Sanjaya was succeeded by a series of Sailendra monarchs into the mid-ninth century, all of whom followed his lead and built several major Mahayana Buddhist temples in central Java near m
Trang 1eng Plateau in north-central Java Sanjaya was succeeded by a
series of Sailendra monarchs into the mid-ninth century, all
of whom followed his lead and built several major Mahayana
Buddhist temples in central Java near modern-day
Yogya-karta, including the early ninth-century temple complex at
Borobudur
In the late ninth century Hindu kings based in central
Java defeated the Buddhist Sailendras and proclaimed their
sovereignty over what they called the Mataram state (ca
760–1000) These kings constructed their own equally
im-pressive central temple complex dedicated to Lord Shiva at
Prambanan, north of Yogyakarta near Mount Merapi, an
ac-tive volcano
After a devastating eruption of Mount Merapi in the
10th century temporarily made the plains of central Java
un-inhabitable, the center of Javanese civilization shifted to
east-ern Java Temples assumed less importance as statements of
royal authority Instead, the kings of Java through the reign
of Airlangga (r 1019–45) encouraged the spread of wet-rice
agriculture in eastern Java and exploited the region’s’
strate-gic position close to the international maritime trade route
to eastern Indonesia’s Spice Islands Following Airlangga’s
death, the Java monarchy split into competing factions, with
kings identified by their association with two rival courts, one
at Kediri on the southwestern edge of the Brantas River plain
and the other at Singhasari to the southeast on the Malang
Plateau
The Majapahit Empire (1293–1525), based near
pres-ent-day Surabaya, was the high point in the development of
the Hindu-Buddhist civilizations on the islands of Southeast
Asia It controlled all the islands that are now part of
Indone-sia, which they called Nusantara Local societies appropriated
Majapahit’s refined culture The most notable of these
soci-eties was neighboring Bali, which still practices the Hindu
religious traditions it inherited from the Majapahit Empire
During the 15th century the Majapahit Empire faced
ag-gressive competition from the newly Islamic ports on Java’s
northern coast In 1528 the empire finally fell to a military
coalition led by the Demak Sultanate
melAKA
The Melaka (Malacca) maritime state was founded by the
Sumatra-based Malay prince Parameswara (d 1414), who
claimed to be the heir to the earlier network of ports along
the straits that the Chinese and Indians called Srivijaya
Parameswara moved his court there from what is now
Sin-gapore in about 1390 Within 50 years Malacca had become
the wealthiest commercial port in Asia It served as both the
connecting hub in the trade between India and China and as
the international source of Indonesian spices
The initial success of Melaka was the result of special diplomatic ties with the Ming Dynasty of China Merchants wishing to trade in Chinese ports were given special treat-ment if they first made stopovers in Malacca In return, the state was obligated to keep the straits free of piracy, thereby assuring the regular flow of Western luxuries, Indian textiles, and Southeast Asian spices into China When the Ming court ended their aggressive diplomatic relationships with the re-gion in the 1430s and subsequently began to restrict China’s overseas contacts, the ruler of Malacca, Sultan Muhammad Shah (r 1424–44) converted to Islam in order to encourage the Muslim merchants who dominated trade in the Indian Ocean to use his port and to legitimize Malacca’s control over other ports in the straits region
vietnAm
Northern Vietnam remained under Chinese sovereignty un-til the fall of the Tang Dynasty, when Vietnamese armies pre-vented the restoration of Chinese rule under the new Song Dynasty The leadership of the newly independent Vietnam
Lý state (1009–1225) partnered with Mahayana Buddhist monks trained in China to establish and administer the new government institutions Minor officials were chosen
by examination for the first time in 1075, and a civil service training institute and an imperial academy, which provided
a mixed Buddhist and Confucian education, were set up in
1076 In 1089 a fixed hierarchy of Buddhist and secular state officials was established with nine degrees of civil and mili-tary scholar officials
By the 13th century, however, the Buddhist religious in-stitutions had become a threat to Vietnamese secular leader-ship The Trân Dynasty (1225–1400) as well as the subsequent
Lê Dynasty (1428–1527) began to recruit newly trained Con-fucian scholars from among the Vietnamese landed aris-tocracy to replace the Buddhist monks as state bureaucrats Vietnam’s emperors implemented their own version of the Chinese Confucian examination system Unlike the Chinese examinations, however, which were open to all qualified male applicants, the Vietnamese system admitted only the sons of the Vietnamese landed elite
From the 13th to the 15th centuries, the Vietnamese rul-ers repelled repeated Chinese attempts to annex their terri-tory and fended off periodic raids by their Champa Hindu neighbors in central Vietnam The multiple wars between the Vietnamese and the Champa eventually resulted in the fall of the Champa Kingdom to victorious Vietnamese forces
in 1471 In 1527, however, the Lê state fragmented into re-gional courts ruled by rival factions of the royal family Af-ter that, Vietnam had no effective central authority until the 19th century
370 empires and dynasties: Asia and the Pacific