Rise of Srivijaya (682): Sumatra's Maritime Buddhist Empire

Srivijaya was a maritime empire centred on Palembang in southern Sumatra that rose in the late seventh century and controlled the main sea lanes between India and China for more than three hundred years. Its earliest dated record, the Kedukan Bukit inscription of 682, describes a king leading thousands of men by river and land to found a victorious settlement. Srivijaya grew rich by taxing and protecting shipping through the Straits of Malacca and Sunda, and it became one of Asia’s leading centres of Buddhist scholarship.

Background: the sea route between India and China

By the fifth and sixth centuries, sea trade between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea was growing fast. Ships carried Indian cotton, Middle Eastern glass and incense, and Southeast Asian spices, resins and gold to China, and returned with Chinese silk and ceramics.

The monsoon winds shaped this trade. Sailors had to wait months in Southeast Asian ports for the wind to change, so harbours along the straits between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra could profit from supplying, sheltering and taxing them. Earlier ports, such as those of the kingdom of Funan on the Mekong delta, had begun to decline, leaving room for a new power.

Southern Sumatra had advantages. The Musi River gave Palembang access to forest products from the interior and a sheltered position near the sea, while the Bangka Strait and the Strait of Malacca lay within easy reach.

The inscriptions of the 680s

Srivijaya’s rise is recorded in a small group of stone inscriptions in Old Malay, the oldest surviving texts in any form of the Malay language. They are written in a script derived from the Pallava alphabet of southern India and use many Sanskrit words.

The Kedukan Bukit inscription, found near Palembang in 1920, is dated by the Saka calendar to the year 604, equivalent to 682. It says that a ruler called Dapunta Hyang boarded a boat in April 682 to begin a sacred journey, a siddhayatra, accompanied by an army of about 20,000. In June he arrived and founded a settlement, and the text ends with words celebrating a victorious and prosperous Srivijaya. Historians disagree about where he came from and what exactly he founded, but the inscription marks the moment Srivijaya appears in history.

Two years later, in 684, the Talang Tuo inscription records that Dapunta Hyang Sri Jayanasa, probably the same ruler, created a park called Sriksetra for the benefit of all beings, in language full of Mahayana Buddhist prayers. Other inscriptions, at Kota Kapur on Bangka island (686), Karang Brahi in Jambi and Telaga Batu in Palembang, contain long curses against anyone who rebelled or betrayed the king. The Kota Kapur stone also mentions an expedition against “Bhumi Java”, probably western Java.

Together these texts show a young state expanding by force, binding local chiefs through oaths and threats, and presenting its king as a Buddhist ruler.

How Srivijaya controlled the straits

Srivijaya was not a territorial empire in the modern sense. It was a network of ports and river chiefdoms held together by the ruler at Palembang, who offered rewards to loyal leaders and punished rivals. The sea-going peoples of the coasts and islands, later known as Orang Laut, helped supply its fleets and policed the waters.

Its power rested on three things. First, it drew forest and sea products from the Sumatran interior down the rivers to its ports. Second, it attracted foreign merchants by keeping the straits safe and offering good harbours, while forcing ships to call at its ports rather than at rival ones. Third, it built a close relationship with China, sending tribute missions that gave its merchants privileged access to Chinese markets.

The goods that passed through its harbours show how wide this network was. Sumatra and its neighbours supplied camphor, benzoin and other aromatic resins, gold, rattan, tortoiseshell and exotic woods, which Chinese buyers valued as substitutes for or additions to Middle Eastern incense. Pepper and spices from the eastern islands moved westwards, while Chinese ceramics, silk and metal goods flowed in the other direction. Shipwrecks found in the Java Sea, such as the Belitung wreck of the ninth century, carry thousands of Chinese bowls on what appears to have been an Arab-style ship, a vivid picture of the trade Srivijaya oversaw.

Chinese records call the kingdom Shilifoshi and later Sanfoqi, and Arab and Persian writers knew it as Zabaj or Sribuza and wrote of its great wealth. By the late eighth century its influence reached the Malay Peninsula: an inscription of 775 from Ligor, in modern southern Thailand, praises a king of Srivijaya.

A centre of Buddhist learning

The Chinese monk Yijing (also written I-Tsing) gives the best eyewitness picture of early Srivijaya. Sailing from Guangzhou in 671, he spent six months there learning Sanskrit before continuing to India and the great monastery of Nalanda. He returned in 687 and stayed, with one short visit to China, until 695, copying and translating texts.

Yijing wrote that more than a thousand Buddhist monks lived in the city, studying the same subjects as in India, and he advised Chinese pilgrims to spend a year or two there before going on to India. He also noted that the neighbouring kingdom of Malayu, around Jambi, had become part of Srivijaya.

Srivijaya’s Buddhist links reached far. In the ninth century a king of Suvarnadvipa, the “Golden Island”, named Balaputradeva, paid for a monastery at Nalanda, as recorded in a copper plate of the Pala king Devapala. Balaputradeva is widely thought to have been a member of the Sailendra dynasty of Java, the builders of Borobudur, showing the dynastic connections between Sumatra and Java. In the early eleventh century the Bengali scholar Atisha is said to have spent about twelve years studying with a master in Suvarnadvipa before going to Tibet.

Key people

• Dapunta Hyang Sri Jayanasa: the ruler named in the inscriptions of 682–686, generally regarded as the founder of Srivijaya’s power.
• Yijing (635–713): Chinese monk and translator whose writings describe Srivijaya’s Buddhist community in the 670s–690s.
• Balaputradeva: ninth-century ruler of Suvarnadvipa, linked to both the Sailendras and Srivijaya, who endowed a monastery at Nalanda.
• George Coedès (1886–1969): French historian whose 1918 study first identified Srivijaya as a Sumatran kingdom.

Decline and fall

Srivijaya’s dominance lasted into the eleventh century, but it faced rivals. Java’s kingdoms grew stronger, and the Cholas of southern India, who traded across the Bay of Bengal, came to see Srivijaya’s control of the straits as an obstacle.

In 1025 the Chola king Rajendra I launched a naval raid that attacked Srivijaya’s ports, including Palembang and Kadaram (Kedah), and captured its king. The Chola invasion of Srivijaya did not create a lasting Chola empire in Sumatra, but it badly weakened Srivijaya’s grip. Over the following century the centre of power moved to Jambi, and Chinese sources continued to refer to Sanfoqi.

By the thirteenth century, Chinese merchants were sailing directly to many ports, and the Javanese kingdom of Singhasari sent an expedition to Sumatra in 1275. The later Javanese state of Majapahit absorbed much of the old Srivijayan world in the fourteenth century. According to Malay and Portuguese accounts, Parameswara, the founder of the Malacca sultanate around 1400, was a prince from Palembang, so Srivijaya’s trading model passed to Malacca.

Myths and facts

Myth: Srivijaya had a great capital of stone temples like Angkor. Archaeologists have found relatively few monumental remains at Palembang. Like many Southeast Asian port-states, its city was largely built of wood and bamboo, and much of it may have stood on rafts or stilts along the river. This scarcity once led scholars to doubt that Palembang was the capital, though most now accept that it was, at least in the early period.

Myth: Srivijaya was a Malay “nation” with fixed borders. It was a flexible network of alliances and ports whose reach rose and fell. Modern Indonesian and Malaysian nationalism has drawn on Srivijaya as a symbol, but its political shape was quite different from a modern state.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 671: Yijing stops for six months in Srivijaya on his way to India.
• 682, April–June: Dapunta Hyang’s expedition and foundation, recorded in the Kedukan Bukit inscription.
• 684: The Talang Tuo inscription records the foundation of the Sriksetra park.
• 686: The Kota Kapur inscription on Bangka mentions an expedition against Bhumi Java.
• 687–695: Yijing lives and works in Srivijaya, translating Buddhist texts.
• 775: The Ligor inscription shows Srivijaya’s influence on the Malay Peninsula.
• c. 860: Balaputradeva endows a monastery at Nalanda.
• 1025: The Chola king Rajendra I raids Srivijaya’s ports and captures its king.
• 1918: George Coedès identifies Srivijaya as a Sumatran kingdom.

Why it matters

Srivijaya showed how a state could become powerful by controlling a sea route rather than large areas of farmland. It linked China, India and the Islamic world through the Straits of Malacca, spread Buddhist learning across maritime Asia and left the earliest written records of the Malay language. Its model of a port-state guarding the straits was inherited by Malacca and remains central to understanding Southeast Asian history.