21. Majapahit - Empire of the Islands

Paul Cooper (0:14)

In the year 1815, the English colonial official Thomas Stamford Raffles would travel across the island of Java in what is today Indonesia.

At this time, the world was torn by war. In Europe, the Napoleonic Wars were raging, and the earth's oceans had become just another battlefront.

The lush tropical island of Java had been until recently a Dutch colony, but the Netherlands had been conquered by Napoleon in his advance across Europe, and so the Dutch colonies had fallen under the control of the French. Now the British desired to take Java for themselves and strike a blow at Napoleon's overseas empire. In 1811, British marines launched an invasion of Java, landing among its coral reefs and sky-blue oceans, clambering through its shady mangrove forests and up its beaches of black volcanic sand, climbing the steep cliffs in the shadow of its towering volcanoes. From there, they overwhelmed the inexperienced Dutch defenders and took the island for the British Empire. With them, came the Englishman Thomas Stamford Raffles, who later wrote about these events.

SPEAKER_2 (1:56)

Holland had ceased to be an independent nation, and in the year 1811, the French flag was hoisted over Java. But on the 17th of September of the same year, a capitulation was entered into by which all the dependencies fell into the hands of Great Britain.

Paul Cooper (2:16)

Raffles was a lifelong sailor and had actually been born at sea, on a ship commanded by his father off the coast of Jamaica. He became a clerk in the British East India Company at the age of 14, and from there became a true company man. He had spent the best part of the last decade furthering the interests of British colonialism in East Asia, and had even become fluent in the language of Malay. When Java was captured by the British, partly as a result of his skill at languages, Raffles was granted the position of lieutenant-governor. At the age of just 30, Raffles found himself in charge of an island a thousand kilometres across, home to more than 6 million people.

Raffles was fascinated by Java. He remarked on its dramatic landscape of soaring volcanoes and steamy rainforests, its fertile rice terraces and remarkable culture, as he wrote home to King George III.

SPEAKER_2 (3:38)

The gracious permission which I have received affords me an opportunity of interesting Your Royal Highness in favor of the amiable and ingenious people whose country they describe.

A chain of very high mountains runs along the whole length of Java. Even in July and August, the atmosphere is refreshed by occasional showers, and the landscape is at all times of the year covered with the brightest green.

Paul Cooper (4:05)

But most of all, he was fascinated by Java's antiquities. Everywhere among its forests and shaded rice terraces could be seen the remains of the countless temples, palaces, and even whole ancient cities left in ruins.

A few years later, around 1815, he embarked on a journey around the island with the aim of surveying these ruins and writing a book. Although by then Java was an overwhelmingly Muslim land, Raffles found everywhere the remains of an older culture hiding just beneath the surface.

SPEAKER_2 (4:54)

As he writes in his work, The History of Java, the Muhammadan religion as it present exists on Java seems only to have penetrated the surface and to have taken but little root in the heart of Jarvans.

But the antiquities of Java consist of ruins of edifices and in particular of temples sacred to the former worship. Images of deities found within them and scattered throughout the country, either sculpted in stone or cast in metal, inscriptions on stone and copper in ancient characters and ancient coins.

Paul Cooper (5:31)

Raffles was fascinated by these remains, which seemed to confirm stories he had heard, stories of a great empire that had risen up on that island, a thriving combination of Hinduism and Buddhism that had flourished for centuries, spread its influence across the sea to countless other islands in the Indonesian archipelago, and built what may have been one of the largest empires in Southeast Asia. This was the empire of Majapahit.

SPEAKER_2 (6:10)

The numerous and interesting remains of former art and grandeur, which exist in the ruins of temples and other edifices, the abundant treasures of sculpture and statuary, either lay entirely buried under rubbish, or were but partially examined. Nothing, therefore, of the ancient history of the people, of their institutions prior to the introduction of Muhammadanism, of their magnificence and power could be accurately known or fully relied on. The grandeur of their ancestors sounds like a fable, and it is only when it can be traced in monuments which cannot be falsified, that we are led to give credit to their traditions concerning it.