Place · Srivijaya port city · Indonesia

Palembang / Srivijaya

Date

7th–13th c.

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

-2.991, 104.775 (approximate)

Connections (9)

• Strait networkTambralinga / Nakhon Si Thammarat

  Tambralinga, generally associated with Nakhon Si Thammarat on the peninsula, is another of the Tanjore inscription's named targets, and the campaign's places together span the Malay peninsula and Sumatra — the geography of the Srivijayan network rather than of a single state. Tambralinga later sent its own king, Chandrabhanu, to invade Sri Lanka twice in the thirteenth century, so the traffic across the Bay of Bengal ran in both directions.

• Power passed toSingapore

  The Malay Annals make Singapura a foundation of Sang Nila Utama, a prince of Palembang claiming descent through Alexander from an Indian king, who named the island for an animal he took for a lion. There are no lions in Southeast Asia. Fourteenth-century Chinese sources call the place Temasek and archaeology on the Singapore River confirms a real trading town. The Sanskrit name, the title and the genealogy are borrowed Indian prestige, which is how most Malay and Javanese dynasties described themselves.

• Teaching lineageNālandā mahāvihāra

  Yijing stopped at Srivijaya for six months on his way to India in 671 and for several years on the way back, and wrote that a Chinese monk intending to study at Nalanda should spend a year or two at Palembang first to learn Sanskrit grammar. A Sumatran port was a recognised preparatory school for an Indian university. Srivijaya's rulers also endowed a monastery at Nagapattinam under Chola licence, so the traffic was institutional in both directions.

• Imperial administration ofPannai, Sumatra

  Pannai on the Sumatran coast was one of the ports the Srivijayan system controlled, and the Tanjore inscription names it among the places Rajendra's fleet took in 1025. What the raid actually did is disputed: Srivijaya recovered and continued sending embassies to China, so the campaign reads less like a conquest than like a violent renegotiation of the terms on which Tamil merchant guilds could trade through the straits.

• Power passed toTrowulan

  Majapahit in east Java displaced Srivijaya as the dominant power of the archipelago in the fourteenth century, and the Nagarakretagama lists tributaries from Sumatra to New Guinea — including the Palembang region that Srivijaya had run for six hundred years. The shift is from a straits-controlling port polity to an agrarian Javanese empire with a fleet, and it moved the centre of the archipelago's politics from Sumatra to Java, where it has stayed.

• Trade routeNagapattinam

  A Srivijayan king endowed the Chudamani vihara at Nagapattinam in about 1006 with Rajaraja's licence and a grant of village revenue, recorded in the Leiden copper plates — so the Cholas were taking money from Srivijaya to build a Buddhist monastery in their own port twenty years before they attacked it. Both facts are documented and neither cancels the other, which is a reasonable description of how medieval Indian Ocean diplomacy worked.

• Maritime routeGuangzhou / Canton, China

  The Guangzhou to Srivijaya to Tamralipti route is the maritime alternative to the Central Asian road, and Yijing is its best witness: Persian ships, monsoon seasons, a Sumatran stopover for Sanskrit, and a Buddhist establishment in the Straits teaching the Indian curriculum. He made both legs twice and never once went overland.

• Trade routeKedah / Kadaram

  Kedah and Palembang are the two halves of the Srivijayan system: a peninsula port controlling the isthmus portage and a river capital controlling the strait. Yijing passed through both in the 670s as a monk buying passage; Rajendra Chola's fleet attacked both in 1025, and the Tanjore inscription names them in the same order a sailor would meet them.

• Route adjacencyThe Laguna Copperplate Inscription

  The Laguna plate is a Srivijayan document in everything but findspot. It is written in Old Malay with Sanskrit, Old Javanese and Tagalog terms, in the Kawi script, and dated by the Saka era — the whole apparatus of the Srivijayan and Javanese commercial world, which reached the Philippine islands as its northern edge. Palembang was that world's centre, where Yijing stopped to study Sanskrit for years before going on to India. The plate shows the network's paperwork conventions being used a thousand kilometres past its core.

On these journeys

• Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
• India and Southeast Asia — scripts, Sanskrit and sacred kingship
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
• Yijing — the sea road to Nālandā (671–695)

Sources

ISEAS, Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa; Tanjore inscription tradition

• Wikipedia