Trans –Regional and –National Studies of Southeast Asia enters its second year of publication with an examination of heritage, history and historical processes. The contributions range from a critique of broad world-historical frameworks to detailed analysis of architectural references in court chronicles. Together, the articles share in attending to historical, regional, and comparative processes in, across, and beyond Southeast Asia.

Global trends which have seen the dramatic rise of the East-Southeast Asian economies suggests a turning of the wheel. Students of world history will recall the central place of China and India in the pre-modern world as producers and exporters of, variously, silks, ceramics and textiles, just as their populations and economies vastly dwarfed those of medieval Europe. The sprawling tropical zone of Southeast Asia, known historically as a prime source of spices and natural commodities, also boasted impressive civilisations. Still we are perplexed as to how a region boasting internationally known trade emporium dropped off the centre stage of world history. Reading back, did colonialism and imperialism turn the tide against indigenous agency? Or was stagnation an inevitable feature of life in pre-modern Southeast Asia? In seeking to answer these and other questions, this article both replays and critiques the many constructions of the broader East-Southeast Asia region, including its historiography, with special attention to recent trends in the framing of world-regional and global history. This is important, I argue, as localism, powerful state narratives, and the legacies of colonial conceptions and categories all contrive to ignore the importance of a holistic framing of this part of the globe.

The maritime regions of Southeast Asia played an important but varying role in connecting South Asia and China prior to the sixteenth century. With regard to commercial exchanges, traders, ships, and polities in Southeast Asia facilitated and sometimes controlled the flow of goods. Additionally, merchant associations from South Asia and China established their bases in Southeast Asia to participate in trading activities in the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea regions. At least three distinct networks emerged as a result of these maritime interactions: 1) networks of exchanges among the polities skirting the Bay of Bengal; 2) networks that connected the areas around the South China Sea; and 3) networks of direct exchanges between South Asia and China. Buddhist ideas also circulated through these networks, but seem to have made limited inroads in the maritime regions of Southeast Asia prior to the fifth century AD. By this time, Buddhism had already spread widely in China, with significant number of Buddhist missionaries arriving in the region through the maritime routes. Rather than playing a staging role in the transmission of Buddhism to China, the doctrine may have penetrated maritime Southeast Asia due to the vibrant Buddhist interactions and a significant increase in commercial activity along the networks linking South Asia and China during the fourth and fifth centuries. The use of Buddhism to legitimise new regimes in China and the diplomatic exchanges between Southeast Asian polities and these courts may have also facilitated the spread of Buddhism in the region.

In August 2010, the Vietnamese government and people celebrated the 1000th anniversary of the establishment of their capital Thăng Long (present-day Hanoi). Historical research on Thang Long has progressed considerably over the past decade, especially since the ‘18 Hoàng Diệu’ archaeological site was found. As a specialist in the Ly-Tran Period, I offer this contribution to the study of the spatial composition of Thăng Long Capital under the Ly dynasty (AD 1010–1226), through a re-examination of written sources such as dynastic annals. In view of the various functions necessary for a capital, new questions need to be addressed based on the original texts of the sources and the theories of East Asian ancient capitals. For instance: 1) were the cam trung (‘inside the forbidden area’) and dai noi (‘great interior area’) the same or not? 2) thanh (‘wall’) and thanh noi (‘inside the wall’?) are often mentioned in the sources, but which wall of the capital was it? 3) In China, the outermost area of the capital was not always included in the thanh (cheng) area; did the system of ‘three concentric walls’ indeed exist in Đại Việt during the Ly-Tran Period? And, 4) what functions and meanings did the space within each wall (and the suburban area outside the outmost wall) have? Given the present condition of sources, it is difficult to answer these questions. In this article I offer some tentative remarks in an attempt to fix a steady base for future collaborative research between historians and archaeologists.

The three cities of Malacca, Penang and Singapore share a century-long history as the British Straits Settlements, with similar multicultural traditions and urban morphology of dense shophouse districts. In the post-colonial period, these have been the basis for the production of heritage for urban renewal, civic identity formation, and international tourism. Yet, each city has approached the production of its history as heritage in different ways. The differences have been specified in terms of whether heritage production has been led by the state, market or civil society, and criticised as ideology or ambivalently interpreted as formative of identity in the face of globalisation. As colonial port-cities integrating into or becoming a new nation-state, I argue that the production of heritage in the three cities is driven by the politics of post-colonial identity interacting with the political economy of urban redevelopment. I argue that the production of heritage is one facet in the production of space and an increasingly important one in globalising Asian urbanisms. We can specify the differences in production of heritage space in the three cities in terms of the orientation of imagination and the ends of production. I show that the three city-states have been interpreting its history for heritage production in either Asian or cosmopolitan imaginations and configuring its heritage production for either political identity formation or economic product development, or a mix of both. The differences, I demonstrate, are caused by the differing politics of post-colonial identity and economic development involving the three cities.

This paper attempts an explanation for the persistence of Khmer cultural identifications on the Ca Mau Peninsula of Vietnam. This low-lying peninsula is a unique human environment, where Khmer villages, Buddhist temple festivals and livelihood activities are centred on a network of saline-infested rivers. The presence of Khmer communities along these waterways is noteworthy, for much scholarship suggests that the waterways of the multi-ethnic lower Mekong region tend to be dominated by non-Khmer ethnic groups. The vigorous Khmer presence on the peninsula is even more intriguing given that the peninsula is a migratory and trade oriented region, long under Vietnamese administration and subject to military and environmental upheavals that have challenged Khmer tenure.

The paper suggests that mastery of communal water harvesting allowed Khmers to survive the long saline water season and gave them a secure foothold in this region. Additionally, their collaborative water harvesting practices contributed to cohesion and a common identity among Khmers and helped strengthen the Theravada Buddhist wat as one of the key cultural institutions on the peninsula. However, the development of an extensive irrigation network by the Vietnamese state in the last thirty years has had the opposite effect. Canal developments facilitated intensive agriculture, immigration and the introduction of new cultural models into the peninsula, while creating economic and environmental insecurity for Khmers and undercutting the traditional grounds for collaboration. Such changes cast light on the links between ethnic identifications and the system of fresh water provision in the lower Mekong region.

In the early 1920s Southeast Asia, before communism compelled the creation of inter-colonial intelligence networks in the late period of the decade, a situation that can be called the ‘China problem’ emerged as an issue for the colonial powers in the region. This problem refers to the political activities by local Chinese populations in response to events that were taking place in China. The colonial powers, however, could not find a common solution to this issue, but instead dealt with it individually. An explanation to this lies in the fact that, unlike in Northeast Asia where the ‘Washington System’ shaped international politics in the 1920s, in Southeast Asia no such official framework had been established to deal with regional issues. This article sets out to demonstrate that under Britain's ‘informal empire’ in Southeast Asia, the colonial powers informally started to exchange information on domestic Chinese politics in their colonies as well as the political development in China. The ‘China problem’ was thus a catalyst that brought to the region ‘international’ politics and in particular the politics of immigration control.