The 13th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes 2002 PUBLIC FORUM

Southeast Asian History Seminar

“Patterns of Southeast Asian History”

Anthony REID Date: 14:00 - 16:30 Friday, September 20, 2002 Place: ACROS Fukuoka Event Hall (Tenjin, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka City) Program:

Outline of Forum and Introduction of Panelists Professor Ishizawa Yoshiaki (Sophia University)

Keynote Speech Professor Anthony Reid (Academic Prize Laureate)

Panel Discussion Professor Anthony Reid

Professor Ishii Yoneo (President, Kanda University of International Studies) Professor Hamashita Takeshi (Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto Unviersity)

Professor Ishizawa Yoshiaki Summary Professor Ishizawa Yoshiaki

Keynote Speech by Professor Anthony Reid

We live in an age that appears to be dominated by the conflict between global pressures and local reactions. Already six years before the World Trade Center bombing and the “war on terrorism”, Benjamin Barber had popularised this dichotomy as Jihad versus McWorld, the struggle between economic globalisation and the varied reactions against it.1 Of course the jihad or nativist sides of this equation, which must include not just Al-qaedah but the popular burning of McDonalds in France, the anti-WTO ‘battle in Seattle’, or the ‘fourth world’ movements of indigenous peoples, are themselves thoroughly globalised in the way they organise, publicise, and respond to the media. Many have seen the two rival phenomena as so thoroughly intertwined with each other that we need a word like ‘glocalisation’, combining global and local, to really express what is going on.

Our age is particularly obsessed with the conflict between global and local, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, outer and inner, because it strikes at the heart of us all. Nobody is immune from the rival pulls of being up with the international trends and of struggling to retain our own identity. The title of a recent booklet by Indian politician Jairam Ramesh, Yankee go home—but take me with you,2 well expresses the ambivalence of attraction and outrage which many feel.

Even if it is particularly acute in our age, this tension between global and local has a long history, as Japanese are the first to understand. Probably no country has been as conscious through its history as Japan of the dangers of isolation on the one hand and of losing one’s identity on the other. Japanese history can be read, and no doubt has been, as a constant struggle between the passionate desire to borrow and innovate, and the equally passionate conviction that survival requires barriers against the foreign.

My own field of Southeast Asian history offers few examples of borrowing as systematic and effective as marked the Meiji and McArthur eras, and none of a sakoku as purposeful as that of the Tokugawa. Southeast Asia is much too diverse to have ever had a single purposeful policy, and most states within it were so exposed to global trade patterns, and even dependent on them for their strength, that they could never pursue a consistent policy of isolation. Nevertheless I believe there is a rhythm to Southeast Asian history which can also be read as interplay between globalisation and localisation. I propose to use this theme today as an introduction to some of my own work, and the reactions to it on the part of others.

“The Age of Commerce”

I am best known, probably, for my two-volume book entitled Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, c.1450-1680 (1988-93). The essential argument of that book was that there was a period at around that time of extraordinary globalisation, though I did not use that term, when Southeast Asia was largely remade by forces and ideas from outside it. As I put this more recently:

1 Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are reshaping the World (New York: Ballantyne, 1995), p.6. 2 Jairam Ramesh, Yankee go home—but take me with you (New York: Asia Society).

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The global commercial expansion of the “long sixteenth century” necessarily affected [Southeast Asia] immediately and profoundly, as the source of many of the spices in international demand and as a maritime region athwart vital trade routes. It was the region most affected by the explosion of Chinese maritime activity at the beginning of the 15th century, and the source of the spices and much of the pepper that drew the Spanish to America and eventually the Philippines, and the Portuguese to India and Southeast Asia. The quickening of commerce, the monetization of transactions, the growth of cities, the accumulation of capital and the specialization of function which formed part of a capitalist transition elsewhere, undoubtedly occurred rapidly also in Southeast Asia during this period. The changes wrought in belief and cultural systems were even more profound. Islam and Christianity became the dominant religions of the Archipelago and pockets of the Mainland, while Buddhism was transformed by its alliance with centralizing states in Burma, Siam, Laos and Cambodia.3

In addition to the profound religious changes just listed, I argued that there was extraordinary cultural innovation tending in the direction of the secularization of performance, literature and art, which had been largely religious or cosmic in orientation before this. Since performance is the easiest element of the globalisation to display graphically, let me say a little more about it while showing some slides.

Some cultural effects of the Age of Commerce

The principal motors of change in the cultural, religious and also political domain were the large and multi-ethnic coastal trading cities which entirely dominated the age of commerce in Southeast Asia. Estimating their size is dangerous, but I believe necessary, and I came up with two sets of numbers which to my surprise have been far more often quoted than challenged, despite their provisional nature. In the 16th century I estimated Hanoi, Ayutthaya, Pegu and Melaka (pre-1511) all had populations around 100,000, before the last three were all devastated by conquest at different points in the century. In the early 17th century, the peak of the Age of Commerce, I had Hanoi, Ayutthaya and the Javanese capital of Mataram at an even larger size, perhaps above 150,000, while Aceh, Makasar, Banten and the southern Vietnamese capital of Kim-long briefly reached around the 100,000 mark. Overall, my estimates suggested at least 5% of the Southeast Asian population lived in large cities of over 30,000 population in the early 17th century, a higher figure than Europe at that time (though probably lower than India or China), and higher than Southeast Asia again reached before the 20th century.4

Three factors need to be mentioned in terms of the role of these cities in remaking Southeast Asian cultures and religions: i. they were multi-ethnic and culturally very diverse, with distinct quarters for dozens

of different groups.5

3 Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1999), p.3. 4 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce: Vol. II: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, 1993), pp. 68-77. 5 “In the port of Melaka very often eighty-four languages have been found spoken, every one distinct, as the inhabitants of Melaka affirm”, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, ed. Armando Cortesao (London: 1944 [1515]), p. 269.

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ii. they were dense enough for many thousands of people to be able to gather for a festival or great occasion.

iii. they were wealthy and leisured enough (thanks to a benign and generous environment) to devote substantial resources to the performing arts. When Nikita Kruschev famously scandalised Sukarno by his impatience with many

hours of theatrical performance put on in his honour, he was in a long tradition of European visitors troubled by the exuberance of Southeast Asian cultural life. Eredia complained of 16th century Malays that the upper class “spend their time in pastimes and recreations, in music and cock-fighting.”6 Even earlier Tome Pires noted that “The land of Java is a land of mummers and masks of various kinds, and both men and women do this. They have entertainments of dancing and stories; they mime…they are certainly graceful; they have music of bells [i.e. gongs]…At night they make shadows of various shapes.”7 In Burma a succession of British envoys to the court found themselves exhausted by the nightly theatrical and musical performances which “continued from day to day almost uninterruptedly.”8 In Banten “the dancing goes on all night, so that in the evenings there is a great hubbub of gongs and instruments.”9 In Patani the Queen’s court entertained envoys and visitors with dances and theatrical performance, “very pleasaunte to behold, so as I doute not to have seene the lyke in any place.”10

The Thai king King Rama T’ibodi in the early 1500s already went some way to secularising Thai entertainments. He was the most loved of Thai kings in later centuries because given credit for establishing “the large feasts and gamedays”.11 He is also credited by tradition with introducing live stage plays by having masked dancers imitate the more sacred shadow puppets. Others doubt that this remarkable step towards secularization could have happened so early. A better documented change was in the ceremony of ‘sending away of the waters’ at the end of the rainy season in Siam. As the French observers at the court of King Narai told it, the magnificent appearance of the king and his dozens of glittering galleys on the water had been since old times believed to embody the spirit of the naga of the river, necessary to achieve the feat of turning the waters back from flooding. But:

this prince (Narai) having found by many years experience, that the waters increased sometimes, for all they were ordered to abate, has left off that ridiculous ceremony, and thought it enough this year by going in triumph to the Pagoda, to show the zeal he has for his religion.12

6 Godinho de Eredia, Malaca, Meridional India and Cathay, trans. J.V. Mills (MBRAS Reprint 14 (1997), p.39. 7 Tome Pires, p.177. 8 R.B. Pemberton, “Journey from Munipoor to Ava, and from Thence across the Yooma Mountain to Arracan”, 1830, ed. D.G.E. Hall, in Journal of theBurma Research Society 63, ii pp. 43-4. Also Symes I (1827), p..208-9; Shway Yoe (1882), p. 285. 9 Willem Lodewycksz, “Weerste Boeck”, 1598, in De. eerste schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indie onder Cornelis de Houtman 1595-1597, ed. G.P. Rouffaer & J.W. Ijzerman, Vol. I (The Hague, 1915), p. 30. 10 Peter Floris, his Voyage to the East Indies in the “Globe”, 1611-1615, ed. W.H. Moreland (London, Hakluyt, 1934), p. 87, also-62-3. 11 Jeremias van Vliet, (1640), p.69. 12 Guy Tachard, A Relation of the Voyage to Siam Performed by Six Jesuits, trans. A. Churchill (1688, reprinted Bangkok, 1981), p.187. Also Reid, Age of Commerce II (1993), p. 179.

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The essentially magico-cosmic purpose of the event had become a means of showing the grandeur of the king to both foreign and domestic audiences, in the name of an orthodox Buddhist kathina ceremony of presenting alms to the monks of the temple. The royal procession was in any case a dazzling display of royal splendour, as described by a French missionary source a little earlier:

More than 200 vessels, equipped and decorated in the most superb and striking manner in the world, in which ride the mandarins and other lords, of the court, allow to be seen in their midst another vessel which surpasses them all in beauty and richness. It is so covered with gold on all sides, that it seems to be altogether made of this precious metal. The King, still more glittering with an infinity of jewels, appears there like the sun in the eyes of all the nations who inhabit Siam, and who make sure to turn up en masse on the banks, and in the houses and gardens along the river.13

A broader case of this sort of shift of performance into the secular domain appears

to have occurred in Java as it accepted Islam during the age of commerce. At least in the view of Pigeaud, the wonderful tradition of shadow theatre, along with masked drama and other forms, were originally “a means to demonstrate visually the cosmic and social order”, representing in visible form the gods and the spirits of ancestors. The reason that Javanese tradition insists (improbably) that both the wayang kulit and wayang topeng were created by the sainted wali who introduced Islam to Java predominately in the 16th century may be that Islam “may have loosened the link connecting the ancient sacral wayang performance with ancestor worship and primeval belief, and so popularization and secularization became possible.”14 In the cosmopolitan cities of the north coast (pasisir), the wayang stories based on Hindu gods and stories became a kind of “entertainment” since they could no longer be religious acts in a formal sense. They also were exhibited to foreigners in multi-ethnic cities like Banten, Melaka and Patani, where they became the “Javanese” entry in a multicultural , almost competitive, menu of musical offerings.

The royal theatre of State

Whether we read Southeast Asian texts or foreign descriptions of the 17th century courts, it seems almost incredible how much of the time and effort of the state went into organizing royal processions, shows and entertainments. All of the other great courts of Southeast Asia in the 17th century - Siam, Burma, Cambodia, Banten, Patani and Mataram - competed with each other in the magnificence of their processions and entertainments. The courts of such contemporary rulers as Louis XIII of France, James I of England, Shah Abbas in Persia or Akbar and Jahangir in India, were similarly concerned to show the king as the centre of a magnificent drama in which he represented not only power but also wealth, vigour, piety, generosity and illumination. It is an equally curious conjunction, however, that everywhere in Europe and Asia these public court spectacles declined sharply in the second half of the same 17th century.

Important events in the life of the court and the state were always accompanied by processions, music, dance and entertainments. The biggest such events were the

13 Relation… des evesques, 1672-75 (1680), p. 129. 14 Th.G.Th. Pigeaud, The Literature of Java (The Hague: 1967), I: 287.

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important religious festivals and the rites de passage of the royal family - circumcisions, weddings and funerals. Even the reception of foreign envoys, however, was the occasion for processions and feasting on a grand scale, including this depiction of the reception of the French ambassadors in 1686. Foreign visitors to the courts of Southeast Asia were our best sources for the magnificence of these royal processions and displays; but they were also actors in them. Ambassadors and traders were exchanged between Aceh, Siam, Pegu (Burma), and Banten, and arrived also from the Moghuls in India, Golconda (in South India), Persia, England, Holland, and France. These envoys were used as actors in the theatre of state, their letters being seen as a kind of tribute to local royalty and therefore to be treated with reverence. Performances on a grand scale were arranged for the envoys. Eventually they too, however, were expected to perform.

In Siam and Burma the most majestic processions were on the river, with hundreds of magnificently-arrayed galleys carrying local and foreign dignitaries to the palace.15 In Malaya and Sumatra, on the other hand, and even Tuban in Java, where there were no native elephants, it was with elephants that the court constituted its most impressive royal processions and brought important visitors to the court. In the Melaka sultanate, according to the Sejarah Melayu, the protocol was that people of sufficient rank were brought to the palace by elephant.16

For royal weddings and rites de passage such as circumcisions (in Muslim countries), there were always elaborate processions, shows and dances. At funerals there was enormous pomp. When Sultan Iskandar Thani of Aceh died in February 1641, a Dutch observer was there to record the ceremonies:

the funeral procession was carried out with royal magnificence: it consisted in a great following of Princes, Lords and Nobles, as well as 260 elephants, all hung with costly silks, gold cloth, and embroidered cloths. Their tusks were covered with gold, others with silver; others had little square houses and lavish tents on their backs, which had many banners hanging from them, worked with silver and gold.17

Of religious festivals at the court of Aceh, the feast of sacrifice (Idul Adh) was

celebrated on the most spectacular scale. The Adat Aceh listed the 30 groups comprising the procession, the last three of which alone were said to contain 110 elephants and over 15,000 armed soldiers.18 There may be some poetic exaggeration in the numbers listed in this court work - indeed it is difficult to see how so many men and elephants could be accommodated in the roughly 500 metres between the palace and the mosque. Yet the outline of this description is confirmed by Peter Mundy, who witnessed the extraordinary procession from the palace to the mosque in 1637. After describing and sketching it as best he could, he added:

The march was also very confused and on heaps, there being scarce room or time

15 As a general Southeast Asian phenomenon, these processions, festivals and contests are described in Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce: The Lands below the Winds (New Haven, 1988), pp. 173-91. 16 C.C. Brown (ed.), “Sejarah Melayu or ‘Malay Annals’. A Translation of Raffles MS 18,” JMBRAS 25 (1953), p. 56. 17 S. de Graaf 18 Adat Atjeh dari satu Manuscript India Office Library, romanized by Teungku Anzib Lamnyong (Banda Aceh, PLPIS, 1976).

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for order. However it was all rare and strange to behold, viz., the multitude of great elephants accoutered and armed after several manners, weapons and ornaments, costly furniture, etc., there being near as many more elephants also fitted for this show (that could not march with the rest for lack of room) which stood in sundry places by while others passed.19

For much of the first half of the 17th century, massive processions such as this were

a constant feature of court life, occurring even at the weekly Friday prayer. They must have dominated the life of the city. Typically they culminated in a public display of animal contests, at which foreign visitors were always given a prominent place.

Contests of animals

It is fortunate for the historian that in this way foreign envoys had a glimpse into the life of the court which they recorded in their letters and reports of their missions. In particular they were often allowed to witness the entertainments of the court. Among the most modest but popular were cock-fights, with the king’s cock expected to win. But in Aceh during the first half of the 17th century the principal entertainment seemed always to be spectacular contests of the larger animals -- elephants, buffaloes and rams. At the tournaments of Java’s courts (known as senenan because they were held on Monday, Senen), nobles would joust on horseback, and then tigers would be set to fight against buffaloes or against a phalanx of men armed with spears. Similarly in Siam and Laos in the 17th century the king frequently arranged public fights between elephants, or between a tiger and a number of elephants. The elephants would always succeed in killing the tiger by repeatedly throwing it high in the air, just as the banteng [buffalo]almost invariably killed the tiger in Java. Similar contests between tigers and either elephants or buffaloes were staged by rulers in what is now southern Vietnam, and in Malaya.20

The dominant motives for these contests appear to have had to do with warfare and with the symbolic victory of the king. Since elephants were regarded as an important royal symbol, staging fights between them was probably intended as both display of this strength and training for the elephants and their handlers. The defeat of the tiger by an elephant (in Siam, Cambodia and southern Vietnam) or a buffalo (in Java) was a symbolic defeat of the forces threatening the good order of the state. It was therefore essential that the tiger lost, and it was handicapped by being tied to a stake and having to fight four elephants at once, or even (in Vietnam) having its claws pulled and its mouth sewn up. Raffles pointed out that the Javanese identified the tiger with the Europeans in his day, and so rejoiced in the repeated victory of the buffalo which they identified with themselves.21

Globalised cosmopolitanism in the 17th Century? In cultural terms as in others, the age of commerce was a high point of globalisation and cosmopolitanism for Southeast Asia. In every field we can point to enthusiastic cultural borrowing, and to a certain competitiveness -- between the mercantile elite and the

19 The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608-1667 ed. Sir Richard Temple Vol. III, part i (London, 1919), pp. 121-3. In this and subsequent English quotations I have modernized the English spelling. 20 Reid, Age of Commerce I (1988), pp. 183-201 21 Thomas Stamford Raffles, History of Java (London, 1817) 1: 347.

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palace on the one hand, and between foreign and local art forms on the other. Performers may have been introduced initially to celebrate each group’s religious festivals, and then their weddings, but in the competitive commercial atmosphere of the port they were soon employed as private entertainments. Chinese opera was a good case in point. Scott tells us that the Chinese in Banten performed their plays not only at religious festivals but in thanksgiving or petition as their ships arrived from and departed for China. But one of the English merchants in the same city only a little later described how the principal Chinese merchant in the town, known to them as Kewee, “caused a play to be acted before us by scenics of China, which was performed on a stage with good pronunciation and gesture”, at the conclusion of a business deal.22 In Banten again, in 1605, Scott gives a full description of the entertainments for the circumcision of the boy king, prefacing it by the remark that

The manner of their country is that when any king comes newly to the crowne, or at any circumcision of their king, all that are of ability must give the king a present; the which they must present in open manner, with the greatest show they are able to make. And those that are not able to do it of themselves do join, a company of them together, and so perform it, both strangers and others.23

After describing all the pageants, historical plays, acrobatics and fireworks for such a festival, Scott added that “All these inventions have been taught in former times by the Chinese…. And some they have learned from Gujeratis, Turks, and other nations which come thither to trade.”24 A similar pattern operated in all the other large ports where there were large foreign communities. In 17th century Ayutthaya, for example, the Shi’ite Indian Muslims always attracted a big crowd for their Hasan-Hussein festival, featuring Indian music, dance and pageantry on a large scale, as did the Chinese on their weddings and festivals. On one occasion in 1688 the French described a great public celebration in the capital in honour of the coronation of two European kings in that year, of England and Portugal. The highlights were not the entries from these countries, however, but the displays of Indian puppets, Siamese dancing, Chinese opera, amazing acrobatics, and Siamese, Burmese, Lao and Malay orchestras.25

17th Century Reaction against globalisation

I argue that the increasing reliance on international trade was drastically curbed in a crisis of the mid-17th century, which also involved a rejection of the globalisation of that period. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) established monopoly control over the Archipelago’s most lucrative exports, while the commercial centres of cosmopolitan life were either destroyed (Brunei 1578; Pegu 1599; Tuban 1619; Surabaya/Gresik 1625; Palembang 1659; Makasar 1669; Banten 1684) or declined through loss of their vital trade. The capital of Java moved from the commercial north coast to interior Mataram (near Jogjakarta) around 1600. The capital of Burma similarly moved from the great maritime 22 Saris, cited by Blusse, ‘The Chinese…in western Java’. 23 Edmund Scott, ‘An Exact Discourse…of the East Indians’ [1605], in The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas, 1604-1606, ed.Sir William Foster (London: Hakluyt, 1943), p.153. 24 Ibid., pp.156-57. 25 Tachard (1688), pp. 184-86.

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city of Pegu to Ava (near modern Mandalay), taking permanent root there in 1635. The Siamese port-capital of Ayudhya was the last Southeast Asian capital to retain a major stake in global trade, but after its “1688 revolution” it too turned its back on most Western and Muslim trade, leaving the Chinese and Dutch in command of a much reduced foreign commerce (Reid 1990b, 1993a).

Among the most serious setbacks to Southeast Asian commerce in this period was the destruction of the shipping of the most active maritime traders of the region. An early blow against Javanese and Malay shipping was the arrival in 1509 of the Portuguese, whose ships were few but relatively manoeuvrable and effective in naval warfare. They wrought havoc against the unwieldy Javanese and Malay junks, some of which were as big as 500 tons. These had proved profitable in shipping foodstuffs and bulk goods in peaceful times. But after many were lost in engagements with the Portuguese, Southeast Asians made a long-term transition to smaller and faster vessels involving less risk.

The biggest disasters for shipping were however at Southeast Asian hands. The destruction of the Burmese imperial capital of Pegu in 1599, following the ruinous rule of Nandabayin, removed its Mon seamen and traders from Southeast Asian waters. Many Mon merchants fled to Siam, Laos or Arakan, but their great tradition of seaborn trade was at an end.26 The Javanese of the cosmopolitan north coast, many with Chinese, Indian or other ancestry, had been even more prominent as traders around Southeast Asia, forming a commercial diaspora in ports such as Melaka (until the Portuguese conquest in 1511), Palembang, Banjarmasin, Banda, Ternate, Patani and Phnom Penh. Their home ports of Surabaya and the adjacent Gresik, Tuban, Demak and Japara were the centres of a new cosmopolitan culture, patronised by the commercial elite, which remade what we now know as Javanese culture. But the interior, rice-based regime of Mataram crushed all these ports in the period 1615-25, and subsequently banned Javanese shipping in 1655, lest it provide a threat to the king. These setbacks might not have happened if the commercial element had not been weakened by its competition with European traders, but the immediate agents of destruction were Southeast Asian.

If this turning away from international engagement in the 17th century sounds familiar, it does of course have echoes in the sakoku process which the Tokugawa imposed on Japan in the 1630s. Like Japan, Vietnam, Burma and Siam in Mainland Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent Aceh, Banten, Makasar, Palembang in the Archipelago, consciously distanced themselves from the dangerous elements of maritime commerce in the mid-seventeenth century. Like Japan, these states were thought by Western historians of an earlier era, and by many of their own nationalists and Marxists, to have lost a great opportunity by turning their backs on the globalisation of that time. A newer historiography, however, is more inclined to see strengths in this process, enabling Southeast Asian societies, like Tokugawa Japan, to define their own paths to the modern at a different pace.

I should add that the part of my argument ascribes this turning away from dependence on the world market to the unusually strong effects in Southeast Asia of a global 17th century crisis has had plenty of critics. This auspicious occasion may be an appropriate one to respond to some of these critics and assess what we have learned since I published this book.

26 Reid, Age of Commerce II (1993), pp.281-3.

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The most effective critic of the 17th century crisis has been Victor Lieberman. In a careful review of my book in 1995, he argued “the thesis of a 17th century watershed seems to me fundamentally inapplicable to the mainland…. In Vietnam no less than in Burma and Thailand, basic political and social changes that began in the 18th century not only continued into the 18th, but accelerated during the 19th to the very eve of colonial rule.” The ongoing trends he instanced here and in elaborated elsewhere, were maritime and domestic trade, urbanization, territorial consolidation of the major states, ethnic and cultural standardisation, and externally validated religious orthodoxy.27 Lieberman has gone on to build an elaborate scheme showing how six Eurasian polities (Vietnam, Siam, Burma, Russia, France and Japan) all were affected by the same consolidating trends between the 15th and the 19th centuries.28

In as under-researched a field as early modern Southeast Asia, a fruitful controversy such as this is to be welcomed enthusiastically, and offered to students as a rare chance to sharpen their analytic skills on a real debate. Let me point at once to what I see as the helpful part of this critique, which is to point towards another period of commercial expansion and urbanisation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He and I helped each other towards a better understanding of this phenomenon in a research project I coordinated, and the Toyota Foundation funded, which led to a 1997 book, The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies.29 I there expressed my regret that “my own work on the ‘Age of Commerce’ of 1400-1650, while intended to undermine any such static assumptions [of pre-colonial changelessness], may have an unintended effect of suggesting that everything after the mid-17th century was commercial retreat and political fragmentation.”30

I was fortunate enough also to be coordinating a research project on the economic history of Southeast Asia (ECHOSEA) in the 1990s, and directed some of its resources to quantifying the most measurable index for regional trade over the long term—the revenues from long-distance exports. The indices we compiled for four leading Southeast Asian exports (cloves, pepper, sugar and coffee) over six centuries demonstrated strikingly the importance of the export boom of the “long sixteenth century”, the profound slump in export revenue from 1660 to 1740 (the 17th century crisis), and the second sustained period of export growth (in revenue terms) between the 1780s and 1840s.31 This volume may be pushing quantification as far as it can go with the shaky pre-1800 data as at our disposal, but it does reveal an interesting and believable pattern.

It would be a mistake to infer that Lieberman has undermined the case for a seventeenth century crisis, even in Mainland Southeast Asia, by showing that population, commerce and state control where again at high levels in the early 1800s. No champion 27 Victor Lieberman, ‘An Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia? Problems of Regional Coherence—A Review Article,’ JAS 54, no.,3 (August 1995), pp.801-04. Similar ideas had earlier been outlined in his ‘Secular Trends in Burmese Economic History, c.1350-1830, and their Implications for State Formation,’ MAS 25 (1991), i, pp. 1-31. 28 Victor Lieberman, ‘Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas,’ in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c.1830, ed. Victor Lieberman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp.19-102. 29 Anthony Reid (ed.). The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750-1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1997). 30 The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies, p. 57. 31 D. Bulbeck, Anthony Reid, Tan Lay Cheng and Wu Yiqi. Southeast Asian Exports since the 14th Century: Cloves, Pepper, Coffee and Sugar (Singapore, ISEAS for ECHOSEA, 1998).

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of the ‘general crisis’ concept has suggested that economies and populations did not recover within a century or so of the crisis. The general trend of history is for population growth and commercial expansion, so that even a reduction of twenty percent over a period of several decades constitutes a major trauma. Thus when Lieberman says of Burma that “by 1815 maritime exchange and shipbuilding almost certainly equalled the level of 1590 in absolute terms, though perhaps not as a proportion of the total economy”,32 he confirms a dramatic 17th century collapse, not the reverse. His data and that of Dhiravat na Pombeijra on Siamese commerce after 1688 is of the same order. It does not deny that international commerce fell markedly after 1688, but only asserts that the Chinese connection enabled it to recover in the 18th century.

A more central argument is how far the undoubted downturn in mid-17th century trade, and the relative impoverishment that followed in many quarters, mattered in the long term. Can we attribute to this setback Southeast Asia’s failure to compete with other parts of the world in the 19th century, or did the critical changes in the balance of power and productivity take place only after 1800? This question has been robustly taken up by Andre Gunder Frank, whose ReOrient (1998) was a powerful argument for recentering the debate about the origins of the modern world in Asia rather than in Europe.33 Frank is particularly anxious to debunk the hugely influential schools of Marxist and post-Marxist scholarship which looked to Europe as the source of capitalism, and therefore to European exceptionalism as the chief question to be explained. As he saw it, China was still the dominant world economy in 1800, and the world-system prior to then should not be seen as Europe-centred but as interdependent and if anything Asia-centred. The sources of European dominance in the 19th century, therefore, must be sought by examining that whole world system even-handedly, not by searching for the roots of the earlier capitalist transformation or “the European miracle”. As I begin to explain below, I believe he goes too far in minimizing the disadvantages much of Asia, but especially Southeast Asia, suffered from the 17th century.

One part of Frank’s argument is his belief that the 17th century crisis was important for setting Europe back, while it “left most of Asia unscathed”.34 Most of his attention here is engaged in the larger debate about the nature of the crisis which brought about the fall of the Ming dynasty in China in 1644, but he does devote a little attention to discounting my evidence for Southeast Asia. Unfortunately he read only a small part of this debate and did not refer to my 1993 book where the enormity of the crisis in Southeast Asia is set out rather fully. He was able to assert that Indian traders simply replaced European ones in importing Indian cloth to the Archipelago in the mid-17th century,35 in ignorance of the mountain of contrary evidence, now most carefully assembled by Ruurdje Laarhoven.36 In fact the VOC had established such a dominant position in supplying

32 Liberman, ‘An Age of Commerce’, p.801. 33 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Frank generalized and extended an argument being prepared with some care for China by Ken Pomeranz, whose major book appeared later – Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000). 34 Ibid. p.353. 35 Ibid., pp. 233-5. 36 Ruurdje Laarhoven, ‘The Power of Cloth: The textile trade of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) 1600-1780), Ph.D. dissertation, ANU, 1994.

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Indian cloth to the Archipelago that only about a third as many Gujerati and Coromandel ships were visiting Southeast Asian ports in the 1640s as had done so around 1600. When VOC exports themselves declined drastically in the last third of the century the Dutch blamed not Indian rivals but the impoverishment of Indonesians, who now had no choice than to make their own modest clothing. 37

Another phase of partial globalisation, 1780-1840

In my view the decline in the value of long-distance maritime trade to Southeast Asians, which occurred in the middle of the 17th century, did mark a retreat from globalisation and towards localism in cultural and intellectual terms. In 1993 I was bold enough to say that this crisis

marked a change of direction that was not reversed until another period of crisis in the mid-20th century….Cosmopolitan trading cities did not dominate the life of Southeast Asians, whether demographically, economically or culturally, between the late 17th century and the mid-20th, as they did before or since.38

While I believe this remains in essence true, this statement does mask the other very

significant stage of globalisation for Southeast Asia which occurred in the late 18th century. I am now more inclined to see three stages of trade expansion, with consequent greater importance of cosmopolitan influences in political and cultural life (roughly 1480-1650; 1780-1850; 1950-?), alternating with more introverted periods of consolidation and localisation. The middle expansionary phase, however, faced a more limited range of intellectual possibilities than the other two.

Lieberman rightly points out that the second phase of increased trade revenues had different political consequences in the Mainland and the Archipelago. Few Archipelago states were left with enough coherence and autonomy to benefit from this second globalisation as they had from the first. Those that did -- Aceh, Brunei, Riau, Palembang, Sulu, Trengganu, Surakarta, Karangasem/Lombok, Bone -- had much shallower roots and a weaker grip on their populations than the “more stable political systems” of the Mainland.39 Hence it was primarily the three increasingly coherent Mainland state -- Burma, Siam and Vietna -- that were able to emerge from the collapse which each of them underwent in the second half of the 18th century with increased territorial consolidation, administrative centralisation and cultural integration, to use Lieberman’s measures.

My present theme of globalisation and localisation leads me to venture briefly into the fascinating but dangerous area of cultural consequences of economic globalisation in this middle phase. A point on which Lieberman and I strongly agree is the effect of the “Age of Commerce” in increasing the appeal of externally validated, globally active, religious systems. In the Mainland as well as the Islands, I would argue, the outcomes of the second stage of globalisation were less open than those of the first. The Age of Commerce proper was “marked by constant innovation, by repeated adaptation and 37 Reid, Age of Commerce II (1993): 28-29, 301-2. 38 Reid, Age of Commerce II (1993), p.329. 39 Victor Lieberman, ‘Mainland-Archipelagic Parallels and Contrasts, c.1750-1850,’ in The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies, ed. Anthony Reid (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp.27-38; Lieberman, Beyond Binary Histories, pp.23-52.

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incorporation of new ideas.”40 Southeast Asian elites became for a time obsessed with novel clothes, animals, mechanical devices and inventions of all sorts, just as they were open to new religious and cultural ideas. The adaptations they made by the middle of the 17th century involved the acceptance of what seemed more modern, cosmopolitan and rational world-views embodied in Islam, Christianity and Theravada Buddhism than had been the case with the animistic local spirit-cults which had dominated agrarian life.

Then followed more than a century when international trade was less rewarding, and many rulers urged their subjects not to plant pepper and cloves lest it bring them war and oppression.41 As economies became more self-sufficient and polities less dependent on trade and its cosmopolitan practitioners, foreign cultural and intellectual models also lost much of their appeal. When Dutch and Spanish monopolies lost their grip in the late 18th century and another trade upturn occurred, Southeast Asians were again exposed to pressures for a scriptural and rational set of values valid in the global marketplace. The shopping basket of options, however, was now more restricted. European models were increasingly dressed with the unattractive arrogance of power, while the choices for Islam, Catholic Christianity and Theravada Buddhism made in the earlier Age of Commerce created a line against enthusiasm for the ideas of the European enlightenment. The radical ideological experiments of this period tended to be of the neo-traditional sort, imposing a kind of scriptural orthodoxy as a weapon against the globalising challenges. The puritannical Wahhabi doctrines of the Padris in Sumatra, or the “grim determination” with which Chinese Confucian models were applied to Minh Mang’s Vietnam (1820-41),42 were “modernising” responses to this second globalisation. But we need another term for this type of “stunted” or “limited” modernisation which radically opposes not only local tradition but also much of the dynamic driving the globalisation process itself.

Colonial localisation and contemporary globalisation

The high colonial period (roughly 1870-1930) was in many respects the opposite of globalisation in its impact on Southeast Asian populations. Colonial cities became largely European and Chinese enclaves, while the indigenous populations became more rural and peasant-like than they had been for centuries. In Geertz’s phrase, Dutch rule brought Javanese products into the world market but not its peoples. Colonial administrations encouraged hierarchic stability rather than change among the peoples they ruled. Although there were of course also many respects in which western models became normative for the world in precisely this period, I take the view that colonialism on balance encouraged more localism by its sharp distinctions of race, nationality and language.

The truly globalising factor in the late colonial mix was the imposition of western-style educational institutions and syllabuses in Southeast Asia. By the 1920s and thirties in most countries (and earlier in the Philippines) there were substantial new elites whose education had been wholly western, and who sought radical solutions of their own for their powerlessness. If colonialism in general localised, its education surely globalised. With hindsight we might characterise the approach of these new elites, both in planning for independence before 1945 and in carrying it out thereafter, as a kind of “high modernism”

40 Reid, Age of Commerce II (1993), p.328. 41 Ibid., pp. 298-302, 42 the phrase is John Whitmore’s, in Lieberman (ed), Beyond Binary Histories, p.241.

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(James Scott’s phrase) which combined elements of Marxism, westernization and nationalism. Although typically anti-Western in their nationalism, they believed they could create new states on the model of western nation-states with very few concessions to local tradition.

The subsequent generation of elites, sobered by experience and educated in mixed systems, has been less inclined to radical ideologies of globalisation, even while they have faced an ever more globalised world. Again looked at by hindsight, we might see Marxism and perhaps even nationalism as examples of what I called “stunted modernisation”, attacking not only local traditions but also the most dynamic elements of global capitalism.

Does this cursory overview of Southeast Asia’s past help us to understand the conflict of globalisation and localisation in today’s world? It is clear that each stage of globalisation produces losers as well as winners, and a great variety of styles of borrowing, of neo-traditional radicalism, and of genuine innovation. Today’s world requires us to ponder more than ever the options for coping with powerful external models. The history of Southeast Asia, as I noted at the end of my 1993 book, “offers abundant evidence of creative responses to rapid economic change, a variety of social forms, and variety of political and intellectual possibilities”.43 * The above text introduces the keynote speech given by Professor Anthony Reid, the Academic Prize

Laureate of the 13th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes 2002.

43 Reid, Age of Commerce II (1993), p. 330.

The 13th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes 2002 FORUM

“Asia, My Global Community”

Date: 13:30 - 15:30 Saturday, September 21, 2002 Place: ACROS Fukuoka Event Hall (Tenjin, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka City) Panelists: Laureates: Mr. Zhang Yimou (Grand Prize) Professor Kingsley Muthumuni de Silva (Academic Prize) Professor Anthony Reid (Academic Prize) Mr. Lat (Arts and Culture Prize) Coordinator: Professor Ogura Sadao (Chubu University)

FORUM OGURA SADAO: In the wave of globalization that is enveloping the world, Asia too has been plunged into a turbulent era. In particular, in the case of Asia, traditions and cultures are being suppressed and we have now entered a period of confusion and destruction. Our communities do not exist in isolation amidst this globalization, it is an era in which each region must achieve healthy development from a global perspective. We must construct our global community with a sense of creativity, and in this, each person must have their own responsibility. Today, I would appreciate it if the laureates would speak on this subject in a casual, frank and friendly manner.

When I look at you Mr. Lat, I get the impression that you were a “kampung boy,” the boss of the neighborhood kids. How did you really spend your days as a child living in a kampung (village)? LAT: I was born in a kampung in Perak, Malaysia, in a village without electricity. I will tell you a little story, which will give you some background on those days. When I was about nine years old, some boys and I would usually go home on bicycles after prayer in the mosque. But some of the older boys told me one time, “Tonight, we are going somewhere,” so I followed them and went to another village. Apparently the adults there were preparing for a wedding feast. We got down from our bicycles and stood near one house. Then the adults called us, and each one of us was given something to do. Somebody had to arrange plates. Somebody had to help with the cooking. And somebody was asked to arrange the tables. If you were big, you helped with the harder work. Then I realized that we had gone there for jobs. Also that was the only chance for us boys to meet girls. In our village, we could say, “hello” to the girls but could not say, “Hello, why don’t you come here.” During the wedding feast, I saw girls not in their uniforms but in traditional clothes. They looked very beautiful.

Today, at a wedding feast, no teenagers are asked to work. You hire caterers from some big hotel even though you live in a small town. The young people and the children would come only as guests. Very different, you know? Eventually, I moved to a town and became a cartoonist. With this background, I managed to bring out stories. OGURA: Professor Reid, I hear that your father was a diplomat; how was your childhood? ANTHONY REID: Looking back from here, I suppose I must have been a global kid; one of those notorious diplomatic kids who gets dragged around the world at an early age. It’s easy to say that I was part of a globalization process, but at the time, it had been somewhat traumatic. It’s somewhat painful to be yanked out of your little group of friends playing together and find yourself placed in somewhere else. I guess I found each of my dislocations disruptive, but of course I’m now intensely grateful for them.

The first time was at age four before the Pacific War had finished. I was shipped across the Pacific in an American troop carrier to California because my father was in Washington. It was traumatic to go to a new school where people made fun of my accent, but that was a very common phenomenon for kids. I think the bigger impacts on me were the subsequent relocations. The second move was to Indonesia when I was twelve and I spent six months with my parents in Jakarta. On the third occasion, I was eighteen and able to travel on my own. I went to Japan to see my parents, for only five weeks, but again I remember it as a time of extraordinary challenge. And as I look back on the visits to Indonesia and Japan, at the beginning and end of my teenage years, you might say, I think those two events have struck me, challenged me, and turned me around.

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These places were different from where I had lived. I was living in a rather homogeneous New Zealand where everybody spoke English, where people were not wealthy but certainly not poor and relatively egalitarian. It was a comfortable place to live at that time. My first discovery was how different people were; the language was different, and a sort of enormous effort to understand each other and to get through the language barrier was necessary. Food, clothing, life style, everything made me question the whole world I’d grown up in. So concern with understanding otherness or difference seemed to me something that I had to do as a sort of a life project.

The second thing that struck me in both places was poverty. At that time, that was 1957, Japan was still poor and there were beggars. I remember I was extremely troubled by meeting a beggar in Tokyo for the first time. I was also very disturbed in Indonesia when I saw beggars. I, at least, had nice clothes and a nice bed to sleep in but the beggars seemed to have nothing. Gradually, over the years, it has become easier to cope with these things but they’ll remain memories that trouble me through rest of my life. OGURA: Professor de Silva, you were born in the same year that the general elections under universal suffrage were first held in Sri Lanka. I am sure that you were called a “child of democracy.” But at that time, war had also started in Sri Lanka and that must have been a very difficult time. KINGSLEY MUTHUMUNI DE SILVA: I’m intrigued by this attempt to link me with universal suffrage. I was born more or less at the same time that the first general election in Sri Lanka was held under universal suffrage. However, that was not something that struck me at all until I became a young man. I have lived in a small town virtually all my life. It was a very attractive town. Most people like living there and even those who go and stay somewhere else for a while want to return. It is that sort of place. The first change in it came somewhere around 1941, 42 when the British were on retreat. The town in which I lived was transformed by the presence of hundreds of British and Australian soldiers and, later on, American soldiers. There was never any great tension between the cantonment and the people at large. They left each other alone.

The situation became even more complex somewhere around 1944 when Sri Lanka became the headquarters of what was called the Southeast Asia Command. It meant more hardship for the people because virtually every big building that belonged to the state became a part of the Southeast Asia Command. Even the hotels in town were taken over.

My memory of those years revolves around three things. First, life was becoming more uncomfortable in the sense that the usual array of food that we were accustomed to became more difficult to get. People became used to eating bread, but it was not a real local cuisine. Second, we discovered, at a personal level, the fact that life had changed. We used to play cricket in the large lawns of what is called the Royal Botanical Gardens, and one day a policeman came and said without any reason, “You have to leave.” And the third thing I remember was that we saw cars of various sorts coming into the gardens. There was a tall, handsome officer in one of those cars. Years later, I recognized him as Lord Louis Mountbatten. At that time, he was just one of the white men in uniforms that came to give people orders. I also remember that Mountbatten had the arrogance to take over and to live in the governor’s residence in Kandy. The poor governor, when Mountbatten came to Kandy, had either to share the residence with him or to live somewhere else. Those are my very early memories. OGURA: I’d now like to ask Mr. Zhang to tell us about his childhood. ZHANG YIMOU: When I was small, I lived in Xian. The Cultural Revolution started when I was a junior high school student. My father was an officer in the political party, the Kuomintang, so we were immediately labeled “anti-revolutionaries.” The Red Guard

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always came to our house to conduct raids. They would forcibly restrain my father and confiscate all our belongings. Following this, we were dispatched to rural villages. All five of us, my parents, my two younger brothers, and myself were sent to the different locations. Life in the village was relatively pleasant. The people of the village were not bothered about why I had been sent to the village; they were very kind to me and the political worries that had existed when I lived in the city disappeared. I have filmed a great number of farmers and I think it is related to my life during that time. I lived in the village for three years from the age of sixteen, then I worked in a factory for seven years and began university at the age of twenty-seven. The youth of our era all had these kinds of career experiences. I think that my experience during these ten years was very valuable. I feel that, in the creative process, many painful experiences become one’s fortune.

When the ten-year Cultural Revolution was over, and the normal examination system was restored, I very much wanted to go to university. I wanted a certificate of graduation. Graduating from university made it easier to find work, and I thought it would enable me to change my life. I wanted to enter college to study physical education, the fine arts or agriculture, but I was rejected by all of them. When I thought about giving up, my friends gave me an idea by saying, “You’re good at taking photographs, you should enter the cinematography department of a film school.” However, I was over the age limit for admission, and I was rejected there too. But my friends wisely said, “Write a letter to the director of the cultural department.” Just after the end of the Cultural Revolution, it became popular for citizens to write letters to leaders directly. I wrote to the director of the department and enclosed photographs that I had taken. The director painted pictures by himself and understood art. Then he granted special permission, which resulted in my entering university without the normal exams, physical examinations and political background checks. The film school didn’t concur but the director pounded on the table in anger and apparently the school had no choice but to let me enter. That year, I became the most privileged person among hundreds of thousands of students. However, soon after starting school, teachers displeased with my entrance protested to the director. I lost face and no longer wanted to be at school. During the four years of university, the thought that I wanted to quit never left my head. Despite this, I somehow managed to get through, not because of my love of film, but because of my strong desire to obtain the graduation certificate by any means.

These special circumstances changed the course of my life. OGURA: Professor Reid, during the Prize Presentation Ceremony you said, “I am looking at Asia from the outside,” but I see you as an Asian person. What are your thoughts on this subject? REID: I think that any attempt to say “I’m Asian” came later. I think that was quite a new idea, probably in the 1970’s and 80’s, and started to be a possible aspiration for people, especially in Australia. But when I was growing up in New Zealand, the idea was not so much “We are Asian,” as it was “We are close to Asia.”

At that time, there was a sense of discrepancy between the comfortable world of New Zealand and the uncomfortable world of poverty, political upheaval and challenges in Southeast Asia, which we read about daily in the newspaper, not so far away from us. So for me, especially from the end of high school and through out university, Asia was a challenge. The poverty and otherness, certainly for me, were very important, and both of those factors were localized in Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia because it had plenty of problems, both political and economic. It seemed as if it was something we should respond to. So, a number of my generation wanted to understand this region, do something about it and know about our relationship with it.

The Colombo Plan was launched during the 1950’s when I entered university. The Colombo Plan was a plan to group countries around Asia and help people in the more

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unfortunate countries, with scholarships especially. It was something completely new for New Zealand. They’d never had any foreign students before, but starting in 1957, I believe, we started to receive students from Southeast Asia at my graduate university - especially from Sarawak and Sabah. At that time, they were very small and were not part of Malaysia; they had no clear sense of where they were headed politically. So another small country - like New Zealand - could hope to make a difference by helping them. In my classes, there was a group of people who later became the leaders of Sarawak and Sabah. They were wonderful people and I had a great deal to do with them; I helped them to understand the New Zealand environment and they helped me to understand Southeast Asia. That was certainly one of the opportunities that made Southeast Asia real for me.

Later, I did my Ph.D. in Britain, and I got my first job in Malaysia. Then I took a job in Australia. Gradually, it became clear that if you want to be a Southeast Asianist, New Zealand is a little bit far away. But I don’t think the issue of whether I’m a New Zealander or an Australian or an Asian bothers me too much. I think basically I’m a human being and that’s the most important thing. OGURA: Mr. Lat, I hear that when you were a child you left home. LAT: No, no, I didn’t leave but my family did move from the village to the town of Ipoh when I was ten years old, and I went to what we called English School. It gave students a better chance of having a good future, it was better to go there. But my life had always been very dull, there was nothing much happening in a small town like Ipoh. And, you know, when you are twelve or thirteen years old you’ve got to stand out. So I started to draw to impress everybody. And I found out that every time I drew in class, the teachers and my friends seemed to be happy with my drawings. I drew a lot because my father always encouraged me, and I became a fan of comics. Then I sent my comics to the publishers of movie and entertainment magazines in Penang. If your cartoon appeared in a movie magazine, you’d be paid with free cinema tickets. So I sent childish jokes to the film magazines in Singapore and I got many free tickets.

When my first cartoon came out in a magazine I was so touched that I was shivering. That feeling, I never get it these days. Life went on and I drew and drew and I ended up at the newspapers. In the late 1960’s I began a series in the newspapers and I eventually got a job as a reporter at a newspaper in Kuala Lumpur. I moved there in 1970 to become a crime reporter. I worked as a crime reporter for four years, but my writing didn’t improve because I was not good. My drawings improved because I mixed with many people. So I learned about life in Kuala Lumpur and suddenly I realized that the purpose of drawing is to get in touch with people. OGURA: Why is it that your work often portrays children humorously? LAT: Because children always ask questions. In my editorial cartoons, one single panel makes a social commentary. I draw anything. I draw street scenes, living-room scenes, and bus stations - commenting on what people are talking about and what people are reacting to currently. But if I am working on a comic book, I draw kampung scenes with the children of my time; the whole idea is to tell the present generation that their parents and their grandparents came from a very different era. In Malaysia, thirty to fourty years ago, it was totally different. There’s no way I can bring it to today, but the children of today should know about their origin so that they will love their elders more.

I learned to be a freelancer in Japan on my first trip in 1981. I learned that you could be a cartoonist by working for yourself - being your own boss. You don’t have to work for the newspaper. When I met Sato Sanpei, Baba Noboru, and Tezuka Osamu, I found out that these people were all freelancers. And there I was in Malaysia, working for this newspaper, so I said, “When I go back, I want to be like Sato Sampei.” And that’s what I did. I went

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back after the trip and a few years later quitted the newspaper. By that time I already had my first daughter, so it was a bit of a gamble. But suddenly I realized that it was a very meaningful thing to do. So from that time onward, it has been the same; I’m still a freelance cartoonist getting in touch with people. OGURA: Professor de Silva, I get the impression that you are a very studious person. I’ve heard that your understanding of history books was perfect and that you had achieved a very high level of English before entering university. Was this of your own intention or was it due to the influence of your teachers and parents? DE SILVA: I don’t think it was due to the instruction; it was my own inclination. I was interested in the subject, and then I had my education in a school that had a reputation for encouraging history. The founder of the school was an historian of Sri Lanka, one of its most distinguished pupils was a well-established professor of history and so the impression was created that they would produce someone similar soon. I think they succeeded in that because they found that I was inclined to study history. But in regard to a situation like Sri Lanka, where students are encouraged to veer in the direction of economics or engineering or medicine, I was one of those who held out and said, “I am not succumbing to that temptation.” When I went to university, it was with the single-minded purpose of reading history. We were enormously lucky; we got a world-class education in Sri Lanka at the university at that time, and it enabled students to compete with people from outside the country.

For instance, when I graduated and went to London University, I got my Ph.D. in two years. I had a supervisor who was a few years older than I. He told me a few stories of his wartime services. He described a situation in Northeast India where they were battling against the monsoon and also when they had British officials like Mountbatten coming to see them and how it almost led to revolt among the soldiers to see them so well dressed - all of them in their uniforms drenched, things like that. I also had another person with whom I worked. He was in political science. He told me that he actually wrote the dispatches for Mountbatten, that Mountbatten never wrote them, and that he heard Mountbatten and then prepared the dispatch. So it’s that sort of background that we were fortunate to work with in England. OGURA: Mr. Zhang, you say that you like ‘red’. Is there something about the color red that motivates you to create a film? ZHANG: In my hometown, ‘red’ is a special color. The color red is used in great quantities at weddings, funerals and a large number of festivals. Therefore I have memories of red from an early age, and since I have become a director, I have unwittingly and unconsciously selected red when I have chosen costumes. I like the color red and I think it looks beautiful when women wear it. Even in my films, I want to shoot as much red as possible. This is because I think it’s very beautiful. Therefore, from my first film until the present, red has become the color that I use the most. In films from Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern to Hero, a new film about swordsmen that I’ve just finished shooting, I’ve used a great deal of red.

For the costumes for Hero I chose Wada Emi, a famous Japanese fashion designer who worked with Kurosawa Akira on Ran. Ms. Wada is a very diligent person. The story we shot was set in a period 1700-2000 years ago, and the red color and the cloth of those days were special and not available in any shop. So she brought a lot of dyes from England and Japan, found a small factory on the outskirts of Beijing and spent one entire summer dyeing cloth. It was hot, and the dyeing produced a really awful smell, but in order that I could select one kind of red, she produced more than one hundred varieties. Ms. Wada dyed all the colors used in Hero by hand. I think she should receive the Oscar for best costume design.

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OGURA: Concerning something that Professor Reid said earlier, “One can say Asia possesses a great diversity and is a dynamic region. This can be felt when people from all over this vast region assemble in one place.” Professor Reid, you study the age of Asian commerce through fieldwork. I feel that the movements of people involved in commerce possess a dynamic energy. Will this dynamic movement, which harmoniously unites islands and continents, become a decisive energy in determining Asia’s future? REID: I would like to say two things about that. First, that there is a great sense almost everywhere in Asia of a backlog that needs to be made up. For a long period, up until the mid 20th century, Asia was not doing very well and was dominated and often distorted in its reactions to modernity, and now there’s so much catching up to do. Essentially, I think most Asians feel they can do it. They just need some time to get there. There isn’t any sense of - well perhaps in some other parts of the world - despair or a “We can’t do it” hopelessness. Everywhere there is this sense of, “Yes, just give us a chance.” So I certainly see dynamism and energy everywhere in Asia.

The other factor I think is that the class system works a little differently in Asia. This is a ridiculous generalization of course, but I think the recent history of Asia has led to an assumption; the colonial experience has led people to think, “If we have education we can lead.” I mean there’s certainly a class system everywhere. There is a very vast gap between those who have privilege and those who do not, but there’s a widespread sense that if one can get an education that one can do it. So I think, there is a certain dynamic. If politics do not explode and cause more chaos, the dynamic will be there. OGURA: Mr. Lat, when I first met you, we talked about the problem of pollution caused by large Japanese corporations in Malaysia, and I remember you said that the natural environment is an extremely important factor. It’s not just in Asia; we humans have destroyed a considerable amount of the natural environment, haven’t we? LAT: When I was a kid and the changes came to the kampung, there was nothing I could do about it. Because tin and rubber were the number one export for Malaya at that time, tin dredges were built around our village and they were swallowing the land. I drew them eating the land. There was rubber tapping as well. When tin went down, rubber went way down and industrialization became bigger, factories came in and they took over the surrounding areas.

I must say that I only watch and draw about it. And in our lifetime, there’s a lot of things that we only can watch and cannot do much about. But for the time being, I can look at the immediate surroundings and comment on it. No matter how global Malaysia becomes, I still look around the little neighborhood. OGURA: Professor de Silva, as well as being an historian, you are also a mediator in the ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka. It is said that the 21st Century is the era of terrorism, but men have committed terrorism and killed one another for a very long time. When you visited a school, a student asked the question, “Is it possible to rid the world of terrorism?” DE SILVA: Undermining the appeal of the terrorists of course requires social change, political change, and economic change. That’s very difficult, however there are those in our part of the world, especially in India, who now believe that the correct response is counter-terrorism. I’ve not been convinced by that argument, although some of the experts on this in India point out what they did in the Punjab as an example of how it can be settled. But I have never been a mediator, not like Professor Ogura mentioned. I was an advisor to the Sri Lankan government in 1987 and 88. I have never played that role thereafter. It seemed to me a rather futile one; not because of the government of Sri Lanka, but because of

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the Indian government and what it was looking for. Moving on to what’s happening in Sattahip, Thailand, there are some encouraging signs.

These are the third set of talks between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan government. As I see it, the two earlier sets of talks were rather amateurish. They didn’t even discuss some of the principle issues prior to the negotiations. On this occasion, there is a greater degree of professionalism. There is a peace secretariat and three senior cabinet ministers have been given the task of negotiating. One of them, whom I know personally, is a very able man. And he has been constantly telling me that this will take years. A man named John Derby, a friend of mine from Northern Ireland, said in his book that negotiations in ethnic conflicts are a bit like mountain-climbing. The whole process takes a long, long time, and I am sort of happy that the pragmatic approach is being followed. But don’t expect too much despite whatever the journalists and the diplomats may say. Take the issues one by one and try to handle them. India’s conflict in Kashmir has gone on now for over 50 years. There is no great hope of any sort of resolution now. Nor is there any great hope of a resolution on the problems of India’s northeast. And let us not talk about the Middle East. For that matter, the only encouraging thing one can think of in recent times has been the intervention in the Balkans and, of course, the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland - and all of them have taken a long time. So that’s how I would look at the negotiations in Sattahip. OGURA: Campaigns for independence by separatists are occurring in areas all over Asia and Africa. In the recent negotiations in Sattahip, they took up the specific issue of granting autonomy, rather than approving independence, to Tamils in Sri Lanka. Professor de Silva, what are your thoughts on this matter? DE SILVA: There has been a certain degree of autonomy granted to all these regions since 1980. Autonomy is not the problem. The problem is separatism, and if there is any encouraging sign from Sattahip, it is the pronouncement by the LTTE that they’re more interested in autonomy than independence. However, those of us who have been studying this problem for past ten to fifteen years remember that they have said this in the past as well, and if there’s a reason for optimism, it is simply because the major power in the region has made it clear that they “will not accept any separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka because it would help spread separatism in India.” And the United States, for the first time in about fifteen years, has got itself interested in the situation in Sri Lanka and before the negotiations started, had asserted more than once to the LTTE that “There is no way in which you will get a separate state.” The implications were pretty clear that international opinion would not accept it.

An autonomous region, the one that we were talking about, has no resources. It is very, very resource-poor. It has been for centuries some of the more backward parts of Sri Lanka; the whole idea that you could rehabilitate that region very early is a self-defeating prospect. It will take a long, long time. The issue is not autonomy, it is resources. OGURA: I’d like to ask this of all the laureates: what is your idea of “creativity?” LAT: I have met Mr. Edward de Bono. He was an expert in lateral thinking and he mentioned that the word ‘creativity’ had always been associated with artists, which is not true at all. I didn’t have the chance to ask him the reason why, but I always thought that when artists are trying to create a work of art, they have to think creatively.

In a world like ours, there is diversity, there are many types of people. It is best to think of many ways to get together and become as one. We tend to forget about who we actually are; I always experience this. During my trip to New Zealand, I was mistaken for a Maori band member in a hotel in a small town. In Nashville, Tennessee, when I said, “I’m from Malaysia,” I was asked, “Is Malaysia in Alaska?” So we all are different but when we get

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together it is so interesting. When we find out about each other and build friendships, I guess we need the creativity that we have in ourselves. REID: For me, creativity is hard work. It seems to me if I have ever been creative in my life it’s been through addressing an issue that’s hard. It’s by deciding not to go down the path that seems like the easier way to go but rather confronting something that seems to be very hard. I’m not sure if I understand creativity; if it’s waiting for me to be able to draw like Michelangelo or even like Mr. Lat, I’ll be waiting for the end of my days and it’ll never come. For me, creativity is going out there to address something that I would probably rather not address because it’s hard work. To try to understand something, to try to read more about it, to learn more about it until maybe finally it’s not so difficult after all, that’s what I believe to be creative. DE SILVA: I’m willing to follow Professor Reid in saying that it is a reflection of the capacity for hard work and the capacity to stand up to those who obstruct you. Now, if you want to go around and see how creativity suffers, you must go to South Asia. University systems and bureaucracies seem to be performing that function with outright efficiency. There are areas in which that outright efficiency really fails, and one example is of course the film industry. They’ve had a really tough fight in the Indian film industry, an industry that has so much importance to the lives of the people there.

But creativity to me is extremely hard work. That’s why the creative person is so unpopular in many parts of the world. Even writing history can be a real grind against obstructions at times, and it’s your own capacity to stand up to them that makes you creative. ZHANG: I think the most important thing about creativity is a sense of uniqueness or individuality. You have to be different from others. All the many different things that we Asians create possess Asian characteristics. These are different from America and different from Europe. These things possess s unique Asian sense - enabling us to preserve Asian culture. If you are an industrious person and copy what Americans do, the more you do the more you fail. Therefore, I think Asian creativity should primarily be based on unique individuality. This is essential for the world as well. The world needs a variety of voices. It’s also important to respect each other and to learn from one another. I think the direction of our future lies in a multi-cultural/multi-ethnic world based on mutual respect. OGURA: Ethnic problems and problems of nationalism are extremely important and require endless efforts, don’t they? DE SILVA: Since you raised the issue of nationalism, I will touch on the question of Indian nationalism. I always regarded Indian nationalism as very much a fundamental failure or inability to recognize what the British had created. The (British) Raj was the largest empire in the history of India, and the first thing that happened when the transfer of power took place over the decades was that the Indians were unable to reconcile Hindu and Muslim - forgetting that the Muslims had been a factor in Indian history for a thousand years. In other words, neither Nehru nor Gandhi really succeeded in holding what was called the Raj together. They failed to understand the strength of this whole question of ethnic identity - whether you define it in terms of language, culture or religion. This is the same story in Sri Lanka. It has been the same story in Pakistan. Fortunately, Southeast Asia has been able to handle its problems somewhat better than we have, but let’s hope that we ourselves, in our part of the world, have learnt our lessons. I am not willing to accept homilies from Europeans on this. Let us not forget that 50 years before the Second World War, Europe was the center of all our troubles. There were more ethnic conflicts and more elements of sheer criminality performed on people in Europe than we or people in Southeast Asia have ever been guilty of.

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OGURA: Globalization is a term often referred to, but I would say globalization has existed for a long time. It is an issue created by men in the running of everyday life. Globalization has a powerful impact on our lives today. I think that rather than defend ourselves from it, we have to join together to challenge globalization if we are to value the communities in each region of Asia. I believe the 21st Century will be a very important century for us. I hope everyone in the audience will become interested in the events in Sri Lanka and the changes in Ipoh. In order to conduct heartfelt exchange, I think we must develop communities in which all members consider each other and share the other person’s pain and sorrow. ＊With Professor Ogura Sadao (Chubu University) as a coordinator, this Forum brought together the four

laureates of the 13th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes 2002. The above text summarizes remarks made by the laureates.