The "Tantric Shrine" excavated at Santubong, Sarawak

Abstract

In the early centuries of the Christian era many settlements strung out along the river mouths, bays and natural harbors of the Malaysian littoral were drawn into a web of international commerce that knit together China, Southeast Asia, India and Western Asia. Along these shores ancient trading communities prospered and entered briefly into history as entrepots and relay centers in this trading system. Some of them are prominent in Chinese annals, many of them sent diplomatic missions to China, many of them figure in ancient Chinese economic intelligence reports. On the basis of the textual evidence, scholars have been able to analyze their approximate geographic. location, and when the archaeological evidence has been uncovered and analyzed it should be possible to fix their precise location in space and time to enlarge and enrich our picture of these intensive and sustained contact patterns which contributed so heavily to the intellectual life and customs of early Southeast Asia. One of the centers of ancient trade, unsuspected until recently, is on the southwestern coast of Borneo where the system of the Sarawak River threads into a complex of river mouths and empties into the South China Sea. From the westernmost projection of Borneo, Tanjong Datu, a wide bay of fifty miles in length curves about in an arc to Tanjong Po. In clusters along this arc one finds the residue of an ancient trade in iron and ceramics and colored glass beads exchanged there along with products of the jungle, scented woods, colorful feathers, ivory hornbill, the succelent nests of the swift, and rhinoceros horn.