The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Mar 01, 2007

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Another "Mediterranean" in Southeast Asia

Denys Lombard

Another “Mediterranean” in SoutheastAsia [1]

By Denys Lombard

Translation by Nola Cooke

Abstract: Southeast Asia, long known as anintermediate zone between the ancientcivilisations of China and India, is also an areathat scholars have long portrayed ashistorically subject to influences coming fromits west, beginning with Indianisation, thenislamisation and finally westernisation.However, this article argues that it would befar more insightful, and historically moreaccurate for the last several centuries at least,to treat Southeast Asia and southern China aspart of one region, in the same way thatFernand Braudel approached the history of theMediterranean.

In contemporary thinking about Indonesia,once we shift our perspective from the level ofa national space, like for instance that occupiedby the Indonesian archipelago, to a broaderregional perspect ive, two scenariosimmediately come to mind: the first is“Southeast Asia”, the second “ASEAN”. Bothscenarios are in fact variants of the sameapproach and, speaking chronologically, quiterecent (dating respectively from 1945 and

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1967), with the second merely the political (andsemi-futurological) formulation of the first.Without dwelling too much on the difficultiesASEAN confronted in the late 1990s, [2] we cancontinue to predict a good future for SoutheastAsia. Happily situated between the age-oldgiants of India and China, it continues to takeoff, despite the occasional bumps and alreadyforms a sort of privileged buffer zone betweenthe two Asian giants, a centre about the samesize as Europe and a worthy pairing with it…

But this sense of Southeast Asian “centring” isnot all that new. If the names in current use arequite recent, it was still a very long time agothat the West first identified the totality of the“East Indies”—that space which the Chinese fortheir part had designated for long centuries asthe Nanyang, or “South Seas”—as a sort of“party-wall” that both connects and separatesthe two giants, a zone where Chinese andIndian influences had historically met (fromwhence the fruitful concept of “Indochina”) andas a region of lesser political density, wherestructures were less rigid and where they couldhope to find an advantageous zone of influence.

Map of the “East Indies,” circa 1662

This perception is reflected more or less clearlyin all the successive histories of Southeast Asia.

Initially written from a colonial perspective,and later from a nationalist one, in either casethey were marked by a strong desire to stressthat the greatest influences came from theWest: first of all “Indianisation”, then“Islamisation” (conceived essentially as comingfrom Islamised India, or from the Middle East),and finally, of course, “Westernisation”, afterthe early sixteenth-century arrival of thePortuguese. Written originally by Europeans,and aiming above all to teach readers to look toEurope (and later the US), these historiesminimised the rhythms coming from the Northto very little indeed, except for the Japanesecommotion of 1942 which, even so, was rightlyrelated as a totally unforeseen and evenaberrant cataclysm.

In this sort of perspective, the Southeast Asianspace naturally remains open to the Indianworld, beyond the Gulf of Bengal (which weknow had been an area of exchange betweenSri Lanka and Burma, as well as betweenBengal and Arakan), as well as towards theMelanesian world (which we know begins inIndonesian itself, in Maluku, Irian and Timor).Yet, by contrast, it excludes all relations withthe Chinese world. No thought is given here totrying to rethink over the centuries [in thelongue durée] the possible contacts betweensouth China and Southeast Asia; at best,historical consideration was confined to therecently formed Chinatowns, which in turnwere deliberately seen as settlements of“foreigners”, and thus as an epiphyte…[3]

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Ethnic Chinese offer prayers at a temple in Kuala Lumpur,February 2007

It is worth noting that such a spatial, and aboveall mental, “uncoupling” of Southeast Asia fromsouthern China serves the interests of a lot ofpeople. First of all, it allows Western SoutheastAsianists to exhibit, unblushing, a fineignorance of China (no small advantage, whenwe consider the difficulties we know await theapprentice Sinologist…). It is also reassuring:by clearly isolating fields, it justifies ignorancein the name of a supposedly indissoluble andairtight compart-mentalisation. The thing isalso probably done to please many people fromthe countries involved, Indonesians,Malaysians, or even Vietnamese, who rarelylike to think of their large neighbour, or tomeasure themselves against it, and would allprefer to create a collective dead-end in itsrespect (despite the dangers this mightrepresent for their own futures). Let us add,too, that it is by no means certain that thisapproach would not also appeal to manyresponsible Chinese of the continent who, stillconcerned about the approach of “southernmiasmas”, prefer to remain within the shelterof their borders in order to better imagine “theState”. … Today only Japanese and Taiwanesebusinessmen have a clear awareness of theintellectual heresy that this fictive “wall”represents: Japanese and Taiwanesebusinessmen, and Chinese businessmen from

the continent as well, who, thanks to theirgeographic position, have been breaking down“the wall” for many years, and whose cultureenables them to feel something that could berather better understood as the effects of acontinuum.

* * *

Cover of a recent edition of Fernand Braudel’sLa Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen àl’époque de Philippe II

We are going to try here to sketch precisely,although in a few lines, all the possibleadvantages of enlarging “the region” to includethe provinces of southern China, and ofimagining that in Southeast Asia we findanother “Mediterranean”; not from a foolish

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desire for imitation but because this Braudelianapproach [4] has the great merit of proposing aglobal vision that obliges our thinking to takeaccount of the two shores at the same time. Letus recall that the essential aspect of Braudel’smethod consisted in requiring the reader to“rethink” the two halves of a geographicalensemble, each at the same time, somethingwell attested for the Roman era (mare nostrum)[5] but which the advent of Islam hadsupposedly destroyed. Going beyond thecrusades, Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, andthe colonial North African wars, Braudel’s bookallows us to rediscover—and not without someamazement—the uni ty of a coherentgeographical space. By so doing, problemschange their appearance: it is no longer aquestion of analysing the opposition of twoirreconcilable “blocs” (“Christianity” and“Islam”), but of understanding the reasons fortwo parallel evolutions which, far fromoccurring separately, influenced one anotheron a very considerable number of occasions.

At this point, we can affirm that wanting tounderstand Southeast Asia without integratinga good deal of southern China into our thinkingis like wanting to give an account of theMediterranean world after removing Turkey,the Levant, Palestine, and Egypt. By this new“centring”—or rather, by restoring thecentring—geography can and should help us togo beyond the received ideas that a certainstyle of history wants to us preserve, byinsisting on staying too close to the facts (or tocertain facts).

Map of administrative divisions in China

But first we have to explain what we mean hereby South China. It seems to us that weobviously need to take account of Guangdong(with Guangxi) and Fujian, and the two bigislands that respectively go with one (Hainan)and the other (Taiwan). But it is equallyappropriate to take account of Yunnan, a regionof high passes and caravans, without which wewould but poorly understand the evolution ofupper Burma and of Tonkin, and the dynamic ofall the Thai peoples who, from the thirteenthcentury, would deeply influence the whole ofthe Indochinese peninsula. Yunnan was aregional impulsive force from the Bronze Age(because its chalky karstic soils containedabundant mines of tin). Further, far from beingat the ends of the earth, as Europeans mighthave liked to imagine it in the nineteenthcentury, Yunnan has almost always been aplace of journey crossings and exchanges.Mahayana Buddhism flourished there duringthe Nanzhao kingdom (which once extended asfar as Hanoi) and, when the province wasfinally and irrevocably attached to the Chineseempire (under the Yuan, in the thirteenthcentury), Islam appeared there with thecaravan traders, at the same moment that it setfoot on Sumatra. At Chieng Mai, in our owntimes, we can still meet some of those Chinese

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Muslim families who, among other commercialventures, are trading jade with Yunnan.

As for the two large islands of Hainan andTaiwan, which are like anchors cast out to seafrom the Chinese continent, it is quitefascinating to compare their evolution. Bothwere initially occupied by non-Chinesepopulations, in the first case by Thais especiallyand by Austronesians in the second, so wecould say that, from a certain perspective, theywere both at base “Southeast Asian”. But ifHainan was Sinicised quite early and has neverceased to form part of the continental system,Taiwan was not really occupied before theseventeenth century, above all by farmers fromFujian; and we know what its recent evolutionhas been.

Postcard image of Taiwan

Right from the start of our analysis, we mustinsist on the idea of continuity which ties theseregions, today officially “Chinese”, to the restof Southeast Asia. It is easy to show that thekarstic and tin bearing areas of Yunnan (and ofGuizhou-Guangxi) exist with great consistencyfrom the north to the south of the Indochineseand Malay Peninsulas, appearing even as faraway as the shores of Sumatra. Furthermore,tin mines can be found similarly along thewhole length, at Phuket (now in Thailand) justas at Perak, on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur

just as at Bangka and Belitung (Billiton). Wefind volcanic activity in certain parts of Taiwanand Hainan, and earthquakes might damageFujian or Hong Kong just as easily as thePhilippines or Burma. It is also a commonplacethat this whole region falls under the monsooncycle and experiences typhoons, whilebotanists and zoologists, in parallel with eachother, stress the fact that the flora and fauna ofsouthern China bears great analogies to thelight forests of Indochina, and that in earliertimes elephants were common in the North andthe South. Just as in Hainan, the coastalregions of southern China were also covered bytropical forests, the point being that forestfelling began here much earlier than furtherSouth. Just as with Europe’s Mediterranean,then, the opportunity exists here for historiansto study the differential retreat of the forests,occurr ing much ear l ier in the mosteconomically developed countries: in theMuslim world retreating to the west, in Chinato the south.

Elephant in southern Yunnan

That said, however, it is obvious that we arenot going to find in this Southeast Asian“Mediterranean”, thus defined, all the elementsof the original. For example, we only need to

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glance at the map to understand that it is verymuch more open to the two great oceans thatadjoin it, the Indian and the Pacific, and incontrast that it is very much more empty, withno island here playing the role of “stagingpost”, as Cyprus, Crete, Malta or even Sicilydid in times past. The obvious candidate is theParacels, but they were located within adangerous zone that early navigators preferredto skirt around rather than go through directly;and the astonishing international game thatnow breaks out from time to time over theseminiscule islets, which are the Xisha (Paracels)or the Nansha (Spratleys), can only beexplained by the oil reserves discovered there,quite recently on the temporal scale we areusing here.

We could go on listing differences “word forword”; but the most basic one is probably less amatter of physical structures than of history,the fact that in this other Mediterranean we donot f ind a similarly powerful commondenominator like the Roman Empire providedfor several centuries. No truly unified politicalsystem; no generally widespread language likeLatin; no unifying religion like Christianity atits inception. We could certainly object that theso-called “period of Indianisation” had likewiseseen the establishment of certain commoncultural elements in Java, Bali, Cambodia,Champa, and even in China itself, by theintermediary of Buddhism, and that Sanskritcould have functioned at certain times as a sortof koineÌ€ . [6] Even so, it never reallyhappened on the same scale.

This objection notwithstanding, it does notmean there cannot be found in Southeast Asiaelements of an ancient common culturalfoundation, beginning with an ancestral cult,linked to that of the buffalo, which can bedetected from the south of China to as far awayas Indochina, the Philippines, and Indonesia.During the prehistoric epoch (that is, a periodbroadly corresponding with the Roman era in

the West and the Han in China), the discoveryof an impressive number of bronze drumsprovides us with the outline of what is calledDongson culture, reaching west from thebronze rich southwest of China to the bordersof Iran, and to the south passing throughVietnam, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Bali,Sumbawa, etc . That other technica linformation, like the use of braced ridge tiles,[7] could also have spread along with bronzeworking cannot be doubted. Some pre-historians are currently researching thepresence of boat-coffins, found equally inWuyishan, one of the highest places in northernFujian, in the Niah cave (northern Borneo), andin several places in the Philippines.[8]Generations of students of mythology have alsostudied the similarities found among thevarious folklores of river-valley dwellers.

Dongson drum probably made in Vietnam circa 200 A.D.

Finally, it is appropriate to note the work atpresent being carried out with greatenthusiasm by many anthropologists, Chineseas well as western, on the Hakkas. We knowthat these “guests” (that is the sense of theirname in Chinese: hakka or keija in mandarin)were formerly always considered as a more orless Han people, come from the North largelyin the Sung period, who had settled in southernregions. Their “difference” from other suchgroups, it used to be said, was in their

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wonderful ability to preserve their originaltraditions (and dialect). But today the tendencyis to view them as “aborigines”, as people ofthe South, who had been progressively butincompletely acculturated by Han civilisation.[9] And it is very true that certain of theircustoms (for example, double funerals) arebetter explained by the existence of an “oldSoutheast Asian stock” than by any import fromthe North. [10]

Hakka dwelling in southern Fujian

It goes without saying that this demonstrationis hardly insignificant here. To a certain extent,it aims at questioning the official monolithicview of Chinese culture, and there are goodreasons for believing that the anthropologistsare not entirely incorrect…

* * *

It is true that, historically, the early SoutheastAsian “Mediterranean”, like the original, wasfor a long time “divided up” (to borrow the finetitle of Jean Guilaine’s book about the origins of“our” Mediterranean [11]). There is everyreason to think that it stayed that way evenlonger, and that coastal navigation routes,extending from port to port and finally endingup by linking all shores together, took a little

longer to establish there. We can put together arough chronology of the establishment of thesetrade routes, by analysing certain texts, initiallymainly Arabic and Chinese ones, but also inparticular by using the data of Chinese ceramicexports, which can be found on all the shoresand which have been well studied in recentdecades.

Early Ming plate found on shipwreck nearTernate, Moluccas, eastern Indonesia

From this it seems most likely that the oldestroute was the Western one, linking a number ofoften-rival trading areas near the Straits ofMalacca to the great port of Canton. Afterleaving from some port of Sriwijaya (Shilifoshiin Chinese texts)—a generic term broadlydesignating the Malay Peninsula and southeastSumatra whose trading centres includedPalembang, Jambi, Bangka, Kalah, Ligor—theroute passed by the Tioman Island (mentionedas early as the ninth century in an Arab text)before reaching the present coast of centralVietnam, controlled at that time by a series ofsmall and competing Cham principalities that

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increasingly had to struggle againstVietnamese southern expansion. Further north,the route might go up to Tonkin, or modernnorthern Vietnam, where in the town of Luy-lau(where Buddhist pilgrims from China metothers from India and Central Asia) theexistence of a very cosmopolitan society fromthe third century is well attested. But the routemight equally turn to the northeast, to Canton,perhaps touching on the southwest point ofHainan Island, where vestiges of a smallIslamised Cham community still persist today.Thus the later “historical” rivalry between thefuture Vietnam and Guangdong-Guangxi regionof south China might possibly be explained bythe economic rivalry that grew up between theports of Tonkin and those of South China in themore distant past.

It is by this Western route that Islam reachedChina, not very long after the death of itsfounder; Canton contains the tomb of one of theProphet’s close relations, Abu Wakkas, as wellas an ancient mosque whose minaret, whichwas also used as a lighthouse, dated from theninth century. From this era, a good twocenturies before it reached Java (whose oldestinscription only dates from the eleventhcentury) Islam was set to become the mainideological propensity of the seagoingmerchants who circulated along the coasts ofChina. When a revolt broke out in 879 CE, theforeign community of Canton, mainlycomprising Muslims but also containingChristians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, [12] wasattacked and Mas’udi records 200,000 werekilled.

There is every reason to suppose, although thistime the facts are much less well documented,that another route joined Sriwijaya to the easto f modern Indones ia , by a ser ies o fintermediary stops to the passisir ports of thenorthern Java coast. This old route (which mayperhaps have only been an extension of thatused by the bronze drums) allowed the

westward transport of cloves—gathered mainlyin the Ma luku reg ion bu t known inMediterranean markets from the Romanperiod—along with various other products ofthe greater East, like parrots that wereunknown in Java but well represented on thebas-relief carvings at Borobudur (ninthcentury).

Borobudur / Detail of frieze depicting parrots

From the tenth and eleventh centuries, we canmake out certain changes. In China, the periodknown as the Five Dynasties (907-960 CE) wascharacterised by a great level of autonomy inthe southern regions, which took advantage ofthe temporary imperial crisis. Fujian, known forsome decades as the kingdom of Min, [13] tookoff economically, little by little preparing itselfto become one of the early economic motors ofSoutheast Asia; while under the Southern Han(Nan Han) the Guangdong region experiencedenormous development, notably in regard tometallurgical production. In the archipelagothat later became the Philippines, we see theemergence of the gold-rich site of Butuan (on

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the north coast of Mindanao), which starts toexchange Chinese ceramics for its gold. OnJava, the centre of gravity moves from themiddle to the east; and in the area of modernnorthern Vietnam, finally freed from Chinesecontrol, war begins with the Chams to thesouth. This conflict would end with the Chamwithdrawal, thus causing the western traderoute, which had made possible the firstcontacts with India, with maritime Buddhism,and with Islam, to become unproductive for along time.

However, the great turning point for SoutheastAsia, as in fact for all of Eurasia, occurred inthe thirteenth century, with the “Mongolmoment” in world history, [14] and then in thefourteenth century when, almost immediatelyafter, unrest in the Turkish principalities ofCentral Asia closed the continental trade routethat Marco Polo and Rubriquis had taken (aswell as Rabban Sauma, from the other wayaround). From this era, the “weight of theNorth” (that is to say, from southern China)scarcely ceased to prevail in Southeast Asia.Until then, the main impacts, whether Buddhistor Muslim, had in reality mostly come from thesouthwest, with “Indianisation” easily formingthe most important such phenomenon. But,henceforth, Chinese ports would make the mostobvious impact. From the thirteenth century,there was a Chinese community at Angkor; inthe fourteenth century, there were Chinesesett led in Siam who founded the newcommercial city of Ayutthaya, [15] while wealso hear at that t ime of communitiesestablished on the north coast of Java, notablyat Gresik.

Painting of Khubilai Khan

The Mongol conquest is still a rather poorlyunderstood phenomenon, but it is clear that, onleaving Central Asia, Genghis Khan and hissuccessors wanted to organise a sort of worldsystem that would have integrated not onlyChina, eastern Europe, Iran, and India, but alsoall the islands and countries at its easternperiphery, including Japan, Vietnam, Champa,Burma, and Java. The two centuries thatfollowed would see the emergence of newcentres of gravity, the take-off of numerousport cities, and above all the development of anEastern maritime route, linking the ports ofFujian by various stops to Luzon, Mindoro, theVisayas, and, beyond Mindanao, to Brunei inone direction, and Sulu and Maluku in theother. On the other shore at this time, the 1471Vietnamese conquest of the Cham capital ofVijaya confirmed the decline of the Westernroute.

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From this point on, we could say that the circlewas closed and that henceforth the Nanyangoperated as a Southeast Asia “Mediterranean”.From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries,we witness the remarkable development ofsouth Fujian’s large ports: Zhangzhou andQuangzhou, then Amoy (or Xiamen). In the lasttwo cases, a wealth of Muslim inscriptionsattests to the presence of a large foreigncommunity, comprising Arabs and Persians.Powerful Hokkien merchants now begansetting up bases not only in Java, Patani, andthe Philippines, but also in Guangdong andHainan. In parallel, at the same time, a wholeseries of independent merchants, Japanese andChinese (whom we call the wokou), tookadvantage of the favourable circumstances todevelop a private commerce not only betweenports in China and Japan but also in SoutheastAsia, where no state watched over them.

Statue of Chinese admiral Zheng He(1405-1433)

During the first decades of the fifteenthcentury, the famous expeditions by AdmiralZhenghe not only crossed the South Seas butwent as far as India, Mecca, and evenMogadishu in Africa. They were broken offafter 1436, and this interruption has generallybeen interpreted as a Chinese desire to“withdraw”. This still remains to be proven, forthe stopping of the great State expeditions inno way meant Chinese emigration ceased. Wecan indeed wonder if, fundamentally, theChinese had not moved on very much earlier toa system of private trading (so vaunted in ourdays), while the West still remained entangledin i ts “companies”, who made war on“freebooters” for a further two or three

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centuries.

From the sixteenth century, things changed ab i t , p a r t l y d u e t o t h e p r e s e n c e o fEuropeans—the Portuguese, and then theDutch and English—but only in part for thisreason. Little by little, Fujian’s primacy wasreceding and Canton taking back her formerplace, but under a less liberal system: 13 hang,or guilds, were set up there in 1557, and in1720 they would begin the Kohong system thatallowed Chinese mandarins better control ofWesterners. One might reflect from this that,whenever China opens up via Canton, it isalways done less widely and in a morecontrolled fashion than through Fujianeseports.

Containers at Fuzhou port

Despite the official closure of Japan in 1638,and that of China several times under both theMing and the Qing, it is nevertheless still notcertain that these great North Asian countrieshad chosen a “defensive” policy, in oppositionto triumphant western merchants. The contraryis more likely to be true. On the one hand, theykept very much in their own hands the controlof certain commodity flows, all the whileprofiting as the main destination of lucrativetraffic (like Mexican silver, which for a longtime reached China via the intermediary of the

Manilla galleon, or Chinese silks that went toJapan via Deshima). On the other hand, theycreated important diasporas. Through theirmultiple diasporas, Chinese people founded thecapitalist networks from which originate almostall the “national” bourgeoisies of SoutheastAsia today. As for the Japanese, who at thestart of the seventeenth century had alsocreated important “Nipponese quarters”(Nihonmachi) at Ayutthya, Faifo (or Hoi An, inmodern central Vietnam) and Batavia, all theiradvantage was lost after the 1638 rulingeffectively forbade the departure of privateindividuals, although they would regain it afterMeiji and above all at the start of the 20th

century.

Viewed in parallel with this, the story of theEuropean merchants is hardly wonderful. Afterthe “great success” won by the sixteenth-century Portuguese and seventeenth-centuryDutch (who had nevertheless been obliged tosurrender quite lamentably at Formosa, whenopposed by Koxinga), eighteenth-centuryreports are rather ordinary. Macao’scommerce, pushed out of Japan after 1638,took refuge in trifles at Makassar or at Timor,where the sandalwood trade certainly madesome fine personal fortunes but could hardly beclaimed as high priority commerce. As for thatof the Dutch East India Company, we know thatit was on the point of giving up the ghost whenthe Napoleonic crises shook Europe. TheEnglish and French[16] companies hardly faredany better. The events of the nineteenthcentury are well known and could give theimpression that Westerners, finally in harmonyafter 1815, had reached an agreement to“open” China, and then Japan. But events of the20th century by contrast leave us quite scepticalabout their ability to “control” the region andto hold their own there.

In sum, the notion of the “Mediterranean” is auseful instrument that helps us to rectify atraditional “centring” which now risks being

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very inadequate, and to substitute another thatallows us to integrate a much vaster space andmuch longer periods of time. Thus restored inits totality, and from a deliberately non-traditional perspective, the history of SoutheastAsia might reasonably hope to escape from the“polarised” history to which it has too oftenbeen confined (with “national” historiesslavishly following in the footsteps of thepreceding “colonial” histories) and of profitingfrom a new approach that takes account ofsynchronisms and networks. Let me insist, withmy final words, that reintegrating the south ofChina into our thinking will in no way “breachthe dikes” (as too many timid minds imagine).The real object at stake is, in fact, as hasalready been suggested in passing, to open allof South China to comparative studies, amagnificent project that should not put anyoneoff.

This article appeared in the inaugural issue ofthe e-journal China Diaspora Southern Studies(http://csds.anu.edu.au/) in February 2007. Theeditors of the journal are Nola Cooke and LiTana of the Research School of Pacific and AsiaStudies, Australian National University. Cookeand Li are the editors of Water Frontier,Commerce and the Chinese in the LowerMekong Region, 1750-1880.

Posted at Japan Focus on March 4, 2007.

Notes

[1] This is an edited translation by Nola Cookeof an article by the late French scholar, DenysLombard. It was first published in 1998 in aspecial edition of the French geographicaljournal, Hérodote, devoted to Indonesia asIslam’s “Orient”. See Hérodote, no. 88, 1988,pp. 184-92. References in brackets have beenadded to the original text. Many thanks toClaudine Salmon for her assistance withaspects of the translation.

[2] Lombard refers here to the Cambodianproblem, and the monetary crises of themid-1990s, especially the difficulties of the Thaibaht and the Indonesian rupia.

[3] An epiphyte is a plant that grows on anotherwithout being parasitic on its host.

[4] Lombard refers to the highly influentialhistory of the Mediterranean world by FernandBraudel, La Méditerranée et le mondeméditerranéen aÌ€ l’époque de Philippe II [TheMediterranean and the Mediterranean World inthe Era of Philip II], first published in France in1949 and reprinted several times since. It wastranslated into English by Sian Reynolds as TheMediterranean and the Mediterranean World inthe Age of Philip II, published by Collins in1972-73 and recently reprinted by theUniversity of California Press in 1995.

[5] Mare nostrum is Latin for “our sea”.

[6] Koiné was an ancient Greek mixture of Atticand Ionian elements that became the commonGreek language, thus by extension it means anycommon tongue shared by speakers ofdifference languages or dialects over a largegeographical space.

[7] J. Dumarcay, “La faîtieÌ€re tendue (histoired’une technique)”, Bulletin de l’EÌ�colefrançaise d’Extrême-Orient, no. 49, 1959, pp.632-36.

[8] D. Ziegler, “Entre ciel et terre: le culte des‘bateaux-cercueils’ de mont Wuyi”, Cahiersd’Extrême-Orient, no 9, EFEO Kyoto, 1996-97,pp. 203-31; T. Harrison, “The Great Cave ofNiah: A Preliminary Report”, Man, No 57,1957, pp. 161-66.

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[9] See especially Glen Dudbridge, China’sVernacular Cultures, “Inaugural lecture”,University of Oxford, Clarendon Press, Oxford,1996.

[10] Double funerals are found throughout theAustrones ian wor ld , as far away asMadagascar.

[11] Jean Guilaine, La Mer partagée ,Flammarion, Paris, 1994.

[12] A Persian Manichean religion that believedthe world was locked in struggle between thefollowers of Good and of Evil.]

[13] E. H. Schafer, The Empire of Min, CharlesTuttle, Tokyo, 1954.

[14] S. A. M. Adshead, Central Asia in WorldHistory, MacMillan Press, London, 1993.

[15] Charnvit Kasetsiri, The Rise of Ayudhya. AHistory of Siam in the Fourteenth and FifteenthCenturies, Oxford University Press-DuangKamol, Bangkok, 1976.

[16] On the difficulties of the French Companyin its trade with China, see the excellent studyby L. Dermigny, La Chine et l’Occident. Lecommerce à Canton au XVIII e sieÌ€cle,1719-1833, SEVPEN, Paris, 1964, 4 vols.