asian ships.

The origin of SAMIS may eventually be pushed back as far as 1500 BCE; ships were sailing between the east coast of Vietnam and the Philippine islands on the opposite shore of the South China Sea by that date (Hung et al. 2013). The oldest ports belonging to this network have been discovered in the vicinity of the Isthmus of Kra on the Siam-Malay Peninsula. The best-known of these late prehistoric ports, Khao Sam Kaeo, was established around 400 BCE. By 200 BCE, it was in contact with other ports around the South China Sea and later the Indian Ocean. None of the ports with which Khao Sam Kaeo was in contact during the late centuries BCE has yet been located. This is a clear example of the magnitude of the task confronting archaeologists who wish to understand the development of SAMIS before it branched out to involve better-known civilisations in India and China, and thus entered the historical record.

The relationship among various nodes on shipping networks is always precarious; collaborators can also be contenders. Normally, ports’ most serious rivals are those nearby, but this is not always the case. In 1025 CE, the Chola kingdom of South India raided the major ports in the Straits of Melaka, bringing down the Malay kingdom of Srivijaya, which had controlled the Straits since about 680 CE. The motives for this invasion are unknown, but in the aftermath, the north end of the Straits comprising north Sumatra and the area between Phuket and Kedah on the Malay Peninsula came under strong Tamil political, artistic, and economic influence. This situation lasted for about 150 years, after which the Chola kingdom gradually disintegrated.

The Chola attack and subsequent incorporation of the northern Straits into the South Indian empire is the only example of an attempt to incorporate any part of the Southeast Asian port network into an Indian Ocean polity. The Mongols during the Yuan Dynasty sought to compel rulers in Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Java to come in person to declare fealty to the emperors, but Southeast Asians resisted these demands and repelled military reprisals aimed at enforcing these orders. The significance of these attempts is that the same thought crossed the minds of both Indian and Chinese strategic planners: that these great continental empires could benefit by incorporating Southeast Asian ports into their economic spheres. That the Chola only occupied a small part of Southeast Asia and that the Mongols failed to incorporate Southeast Asia politically into their orbit demonstrates the fundamental Southeast Asian character of SAMIS.

The outline of Singapore’s premodern history is moderately well-known. Excavations beginning in 1984 have shown that a town was founded around 1300 on the northeast bank of the Singapore River and by the mid-14th century covered approximately 85 hectares (Miksic 2013). The settlement was divided into a ceremonial district on a hill, southeast of which lay a plain where people lived, conducted trade, and manufactured various items. Interaction with China was significant. Approximately 50 per cent of the half million artefacts recovered consisted of Chinese ceramics; Chinese coins were used in all parts of the settlement. Other artefacts were imported from Indonesia, mainland Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

Historical sources written in Malay, Javanese, and Chinese refer to Singapore as a thriving port and cultural centre which fought off an attack from Siam but had to pay tribute to both Java and the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya. A usurper from Sumatra seized control of the port around 1392 but was driven out in 1396, and in 1400 founded a new port on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula named Melaka, which became a cynosure from Portugal to Okinawa due to its central position in SAMIS through which spices flowed from eastern Indonesia to Europe and mainland Asia. In the 15th century, Singapore played a strategic role in Melaka’s government as the base of its navy; it was also a place where passengers and no doubt cargo could change ships on the way from their original port to their final destination.

Melaka fell to the Portuguese in 1511, but the network of ports in SAMIS, which sustained Melaka and its dependency in Singapore, retained its shape. The role of central node in SAMIS soon shifted to the port of Banten (Bantam in English), west Java. Singapore remained an important port with a harbourmaster as part of a Malay kingdom ruled from the Johor River until the early 17th century when it was destroyed by a Portuguese attack. For the next two centuries, Singapore remained linked to SAMIS as a provisioning station for passing ships and a source of expert seafaring manpower for local contenders for power, but the archaeological imprint of this period is very faint.

Tiers of SAMIS

An important facet of the interaction sphere concept is the endeavour to distinguish between spheres of different levels and different items of trade and exchange. Major ports such as Singapore operate in two ways. They interact with other major ports but also serve as centres for groups of smaller local ports. These local spheres of interaction are just as important for our understanding of history as the major spheres, but they are more difficult to study since their remnants are not as obvious, and they were seldom mentioned by foreigners.

The islands south of Singapore played a vital role in Singapore’s success both in the Temasek period and in the colonial and early post-colonial phases. The island of Bintan was a contender for the position of primary port in the Singapore-Johor-Riau area in the 14th century. The Malay Annals depict Bintan as the main port in the Singapore area before the arrival of Sri Tri Buana. This image is supported by limited archaeological research and Chinese sources which record that Bintan sent a tributary mission to China in the 1320s, along with two other ports, Longyamen and Danmaxi. Longyamen is believed to refer to the area of Keppel Harbour, though no archaeological remains have yet been found there. Danmaxi is the transliteration of Temasek; the 14th-century settlement on the main island was known to the Chinese merchant Wang Dayuan as Banzu, a transliteration of the Malay word pancur, “spring of water.” Banzu was one of 99 places which Wang claimed to have visited in the 1330s. Some were clearly more important than others. It would be possible to use Wang’s descriptions to reconstruct a tentative map of the network of ports known to the Chinese at the time, though many of the toponyms he mentions have not been linked to precise locations.

Wang Dayuan described a range of ports, from large to small. Few of these can be connected with archaeologically known sites. It is probable that the 14th-century port network in Southeast Asia resembled that of modern times: at smaller ports, commodities were collected from producers and shipped to a few major ports from which ships sailed long distances. A few second-tier ports have been discovered in the Singapore area by archaeologists. These include Kampai in northeast Sumatra (Ery Soedewo 2020) and Natuna (Naniek Harkantiningsih 2018) and Midai in the Seven Islands (Pulau Tujuh) area east of Singapore (Miksic 2013, 374-376). No systematic research has been conducted on Tioman Island, off the east coast of peninsular Malaysia, but many intact Chinese ceramics from the Song and Yuan eras (12th to 14th centuries) have been reportedly found there (Kwan and Martin 1985). Tioman was a significant navigational landmark and probably a watering place for ships.

Stark cultural differences distinguished the societies of the first- and second-tier ports. One of the most glaring is the absence of any burials in the first-tier ports or their vicinities. This fact implies that cremation was practised. The second-tier ports, in contrast, are associated with many cemeteries where the deceased were interred with numerous grave offerings, including Chinese ceramics. The major ports usually yield evidence of Buddhist and Hindu shrines and religious practices, whereas these are absent from the second-tier sites (Miksic 2000). Chinese bronze coins are common at major ports, but they are rare or absent at second-tier sites.

Singapore’s ancestry as a top-tier port in the vicinity of the Straits of Melaka can be traced back over 2,000 years. The oldest site in this region where intensive research has been conducted is Khao Sam Kaeo, on the east coast of the Siamo-Malay Peninsula. Much is now known about the origins and growth of this port, which may have been inhabited 2,400 years ago, and where by the beginning of the present era merchandise and undoubtedly people from the SAMIS were coming together to exchange goods and ideas. Much still remains to be learned about this port and others have been located in the same general area.

In this book, Favereau and Bellina introduce us to a strategy for using artefacts to reconstruct the interaction between various groups in this port, including the formation of cultural hybridity. This latter concept is defined as the blending of cultural traits from at least two different regions to create a new culture. Such a phenomenon is well known from the recent historical period in Southeast Asia, where the Malay term peranakan has been used to denote cultures formed by blending Malay and other traits to create new and distinct types of artefacts and customs. We cannot observe ancient customs directly, but we can infer that such evolution was occurring from the artefacts left behind; in this case, pottery is the type of artefact which reveals the development of such hybridity at the very earliest period of the formation of SAMIS. This is a major new direction for research that should be applied to other regions and types of artefacts. The procedure used here can serve as a model for future archaeologists who are attempting to elucidate the relations between different cultures at Southeast Asian port sites. Favereau’s and Bellina’s chapter also suggests the existence of a port hierarchy within the southern Thailand region 2,000 years ago, near the very inception of the SAMIS. This is strong evidence of social complexity on a regional scale in late Southeast Asian prehistory.

The trade between the Roman port of Berenike on Egypt’s Red Sea coast and India is mentioned in numerous classical texts. Two major works focused on this trade were written in the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Common Era. The first, Periplus Marae Erythraensis, is a guide to the ports and commodities traded from the Red Sea to the coast of northeast India, with some allusions to commodities from the east coast of the Bay of Bengal. It was written around 50 CE by a person with intimate knowledge of this trade; it has been speculated that he was a merchant or ship’s captain (Schoff 1912; other translations also exist). It also shows that south India was in direct contact with Southeast Asia (Seland 2010, 59). The oldest descriptions of long-distance maritime trade in Indian sources date from the end of the 2nd century CE and take the form of figurative poetry such as Pattinappalai rather than narrative description (Seland 2010, 61). Indian sources prove that India and Southeast Asia were in frequent commercial and cultural contact but do not provide concrete data about this trade.

The second European to write about Southeast Asia was a Greek named Klaudios Ptolemaeos, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He was a cosmographer who wrote a book around 150 CE entitled Hyphegesis Geographike, which was about map-making, in which he gave coordinates for many places in the Indian Ocean. He traced a route all the way to a place called Kattigara, near the border with China, which might have been Oc-èo. He gave the name of a port in eastern India from which ships sailed to the Golden Peninsula, no doubt the Siamo-Malay Peninsula. He also listed no fewer than 16 places on the peninsula, one of which, a port named Sabana, lay in the vicinity of Singapore. He quoted an earlier astronomer from Tyre, now in Lebanon, who recorded a route to a place that may have been either on Sumatra or Java. He mentioned that people from this location in western Indonesia sailed to Kattigara and that large ships came to India from this region (Berggren and Jones 2000, 75-76; Miksic 2013, 34-35). All this reinforces the idea that the Singapore area was part of a major maritime network 2,000 years ago. The major shippers were probably Malayo-Polynesians. Around this time, the first human inhabitants of Madagascar arrived, and they spoke a Malayo-Polynesian language. Around the same time, their cousins were exploring the islands of the western Pacific Ocean, which eventually led them to settle in Polynesia.

One major Southeast Asian port has yielded evidence of Southeast Asian trade with India and the Mediterranean in the early first millennium CE: Oc-èo in the Mekong Delta. This is the prime candidate for the location of Kattigara. Oc-èo is the largest member of a group of sites in the delta where artefacts from India and the Mediterranean have been discovered (Malleret 1959–1963). These sites probably belong to a kingdom known to the Chinese as Funan. The Chinese recorded that Funan created an empire by conquering lands as far west as the Siamo-Malay Peninsula. Historians are unsure about the accuracy of this statement, but it seems likely that the Mekong Delta was a major center for a trading network that extended from the Philippines to India. A Chinese mission visited Funan in the mid-3rd century, and numerous missions from Funan to China are recorded in Chinese sources, but few Chinese artefacts are found in the Mekong Delta (Miksic and Goh 2017, 159-169).

Research at Sungai Batu in south Kedah, in the northwestern part of peninsular Malaysia where the Straits of Melaka meet the Bay of Bengal, has yielded evidence of a possible port dating from the early centuries CE. Reports of this site have focused on evidence for large-scale ironworking and brick-making (Nasha Rodziadi Khaw et al. 2021).^[1] An inscription from south Kedah records a prayer for a safe journey by a Buddhist ship captain around 400 CE (Christie 1990, 48), but no evidence of a port trading with India or the Mediterranean from this period has yet been found in Kedah. Other sites in south Kedah have yielded considerable evidence of trade with China and India, but they did not appear until around the 9th century (Nik Hasan and Kamarudin 1993).

Chinese sources of the 3rd to 6th centuries also mention ports in western Borneo, south Sumatra, and Java. A famous Chinese Buddhist monk, Faxian, undertook a pilgrimage to India via the overland route but returned to China by sea. During this voyage, his ship stopped in a place that most historians believe was in west Java (Coedès 1968, 54). Archaeological information about ancient ports in Java is very limited, though two neighbouring sites have yielded evidence of a major center of Buddhism and Vishnu statues imported from northeast and southeast India (Dalsheimer and Manguin 1998; Hasan Djafar 2010). The chapter by Himanshu Ray in this volume brings together a number of these topics, including the role of Buddhist relics in the early phase of SAMIS. As she notes, the history of this trade is connected to the displays in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum, including the gallery devoted to the Belitung shipwreck of the 9th century, and to the National Museum of Singapore, where gold ornaments found on Fort Canning Hill are exhibited. Archaeologists are still uncertain as to the origin of these ornaments; they make use of imagery from India but are also depicted on Sumatran statuary of the same period (the 14th century). They could well have been made on Fort Canning, where archaeologists have documented remains of a goldsmith’s workshop (Miksic 2013, 284-285, 344-345). Ray also underlines the importance of the role of museums in framing the public discussion of the history of maritime trade in Asia (e.g., in the debates over China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Project Mausam, a similar endeavour launched by India in 2014, and Indonesia’s Global Maritime Fulcrum concept), a subject to which this book hopes to contribute (see also Cai Yunci’s chapter later in this book).

The first port network in SAMIS for which we possess extensive archaeological as well as historical information dates from the late 7th through mid-11th centuries. Historical sources call this network Srivijaya. This name was known to 19th-century scholars from inscriptions in Sumatra, but what it referred to was mysterious. The prefix Sri- is often a prefix attached to a proper name in Sanskrit, and so it was first thought that Srivijaya was the name of a king. In 1918, George Coedès famously demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it denoted a kingdom, not a person. For much of the 20th century, scholars debated the location, extent, and structure of this kingdom. O.W. Wolters wrote two important books about Srivijaya. The first one, Early Indonesian Commerce (Wolters 1967), discussed the factors that led to Srivijaya’s formation, based mainly on Chinese texts. The second book, The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History (Wolters 1970), deals with the aftermath of the kingdom’s demise. However, he never wrote a book about what went on during the kingdom’s actual existence, though he did publish several short articles about it.

The discovery of several inscriptions in the region of Palembang, South Sumatra, seemed to indicate that this region had some important connection with Srivijaya. However, archaeological expeditions to the region in the 1950s and 1970s did not yield the expected quantities of major trade items, leading to skepticism about this identification (Bronson and Wisseman 1976). In the 1990s, a restudy of some of the artefacts collected by earlier scholars yielded firmer evidence that Palembang was indeed the centre of an important trading network, which could have been famous throughout the entire SAMIS for its wealth. This insight, based on a better interpretation of the Chinese ceramics found in Palembang, led to the first systematic archaeological excavations in the city, which yielded more discoveries consistent with that conclusion. Unfortunately, only preliminary reports of these excavations have yet been published (Manguin 2021:2021, 89-90; Miksic 2021, 416-417). It is therefore still premature to discuss Srivijaya’s nature, since research of the type employed at Khao Sam Kaeo has yet to be replicated in South Sumatra.

The formation of the Srivijaya trading network can be dated to the period between 671 and 689. In the former year, a Chinese Buddhist monk sailed from Guangzhou to Srivijaya (presumably Palembang), then to Malayu (Jambi, on the Batanghari), and Kedah, from whence he travelled to Tamralipti in northeast India. In 689, he returned to Palembang via the same route. His description of the return trip notes that Jambi and Kedah “are now Srivijaya.” The meaning of this phrase is unclear. Most historians have assumed that this implied conquest and subjugation, but this is not supported by any other source. Other interpretations are also possible.

Yijing used the term “Srivijaya” in two senses: one denoting a port, the other a geographical entity covering much of the east coast of Sumatra. He said that Srivijaya had 14 cities divided between two kuo (kingdoms) and three zhou (geographical regions): Barus (North Sumatra), Malayu (south-central Sumatra), and Mukha Asin (apparently referring to the Musi and Banyuasin estuaries). In 742 CE, another Chinese source recorded that Srivijaya was “a double kingdom” with “separate administrations,” one in Palembang and the other in Barus (Wolters 1967, 17; Wolters 1986, 16; Miksic and Goh 2017, 290). The archaeology of Barus at this time is better documented than that of Palembang. However, the remains unearthed there so far date from no earlier than the 11th century, in other words, around the time of the Chola invasion (Guillot 1998; Guillot et al. 2003).

These references do not give the impression that Srivijaya was a highly centralised polity. It is plausible that it referred to a trading consortium of some type. The southern part of Sumatra, being closer to the South China Sea, naturally had more frequent direct contact with China, whereas the northern end of the Straits, including Sumatra and Kedah, were perceived as more important by the kingdoms of India. This is borne out by the Tanjor Inscription of 1030, which records a naval invasion of the Straits of Melaka and especially praises the Chola king who launched it as “the victor of Kedah” (Wheatley 1961, 199-200). A major Hindu temple (Candi Bukit Batu Pahat) and other archaeological remains indicate that Tamil influence was strong in the Kedah region for the next 100 years (Miksic 2013, 106-110). The fact that the Chola fleet attacked 13 different ports suggests that it was not sufficient to cut off the head of the empire by simply attacking Palembang; if it was necessary to attack all the major members of the league to succeed, this implies that each one enjoyed considerable autonomy.

This attack probably was designed to usurp control of the north end of the Srivijayan trading network by Indian trading guilds. The southern end of the Srivijayan network recovered relatively quickly. Archaeological remains found in Jambi indicate that this port became the main nexus in the south end of the Straits of Melaka for trade with China (Miksic and Goh 2017, 404-408). At least three and possibly six of the ports claimed as Chola conquests are believed to have been situated on the Siamo-Malay Peninsula between southern Myanmar and northern Malaysia: Mayirudingam, Ilangkasoka, Mappapapalam, Talaittakkolam, Madamalinggam, and Kadaram. Another was in the Nicobar Islands. Two are unidentified. Two were in North Sumatra. Only Jambi/Malayu and Srivijaya are located in southSouth Sumatra. This distribution of targets strongly suggests that the Chola were focused on the northern end of the Straits.

It is generally accepted that Madamalinggam was Tambralinga. The history and archaeology of this site on Thailand’s southeast coast have been the main focus of interest by the archaeologist Wannasarn Noonsuk, who was born and raised there. In his contribution to this volume, Noonsuk explores the implications of his research on Tambralinga for the conclusion that Srivijaya was a league of commercial partners rather than an empire ruled from Palembang. This is an important proposition which, if it can be supported by more data, would represent a major new perspective on the organising of trading networks in the ancient Straits of Melaka. This idea is beginning to garner more support.

Underwater archaeology is another area in which much progress has been made in the past 20 years. This point is emphasised in Michael Flecker’s chapter in this book, which describes three very similar shipwrecks: all sank in the 12th century, perhaps within a decade of each other; all were Southeast Asian ships; and all carried cargoes of Chinese ceramics. They all sailed from China to different ports in the archipelago when they sank. Only one, the Flying Fish, off Sabah, North Borneo, was properly excavated. A radiocarbon date and stylistic analysis of the Chinese ceramic cargo on board suggest she sank around the beginning of the 12th century. The ship probably was sailing from Quanzhou to northwest Borneo.

The second, Pulau Buaya, was found not far from Singapore. In addition to Chinese pottery, she also carried Chinese cast iron frying pans and machetes, and earthenware from the Pa-O area of southern Thailand. Flecker believes she was probably heading for Muara Jambi.

The third wreck, the Lingga, in addition to ceramics, also included iron pots and blades, as well as copper ingots and Chinese coins. Southeast Asian commodities on board included resin and candlenuts. Dr. Flecker believes the Lingga could have been heading for a destination to the west, e.g., the Indragiri River on Sumatra. Little is known about the history of that part of Sumatra, but the little that is known hints at Indragiri’s possible importance.

Flecker’s commentary on the likely sailing routes taken in the past to get from the south of China to destinations in the west is brief but highly suggestive. This type of research, which seeks to go beyond the superficial references in foreign sources to a few large kingdoms in order to uncover the complex network of relationships between the ports where only Southeast Asian sailors and merchants came and went, is vital to making progress to the next stage of understanding SAMIS.

Chinese archaeologists have recently made a substantial new contribution to the study of shipping and trade at the Chinese terminus of SAMIS. The chapter by Sun Jian in this book summarises research on the Nanhai I Shipwreck. This site was accidentally discovered in 1987 during a search for a Dutch ship that sank near Xiachuan Island, Guangdong Province, in the 18th century. The ship was well protected from disturbance by thick sediment.

The ship lay undisturbed for 14 years. Eventually, the Chinese government decided to apply an approach that had never been used before: to lift the entire ship in one piece from the seabed and move it to a research facility on land where it could be excavated with much greater precision than is normally possible for divers. A long period of planning and preparation led to the unprecedented successful lifting of the entire shipwreck in 2007 and its transport to a specially built museum and research centre. Conservation of the wreck was followed by periodic excavations of the hull’s interior beginning in 2014.

The contents of the hull consisted of about 180,000 artefacts of a wide range of materials. Many are similar to those found in Southeast Asian shipwrecks of the Southern Song period (1127-1279). The exceptional opportunity to record the exact location of each item in the cargo provides an unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct the precise sequence of loading of the vessel. The ship displays hallmarks of Chinese maritime construction, including the division of the hold into compartments by bulkheads. Shipwrecks are often called time capsules, but in this case, the opportunity to record the precise relationship of almost every item of cargo in the ship gives literal meaning to this cliché.

It is believed that the ship sailed from Quanzhou, but its destination is a mystery. No Chinese ships this early have been found in Southeast Asia, though Chinese merchants were certainly sailing there in the 13th century. The cargo contained some unusual items that have seldom been found in Southeast Asia, except for Kota China, such as Jianyao blackware. Ancient inkstones have not been found in Southeast Asia, though a qingbai water dropper for use with an inkstone has been found at Kota Cina.

Research on the ship and its contents will continue for many years. As more data become available, they will continue to add new understanding to the relationships between ports in China and Southeast Asia. One line of inquiry that has yet to be thoroughly explored is the development of early overseas Chinese settlements in the 14th century.

Whereas Tambralinga’s history can be traced to the early formative period of SAMIS, another archaeological site appeared in a previously insignificant area in the north end of the Straits of Melaka in the 11th century, on Sumatra’s northeast coast. No earlier ports have been discovered in this area; this port’s emergence may be a sign that the SAMIS was changing during this period. In most instances, archaeologists and historians face the problem of having Chinese, Indian, or Arab place names but no archaeological sites to connect with them. In the case of Kota Cina, we have the opposite problem: a major archaeological site but no name to connect it to any historical sources.

The site’s current name, Kota Cina, is a modern name meaning “Chinese Fort.” It is located on the northeast coast of Sumatra, opposite Kedah. The site was a prosperous port for about two centuries. Whereas Barus, on Sumatra’s northwest coast, has yielded mainly Arabo-Persian and Indian imported pottery of this period, Chinese ceramics make up a significant proportion (~30 per cent) of the ceramic assemblage at Kota Cina. Excavations at Kota Cina have yielded the largest and most varied collection of Song Dynasty ceramics of any site in Southeast Asia (Miksic 1979; Edwards McKinnon 1984). The ceramics at this site also include an appreciable quantity of pottery from southern Thailand (Miksic and Yap 1992), but Kota Cina’s regional network must have been much more extensive than this. It is possible that Kota Cina had a connection with a port in the southern part of the Straits of Melaka, such as Jambi, but at this point, we can do no more than speculate.

After Kota Cina was explored in the 1970s, no more research was conducted there for 30 years. In 2011, an intensive five-year project was conducted at the site. That effort yielded a copious amount of new data that are still being analysed. This book contains a summary of the goals of this major exploration by Daniel Perret. The new data will go a long way toward making it possible to resolve some of the major questions posed by earlier research: Who lived at the site? What activities were conducted there? What types of changes took place during the approximately two centuries during which the site was active?

The small-scale investigations of the 1970s showed that Kota Cina bore all the signs of a medium-sized port with a multi-ethnic population, including Chinese, South Asians, local Sumatrans, and possibly other Southeast Asians. Ports in southeast Sumatra and southern Thailand flourished at this time, but there is no indication that they had any influence in the Kota Cina area. No polity is known to have existed in northeast Sumatra during this period. Who then ruled Kota Cina? It is tempting to infer that Chinese and Indians sojourned here, but this cannot be proven based on artefacts alone. Kota Cina strongly resembles an earlier version of Singapore; as Daniel Perret notes in his chapter, it may be no coincidence that Singapore was created at approximately the same time that Kota Cina was abandoned. It is, however, unlikely that there was a direct relationship between the two ports since they were located at opposite ends of the Straits of Melaka. Some larger shift in trading patterns may have been at least partly responsible. Analysis of the new finds at Kota Cina will take years, but Perret’s chapter serves as a useful hint at what is to come.

The next four chapters in this book focus on early Singapore and its environs. Goh’s contribution is one of the first studies to delve deeply into the internal workings of an early port site in Southeast Asia by comparing the range of artefacts found in two areas of the ancient settlement: one on the hill that formed the political and religious centre of the city, and the other an area near the artificial embankment that formed a major part of the city’s defences. Goh utilises analysis of ceramics found in the two sectors to create a detailed image of the diversity that characterised the fabric of urban life in the ancient port. She is leading a long-term project to develop a database of artefacts found in Singapore sites as well as related locales in other parts of Southeast Asia (https://epress.nus.edu.sg/sitereports). This database provides information on the many types of pottery, the most durable consumer goods in ancient Singapore, found in Southeast Asia, as a proxy for many facets of life.

Chi’s chapter explores a similar theme by focusing on utilitarian Chinese stoneware ceramics from Singapore and comparing them with similar wares from Kota Cina. His approach involves the use of sophisticated laboratory analysis of the minerals found in the pottery at the two sites to investigate the links between the places where pottery was made and the places where it was used. This type of laboratory analysis is also in an early stage. One of the main questions Chi addresses is the degree to which pottery can be used as a proxy for other types of connections between ports in China and Southeast Asia. This line of inquiry promises to yield more interesting insights in the future.

One important factor that contributed to the early development of Singapore was its position as a node that connected the vast area of the Riau Archipelago with the sailing routes between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Due to the reputation of its inhabitants as pirates, foreign ships rarely visited Riau. It was the Riau people who brought highly valued products from pearls to sea slugs and coral to Singapore, where they traded them for imported items such as Chinese ceramics. The editors of this book (Miksic and Goh) collaborated with Indonesian archaeologist Marsis Sutopo to visit some of the islands in the Riau Archipelago and record surface finds (Miksic 1994, 1995, 2002).

This book contains a report on one of the first systematic excavations to be conducted in Riau. The author of this report, Naniek Harkantiningsih, sadly passed away before this volume was published. Her chapter on Natuna is an important record of the commercial network in which Singapore was a major participant from the 14th to the 16th century. Future generations of archaeologists will be indebted to her for her dedication to Indonesian archaeology.

Peter Borschberg and Kwa Chong Guan discuss Singapore’s significance in the late 16th century. Both note the implications of Portuguese records that show an official based on Singapore’s south coast had duties related to merchants engaged in long-distance trade. It is thanks to Kwa that we know of the discovery of large Chinese porcelain plates in the Kallang Estuary during dredging work. This is the only location in Singapore outside of the Singapore River valley to have yielded such artefacts. Development of the Kallang Estuary has rendered hopeless any thought of archaeological exploration of that area, so it is impossible to test Kwa’s hypothesis that Singapore’s harbourmaster (shahbandar) was based there, rather than along the Singapore River, where more sherds of the 16th century have been discovered.

One of Borschberg’s main points is that the half-Portuguese, half-Bugis admiral Eredia was well aware of Singapore’s strategic importance as a centre of international trade and its potential to be of considerable use to the Portuguese based in Melaka. The harbourmaster of the local Malay ruler who lived up the Johor River was stationed in the middle of Singapore’s south coast. As Borschberg observes, this location was not only logical because of its proximity to ships passing between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea; it was also well placed to exploit the exports from the southern Malay Peninsula. The Johor River and its broad estuary form an important water highway linking the hinterland producers of natural products important in long-distance maritime trade with markets. As Kwa shows, archaeological discoveries along the Johor River have yielded hints that the population living along the Johor River may have been in contact with the Mediterranean as long ago as 2,000 years.

Borschberg’s chapter raises several interesting questions that have not yet been seriously investigated. One concerns the function of a shahbandaria and associated port on the south coast of Singapore at a time when many merchants also visited the Johor River estuary. Another is the location of Bulla, apparently a significant port that existed somewhere near Bintan or Batam in the 17th century. Borschberg’s chapter shows that further study of Singapore as part of the Johor (and Riau) kingdoms would be an interesting case of an area where the roles of main and subsidiary ports have oscillated over a fairly wide area. The discovery of the reasons for such fluctuations and the conditions necessary and sufficient for such a historical pattern to evolve would be very instructive.

Kwa discusses the implications of shards of 16th-century Chinese porcelain found in the Kallang Basin in the late 1960s, but his attention is mainly focused on the history and archaeology of the Johor River. This river has a wide estuary and an extensive hinterland. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the river was a centre of considerable activity, both commercial and naval. Kwa’s study demonstrates that it is highly probable that more sites of early ports remain to be found along the Johor River’s upstream banks. Recent archaeological research indicates the development of numerous settlements there during the last 500 years.

The Silk Road of the Sea experienced significant changes in the 16th century under the influence of Islamisation and European intrusion. The SAMIS network continued to function until the 18th century, but thereafter the old relationships between the main ports, the ports on different levels of the commercial hierarchy, and the ports and their hinterlands all changed. The chapter by one of the editors of this book, Miksic, focuses on the major port and kingdom of Banten in West Java. Indonesian archaeologists and historians have devoted much effort to filling in the many gaps in the European and Chinese records with local materials. Banten Lama is one of the best-preserved port cities of this period in Indonesia. Much important archaeological research has been conducted at Banten Lama and its predecessor, Banten Girang, but little of it has been published in English. Miksic’s chapter strives to summarise the work of the Indonesian archaeologists at these sites. Much more research remains to be done before the effects of European contact, Chinese immigration, and Islamisation on pre-colonial cultures of Banten and other Southeast Asian ports can be disentangled. Miksic’s discussion provides suggestions on the directions and forms of inquiry that can be utilised for research in this later phase of the SAMIS between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Unfortunately, few Indian scholars have been interested in early Southeast Asia since the dissolution of the British Empire. The chapter by Gauri Krishnan shows how valuable such a perspective can be. Her materials include rarely used sources from Gujerat and Jain texts to study textiles and other perishable materials (very important in historical sources, not found by archaeologists; for relevant previous studies, see Lee 1994; Pullen 2021). She also utilises previous research on the vanigrama/manigrama, “merchant guilds,” consisting of merchants from different cities and regions of India, which existed as early as the 5th or 6th centuries. They were present in peninsular Thailand according to the Takuapa inscription and in Barus, northwest Sumatra. She shows how texts created by the trading guilds can help bridge the gap in understanding the relationships between the long-distance and local trading networks in the Southeast Asian Maritime Interaction Sphere.

Gauri relates in detail the many ports in India and Sri Lanka with which early Islamic kingdoms in Aceh and Melaka were in contact and the role of textiles in this relationship. Textiles do not appear in archaeological sites and rarely in inscriptions, so it is necessary to attempt to reconstruct the textile trade during the period before European sources become available through analogy with the situation in the 16th and 17th centuries. Gauri’s chapter calls attention to an additional layer of complexity in the study of the relationship between ports in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese capture of Melaka and some ports in western India led to some restructuring of the Muslim network, but the overall shape of the network and the institutions in it did not change significantly. The Islamisation of India under the Mughals does not seem to have affected the cultural relationship between India and the long-distance trading networks of Southeast Asia, which were mainly in Malay hands; the conversion of many Malays to Islam simply recapitulated the pattern that had characterised the Southeast Asian appropriation of elements of Brahmanism and Buddhism a millennium earlier.

Cai Yunci, in “The Quest for World Heritage Status: The Politics of Heritage Instrumentalisation at the Maritime Port City of Quanzhou in China,” looks closely at the impact of a newfound interest in the effect of the SAMIS (or, to use a common term, the “Silk Road of the Sea”) on the physical development of Quanzhou. This port in southeast China was involved in active trade with Southeast Asia by the early 2nd millennium CE. The desire to exhibit this history in various ways has affected many ports in the SAMIS. Quanzhou is but one example of the interaction between history and the present. Cai’s exploration of the types of sites that China has chosen to preserve and market as evidence of Quanzhou’s important past and the methods used to develop them provide important insights into future possibilities for development that other ports in the SAMIS would do well to heed.

UNESCO’s recognition that trade routes form discrete and significant expressions of human cultural heritage worthy of preservation is a recent phenomenon, beginning in 2014. The inscription of sites along the overland Silk Road was the first example of the nomination of a series of sites. Since 2014, several other routes have been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list. India has proposed Project Mausam as a similar framework that would inscribe sites in the SAMIS, but as of 2024, this project is still in a developmental stage, hindered by factors that Cai describes.

The difficulties facing the inscription of the maritime Silk Road (epitomised by SAMIS) on the World Heritage list as a counterpart to the overland Silk Road and Singapore’s possible inclusion in that serial nomination as an ancient port are two subjects that are unresolved at the time these essays are published. What benefits and what costs would inscription on the World Heritage Sites list entail for Singapore? How would Singapore choose to define itself as a member of that group, which could stretch from Quanzhou to Mombasa? Fourteenth-century Singapore was certainly in contact with Quanzhou; ceramics from the Cizhou kilns site (which has been significantly redeveloped as part of China’s effort to have that port inscribed on the WHS list) have been found on Fort Canning and along the Singapore River.

As this introduction shows, much has been learned since the publication of the previous book on Southeast Asian harbours in 2013. Perhaps this book will encourage archaeologists and historians (and preservationists) of the next generation to develop more collaborative projects in order to exploit the lessons that the ancient Silk Road of the Sea can teach about the feasibility of collaboration over the vast area of the Southeast Asian Maritime Interaction Sphere and the benefits of rediscovering and preserving the many as yet unexplored aspects of this network.

Bibliography

Footnotes

1. Prof. Dr. Mokhtar Saidin presented a paper on this site at the 2019 conference, but unfortunately it could not be included in this book. ↩︎