Book Reviews Asia Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola naval expeditions to Southeast Asia

摘要

Before European naval power began its history in Southeast Asia just 500 years ago, there were three prior external naval assaults on this vital hinge of commerce. Each was remarkable, and baffling in its motivation. Two came from Chinese ports-the Mongol-led expeditions of the 1290s and the enormous fleets under the Muslim Ming Admiral Zheng He in the early 1400s. The earliest and least well documented was the expedition mounted by the Tamil Chola Dynasty in 1025, evidently from its major port of Nagapattinam, against ports associated with Sriwijaya in Sumatra and the Peninsula. The 600th anniversary of Zheng He's first expedition in 1405 came and went with much fanfare but virtually sheds no further light on the motivation for this eccentric moment-although the consequences of that intervention for Southeast Asia have now been very well covered in Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century: The China factor, ed. Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (NUS Press and University of Hong Kong University Press, 2010).