Robert D. Kaplan - Asias Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

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CONTENTS

I walk along jungle trails in the heat-inflicted silence. Blackened, redbrick humps lie strangled in greenery against steep mountains devoured by rain clouds. I am in My Son, in central Vietnam, forty miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea. Flowers and grass grow out of every nonvertical surface of each monument where altars, lamps, and lingas used to be placed, swimming in incense and camphor. Half-destroyed statues that recall India deep in Southeast Asia are embraced by columns in the walls, blotched blue and white with lichen. There are headless gods and time-mottled dancing figures now ferociously explored by insects. The loose bricks are like missing teeth: the monuments so hacked and battered that what remains recall the abstract shapes of modernist sculpture. A lichen-coated linga, the phallic symbol of Shivas manhood, stands alone and sentinel against the ages.

The size and abundance of Temple Groups B and C hold out the promise of a Vietnamese Angkor Wat, but once I come upon the other temple groups I realize just how little is left of nine centuries of religious life here, stretching from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages. Group A is a mere low pile of rubble, testimony to American helicopter-borne destruction in a war of less relevance to Southeast Asias future than are these ruins and what they represent.

The fiercest nationalisms are often begot by what, in Freudian terminology, is the narcissism of small differences. What rescues Vietnam from being a mere southern redoubt of Sinic culture is its Khmer and Indian heritage, which allows for a unique confection that is ever so similar and yet ever so different from the civilization of China. Invoking Champa, from the fourth through thirteenth centuries, is to expose the lie of Cold War area studies with which Washington remains enamored, which place Southeast Asia firmly in an East Asia and Pacific realm; while in fact this region is part of an organic continuum that is more properly labeled the Indo-Pacific, whose maritime heart is the South China Sea: for Champa represents a seafaring, piratical race. Squeezed between the Central Highlands and the sea, with numerous rivers and natural harbors at their disposal, with woods, spices, textiles, honey, wax, and metals to trade, the Chams were well placed to benefit from the commerce between the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. The French had it right when they designated this region not Southeast Asia, but Indochina.

Witness the medieval Chola Empire of the Hindu Tamils, based in southern India, which sent its fleets throughout this seaboard as far north as China; even as ancient Chinese pottery has been found as far south as Java, and Chinese ships under the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties ventured as far as Odisha in northeastern India. Long before the North and South Vietnams of the Cold War era, there were northern and southern Vietnams that had existed across this civilizational fault line and across the chasm of the centuries between antiquity and modern times: Dai Viet being a young and insecure kingdom in the north after having been a province of the Chinese Empire for over a thousand years; while to the south lay the Khmer Empire and Champa. Champa, in particular, was the enemy of Dai Viet, preventing the latters expansion to the south, until Champa was finally reduced to near ashes by the majority Kinh in the north, with an underlying sense of guilt felt by northern Vietnam toward southern Vietnam ever since. Champa, as the historical and cultural representation of southern Vietnam, was always more closely connected to the Khmer and Malay worlds than to Sinicized Dai Viet to the north.