Southeast Asian arts




The cultural setting of Southeast Asian arts


External influences



Indigenous traditions

The peoples of Southeast Asia were once thought to have shared a lack of inventiveness since prehistoric times and to have been “receptive” rather than “creative” in their contacts with foreign civilizations. Later excavations and discoveries in Myanmar and Thailand, however, inspired some scholars to argue against the accepted theory that civilization moved to Southeast Asia from China in prehistoric times; rather, these scholars contended, the peoples of mainland Southeast Asia were cultivating plants, making pottery, and working in bronze about the same time as the peoples of the ancient Middle East, and therefore civilization spread from mainland Southeast Asia to China and India. Southeast Asians do not have a strong tradition of art theory or literary or dramatic criticism, for they are always more concerned with doing the actual work of producing beautiful things. Because the Southeast Asians, especially in the western half of the mainland, worked on nondurable materials, it is not possible to trace the development and evolution of art forms stage by stage. The region has always been thickly forested, so it was natural that the first material to be used for artistic purposes should have been wood. They retained the wood-carving tradition, begun in ancient times, even when they learned to work with metals and with stone; wood carving flourished long after the great age of stone sculpture and stone architecture, which ended in the 13th century. Proto-Neolithic paintings discovered in a cave near the Salween River in the western Shan state of Myanmar have very close affinity with the later carvings on posts of houses among the Nagas on the western hills of Burma. Similarly, cave paintings of a pair of human hands with open palms, one holding the sun and the other holding a human skull, are reflected in the later aesthetic tradition of Southeast Asia: the sun symbol is found as an art motif all over the region, and a suggestion of awe, triumph, and joy at acquiring a human head is found in carvings under the eaves of the Naga houses. The cave painting testifies to the continuity of the magico-religious tradition connected with all the arts of the area.

The art of casting the bronze drums found at Dong Son, near Hanoi, which are similar to the bronze drums used by mountain tribes throughout Southeast Asia, was thought to have come from China, but recent excavations in Thailand proved that the drums and the so-called Dong Son culture itself are native to mainland Southeast Asia. In any case, the continuity of the aesthetic tradition of Southeast Asia can be seen in the bronze drums that were cast by the Karen for centuries until the early years of the 20th century. The mountains of mainland Southeast Asia provided gold, silver, and other metals, and the art of metalworking must have developed quite early. Silver buttons, belts, and ornaments now made and worn by the hill peoples in Southeast Asia have behind them a very ancient tradition of workmanship. The same artistic tradition is found in textile designs.

Music, dance, and song were originally associated with tribal rituals. From the beginning, the main characteristic of Southeast Asian music and dance has been a swift rhythm. The slow and stately dances of the Siamese court were of Indian origin; when they were introduced into Burma in the 16th century, the Burmese quickened the tempo, but, even with that modification, the dances were still called Siamese dances to distinguish them from the native ones. In their oral literature—namely, in folk songs and folktales—the emphasis is on gaiety and humour. Typically, Southeast Asians do not like an unhappy ending.

The role of royal patronage and religious institutions

Fresco of the Preaching Buddha at the Wet-kyi-in, Gu-byauk-gyi, Pagan, c. 1113.J.A. Lavaud, ParisIn all the regions of Southeast Asia, the arts flourished under the patronage of the kings. About the time of the birth of Christ, tribal groups gradually organized themselves, after some years of settled life as rice cultivators, into city-kingdoms, or conglomerations of villages. A king was thus little more than a paramount tribal chieftain. Since the tribes had been accustomed to worshiping local spirits, the kings sought a new spirit that would be worshiped by the whole community. One reason that the gods of Hinduism and Buddhism were so readily acceptable to Southeast Asia was this need for new national gods. The propagation of the new religions was the task of the kings, and consequently the period from the 1st to the 13th century was a great age of temple building all over Southeast Asia. Architecture, sculpture, and painting on the temple walls were the arts that flourished. In the ancient empires of eastern Indochina and the islands, scholars of Sanskrit, the language of the sacred works of Hinduism, became part of the king’s court, producing a local Sanskrit literature of their own. This literary activity was confined to the hereditary nobility and never reached the people, except in stories from the great Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana. Because the Hindu religious writings in Sanskrit were beyond the reach of the common people, Hinduism had to be explained to them by Hindu stories of gods and demons and mighty men. On the other side of the peninsula, in the Pyu-Burmese empire of Prome, which flourished before the 8th century, there was no such development—first, because Hinduism was never widely accepted in Burma and, second, because the more open Burmese society developed neither the institution of a god-king nor that of a hereditary nobility. Although Pali scholars surrounded the king in later Pagan, Pali studies were pursued not at the court but at monasteries throughout the kingdom so that even the humblest villager had some faint contact with Pali teachings. While the courts of the kings in Cambodia and Java remained merely local centres of Sanskrit scholarship, Pagan became a centre of Pali learning for Buddhist monks and scholars even from other lands. As in the case of stories from the Indian epics, stories of the Jatakas (birth stories of the Buddha) were used to explain Buddhism to the common people, who could not read the scriptures written in Pali. Just as scenes from the great epics in carving or in fresco adorned the temples in Cambodia and Java, scenes from the Jatakas adorned the Pagan temples.

Musicians of the Pyu kingdom played before the emperor of China in 801, and the various musical instruments at the performance have their counterparts at the present day, not only in Myanmar but throughout Southeast Asia. At Pagan the people were so fond of music that even the collection of taxes became an occasion to dance and sing, and a royal official, endowing a temple, inscribed a prayer asking that in all his future existences until he reached Nirvana “might he be woken up every morning to the strains of music sweetly played on flute and violin.” In spite of this love for music and dance, no dramatic art seems to have developed in Burma, perhaps because Sanskrit, in which there was a dramatic tradition, was not studied. In contrast, at the courts of Cambodia and Java, the Sanskrit drama, Hindu dances, and native dance traditions combined and produced the court opera ballets. These dramatic elements later reached the common people by way of the shadow play.

The patronage of the king and the religious enthusiasm of the common people could not have produced the great temples without the enormous wealth that suddenly became available in the region following the commercial expansion. With the Khmer and Javanese empires, the wealth was produced by a feudalistic society, and so the temples were built by the riches of the king and his nobles, combined with the compulsory labour of their peasants and slaves, who probably derived some aesthetic pleasure from their work because of their religious fervour. Nonetheless, their monuments, such as Borobudur, in Java, and Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, had an atmosphere of massive, all-conquering power. At Pagan, where wealth was shared by the king, the royal officials, and the common people, the temples and the monasteries were built by all who had enough not only to pay the artisans their wages but also to guarantee their good health, comfort, and safety during the actual construction. The temples were dedicated for use by all monks and lay people as places of worship, meditation, and study, and the kings of Pagan did not build a single tomb for themselves. The Khmer temple of Angkor Wat and the Indonesian temple of Borobudur were tombs in that the ashes of the builders would be enshrined therein; the kings left stone statues representing them as gods for posterity to worship, whereas at Pagan there was only one statue of a king, and it depicted him on his knees with his hands raised in supplication to the Buddha. Consequently, the atmosphere that pervaded the temples of Pagan was one of joy and tranquillity.

This golden age of wealth and splendour in Southeast Asia ended in the 13th century with a sudden violence, when Kublai Khan’s armies destroyed both the Burmese and the Khmer empires and his navy attacked Vietnam and Java. The tiny kingdoms that subsequently sprang up all over Southeast Asia continually fought among themselves; their kings were neither powerful nor rich, and the royal courts became centres of military planning and political intrigue. During the 13th and 14th centuries, in the new Javanese kingdom of Majapahit and the new Burmese kingdom of Ava, vernacular literatures came into being. Again, differences in social structure had aesthetic repercussions. In Majapahit the king was powerful and gave his patronage to the newly arisen literature, confining it to the court. At Ava the vernacular literature bloomed throughout the kingdom, and the king, lacking power and prestige, prevailed upon some established writers to join the court circles and give them glamour.

After Majapahit, a new cultural force—namely, Islam—reached insular Southeast Asia, and over the two layers of indigenous and Hindu–Buddhist cultures was added the third layer of Islam. In mainland Southeast Asia, a new Burmese empire arose over the ruins of the old and continued its task of spreading Buddhism. Hindu tradition reached the Burmese court secondhand in the 18th century as the result of the Burmese conquest of Siam and was one of the factors that contributed to the rise of a Burmese drama. On the other side of the peninsula, Vietnam, reconquered by China, fell more and more under the influence of Chinese culture. After a short period of Islamic bloom, native culture in insular Southeast Asia was subjected to alien rule. In Burma and Siam alone among the states of Southeast Asia, native arts continued to flourish because, after centuries of warfare, they finally emerged as strong kingdoms.

Predominant artistic themes

The Great Departure of Bodhisattva, detail from Episodes from the Life of Buddha, Thai painting on silk panel, 17th–18th century; in the Musée Guimet, Paris. Detail 93 × 93 cm.Ciccione—Rapho/Photo ResearchersThe predominant themes of Southeast Asian arts have been religion and national history. In religion the main interest was not so much in actual doctrine but in the life and personality of the Buddha and the personalities and lives of the Hindu gods. In national history the interest was in the legendary heroes of the past, and this theme appeared only after the great empires had fallen and the memories of their glory and power remained. The Buddha image, which went through various stages of development, remained the favourite motif of sculpture and painting. The depiction of scenes from his previous lives in fresco and relief sculpture also had the purpose of teaching the Buddhist ethics to the people, as the Jatakas emphasized certain moral virtues of the Buddha in his previous lives; it also gave an opportunity to the artist to introduce local colour by using, as background, scenes from his own contemporary time. The depiction of scenes from the Hindu epics also had the same purpose and gave the same opportunity to the artist. Many figures from the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, such as gods and goddesses, heroes and princesses, hermits and magicians, demons and dragons, flying horses and winged maidens, became fused with similar native figures, and, gradually, folklore plots became merged in the general religious themes.

The naga, a superhuman spirit, was taken from Buddhist and Hindu texts and merged with native counterparts, with the result that different images of the naga appeared in various regions. The Burmese naga was a snake with a crested head. The Mon naga was a crocodile, and the Khmer and Indonesian naga was conceived as a nineheaded snake. The demons of various kinds from all over Southeast Asia became merged under one name of Pali-Sanskrit origin, yakkha or yaksha, but they retained their separate identities in sculpture and paintings of their own different countries. The lion, which was unknown to the monsoon forest but was a figure of Hindu and Buddhist mythology, evolved into a native symbol and art motif. The worship of the snake-dragon as a god of fertility was retained in the Khmer empire; the nineheaded naga became a symbol of security and of royalty, and stone nagas guarded the palaces and temples. Buddhism frowned upon naga worship. In Burmese and Mon sculpture the naga was always shown as a servant of the Buddha, putting his body in coils to make a seat for his master and raising his great hood as an umbrella over his master’s head. According to tradition, the guardian figure of a Mon temple was a two-bodied lion with a man’s head, and the guardian figure of a Burmese temple was the crested lion. The Tai made themselves heirs to both the Khmer and the Mon art traditions relating to the naga, but the guardian figure of their temples was the benevolent demon.

Ancient symbols and animal imagery merged with Indian animals and entered the arts. The Pyu embossed the symbol of the sun on their coins as insignia of their power, and the Burmese transformed it into their favourite bird, the peacock, on the excuse that Buddhist mythology associated the peacock with the sun; the Mons adopted the red sheldrake as their symbol, and in Indonesia the mythical bird called Garuda, the vehicle of Vishnu, became merged with the local eagle. The figures of these birds also became decorative motifs. Animals of the Southeast Asian forests whose figures had adorned dwellings of wood and thatch were stylized and came to adorn palaces and monasteries. Ancient geometrical patterns mixed with new spirals and curves from India, and Indian floral designs merged with those of trees and fruits and flowers copied from the monsoon forests.

The unique aesthetic of the region

The arts of Southeast Asia have no affinity with the arts of other areas, except India. Burma was always an important route to China, but Burmese arts showed very little Chinese influence. The Tai, coming late into Southeast Asia, brought with them some Chinese artistic traditions, but they soon shed them in favour of the Khmer and Mon traditions, and the only indications of their earlier contact with Chinese arts were in the style of their temples, especially the tapering roof, and in their lacquerware. Vietnam was a province of China for 1,000 years, and its arts were Chinese. The Hindu archaeological remains in southern Vietnam belong to the ancient kingdom of Champa, which Vietnam conquered in the 15th century. The Buddhist statues in northern Vietnam were Chinese Buddhist in style. The essential differences in aesthetic aim and style between the arts of East Asia and those of Southeast Asia could be seen in the contrast between the emperors’ tombs of Vietnam and the temple-tombs of Cambodia and Indonesia or the opulent and dignified Buddha images of Vietnam and the ascetic and graceful Buddha images of Cambodia and Burma. Islamic art, with its rejection of animal and human figures and its striving to express the reality behind the false beauty of the mundane world, also has no affinity with Southeast Asian arts. Both Hinduism and Buddhism taught that the sensual world was false and transitory, but this message found no place in the arts of Southeast Asia. The world depicted in Southeast Asian arts was a mixture of realism and fantasy, and the all-pervading atmosphere was a joyous acceptance of life. It has been pointed out that Khmer and Indonesian classical arts were concerned with depicting the life of the gods, but to the Southeast Asian mind the life of the gods was the life of the peoples themselves—joyous, earthy, yet divine. The European theory of “art for art’s sake” found no echo in Southeast Asian arts, nor did the European division into secular and religious arts. The figures tattooed on a Burmese man’s thigh were the same figures that adorned a great temple and decorated a lacquer tray. Unlike the European artist, the Southeast Asian did not need models, for he did not strive to be realistic and correct in every anatomical detail. This intrusion of fantasy and this insistence on the joyousness of human life have made Southeast Asian arts unique.


General considerations

Regional distinctions


There are no examples of Chinese literature written in Vietnam while it was under Chinese rule (111 bcad 939); there are only scattered examples of Sanskrit inscriptions written in Cambodia and Indonesia; yet most of the literary works produced at the court of Pagan in Burma (flourished c. 1049–1300) have survived because the texts were copied and recopied by monks and students. But in the 14th–15th centuries, vernacular literatures suddenly emerged in Burma and Java, and a “national” literature appeared in Vietnam. The reasons behind the development of each were the same: a feeling of nationalistic pride at the final defeat of Kublai Khan’s invasions, the desire of the people to find solace in literature amidst change and struggles for power, and the lack of wealth and patronage to channel artistic expression into building temples and tombs. In Vietnam and Java literary activity centred on the courts; but in Burma the first writers were the monks and, later, the laymen educated in their monasteries. In the new Burmese kingdom of Ava (flourished after 1364), the Shan kings were proud of their Burmese Buddhist culture, and they appointed the new writers into royal service, with the result that courtiers became writers also. The Tai kings of Laos and Siam led their courts in learning Pali from the Mon, whom they had conquered, and Sanskrit from the Khmer, whom they harassed; nevertheless, seized with national pride and influenced by the Burmese example, they developed their own vernacular literature. But Cambodia itself declined. Although the monks in the Theravada Buddhist (i.e., the Southeast Asian form of Buddhism) monasteries produced a few works in Pali, no vernacular literature emerged until finally Khmer-speaking people (those living in the area comprised approximately of modern Cambodia) were borrowing many words from the Tai.

For its vernacular literatures, Southeast Asia can be divided into (1) Burma; (2) Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia; (3) Vietnam; (4) Malaysia and Indonesia; and (5) the Philippines (which produced a vernacular literature only in the 20th century, after the imposed Spanish and English languages and literatures had made their impact).

Prestige of the writer

During the time of the kings, a Southeast Asian writer enjoyed patronage and a prestigious position in society. He could not, however, make a living by writing as a profession. Manuscripts had to be written by hand, and only in the case of famous works might one or two duplicates be made, again by hand. There was no question of selling the manuscript. A writer could only hope to attract the notice of his king and obtain a monetary reward or a royal office. By the time that printing presses were introduced, in the colonial period in the 19th century, the kings were gone and with them their writers. Colonial rule overwhelmed and destroyed vernacular literary traditions, leaving intact only oral literatures in the forms of folktales and folk songs. Literary criticism, as understood in Western cultures, had never been known, either in the ancient or modern literatures of Southeast Asia. Apart from a few stray writings on versification, therefore, no works of literary criticism or literary history existed until the colonial period. Even then, the interest of European scholars was chiefly confined to archaeology, and only a few made the attempt to study some special type or period of a vernacular literature (for example, vernacular versions of the Ramayana, the great Sanskrit epic of India, or of 14th-century Javanese verse). There is a work in French dealing with Thai literature and a work in Burmese dealing with Burmese literature; but apart from these no study of any Southeast Asian literature as a whole has yet been made. For this neglect, native scholars are much to blame.

Pre-European colonial period


The Burmese borrowed many words from Pali but not to the extent that the Indonesians, the Khmer, and the Thai borrowed Sanskrit words. The Burmese language was monosyllabic and tonal, and since there was no accent or stress, the feature that distinguished verse from prose was the regular occurrence of rhyme. They modeled their literature not on classic examples from Pali or Sanskrit but on their own traditional folk songs.

The 15th century

In the 15th century, four types of verse existed: (1) pyo (religious verse), which retold stories of Buddha’s birth and teaching and were taken from the Jatakas (a collection of folktales adapted to Buddhist purposes and incorporated into the Pali canon), to which were added imaginative details and a Burmese background; (2) linkar (shorter religious verse), or a devotional poem, characterized by a metaphysical flavour comparable in many ways to that which informs the work of the early 17th-century English poets George Herbert and Robert Herrick; (3) mawgoon (historical verse), half ode, half epic, written in praise of a king or prince and developing out of military marching songs; (4) ayegyin (lullaby), an informative poem usually addressed to a young prince or princess and written in praise of his royal ancestors.

Literature in the 15th century is dominated by three monks: Shin Maha Rahta Thara, who wrote for the court of Ava, and Shin Maha Thila Wuntha and Shin Uttamagyaw, both of whom were of village stock and did not go to court but remained on in their village monasteries. Shin Maha Thila Wuntha, in the closing years of his life, turned to prose and wrote a chronicle history of Buddhism. In this period several courtiers, both men and women, also began to achieve some literary success, and the genre called myittaza (epistle) first evolved, which is a long prose letter written by a monk and addressed to the king to advise him of his duties.

The 16th century

In the 16th century, the Burmese conquered Siam, and their subsequent knowledge of Thai romantic poems gave rise to a new verse form called the yadu (the seasons). They borrowed only the theme, however, and not the form, and they developed it as an emotional poem, passionate, yet with something of the cool intellectual strength of the poems of the English metaphysical poets John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The most famous writers of the yadu were two court poets, Phyu and Nyo; a general of the army called Nawaday; and Natshinnaung, king of Toungoo. The wide popularity of the poems eventually gave rise to a mock-heroic form called yagan (“Kick the yadu”).

Golden age of literature

In the early years of the 18th century, U Kala compiled a history of Burma, written in precise and clear prose; the closing years, which coincided with the establishment of the third Burmese empire, saw a great period of literature. The Thai court, brought as captives to the Burmese capital, introduced to the Burmese poetic romances and their Rama play (based on the Ramayana). Contact with the Thai stimulated the growth of a Burmese court drama and led to the appearance of Burmese court romances in poetic prose. The king’s treasurer, however, made fun of the Thai importations and wrote the Rama Yagan, in which the high romance and courtly elegance of the 4th-century-bc Ramayana (“The Life of Rama”) were given a rustic setting, with hilarious results. From the quiet of their monasteries, the monk Awbatha wrote a novel-like rendering of the Ten Long Jatakas and the monk Kyeegan Shingyi wrote homely, pithy, and sometimes even humorous myittaza (“epistles”) from villagers to their relations in the cities.

The defeat suffered by the Burmese in the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26—their first defeat since the time of Kublai Khan in the 13th century—introduced a note of melancholy to Burmese literature. During this first half of the 19th century, many of the new melancholy lyrics were set to music. Two great writers were a product of this period: the dramatist U Kyin U and the courtier U Pon Nya, the greatest writer of the time, whose plays, epistles, and songs are full of humour and zest for life.


Until 1824 Thai literature was entirely the province of the king and his court: the king maintained a corps of writers, and it was the custom to attribute authorship of any literary work to the king himself. Thai vernacular literature began with verse, based on Sanskrit models but relying on an elaborate rhyme scheme because the Siamese language was tonal. The two earliest known poems were Yoon Pai (“The Defeat of the Yoons”), an epic-ode having similarities to the Burmese mawgoon genre, and Mahajati (“The Great Jataka”), a poem stressing ethical ideas, similar in form to the Burmese pyo. Both poems, written during the period 1475–85, give ample proof that Thai writers, using Sanskrit, Khmer, and Burmese models, could nonetheless produce a truly Thai work.

First golden age: King Narai (1657–88)


Second golden age: King Rama II (1809–24)


Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam





Malaysia and Indonesia







European colonial and modern periods






Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam


Malaysia and Indonesia


The Philippines



General characteristics

Society and music

Rural and urban music

Gamelan ensemble, with drum (centre), metallophones (left), and gongs (background), Bali, Indonesia.Courtesy of the Indonesian Tourist BoardA general musical division exists between the urban and rural areas of Southeast Asia. Urban centres comprise the islands of Java and Bali and places in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, where big ensembles of gong families play for court and state ceremonies. Rural areas include other islands and remote places, where smaller ensembles and solo instruments play a simpler music for village feasts, curing ceremonies, and daily activities. In cities and towns influenced by Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, shadow and masked plays and dances utilizing music play important communal roles, while in less urbanized areas, in lieu of musical plays, chants and songs in spirit worship and rituals are sung in exclusive surroundings—a ritual procession on the headwaters of Borneo, a drinking ceremony in the jungles of Palawan, a feast in the uplands of Luzon.

In both regions the physical setting is usually the open air—in temple yards and courtyards, under the shade of big trees, in house and public yards, fields and clearings. Many musical instruments are made of natural products of a tropical environment, and their sounds are products of this milieu. The music of buzzers, zithers, and harps is thus akin to sounds heard in the tropical vegetation of Southeast Asia. In Bali, for example, special ways of chanting and sounds of the jew’s harp ensemble (genggong) imitate the croaking of frogs and the noise of animals.

Relation to social institutions

Music in Southeast Asia is frequently related to ceremonies connected with religion, the state, community festivals, and family affairs. In Java, important Islamic feasts, such as the birthday of Muhammad or the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, as well as animistic ceremonies marking the harvest and cycles of human life, are celebrated with shadow plays (wayang [wajang]). In Bali, the gamelan gong orchestra opens ceremonies and provides most of the music for temple feasts. The gamelan selunding, an ensemble with iron-keyed metallophones (like xylophones but with metal keys), plays ritual music, and the gamelan angklung, so called because it formerly included tube rattles, or angklung, is used to accompany long processions to symbolic baths near the river.

In what is now Peninsular Malaysia the court orchestra, or nobat, was held almost as sacred as the powers of the sultan himself. Among the Bidayuh and Iban in Borneo, ceremonial chants are sung in feasts related to rice planting, harvesting, and honouring the omen bird kenyalang (rhinoceros hornbill) and other spirits.

The relation of music to dance and theatre

In the Thai masked play, or khon, dancers, chorus, soloists, and orchestra are all coordinated. The musicians know the movements of classical dance and coordinate musical phrases with dance patterns, turns, and movements. In the shadow play, or nang sbek, the dancer, who manipulates a leather puppet, must keep his foot movements in time with vocal recitations. During pauses in which the gong ensemble plays an interlude, the dancer must change steps accordingly. In general, when there is solo singing, the instrumental ensemble remains silent or plays only a few instruments in contrast to interludes of acrobatic shows or scenes of fighting, when the full orchestra clangs on all the instruments. In Balinese dancing, body movements, paces, and directions are dependent on drum strokes and signals from a wood block (keprak) and cymbals (cengceng). The dancers generally rehearse with the musicians to know exactly when choreographic changes take place.

As theatre, the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata have different musical supports, depending on the country. In Bali, Mahabharata shadow plays are presented to the accompaniment of a quartet of metallophones known as gender wayang. In Cambodia, where the preference is for stories of the Ramayana (which is called Ramker in Cambodia), the music is a full gong ensemble similar to the Thai pi phat ensemble, while in Myanmar, a percussion orchestra of drums and gongs in circular frames accompanies singing, dancing, and dialogues in all types of plays.

Musical traditions and practice

Vocal music

The role of the voice in music making differs from that of European music in both concept and execution. Men’s and women’s voices are each not divided into high and low ranges but are used for their colour qualities. In the Javanese shadow play, for example, the narrator (dalang) assumes many singing and speaking qualities to depict different characters and scenes. Arjuna, the chief wayang hero, is represented with a clear voice, speaking in a single tone. Puppets with bigger bodies are given lower, resonant voices. In Thai masked plays there is no desire to produce full open tones, as in Italian bel canto. A vocal tension accounts for shades of “nasal” singing that can be discerned in commercial recordings of Thai, Javanese, Cambodian, and Vietnamese music. In the Javanese orchestra (gamelan) the voice tries to imitate the nasality of the two-stringed fiddle (rebab). In Bali, a particular use of men’s voices is in the kecak, a ritual in which groups seated in concentric circles combine markedly pronounced syllables into pulsing rhythmic phrases. In village settings among the Kalinga of Luzon, in the Philippines, singing, speaking, or whispering of vowels is so subtle as to blur the border line between speech and song. On the Indonesian island of Flores, leader-chorus singing, with the chorus divided into two or more parts, is accompanied by a prolonged note (drone) or by a repeated melodic, rhythmic fragment (ostinato). In Borneo, or Mindanao and Luzon in the Philippines, a man or woman may sing an epic or a love song in a natural voice with little or no attempt to nasalize it. Epic singing, with long or short melodic lines, goes on for several nights, and some of the sounds are mumbled to give words and their meanings a particular shading. Further, a sensuousness in the quality of Islamic singing is achieved through the use of shades of vowel sounds, vocal openings, and a bell-like clarity of tones.

Instrumental music

Although gong orchestras consisting of gongs, metallophones, and xylophones bind Southeast Asia into one musical cultural group, the types of ensembles and sounds they form may be classified into four areas. Java and Bali make up one unit because of their predominant use of bronze instruments in orchestras that make one homogeneous sound. Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia form another subdivision, with families of musical instruments producing heterogeneous sounds: the bronze group makes slowly decaying sounds, wooden xylophones play short sounds, and a reed blows a penetrating melody accompanied by a fourth group of cymbals, drums, and another gong. Burmese orchestras differ from the Indonesian and Thai groups by the unique use of a row of tuned drums (sometimes called a drum circle), with sounds consisting of sharp attacks and quick-vanishing waves. The fourth area, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, uses several types of suspended and horizontally laid gongs. These gongs produce various combinations of sounds. In Nias, an island west of Sumatra, one group of three heavy suspended gongs plays three rhythms of homogeneous sounds. Suspended gongs with a wide rim and a high knob (or boss) are played alone, with another gong or with a drum on the Philippine islands of Mindanao and Palawan and the Indonesian island of Kalimantan (Borneo). Gongs laid in a row, called kulintang, are melody instruments accompanied by a percussion group. The most developed melodies are found in Mindanao, and the area of distribution extends to Borneo, Sumatra, and Celebes, in Indonesia. The sets of tuned gongs found throughout Southeast Asia are also called gong chimes, gong kettles, and gongs in a row.

Tonal systems

In contrast to the Western diatonic-scale system (based on seven-note scales comprised of whole and half steps) and its association with relatively “fixed” pitches, there prevails a gapped system in Southeast Asia (i.e., scales containing intervals larger than a whole step) with elastic intonation. Examples include the five-tone slendro and the seven-tone pelog of Java and the seven-tone scale of Thailand. In each of these systems the distances between corresponding tones in two different sets of octaves are not exactly the same. For example, one Javanese slendro octave has the following intervals expressed in cents (a unit of pitch measurement; 1,200 cents make 12 semitones or 1 octave): 246, 241, 219, 254, 246; another has 245, 237, 234, 245, 267. In contrast, two tunings of the Western chromatic scale theoretically always have 12 semitones of 100 cents apiece.

Related to tonal systems are modes, which in Southeast Asia use tones of a particular scale system to form melodies. Associated with a given mode are a hierarchy of pitches, the principal and auxiliary tones, endings of melodic phrases (cadential formulas), ornaments, and the vocal line. Modes express emotions and are applied to different times of the day and night and to particular situations in stage plays. They are clearly present, with local variations, in Java, Vietnam, and Myanmar but are less distinct in Bali, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

In rural areas a multitude of scales with mixed diatonic and gapped systems and no modes are used.

Musical time and improvisation

Musical time is generally divisible in units of two or four in urban music, but it occurs more freely and without a metric pulse in rural areas, especially in singing. Musical improvisation or the use of variations based on a melodic theme is not universal. It is essential to the playing of the rebab and singing in the Javanese gamelan, the tappings on the Burmese circle of drums, and the percussive playing on the kulintang. But, in fast playing in the Balinese gamelan, exact repetitions of patterns are necessary, for there is no time for the performer to think of alternative formulas. Similarly, the separate rhythmic patterns of five instrumental parts do not change in the gong (gangsa) music of the Ibaloi of Luzon. Repetition is the essence of the music.

Historical developments


Early bamboo instruments

The widespread use of bamboo musical instruments in practically all parts of Southeast Asia points to the antiquity of these instruments and, probably, that of the music they play. A historical citation of mouth organs and jew’s harps in the Chinese Shijing (“Classic of Poetry”) shows that these instruments were known in the 8th century bce. Prior to this time, other bamboo musical instruments were probably in use, just as bamboo tools were used in pre-Neolithic times.

The music of pre-Neolithic types of bamboo musical instruments, such as are played in the 21st century, may be just as old as these instruments. One general feature that points to this antiquity is the widespread and frequent use of a very simple musical element: a sustained tone (drone) or repetition of one or several tones (ostinato). Sustained tones appear in the mouth organ, where one or two continuous sounds are held by one or two pipes while a melody is formed by the other pipes. Prolonged tones may also be heard in rows of flutes played by one person in Flores. One flute acts as ostinato and the rest make a melody. In group singing, an underlying held tone is common. Repetition of tones occurs in bamboo instruments (jew’s harps, percussion tubes and half percussion tubes, zithers, clappers, slit drums) as well as in nonbamboo instruments. In the kudjapi, a two-stringed lute, one string is used for the ostinato and the other to pluck the melody. In the log drum, two players play fast rhythms of continuous sounds while another player taps improvised rhythms.

Bronze instruments in gong families of Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar employ repeated sounds acting as ostinati. A widespread and preponderant use of dronelike or repeated sounds in Southeast Asia shows that they are probably an ancient fundamental musical element.

Early bronze instruments

Kettle gongs.© Ignatius Wooster/FotoliaThe earliest bronze musical instruments are kettle gongs (deep-rimmed gongs), which date back to c. 300 bce and are found in Vietnam, Bali, Sumatra, Borneo, Thailand, and Myanmar. In Burmese gongs the use of a heavy beater for the centre and a lighter stick to strike the side denotes an opposition of a full and a tiny sound applied today also to the babandil and other gong ensembles in Palawan and Borneo.

Gongs that predominate in Southeast Asia are those with a boss, or central beating knob. The many varieties differ according to their shapes, chemical properties, playing position, number in a series, manner of playing, musical function, and sound. Flat gongs without a central boss are not as widely used. They are found in the hills of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, in some parts of Indonesia, and in the northern Philippines and may have come to Southeast Asia either through China in the 6th century or from the Middle East.

Musical traditions

The influence of the great traditions of Asia—Indian, Chinese, Islamic, and Khmer (Cambodian)—on native Southeast Asian music varies in different countries. From India come principally two ancient Sanskrit epics—the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Deep attachment to themes from the Ramayana pervades the whole Southeast Asian region, except the Philippines, where Indian influence was weakest. Musical instruments attributed to India and appearing in 9th-century reliefs at the Buddhist temple of Borobudur and Hindu temple of Prambanan, in Java, are bronze bells, bar zithers, cymbals, conical drums, flutes, shawms, and lutes. They may still be found in several islands of Indonesia. Khmer gong circles, stringed instruments, mouth organs, drums, and oboes still in use in rural Cambodia and Vietnam are depicted in the 12th-century ruins at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Prehistoric lithophones, or stone chimes, excavated in Vietnam in 1949, may have been the ancestors of kettle gongs. Chinese-type musical instruments (two- and three-stringed fiddles, bells, and drums), the use of the Chinese pentatonic (five-tone) scale, and duple and quadruple time (typical Chinese metres) are used in Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, Islamic musical instruments—drums, two-stringed fiddles (rebab), and three-stringed lutes—may be heard in Java, while melismatic singing (many notes to one syllable), especially in Islamic rituals, is usual among the Malay groups on Borneo.

There are also musical instruments and elements that have developed locally. The mouth organs of Borneo, Laos, and Cambodia are probable ancestors of the Chinese sheng and the Japanese shō (mouth organs). Jew’s harps, tube zithers, ring flutes, buzzers, xylophones, two-stringed lutes, and various types of gongs with boss (knobbed centre) are some of the most typical instruments of Southeast Asia. A probably ancient manner of measuring flute stops in Mindanao—dividing flute segments into proportional lengths to produce the octave, fifth, and other intervals—recalls a very old Chinese account of cutting bamboo tubes into lengths that would sound these same intervals.

In general, music in Southeast Asia is a tradition taught to each succeeding generation without the use of written notation. From exclusive families of musicians in courts, gamelan music was transmitted to the people. Epic and ritual songs are learned by rote and handed down from older to younger generations. Hence, skill in instrumental music is developed by imitation and practice.


Just as today all types of Burmese plays are accompanied by the traditional Burmese orchestra, the beginnings of Burmese theatre contained a music that, like the theatre, was probably based on ancient religious rituals. Before Indian and Chinese musical influences, the inspirational source of Burmese music and dance was the miracle plays (nibhatkhin), which, in turn, were based on singing, dancing, and entertainment in local folk feasts that date back to antiquity. The worship of spirits (nats) at Chinese festivals was accompanied by women who, through song and dance, communicated with and were possessed by these spirits. Following this practice, professional entertainers taking the place of women danced, sang, and played instruments during the first nibhatkhin. These practices led to the dancing and singing associated with the pwe, a popular play for public and courtly entertainment.

Foreign musical influences came from India, China, and Thailand. Indian elements appear in musical terms, theories about scales, and in some musical instruments—oboe, double-headed drums, cymbals, and the arched harp. Chinese influence appears to be older and is apparent in the use of the pentatonic scale and such musical instruments as table zithers (related to the Chinese qin), a dragon-head lute resembling a Chinese pipa, and two- and three-stringed fiddles. From Thailand and the Khmer civilization of Cambodia probably came both the use of gongs in a circular frame and the dramatization of episodes from the Ramayana. In the traditional orchestra for state ceremonies, for the theatre, and, formerly, for royalty, three simultaneous variations of the same theme are performed by two sets of melodic percussion—a circle of about 21 tuned drums (saing-waing) and a circle of about 21 tuned gongs (kyi waing)—and at least one oboe (hne) or a flute (pulwe). To this is added a playing of a percussion group comprising a double-headed drum (patma), a pair of cymbals (la gwin), and clappers playing a duple or a quadruple metre. In three rhythmic patterns applied by these percussion groups to specific song types, the strong beats are always marked by the clappers.

Melodies played on traditional instruments (saing-waing, harp, pattala or xylophone) are frequently broken by rests and consist of segments of two, three, or four notes that form phrases, usually of 8 or 16 beats. Several phrases make up a number of verses to complete a musical rendition. Melodies, based on modes, are constructed according to the previously discussed elements usually found in the modal music of Southeast Asia. Song types exist in Burmese music and are assigned to specific modes.

The Burmese arched harp (saung gauk) has features that may be traced back to pre-Hittite times and the Egyptian 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 bce). Scarcely existent outside of Myanmar, this instrument underwent a renascence in the 20th century. A more popular solo instrument is a wooden xylophone pattala.

The following instruments may be found among Myanmar’s rural ethnic groups: idiophones, or resonant solids—bamboo jew’s harps, clappers, cymbals, wooden slit drums, bronze kettle gongs, drums; membranophones, or vibrating-membrane instruments—goblet drums; chordophones, or stringed instruments—crocodile zithers, monochords with calabash resonators, three- and four-stringed fiddles; aerophones, or wind instruments—lip-valley flutes, ring flutes, panpipes, double-reed winds, buffalo horns, and mouth organs.

Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia

Although their individual political histories differ, the music of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia is almost identical. The musical instruments and forms of this region spring from the same sources: India, the indigenous Mon-Khmer civilizations, China, and Indonesia. In Thailand, three types of orchestras, called pi phat, kruang sai, and mahori, exist. The pi phat, which plays for court ceremonies and theatrical presentations, uses melodic percussion (gongs in a circle, xylophones, metallophones) and a blown reed. The kruang sai performs in popular village affairs and combines strings (monochords, lutes, and fiddles with two and three strings) and wind instruments (oboes and flutes); while the mahori, as accompaniment of solo and choral singing, mixes strings (floor zithers, three-stringed fiddles, and lutes) and melodic percussion (gongs and xylophones) with the winds (flutes and oboes). All three ensembles are provided with a rhythmic group of drums, cymbals, and a gong to punctuate the melody parts. Some of the above musical instruments and their functions may best be illustrated in the pi phat ensemble below.

A slow-moving theme is played by gongs arranged in a circle (khong wong yai) with variations in smaller gongs (khong wong lek), two wooden xylophones (ranat ek, ranat thum), and two box-shaped metallophones (ranat thong ek, ranat thong thum). The last three pairs of instruments vary the theme by playing twice as fast or by repeating, anticipating, and revolving around it. A double-reed oboe (pi nai) hovers above the melodic percussion, providing the only blown sound in the ensemble. Together with the punctuating gongs and drums, the whole orchestra displays a polyphonic (many-voiced) stratification of instrumental parts, using unisons and octaves mainly in the strong beats.

A melody may be broken down into phrase units consisting of two or four measures that may be joined by four other phrase units to make a phrase block, and a given number of blocks constitutes one musical composition. Three speeds of rendition—slow, medium, fast—in either duple or quadruple time are marked by two alternating strokes in a pair of cymbals; a dampened clap marks a strong beat, and a ringing vibration denotes a weak beat.

The tuning system is made up of seven tempered (approximately equidistant) tones to an octave. But the melodies constructed out of this system use only five tones out of seven—which sound close to a Chinese pentatonic scale. This scale may be constructed in any of seven levels or tones of the Thai tuning system. Further, through a process called metabole, melodies may move from one level to another.

In the Cambodian shadow play (nang sbek) two narrators alternate in chanted recitative to explain the role of the leather puppets. Dancers parading these figures across the screen and simulating their actions are accompanied by an orchestra. A limited number of tunes is played to eight dance positions (walk, flight or military march, combat, meditation, sorrow or pain, promenade, reunion, and metamorphosis). In the play these poses are assumed by princes, princesses, monkeys, demons, peasants, or ascetics.

Among different ethnic groups, such as the Khmer Chung (Saoch), Pwo Karen, Bu Nuer, Kae Lisu, Kuay, and Samre, a rural music related to that of the ancient Khmer peoples is played by aerophones (buffalo horns, mouth organs, vertical flutes), idiophones (flat gongs, gongs with boss, cymbals, jew’s harps), chordophones (bamboo zithers), and membranophones (circle of drums). Other important instruments for solo performance or as accompaniment to songs are the three-stringed crocodile zither (chakhe), a four-stringed lute (grajappi), a plucked monochord with a gourd resonator (phin nam tao), and a bamboo whistle flute (khlui).


Although Vietnamese music belongs to the great Chinese musical tradition, which includes the music of Korea, Mongolia, and Japan, some of its musical elements are indigenous or come from other parts of Southeast Asia, and some derive from Champa, an ancient Hinduized kingdom of Vietnam. Archaeological finds in the village of Dong Son revealed that the ancient Vietnamese used kettle gongs, mouth organs, wooden clappers, and the conch trumpet. From the 10th to the 15th century a joint Indian and Chinese element left its musical imprint. The Chinese seven-stringed zither (qin) and a double-headed drum were played together, or a Champa melody was accompanied by a drum. It was at this time that two traditional Chinese ensembles—Great Music and Little Music—and an elementary Chinese theatrical art were introduced. From the 15th to the 18th century the Chinese influence reached its height. Court music (nha nhac) was played by two orchestras. One, located in the Upper Hall of the court, consisted of a chime of 12 stones, a series of 12 bells, a zither of 25 strings (Chinese se), a zither with 7 strings (Chinese qin), flutes, panpipes, a scraper in the shape of a tiger, a double-headed drum, a mouth organ, and a globular whistle. The second orchestra in the Lower Hall used 16 iron chimes, a harp with 20 strings, a lute with 4 strings (Chinese pipa), a double flute, a double-headed drum, and a mouth organ. Ceremonial music, almost nonexistent in the 20th century, was patterned after court music.

In Buddhist ceremonies, prayers were recited in three ways: as recitation in a low voice, as a cantillation (sung, inflected recitation) following the six tones of the Vietnamese language, and as chant accompanied by an orchestra of two drums, bell, gong, cymbals, and fiddles.


From the 19th century to World War II, Vietnamese music reaffirmed its character. Although the playing of court music was restricted, popular music was encouraged, leading to northern and southern styles that were patronized by both the aristocracy and commoners. Western musical influence in this period was manifest in the use of the mandolin, the Spanish guitar, and the violin, as well as by the introduction of European classical music and composition following Western forms. In the later 20th century traditional Vietnamese music began to disappear, but attempts to revive it began in the early 1970s.

Vietnamese rural folk music is built on the same musical principles as court music. The main difference lies in its application to village activities—work, games, courting, marriage, cure for the sick, entertainment, feasts.

Common elements characterize and unify all Vietnamese music. It is based on an oral tradition, with written notation serving only as a reading guide. Melodies are generally built out of a pentatonic system (for example, C, D, F, G, A) to which two auxiliary tones (E, B) may be added to make other pentatonic melodies. A song, usually preceded by a prelude, may be sung in slow, moderate, or fast tempo divisible by two or four, with a simple contrapuntal (countermelody) accompaniment using unisons and octaves at beginning points of phrases. Outside of the first beats, intervals of fifths, fourths, thirds, and even seconds are allowed. An important aspect of melodies is the idea of mode (dieu), the elements of which do not essentially differ from those of Javanese and Burmese music.

Indonesia and Malaysia


Side view of a bonang, one of the instruments that elaborate the main melody in Javanese gamelan music.Wesleyan University Virtual Instrument Museum ( Javanese philosophical concept based on mysticism, the state of being refined (alus, Indonesian halus), and the inner life as related to Hindu, Islamic, and Indonesian thought may best be represented in music by the Javanese gamelan, an orchestra made up mostly of bronze instruments producing homogeneous blended sounds. The instruments in the ensemble may be divided into three groups of musical function. The first group comprises thick bronze slabs (saron demung, saron barung, saron panerus) on trough resonators playing the theme usually in regular note values without ornamentation. The second group consists of elaborating or panerusan instruments, which add ornaments to the main theme. In this group gongs in double rows (bonang panembang, bonang barung, bonang panerus) play variations with the same ratio of speed as the saron group. In softer sounding music for indoor performance, other panerusan instruments with very mellow sounds come in. These are three sizes of thin bronze slabs with bamboo resonators—gender panembung or slentem, gender barung, and gender panerus. Other elaborating instruments are the wooden xylophone (gambang), the zither (celempung) with 26 strings tuned in pairs, an end-blown flute (suling), and a 2-stringed lute (called a rebab by the Javanese), which leads the orchestra. In loud-sounding music, the soft-sounding instruments are not played, and the drum (kendang) leads the orchestra. The third group provides “colotomic,” or punctuating beats in four rhythmic patterns played separately by four types of heavy, suspended, or horizontally laid gongs.

Side view of a celempung, one of the instruments that elaborate the main melody in Javanese gamelan music.Wesleyan University Virtual Instrument Museum ( tuning systems prevail. The slendro tends to have five equidistant but flexible (or varying) pitches in an octave, while the pelog, with seven equally flexible tones, has a more varied structure. One tuning with intervals expressed in cents (140, 143, 275, 127, 116, 204, 222) may roughly be represented by the following notes in a descending scale: C↑, A ♯, G ♯, G↓, F↑, D ♯↓, C ♯↑, and C. (Arrows up are tones slightly higher than Western tempered tuning [in which a semitone is equivalent to 100 cents] and vice versa for arrows down.) Melodies from these tunings are governed by a modal structure (patet) the elements of which are similar to those of Vietnamese and Burmese music.

A suling (flute) atop a kacapi (box zither). The two are typical Sundanese instruments.DiN (Kacapi-suling.jpg: Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0)In West Java the most popular ensembles use a vocal part, a two-stringed fiddle (rebab) or a bamboo flute (suling), and a box zither (kacapi). In the gamelan, submodes (surupan) are formed by the use of vocal tones—sung or played on the suling or rebab—which amplify the number of scales in both the pelog and slendro systems.


In contrast to the introspection of Javanese music, the Balinese gamelan exudes a music of brilliant sounds with syncopations (displaced accents) and sudden changes, as well as gradual increase and decrease in volume and speed and feats of fast, precise playing. The tuning system, musical instruments, and polyphonic stratification are similar to those of the Javanese gamelan, although in Bali the seven-tone pelog is not popular. Most gamelan are tuned to a five- or four-tone system, and the concept of modes is not as clearly developed as in Java. A variety of gamelan exists, each with a special function, instrumentation, repertoire, and tuning system. The gamelan gong orchestra is among the most extensive in its number of instruments. A modern version, gong kebyar, omits the trompong (gongs in a row) and saron (bronze slabs over a trough resonator) and replaces them with gangsa gantung (metallophone with bamboo resonators) and reyong of four gongs to produce exuberant outbursts of sound. The gamelan gambuh, now rare, comprises four end-blown flutes, one rebab, and a group of percussion. The gamelan semar pegulingan, played formerly in royal courts but now almost disappeared, emphasizes the trompong as a solo instrument. The gamelan pelegongan is a virtuoso orchestra that accompanies legong dances, while the gamelan pejogedan is an orchestra of xylophones for dance (joged) and entertainment in the marketplace. The gender wayang is a quartet of slendro tuned metallophones specially employed for shadow plays. The gamelan angklung, a village orchestra assembled during ceremonies, anniversaries, and cremations, originally consisted of rattling tubes that are now replaced by metallophones. The gamelan arja is characterized by a soft timbre (tone colour) and the use of a one-stringed bamboo zither, the guntang, to accompany musical comedy and popular plays.

Other parts of Indonesia

In the islands of Flores, Nias, New Guinea, Celebes, and Borneo, idiophones make up perhaps the most varied collection of musical instruments—gongs of various profiles, slit drums, jew’s harps pulled with a string, clappers, bells, xylophones, percussion sticks, bull-roarers, and stamping tubes. Particularly interesting are idiophones made of bones, shells, skulls, fruits, seeds, planks, pellets, crab claws, clogs, coconut, and shark bones. Membranophones are represented by drums shaped like a cylinder, goblet, vase, round frame, hourglass, cone, cup, barrel, or a tube. Aerophones present an array of vertical and transverse (horizontally played) flutes, panpipes, ring flutes, shawms, clarinets, gourd trumpets, conch shells, ocarinas, and flutes with different mouthpieces. Chordophones include bamboo zithers, spike fiddles (in which the neck skewers the body), one- and two-stringed lutes, musical bows, monochords, guitars, rebabs, bar zithers, and sago zithers. In Flores, part singing with a sustained drone is frequent. Songs in Nias use diatonic (whole and half steps), chromatic (half steps), and gapped melodies largely less than an octave in range. In Borneo descending melodies often make up a tetrachord (four adjacent tones forming the interval of a fourth). In Indonesian New Guinea departures from songs with gapped scales include fanfare, stair descent, and tiled melodies (the last consisting of short phrases repeated at different pitch levels).


At least three principal cultural influences—Indonesian, Hindu, and Islamic—left their musical marks in Malaysia. The Indonesian influence is seen principally in musical forms, participants, and paraphernalia of the Malaysian shadow play (wayang kulit). It is said that the Indian epics and, especially, the Panji tales of Java came to Malaysia via Indonesia, but there are songs in certain plays and musical instruments (e.g., the double-headed drum and oboe) that could have reached Malaysia from India through other routes. Islamic traces are evident in melismatic songs among the Malay groups in songs connected with religious rituals and in choral singing in the mak yong plays. Chinese music, a more recent development, is largely practiced among the Chinese communities, principally in Singapore.

Before Malaysian independence, the nobat, an old royal instrumental ensemble dating back to about the 16th century, played exclusively for important court ceremonies in the palaces of the sultans of Perak, Kedah, Selangor, and Trengganu. Today, in Kedah, the ensemble consists of five instruments: one big goblet drum (negara), two double-headed drums (gendang), one long oboe (nafiri), one small oboe (nafiri), and one gong. The music, which consists of 10 surviving pieces, is broadcast today and performed live.

Three shadow plays exist, principally in the state of Kelantan. The wayang gedek is the Thai form; wayang Jawa, a Malay form, is almost extinct; and the wayang Siam, which is a combination of Thai and Malay influences, is the most popular form of puppet shadow play. The operator of the performance is the narrator (dalang), who manipulates the leather figures, introduces important characters, and describes different scenes with the accompaniment of the orchestra. The music is led by a two-stringed lute (rehab) in the Ramayana, or an oboe (serunai) in the Mahabharata and Panji cycles. The melodic instruments are supported by a percussion group consisting of pairs of goblet-shaped drums (gedombak), cylindrical drums (gendang), barrel drums (geduk), gongs lying on a support (canang), suspended gongs (gong) or, sometimes, a row of gongs played by two or three men, and one pair of cymbals (kesi). The music usually begins with a prelude followed by a list of pieces the sequences of which are dictated by the narrator.

The mak yong, a dance drama that probably dates back more than 1,000 years, was introduced in Kelantan under the patronage of the royal courts. In the 20th century it existed as a folk theatre with an all-female cast. The music that accompanies 12 surviving stories is played by an orchestra of one bowed lute (rebab), two suspended gongs, and a pair of double-headed drums (gendang). A heterophony (simultaneous variation of the same melody) between a solo voice, a chorus, and the rebab creates a music with a Middle Eastern flavour.

A rich musical heritage in the rural sections of Malaysia is shown in musical instruments used by Malay, Thai, Semang, and Senoi groups. Idiophones include shell and coconut rattles, the jew’s harp (mostly pulled by a string, rather than plucked), bull-roarers, bamboo clappers, and the bamboo slit drum. Aerophones include the buffalo horn, wooden and clay whistles, nose flutes, end-blown flutes, and the oboe. Chordophones are two- and three-stringed fiddles with coconut resonators, monochords, and tube zithers. One membranophone is a double-headed cylindrical drum.

In Borneo among the Malay, Kadazan, and Iban groups, the principal instruments are gongs in a row (gulintangan) played with suspended gongs of different types (canang, gong, tawak-tawak). Among the Murut, Kenyah, and Iban the mouth organ with a calabash resonator (sompoton) plays a melody with a drone accompaniment. The jew’s harp (ruding), bamboo zither (tongkungon), nose flute (tuali), hourglass drum (ketubong), and vertical flute (suling) may be heard among different ethnic groups. Iban ceremonial songs are sung in connection with rice festivals and rituals to prevent sickness, while mourning songs make up a rich repertoire of solo and leader–chorus singing. The Kenyah are particularly adept at blending low voices of men singing a melody supported by a drone.

The Philippines

Two musical cultures—Western and Southeast Asian—prevail in the Philippines. Western music is practiced by some 90 percent of the population, while Southeast Asian examples are heard only in mountain and inland regions, among about 10 percent of the people.

The Western tradition dates back to the 17th century, when the first Spanish friars taught plainchant and musical theory and introduced such European musical instruments as the flute, oboe, guitar, and harp. There subsequently arose a new music related to Christian practices but not connected with the liturgy. Processional songs, hymns in honour of the Blessed Virgin, Easter songs, and songs for May (Mary’s month) are still sung in different sections of the country. A secular music tradition also developed. Guitars, string ensembles (rondalla), flute, drum, harps, and brass bands flourished in the provinces among the principal linguistic groups and still appear during town fiestas and important gatherings. Competing bands played overtures of Italian operas, marches, and light music. Young men, like their counterparts throughout the Hispanic world, sang love songs (kundiman) in nightly serenades beneath the windows of their beloved. It was not uncommon in family gatherings for someone to be asked to sing an aria, play the harp, or declaim a poem. Orchestral music accompanied operas and operettas (zarzuelas), while solo recitals and concerts were organized in clubs or music associations. With the advent of formal music instruction in schools, performance and composition rose to professional levels. Beginning in the 20th century, several symphony orchestras, choral groups, ballet companies, and instrumental ensembles performed with varying regularity.

A Southeast Asian musical tradition exists completely apart from the Western tradition. In the north, flat gongs are played in different instrumental combinations (six gongs; two gongs, two drums and a pair of sticks; three gongs). In the ensemble with six gongs, four are treated as “melody” instruments, one as ostinato, and another as a freer layer of improvisation. The melody consists of scattered tones produced by strokes, slaps, and slides of the hands against the flat side of the gong. Other musical instruments in the northern Philippines are bamboo. These are the nose flute (kalleleng), lip-valley or notched flute (paldong), whistle flute (olimong), panpipes (diwdiwas), buzzer (balingbing), half-tube percussion (palangug), stamping tube (tongatong), tube zither (kolitong), and jew’s harp (giwong). Leader–chorus singing among the Ibaloi is smooth and sung freely without a metric beat, while the same form among the Bontoc is emphatic, loud, and metric. Scales in songs and musical instruments use from two to several tones within and beyond an octave and are arranged as gapped, diatonic, and pentatonic varieties.

In the southern Philippines (particularly the Sulu archipelago and the western portion of the island of Mindanao), the more-developed ensemble is the kulintang, which, in its most common form, consists of seven or eight gongs in a row as melody instruments accompanied by three other gong types (a wide-rimmed pair; two narrow-rimmed pairs; one with turned-in rim) and a cylindrical drum. The kulintang scale is made up of flexible tones with combinations of wide and narrow gaps sometimes approaching a Chinese pentatonic variety and oftentimes not. Its melody is built on nuclear tones consisting of two, three, or more tones to form a phrase. Several phrases may be built, repeated, and elongated to complete one rendition lasting two to three minutes. Pieces of music are played continuously for a long period during the night.

In the central west Philippines on the island of Mindoro, love songs are sung that are based on reciting tones with interludes played by a miniature copy of the Western guitar or a small violin with three strings played like a cello.

The performing arts

In variety of dance and theatrical forms and in the number of performing groups, no area in the world except India and Pakistan compares to Southeast Asia. Some form of the performing arts is a normal part of life throughout the several nations. Sophisticated performing groups cluster in and around the present and former court cities—Yogyakarta and Surakarta in Java, Ubud and Gianyar in Bali, Bangkok in Thailand, Mandalay in Myanmar, Siĕmréab near Angkor and Phnom Penh in Cambodia, Hue in Vietnam—where drama, puppetry, dance, and music have been cultivated for 10 centuries or more. Hundreds of commercial theatrical and dance groups perform in such newer centres as Yangon, Saigon, and Jakarta and in scores of provincial cities and towns. Wandering troupes of actors, puppeteers, singers, and dancers travel from village to village in areas adjacent to these population centres. There are few communities in which some form of folk dance is not performed by local people.

In the West, music, dance, and drama are usually separate arts, whereas in all areas of Southeast Asia, drama, dance, mime, music, song, and narrative are integrated into composite forms, often with masks or in the form of puppetry. The spectator’s senses, emotions, and intellect are bombarded simultaneously with colour, movement, and sound. The result is a richness and a vividness in the theatre that is absent in most Western drama, so much of which rests on a literary basis.

More than 100 distinct forms or genres of performing arts can be distinguished in Southeast Asia. These can be grouped, according to which of the various stage arts is emphasized, into (1) masked dance and masked dance-mime, (2) unmasked dance and dance-drama, (3) drama with music and dance, (4) opera, (5) shadow-puppet plays, and (6) doll- or stick-puppet plays.

Diverse traditions in the performing arts

Four relatively distinct traditions exist in the performing arts: folk, court, popular, and Western.

The folk tradition

Dances in the folk tradition are exceptionally numerous and widespread. Some are performed as religious ritual, others, particularly on the Indonesian island of Bali, by highly trained and respected artists, and still another kind as entertainment in which the community participates. Folk theatre is more complex than folk dance and thus less widespread, but it has deep connections with religious ritual. Although the origins of most folk performing arts lie in remote times, later court forms exerted important influence on many of the folk forms. Conversely, folk forms have been a source of inspiration to court artists.

The court tradition

The shadow play and masked and unmasked dance are court arts reflecting centuries of subtle refinement under the patronage of kings and princes. In Southeast Asia the shadow theatre is a major classic art. Leather puppets of mythological figures, the bodies intricately incised to allow light to pass through, are attached to sticks for manipulation. A lacy shadow is created by a flaming lamp as the puppet is pressed against the back of a vertical screen of white cloth. The flickering and insubstantial shadow seen from the other side creates for the understanding viewer a mystic world with deep symbolic meaning. In Java, Bali, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Thailand shadow plays and their techniques have been emulated by human actors and dancers and have been the models for marionette and doll-puppet theatre.

Dance troupes have been a part of court life at least since recorded history began. In the mainland courts of Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Burma, concubines of the ruler’s harem who performed female dances were segregated from male performers, giving rise to separate forms of female unmasked dance and male masked dance-mime. Although certain dances traditionally are performed only by men or only by women in Indonesia and Vietnam, mixed casts have a long history, especially in dramatic pieces. Court dance on the mainland and in Indonesia has been influenced by Indian dance style, and Vietnamese dance by the dance styles of Chinese opera, but they have acquired a distinctly Southeast Asian character. Court dance reached its greatest development when applied to mythological and legendary themes, often taken from the shadow theatre. The resulting dance-dramas and masked dance-mimes of Thailand, Cambodia, and Java are world famous for their magnificent scale and elegance of execution. Some of these court arts are no longer performed, and others face increasing difficulty securing financial support, yet they remain important.

The popular and Western traditions

In the popular traditions are those 400 to 500 professional troupes who perform, except in the Philippines, in commercial theatre buildings of major cities for an urban ticket-buying audience. Some forms of popular theatre are directly modeled on court dance-drama, but most are spoken drama in which court-derived music, song, and dance movements have been inserted. Local legend and history provide the subject matter for many of these plays. As in much of Asia, the performer in the popular tradition is seldom accorded status and may be despised as a vagabond.

The spoken drama, the ballet, and the modern dances are known only superficially in Southeast Asia. The sole exception is the Philippines, where amateur performances of Western plays constitute the country’s main theatrical tradition. Southeast Asian audiences generally find Western plays based mainly on dialogue to be uninteresting and deficient in artistic qualities. European and American films and television programs, however, are widely shown and appreciated, and popular Western dances are found in major urban areas. Undoubtedly the impact of these forms on local audiences will continue to increase, possibly to the detriment of the indigenous traditions.

Characteristics of dance

Dramatic and nondramatic forms

In the parts of Southeast Asia influenced by Indian forms—everywhere except for Vietnam and the Philippines—nondramatic and dramatic dance are both known. Nondramatic, or “pure,” dances that do not express emotional states of characters are numerous in both folk and court traditions. Among court dances, the Javanese bedaja is typical. Nine dancers move in unison, without emotional expression, in precisely fixed choreographic patterns designed to demonstrate sheer grace of movement. The maebot, composed as a Thai “alphabet of dance,” is used to train pupils in the basic movements of court dance. Other dances that include character impersonation yet are not explicitly storytelling dances lie between nondramatic and dramatic dance. In the Thai praleng, two performers wearing god masks and holding peacock feathers in both hands perform an offertory dance to the god before the main dance-play begins. The Balinese legong, danced by a pair of preadolescent girls, may have only the most tenuous dramatic content. Its interest lies in the girls’ unison rapid foot movements and fluttering movements of eyes and hands. Dramatic dance is seen at its best in full dance-dramas and in the excerpts from them that are sometimes danced in concert form.

Styles and conventions of movement and costuming

General characteristics of both dramatic and nondramatic dance are (1) slowness of tempo except in battle scenes, (2) controlled and reserved movements rather than expansive ones, (3) little of the leaping typical of Western ballet but, instead, a feeling of closeness to the ground, and (4) extensive use of arm and hand gestures. From Indian dance has come an open and flexed position of the legs, a side-to-side sliding movement of the head and neck, and a rigidly codified vocabulary of hand and finger gestures known as mudras or hastas in India. In most cases the Indian elements have been altered greatly over their 1,000-year period of assimilation. In Thai, Cambodian, and Lao dance, the 24 to 32 Indian mudras have been reduced to 9; in Javanese dance 7 can be recognized, and in Bali only 1 or 2. They have also been altered in their shape, and the many specific meanings attached to each in India have become fewer, while in some cases a gesture has no specific meaning. Such hand gestures as shading the eyes and tying the sash, which appear in Javanese dances, are unknown in India. Foot movements in India typically follow the rhythm of a drum, often with vigorous stamping sounds that are emphasized by bells on the ankles, but such movements are virtually absent in Southeast Asia. The exaggerated eye, eyebrow, cheek, mouth, and chin movements through which the Indian dancer expresses a broad gamut of emotions are nowhere to be seen. Balinese dancers use darting eye movements, but the court dancer’s face is composed into an almost unchanging expression of aloof gentility. Close contact between neighbouring countries has led to the development of two regional Indian-influenced dance styles, one for Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar and one for Indonesia and Malaysia. Characteristics of the former style include the soft pi phat music of bamboo xylophones, drums, gongs, and oboe as accompaniment, bent-back finger positions not seen elsewhere in Asia, similar and often identical movements for male and female roles, courtship dances in which lovers touch each other and move in unison, and, in dance-drama, lengthy pure-dance pieces inserted solely for their beauty. In the latter style, the performance is accompanied by music of the gongs and metal bars of the gamelan orchestra. Scarves draped from the waist or neck are flicked for effect and manipulated to indicate strength or flying, and male and female dance are clearly distinguished by the powerful masculine lunges of the men and the tiny steps of the women, who also dexterously manipulate the train of the skirt with their feet. Visually, the mainland dance sparkles. Costumes of brilliant silk are covered with sequins and even jewels, and golden crowns and sparkling body ornaments glitter with reflected light. The male dancer in Indonesia wears a soft batik skirt of brown and white, the female a black velvet bodice. Arms and shoulders are bare and powdered golden brown, creating a subdued and warm effect.

The main style in Vietnam, apart from folk dance, is dramatic and highly pantomimic, like the movements of Chinese opera. In classical opera, the flowing white sleeves and the pheasant feathers bobbing from the general’s headdress are twirled and flicked by the actor in many conventionalized movements derived from Chinese forms. Battle scenes are choreographed into precise dance patterns, but the acrobatic movements common in Chinese opera are seldom seen.

Characteristics of drama

Thematic origins and materials

Most traditional plays and dramatic dances are derived from mythological and legendary sources. The tribal epics that relate the origin of the Ifugao and the Bicolano peoples in the Philippines and a number of animistic stories in Indonesian shadow theatre are indigenous myths of great age, while the widely used, romantic Pandji cycle from Java and the Thai King Abhai Mani and Khun Chang Khun Phan are more recent local legends. The most important dramatic sources, however, are borrowed from the Indian Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, from the Jataka Buddhist birth stories, from Chinese novels (such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and Chinese operas, and from a host of Islamic stories, including the Thousand and One Nights and the Amīr Ḥamzah tales. These foreign stories are turned into local legends. For example, the Indian Prince Rama becomes a Thai, a Balinese, or a Javanese prince, embodying the heroic traits admired in each of these countries.

Plays are invariably extensive and have many scenes. It is not unusual for a play to present action over several generations, an indication of the value placed on cultural continuity. A recurring theme concerns restoration of harmony on earth by a ruler acting in accord with divine law. A kingdom is restored, a prince unjustly exiled returns to assume his throne, a usurper is punished, or the prosperity of the land is assured by consummating a particularly desirable marriage. As in Western drama, the hero gains his ends through struggle. Because he acts as the human representative on earth of the known cosmic will, however, his actions exhibit a natural sweetness and serenity, even in the midst of violence, that is foreign to Western drama. Meditation is often the means whereby the hero gains the power to achieve his goal. In more recent plays based on local history and on contemporary events, the assumption of cosmic harmony has been muted, and emphasis has shifted to depicting human conflicts—nationalist versus Western colonialist, modern daughter versus conservative parents, for example—that may or may not resolve happily.


Gods, demigods, kings descended from the gods, and princes and princesses are the heroes and heroines of traditional drama and dance. Powerful religious seers advise them, allies and ministers serve them, crude foreign ogres oppose them, and grotesque, slapstick clown-servants are their attendants. The clowns have been the subject of much speculation. Like the vidushaka clown of Indian Sanskrit drama, they are gluttons, practical and even cynical, and confidants to their masters’ passions and weaknesses. Scholars have theorized that the chief Javanese clown figure, Semar, is derived from an ancient Javanese god who was deposed from his supreme position by the introduction into the drama of the later Hindu gods. In the midst of mythological plays, the clowns comment irreverently on political or social issues of the day, seemingly as spokesmen for the common man in an otherwise aristocratic world. Comic and serious scenes alternate.

Dramatic materials

A written script may be used as the starting point for performance, but usually actors, dancers, musicians, and stage crew improvise from a brief scenario. Specific musical selections are matched to certain kinds of scenes, characters, or actions, and standard movements for entrances and exits are known. Standard descriptive phrases of the kind common in all oral literature are used to introduce the hero and his kingdom, and more than a dozen types of recurring scenes are identifiable. A major interest in playgoing lies in perceiving the skill with which performers rearrange and subtly vary these familiar elements from play to play. Narrative commentary accompanying the dances often interprets a specific action in its broad context, thus helping to universalize the theatrical experience.

Costumes, makeup, and settings

Costume and makeup have great importance in plays and dances. By means of elaborate systems of changing the cut, colour, and ornamentation of costume, the shape of the hairdress, the configuration of the crown, or the facial delineation and colour of masks, at least 300 different dance and dramatic characters can be identified. Doll- and shadow-puppet figures are carved according to similarly elaborate means of identification. Persons familiar with a dance or theatrical form can identify most characters by name or by type. Costumes, masks, and puppets may be works of art highly prized in themselves. Court and folk performances once used no scenery at all. Canvas scenery depicting stock scenes is now used by most popular troupes, but unfortunately it is often as inartistic as it is inexpensive. Only the Thai National Theatre, major troupes performing the popular cai luong drama in Vietnam, and troupes performing in the Western tradition throughout Southeast Asia attempt to design three-dimensional scenery for each play.

Origins and development of the performing arts

Prehistory and links to the present

Knowledge of prehistoric performing arts is necessarily slight. That the performing arts were known and apparently widely practiced by the prehistoric peoples who had settled the mainland and the island archipelagoes is suggested by large bronze drums cast before the Common Era, numerous pre-Hindu tribal myths in remote areas of the Philippines and elsewhere, masked dances of many types still performed by isolated tribes in Kalimantan (Borneo) and in New Guinea, and descriptions of music and dance by Chinese visitors beginning as early as the 1st century ad. Simple dances were almost certainly accompanied by rhythmic percussion sounds and probably by the tuned metal bars or gongs thought to be indigenous to Southeast Asia. Some scholars suggest that tribal ancestors, animistic spirits, and animals were represented, perhaps in shadow form. Whatever their nature, these were folk performances, in part religious rites connected with seasonal festivals and in part joyful entertainment.

A number of existing dances and dramatic forms show prehistoric links. In the trott, a Cambodian deer-hunting dance, masked dancers representing hunter, demon, bull, girls, and deer enact the ritual of a deer hunt to ensure its success in real life. The Dayak of Kalimantan perform a dance to exorcise sickness. The barong dance-drama of Bali is staged by a village in which malicious spiritual forces are believed to have gained dominance over protective ones. By enacting the stand-off battle between the protective Barong lion figure and the destructive Rangda witch figure, the village ritually restores an equilibrium between the contending forces. A local nat, or animistic spirit, of which there are 37 in Myanmar, can be invoked by the dance of a professional “spirit wife,” or natkadaw, through whom the nat communicates with the living. A disputed theory holds that the shadow play began as a ritual in which the spirits of magically powerful tribal ancestors were called to earth, in their natural form as shadows or shades, for advice.

Spreading of styles

Between about ad 100 and 1000, dance and drama in Southeast Asia were profoundly affected by the introduction of dance style and the vast Hindu historical epics of India. First in Cambodia, then in turn in Thailand, Laos, and Burma, the epic Ramayana became the source of dance and shadow plays. In Java the Mahabharata dominated, whereas in Bali and Malaysia both epics were popular. Indian influence, however, can be exaggerated. There is no evidence that Sanskrit play texts or written dramatic treatises such as the Natya-Shastra became known. Strong local performing traditions made it possible to assimilate elements of Indian dance and Hindu stories, and, in subsequent development, Southeast Asian dance and theatre grew ever further away from Indian styles.

Apsaras, heavenly dancing girls, bas-relief from Angkor Wat, Angkor, Cambodia, early 12th century.Josephine Powell, RomeCopper inscriptions from Java identify clowns, actors, musicians, and possibly puppeteers in the 9th century, and epic literature of succeeding centuries contains numerous descriptions of shadow plays that were popular and emotionally gripping. By at least the 4th century, epic recitations were a part of the Brahmanic worship of ancient Cambodia. Carvings of the beautiful apsaras, or heavenly dancing girls, adorning the temples of Angkor attest to the importance of court dance in Cambodia between the 10th and 13th centuries.

Accidents of history often carried the performing arts across national boundaries. It is believed King Jayavarman II took dancers and musicians from Java when he left there in 802 to establish the Khmer dynasty in Cambodia, and shadow puppeteers may have accompanied him as well. Another theory suggests that Cambodia received the shadow play from India by way of Malaysia, through conquest by a Malay prince in 1002. Accidents of war took Khmer dance (and perhaps shadow theatre) first to Laos, when in 1353 a prince who had been raised at Angkor established an independent Lao court at Luang Prabang. Next, it reached the Thai capital at Ayutthaya in 1431, when Angkor fell to invading Thai armies. These returned to their court with the Cambodian court-dance troupe, thereby beginning the traditions of Thai court dance and dance-drama. In 1767 the Thai court was captured, in turn, by the Burmese, who brought to Burma the Thai-modified Khmer dance and created Burmese court drama. By this time, also, Javanese shadow theatre had been taken by colonists to Bali and to Malaysia, from whence it later entered southern Thailand.

When Indonesia was converted to Islam and Chinese influence became strong in the northern tier of mainland states beginning in the 13th and 14th centuries, existing court dance and dramatic forms were scarcely affected. Instead, new Islamic plays were devised in Indonesia and Malaysia for shadow presentation and for the doll-puppet theatre. Islamic influence was very strong in Malaysia, however, and even such pre-Islamic forms as the shadow play absorbed Islamic prayers, characters, and themes. Bali was never converted to Islam, and its performing arts are thought to reflect, even today, an older tradition than is seen in Java.

Chinese performing arts came to dominate Vietnam during the 1,000-year rule of northern Vietnam by the Chinese. Long after the Chinese were expelled, Vietnamese kings patterned their dances and opera on Chinese models. In time, however, local Vietnamese melodies and stories took their place alongside those of Chinese origin; and play scripts, at first filled with Chinese loan words, were rewritten in more colloquial Vietnamese.

Popular theatre and Western rule

From the 19th century onward, the incursion of Western culture brought about a variety of developments. A steady decline in the power of the royal courts precipitated the death of court drama in Burma; the shifting of support for dance and drama from the court to national bureaus of education and culture in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam; and the movement of the court dance-drama into the popular theatre tradition in Java. In every country, new popular forms of theatre were created. These were based on historical events, on Islamic and Chinese stories (but romances rather than Hindu and Buddhist myths), on national heroes fighting colonial rule, and on stories about contemporary events. It was not Western drama that sparked the burgeoning of popular theatre, though these plays were largely spoken dramas interspersed with music and dances. Rather, it was more of an indirect response to colonial rule, which caused an upsurge of nationalist feelings, and to the rapid growth of cities that created large populations without access to either folk or court theatre yet eager for some form of entertainment.

Diverse national forms and traditions

Although most of the dance and dramatic forms of Southeast Asia are related at least in the distant past, except in Vietnam and the Philippines, they acquired a very distinctive national and local character over the centuries. An examination of a few of these myriad forms will provide a more precise picture of the dense texture of the performing arts in Southeast Asia.


Court performing arts that had flourished during the Angkor period (802–1431) almost ceased in the centuries following the fall of the Khmer dynasty. Whether there was an organized court life or not is uncertain because of the scarcity of records, but in the 18th and 19th centuries performances in Thai form were produced by the Thai rulers of the western provinces of Cambodia. At Phnom Penh a classical ballet troupe was established by the royal family in the 19th century.

Court styles

The chief court forms are nang sbek shadow theatre, lakon female dance and dance-drama, and lakon kawl male masked pantomime. The puppets of nang sbek stand four to five feet in height, have no movable arms, and are manipulated from beneath by two fixed handles or sticks. The standing puppeteer either sways the puppet with his arms or he dances with it. In processional scenes, as many as 10 puppeteers parade completely around the screen, front and back. An entire tableau may be carved on one puppet, including several figures, forest scenery, or palace buildings, as if to bring to life the epic scenes carved in relief on the temples of Angkor Wat. Two narrators alternate a slow chant with dialogue. During dance sections, the large pi phat ensemble, augmented by a large drum, is played. Only plays based on the Ramayana are performed, and major puppet figures represent Rama, his consort Sita, the monkey Hanuman, and Ravana, a 10-headed demon king who kidnaps Sita. Khmer peasant figures have been inserted as rustic clowns in every nang sbek play. Performance has religious significance, the gods being invoked and honoured, and a performance may be arranged to assure rain or to halt an epidemic. It is not certain when and how nang sbek originated, but it seems probable that it was taken to Thailand in the 15th century and then brought back. This would explain the details of costume and headdress of today’s puppets that are in Thai style.

The lithe apsaras carved in Angkor’s stone show details of the lakon style of female dance, but neither these nor other records are evidence that their lively dance was used in relating the epic stories. The 19th-century Thai rulers of western Cambodia reintroduced lakon dance and dance-drama, which was indigenous to Thailand as well. At the same time, Thailand’s male masked pantomime was brought to Cambodia, as far as is known for the first time, and it became known as lakon kawl. Both male and female dance-plays were translated into Cambodian. In modern times, costumes and headdresses were redesigned in the style of the Angkor carvings. The stories, music, dance, and dramatic styles of lakon and lakon kawl are much like their Thai counterparts.

Popular forms

Lakon bassac, performed by some 20 professional troupes in Cambodia, is a highly eclectic form. Musical selections, dances for female characters, and costuming are borrowed from court lakon. The form was created by Khmers living in the Bassac River region of Vietnam. Villains wear Vietnamese costumes and move with Vietnamese opera movements, an evidence of the historical conflicts of the two peoples. Chinese, Jataka, or Khmer stories may be performed. Pi phat music alternates with Chinese and Vietnamese instruments and with the Western saxophone and piano. Prince Sihanouk, chief of state between 1941 and 1970, encouraged a few French dramatic productions, but such drama is scarcely known outside the Western-educated elite.


Folk lakon jatri, lakon nai female dance and dance-drama, khon masked pantomime, and likay popular theatre are Thailand’s chief performing arts.

Folk performance

Lakon jatri began in the south, when male dancer-sorcerers performed, in simple folk style, the Manora Buddhist birth story as a dance-play. A troupe of three players was usual. One played the beautiful half-bird, half-human princess, Manora; a second played the hero, Prince Suton; and the third, often masked, played clown, ogre, or animal as needed. Flute, bell cymbal, and drums provided the music. The full Manora cycle of plays, staged in a village in the open, could last for two weeks. Probably after the 14th century, some jatri troupes moved to the Thai capital, where they established commercial theatres and staged a new all-male drama, lakon nok nok, “outside” [the palace], that emphasized plot and an often obscene humour. Advances in dramatic form were accomplished by court writers of lakon nok between 1800 and 1909. Likay troupes succeeded and completely supplanted lakon nok troupes in the early decades of the 20th century, but such popular lakon nok plays as Sang Thong (“The Prince of the Golden Conch”) are presented today in modified form by the Thai National Theatre.

Female court dance-dramas

The lakon nai nai, “inside” [the palace], female dance-drama of the court was created in the mid-18th century from a confluence of three previously separate elements: female court dance, the lakon nok drama, and the Javanese Pandji stories as subject matter. Romantic episodes from the long Pandji tale were ideal for staging in the elegant and delicate style of female court dance, accompanied by songs and the music of a large pi phat ensemble. In the unhurried court atmosphere, dance scenes lasted an hour or more, and dance figures might be repeated many times. In time, other stories came to be staged in lakon nai and were given other names, but the Pandji plays composed by the daughters of King Boromokot (1733–58), by Rama I (1782–1809), and by Rama II (1809–24) remain favourites. In this form, lakon nai was introduced into Cambodia within the 18th and 19th centuries.

Masked mime

Ravana, the demon king, fighting the white monkey Hanuman, in khon masked pantomime, Thailand.Marie Mattson/Black StarUntil recent years, a Thai version of the Khmer nang sbek shadow play, nang yai, occupied an important place in court as a Brahmanic-related ritual performance of the Ramayana. Thai scholars describe it as the source of khon masked pantomime, citing celebrations for King Ramathibodi II in 1515 that included a nang yai performance without puppets. Wearing heavy makeup, the puppeteers themselves danced the usual Ramayana episode as narrators told the story and spoke dialogue. Later, masks took the place of makeup, the screen was eliminated, and khon was born. In present-day Cambodia, one troupe can perform both forms. A number of lakon nai elements entered khon in later years, so that today a khon performance mixes the vigorous, masculine khon with gentle lakon nai singing style and female dance. All of the Thai dance-drama traditions (lakon jatri, lakon nok, lakon nai, and khon) are taught at the Department of Fine Arts in Bangkok, and representative plays from them are staged, often mixing traditions, at the Thai National Theatre.

Popular plays and puppets

The major popular theatre form is likay, which evolved in part out of lakon nok. It is now performed by more than 100 troupes in most parts of Thailand. Actors are skilled in improvising not only the dialogue and lyrics but also the plot of a play as well, weaving romantic scenes and fragments of lakon nai dance, set to pi phat music, into a story from a well-known Jataka, history, or court play. Likay plays are set to music of the Lao khen, a reed organ, in northeast Thailand. A type of shadow play called nang talung, in which a single, seated puppeteer moves small puppets of individual figures with movable arms, is very popular in southern Thailand. The performance technique undoubtedly came from Malaysia, while the plays and the identifying features of the puppet figures, mostly from the Ramayana, are from Thai khon and lakon nai. A similar shadow play exists in Cambodia, suggesting that the form traveled from southern Thailand to Cambodia, perhaps in the 19th century.


From the time Laos became a kingdom in 1353, the performing arts at the relatively small Lao court at Luang Prabang followed those of the more illustrious courts to the south, Angkor in Cambodia and then Ayutthaya and Bangkok in Thailand. Today, Lao dancers study in Bangkok, and the style of dance, music, and drama of the Royal Lao Ballet, the only remaining court troupe in Southeast Asia, is almost identical with that of lakon nai in Thailand. It is usual to perform excerpts from the very long dance-plays, the staging of a full-length spectacle being beyond the means of the court at present. Male khon dance is known but seldom performed. A number of Lao folk dances are studied and performed by the royal ballet troupe.

Scores of popular troupes perform plays derived from Thai likay and set to the lively and melodic Lao folk song style known as mohlam. Mohlam balladeers, accompanied by the khen (a complex reed organ), have for centuries traveled the Lao-speaking countryside, which includes Laos and northeast Thailand, singing bawdy songs of physical love and weaving into their performance local gossip and bits from the epics and court plays. When likay troupes from Bangkok played in northeast Thailand, the pi phat music and court dancing were not popular, although the plays themselves were. Enterprising mohlam performers then set the likay plays to the familiar mohlam song style, thereby creating a new popular theatre form, mohlam luong, or “story mohlam.” Of the mohlam troupes, a few large ones are located in major cities in the two countries, but most are small and travel from village to village, performing for a few days or weeks in each.


In spite of an old Burmese tradition of spirit dances stemming from animism and early contact with Indian culture, formal theatre did not begin until 1767, with the introduction of Thai khon and lakon nai to Burma following the capture and sack of Ayutthaya. Burmese courtiers and dancing girls immediately learned the two forms, and the plays were translated into Burmese. Because Rama was viewed as a previous incarnation of Buddha, pious Burmese were reluctant to alter khon scripts. For a time Jataka plays, including Ramayana episodes, were forbidden to live actors. Instead, marionette troupes doing plays based on khon brought the Rama stories to the Burmese countryside. But the Pandji plays were not considered Jatakas, and even the first Burmese version, by U Sa under the title Inao, departed from its Thai model, thus setting the stage for the creation of court drama, or zat pwe, based on myth and legend but capable of being independently developed. The three zat written by U Kyin U portray the futility of political strife and urge a life of Buddhist renunciation. U Pon Nya created a freer form of dramatic verse, and his Water Seller is noted for its comparatively realistic treatment of court life.

Court drama ceased after 1866, when the British conquered Burma. Thereafter, drama was staged by professionals in public theatres, primarily in Rangoon (now Yangon). U Pok Ni in Konmara (c. 1875), U Ku in The Orangoutan Brother and Sister (1875), and others created a new type of drama, pya zat, that mixed royalty and commoners, emphasized humour, and added songs to appeal to a popular city audience. Hundreds of these works were published. Popular troupes in contemporary Myanmar perform a long bill of attractions that lasts most of the night. It comprises songs and dances, a new contemporary play, and, as a final number, a classic zat in which remnants of old court music and dance are preserved. British touring companies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought examples of contemporary European melodrama and some classics to Burma. Subsequently a number of plays were written in Burmese and in English, following Western conventions and without songs or dance. Of these, The People Win Through (1950), by former prime minister U Nu, is among the most interesting examples.



Shadow-puppet theatre


Plays are set in mythological times, some relating to indigenous animistic festivals and worship of local spirits, some directly dramatizing episodes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, while the majority—the Pandawa (Pāṇḍav in Sanskrit) cycle of about 100 plays—are essentially Javanese creations in which the five heroic Pandawa brothers are placed in different situations. Three and sometimes four god-clown-servants and a set of ogre-antagonists who are not in the epics at all suggest how far removed the shadow plays are from the epics.




Wayang topeng

Wayang topeng (masked dance), Bali.© Pascal Grellety/Bosviel, ParisMasked dance was also popular at the eastern Javanese courts (c. 1000–1400) and may be related to ancient animistic masked dance seen throughout the Pacific islands. Later, Indian dance style was assimilated, and sometime after the 15th century at the earliest, the Pandji story was dramatized. This is wayang topeng, widely performed as both a sophisticated and a folk art throughout Indonesia. Unlike the large-scale unmasked dance-drama, topeng dance focuses on interpreting character through solo dance.

Wayang orang

Java’s spectacular dance-drama, wayang orang, grew out of the strong unmasked dance tradition that is illustrated in reliefs of female dancers carved on the 9th-century Borobudur and Prambanan temples in central Java and that produced the carefully cultivated female group dances of the Surakarta and Yogyakarta courts after their establishment in the 16th century. Of the latter dances, two stand out, the almost sacred bedaja, which even today is danced only in court surroundings, and the srimpi, in which two pairs of girls execute a delicate slow-motion duel with daggers and bows. In the middle of the 18th century, wayang kulit’s Rama and Pandawa plays were set to court dance to form wayang orang, or “human” wayang. The music, narrative, and dramatic organization of the shadow play was kept largely intact, and many of the actors’ movements mimicked the stiff actions of the puppets, though new dance sections were added. Court performances stopped with World War II, but wayang orang continues to be performed by some 20 to 30 professional troupes in major cities. In popular performances, attractive actresses play the roles of such refined heroes as Ardjuna, and humour and spectacle take precedence over dance.

Ketoprak and ludruk


Sundanese performing arts


Balinese dance-drama






The Malay peninsula, in the geographical centre of Southeast Asia, has assimilated repeated intrusions of neighbouring cultures. The dances of the former princely states on the east coast show the influence of Indian nondramatic dance.

The multiform wayang



Chinese and popular entertainments





Satirical drama


The opera

The classic opera, known as hat boi, hat bo, or hat tuong, is a Vietnamese adaptation of the Chinese opera long supported by kings and provincial mandarins as a court art and performed for popular audiences as well, especially in central Vietnam. The introduction of Chinese opera is attributed to the capture of a troupe of performers attached to the Mongol army that invaded northern Vietnam in 1285. The actors’ lives were spared in return for teaching their art to the Vietnamese. In 1350 another Chinese performer was engaged by the northern court as an instructor. Almost exclusively a court art in the north, hat boi was made a form of popular entertainment in central Vietnam by the playwright Dao Duy Tu in the 16th century. It was introduced to southern Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries, but its future was jeopardized by the decades of war in the mid-20th century. The last large troupe of court musicians, dancers, and actors at Hue in southern Vietnam disbanded in 1945. The postwar government of the late 20th century did not provide hat boi with strong support, and the popular troupes lacked audiences.

In form and content, hat boi is a blend of China and Vietnam. Direct imitation of Chinese costume and acting techniques was encouraged under the reign (1847–83) of Emperor Tu Duc, and it is probable that the present form of hat boi dates from this period. At Tu Duc’s court in Hue, the playwright and scholar Dao Tan gathered 300 actors and with them wrote out texts of the standard repertory that previously had been preserved orally. He then had the texts published and distributed them to actors and troupe managers. In the 20th century there was a movement to loosen the rigid structure of hat boi and to reduce the high proportion of Chinese loanwords that makes the operas difficult for the ordinary Vietnamese to appreciate.

Following Chinese practice, the operas are classified as military or domestic. The former, which may be derived from Chinese and Vietnamese legend or history or may be purely fictional, concern struggles for power between kings. The Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms furnishes material for many military plays. The latter, dealing with the lives of commoners, contain humorous scenes alternating with scenes of suffering that are played to the accompaniment of sad southern-style songs. The Confucian ethic of obligation to one’s superior—of wife to husband, of son to father, or of subject to king—underlies plays of both types.

Hat boi staging is modeled on conventions of Chinese opera. Actors perform on a stage that is bare except for a table and two chairs. These can serve as a castle, a cave, or a bed as well as for sitting and eating. A single embroidered drop at the rear has an entrance right and an exit left. Costume and makeup indicate character type: black for boldness, red for anger or rashness, white for treachery, and gold as the colour of the gods. Conventionalized mime may be used alone or in conjunction with symbolic properties. The actor mimes stepping over an imaginary threshold or sewing without needle and thread, but he indicates riding a horse by gestures with a riding crop and travels in a carriage when a stage assistant holds flags with wheels painted on them at each side of his body. Percussion instruments accompany stage action, and songs—which may be in falsetto Chinese style, in soft southern Vietnamese style, or in a form of prose recitative—are accompanied by stringed instruments.

The popular stage

Southern-style singing is the basis of another type of theatre, cai luong, begun in the 1920s by popular singers who performed plays in which they sang the love lament “Vong Co.” Today, regardless of whether a historical or contemporary play is being performed as cai luong or which of many troupes is staging it, this melody will be heard throughout the play many times, underlying different lyrics. Cai luong stars are lionized, and the best troupes maintain high artistic standards. Among popular theatre forms in Southeast Asia, only cai luong plays are fully scripted and directed as they would be in the Western theatre. In contrast to the operetta form of cai luong, modern spoken drama is known as kich. It is a young dramatic form performed mostly by amateurs who are trying to put Western dramatic conventions into practice.

The Philippines

Whatever indigenous theatrical forms may have existed in the Philippines, other than tribal epic recitations, were obliterated by the Spanish to facilitate the spread of Christianity.

The comedia

Comedia, or moro-moro, a folk drama based on the battles between Christians and the Muslim Moro, the Philippines.Courtesy of Philippine EmbassyThe earliest known form of organized theatre is the comedia, or moro-moro, created by Spanish priests. In 1637 a play was written to dramatize the recent capture by a Christian Filipino army of an Islamic stronghold. It was so popular that other plays were written and staged as folk dramas in Christianized villages throughout the Philippines. All told similar stories of Christian armies defeating the hated Moors. With the decline of Spanish influence, the comedia, too, declined in popularity. Some professional troupes performed comedia in Manila and provincial capitals prior to World War II. Today it can still be seen at a number of church festivals in villages, where it remains a major social and religious event of the year. Much in the manner of the medieval European mystery-play performances, hundreds of local people donate time and money over several months to mount an impressive performance.

Styles from Europe

Dances and dramas from Spain were brought in, some of which took root. The María Clara, a stately minuet, and the Rigodón de Honor, a quadrille, were adopted by local European society for its formal balls. Spain’s sprightly operetta, the zarzuela, became the favourite light entertainment in Manila and other cities. Professional zarzuela troupes continued to flourish in the early decades of the 20th century but had disappeared by World War II. New plays with original music were produced in profusion. A number of them based on topical themes and criticizing American colonial policies were banned.

Western drama is studied and widely performed in both English and Tagalog. There are no professional companies, but amateur university and community groups abound. Western classics and recent popular successes are staged, and in recent years many original plays have been written to celebrate the Filipino heritage.

Visual arts

General considerations

Religious-aesthetic traditions

The visual arts in Southeast Asia have followed two major traditions.

Indigenous magical and animist tradition

The first is a complex inheritance of magical and animist art shared by the different tribal peoples of the mainland, where it evolved from Paleolithic origins, and of the islands. Such art gave the peoples who made it a sense of their identity in relation to the forces of their natural environment, to the structure of their society, and to time. It consists of types of potent emblem, masks, and ancestral figures broadly similar to those that hunters and early farmers the world over have used in connection with seasonal ceremonies, life and death rituals, and ecstatic shamanism (belief in an unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits responsive only to the shamans, or priests). The spiritual powers that the arts name and invoke are local and vary from group to group of the population. The rich formal artistic languages have been subject to successive episodes of influence from inland Asia, but each group has developed its own artistic language on the basis of a common fund of Southeast Asian thought forms.

Indian tradition




Relations between the two traditions


Artistic styles

The royal temple is the basis for the classic Indianizing styles of Southeast Asia. Each Hindu temple is centred on a shrine, symbolizing heaven upon earth, which is crowned by a roof tower representing the cosmic Indian mountain, Meru, conceived as the hub of creation. Since all the peoples of Southeast Asia already believed the natural habitat of spirits and gods to be a mountaintop, the Indian pattern was readily accepted. The temple usually stands upon a lofty terraced plinth (a block serving as a base), which itself also symbolized a mountain. Towered shrines could be multiplied on the terraces, though one of them remained the principal focus. Within the cell of this main shrine was a sacred image carved in stone or cast in bronze. The local Hindu ruler identified the subject of this image as his transcendent patron, or celestial alter ego. This was normally one of the Indian high gods, Shiva (represented perhaps by a phallic emblem, the linga) or Vishnu. In Mahayana Buddhist kingdoms a royal bodhisattva (a being that refrains from entering Nirvana in order to save others) was sometimes adopted to fulfill the same role, a favourite form being known as Lokanatha, or Lokeshvara, Lord of the World. Subsidiary shrines, niches, or terraces sometimes contained subsidiary images, including goddesses representing at the same time wives of the god and queens of the king. These images were worked in smooth, deeply rounded, and sensuously emphatic styles derived from Indian art but with varying inflections characteristic of each region and time. The whole exterior of the shrine was usually adorned with rhythmic moldings, foliage, and scrollwork, with figures representing the inhabitants of the heavens. Ideally, the building was constructed and carved in stone; but, particularly where good stone was not readily available (for example, in Burmese Pagan), it could also be brick, coated and sculptured with stucco after northeast Indian patterns. Temple complexes tended to grow as successive kings strove to outdo their predecessors with the magnificence of their buildings. Hindu rulers, influenced perhaps by vestiges of tribal custom, would sometimes retain their own family’s temples and images while destroying those of earlier dynasties.

Buddhism, however, is a religion based on a doctrine of transcendent merit and sustained by an order of monks who have, ultimately, no vested interest in kings and gods. They may, however, take a great interest in the world of spirits and the operations of astrology, just as the local population does, even though they regard such matters as subordinate to the ultimate Buddhist aim of universal Nirvana. Buddhist monasteries, therefore, tended to expand around stupas (domed monuments emblematic of the Buddhist truth, also called pagodas or dagabas) of ever-increasing size and number; the preaching halls, libraries, and living quarters for monks were continually enlarged and repeatedly rebuilt, often as a testimony to the piety of royal patrons. Although, strictly speaking, Theravada Buddhism has no place for a “divine ruler” whose identity an actual king may adopt, provision was made in legend and in court and monastic ritual for the ruler of a Theravada Buddhist country to assume a magical role as the dominant sponsor and patron of the Buddhist truth. His legendary prototype was usually not identified, therefore, with an icon of the enlightened Buddha but with images such as the chief disciple at the knee of the enlightened Buddha, as Prince Siddhartha (the Buddha-to-be), or figuring in scenes of the Buddha’s life that lined the monastery halls and corridors.

Both Hindu and Buddhist art were produced according to prescriptive formulas. If the formulas were not followed, the art was believed not to fulfill its transcendent function. In practice, however, there has been room for styles and types of image to change and develop fairly quickly. Hindu and non-Theravada art recognized what could be called aesthetic values as a component in religious expression. Theravada Buddhism, however, which might be called fundamentalist, has always attempted to preserve the closest possible connections with the Buddha’s recorded original deeds and sayings; its art, therefore, has concentrated on repeating in its main Buddha figures the most exact possible imitations of authentic ancient images. This had led to a relative monotony of style in Theravada icons (see below Burma; Thailand and Laos). In the subsidiary sculptured and painted figures, however, which illustrate scenes from sacred history, Theravada art has had greater freedom of invention. In the 20th century, Theravada Buddhism was the only form of Indian religion to survive in Southeast Asia, save for the modified Hinduism of Bali. Its architecture in recent centuries has been decorated with a vigorous, sometimes coarse fantasy and made gaudy with gilt paint and coloured glass.

General development of Southeast Asian art

Most of the works made under the inspiration of the ancient, magical, and animist tradition are in perishable materials such as wood. Because the climate is so hostile, the works that survive are relatively recent; and any that is even 100 years old generally owes its preservation to Western interest. There are, however, a large number of Neolithic stone implements and prehistoric stone monuments (megaliths), as well as bronzes, which provide a solid archaeological basis for interpretation of early Southeast Asian art.

For the art of the classic Indianizing civilizations, French archaeology played the major role in clearing, excavating, and reconstructing major sites in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam; Dutch archaeology in Indonesia; British in Burma. Old bronzes have been found in fair quantities; apart from those of the early Dong Son culture (see below Bronze Age: Dong Son culture), all belong to one or other of the Indianizing traditions. Many old brick and stucco buildings survive, notably the medieval work at Pagan and in central Thailand, though an enormous number are known to have perished. Little very old painting is known, save a few Indianizing medieval rock and wall paintings on plaster. In spite of the fact that Buddhist monasteries are able to act as agents for preserving their own artworks, most of the surviving Buddhist pictorial art on wooden panels or other fragile material is less than 300 years old.

The stone of dynastic buildings, of course, has survived far the best. Scholars thus know much more about Indianizing stone architecture, with its sculpture, than about any other Southeast Asian visual art. But, where good relief sculpture flourished, one can legitimately assume that vanished pictorial arts also flourished; and from details carved in stone and incised on bronze, as well as from the scattered enthusiastic references in Chinese sources, one can be sure that throughout their history the Southeast Asian peoples have been intensely creative and have lived their lives surrounded by a wealth of imaginative art in many different mediums.

There are many sites yet to be discovered and excavated. Knowledge of the history of art in many parts of Southeast Asia, especially of important episodes in Burma, Thailand, and Sumatra, was still scantily documented at the turn of the 21st century.

Neolithic Period

The earliest works in Southeast Asia that can be called art are the rectangular polished ax heads of a familiar late Neolithic type that have been found at many sites in Malaya, Indochina, and Indonesia. Some of the later Neolithic (c. 2000 bc to early centuries ad) implements are extremely beautiful and polished with the greatest care. They include practical adzes and axes; but some, made of semiprecious stone, were clearly intended for purely ritual purposes. Even in the 21st century a few such blades were preserved and revered as sacred objects in certain Indonesian farming communities and similar objects have continued to be made in some very remote regions. These tools, with their fine edges, suggest that their owners were capable of very high quality woodworking and might well have decorated their wooden houses with designs of which nothing is known.

During the Neolithic Period, metal—both bronze and iron—came into use for implements but did not greatly alter the material culture. In many regions, notably Cambodia, Borneo, and Sumatra, numerous works of megalithic, or stone, art survive, including menhirs (single upright monoliths), dolmens (two or more upright monoliths supporting a horizontal slab), cist graves (Neolithic graves lined with stone slabs), and terraced burial mounds, all dating from the late Neolithic epoch. Some remarkable large stones are worked in relief with symbols and with images of animals and men, notably in the Pasemah region of Sumatra. Shaped stone sarcophagi and skull troughs (containers to hold the skulls of ancestors and of enemies at village shrines) are also known. These megalithic art objects suggest a highly developed cult of a spirit world connected with the remains of the dead (see below Cambodia and Vietnam; Indonesia).

Bronze Age: Dong Son culture (c. 4th–1st centuries bc)

By about 300 bc a civilization with elaborate arts based on bronzeworking existed, extending probably from the Tonkin region into Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. This is called for convenience, after a major site, the Dong Son culture, though it may not have been a true cultural unity. A variety of bronze ritual works, many decorated with human and animal figures and with masks, were cast by the lost-wax method (metal casting using a wax model). The chief objects were ceremonial drums, large and small; the largest was found in Bali and is called “the Moon of Bali” (see below Indonesia). Extremely elaborate bronze ceremonial axes were made—probably as emblems of power. Certain relief patterns on the bronzes suggest that “ship of the dead” designs, like those still woven in textiles in both Borneo and Sumatra, may well have been woven even then. The spiral is a frequent Dong Son decorative motif; later Dong Son art was probably responsible for transmitting—especially into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Borneo—versions of the contemporary Chinese Zhou dynasty’s asymmetrical squared-hook patterns.

1st to 10th century

During the 1st century ad, Indian influence began to spread through Southeast Asia in the wake of trade, both overland, through Burma and Thailand, and by sea traders settled at especially favourable spots along the inland roads and along the sea routes around the coasts and into the islands. Buddhism, which was particularly popular among the Indian merchant classes, took root at a large number of trading cities, where monasteries were set up under the patronage of local kings. Many fragmentary Buddha images based upon Indian types of around ad 300–400 have been found in Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, produced in the kingdoms of the Mon people, the chief of which, in Thailand, was called Dvaravati. By the 5th century the first Hindu kingdoms had been established in western Java and Borneo. These kingdoms produced dynastic cult images, fragments of which have been found.

Perhaps the most splendid of the earlier Indianizing kingdoms, lasting until the 9th century ad, was that of the Pyu people in the upper Irrawaddy River Valley. The Pyu were the people most directly in touch with eastern India by land routes. Only one of their enormous cities has been explored archaeologically (see below Burma). The remains of Buddhist buildings, east Indian Buddhist images, and Hindu sculptures of Vishnu have been found there.

In the 1st century ad the predominantly Hindu kingdom known as Funan (the name given it by Chinese historians) was established in Cambodia. It seems to have controlled an empire that included kingdoms in Malaya and even parts of southern Burma. Its population was probably Mon and shared the culture of the Mon in the lower Irrawaddy Basin. (The Funan kingdom really represents the earliest phase of what became, in the 9th century, the great Cambodian Khmer empire.) Between about 550 and 680 the kingdom retreated from the coast up the Mekong River into Laos, where it was called by the Chinese Chenla. This joint Funan-Chenla tradition produced some of the world’s most magnificent stone cult images. Though Buddhist icons are known, these images principally represent Hindu deities including Vishnu, his incarnation Krishna, Shiva, and a combined Shiva-Vishnu figure called Harihara. The images were housed in wooden or brick shrines, now vanished.

During the Chenla retreat the Theravada Buddhist kingdom of Dvaravati flourished in southern Thailand, on the lower reaches of the Mae Nam Chao Phraya; the kingdom lasted until the 11th century, when it was captured by the Khmer. What little of its art is known is close to that of eastern India and provided the basis for later Buddhist art in the Khmer empire, as well as for some of the later forms of Thai art.

Seated Buddha, andesite, c. 8th–9th century, Javanese, Shrivijaya and Shailendra period; in the Honolulu Academy of Arts.Photograph by Christopher Hu. Honolulu Academy of Arts, purchase 1991 (6186.1)Almost contemporary with Chenla was the rise of the central Javanese kingdom. Soon after ad 600 the earliest surviving Hindu temples were built. In about 770 the Shailendra dynasty began its long series of superb stonecut monuments both Hindu and Buddhist, which culminate in two enormous symbolic architectural complexes: the Mahayana Buddhist Borobudur (c. 800) and the Hindu Lara Jonggrang, at Prambanam (c. 900–930). These monuments were decorated in an individual and exceptionally accomplished style of full-round and relief sculpture. Many small bronze religious images have survived. The art of the Shailendra dynasty testifies to the imperial and maritime power of the central Javanese kingdom, which seems to have influenced politics and art in Khmer Cambodia. It also took over the possessions of a major Theravada Buddhist kingdom called Shrivijaya, which had flourished in Malaya and Sumatra and was centred at Palembang. The Javanese Shailendra ruled most of Malaya and Sumatra and installed themselves there in the mid-9th century, when their home terrain in Java was taken over by the Mataram dynasty, heralding the eastern Javanese period, which began in 927. Shrivijaya, under Shailendra rule, declined in the mid-11th century, and most of its remains still await discovery.

In Vietnam around the 2nd century ad the predominantly Hindu kingdom of Champa was founded. Its capital was at My Son, where many temples have been found. This kingdom suffered much from attacks by the Chinese, and, after it began to lose the north to the Sinicized Vietnamese in 1069, the Cham capital moved in 1069 to Vijaya (Binh Dinh), in the south. There it was involved in continual warfare with the Khmer, who finally annexed southern Vietnam in 1203. The art of the northern Vietnamese as a whole has always been so strongly under the influence of China that it can best be characterized as a provincial Chinese style.

10th century to the present

In Cambodia the Khmer empire succeeded to the old territories of Funan-Chenla. About 790 the first major Khmer ruler, Jayavarman II, who was related to the old Funan royal family, went to Cambodia from the Shailendra court in Java. In 802 he set up a religious capital on a hill at Phnom Kulen; he seems to have called in artists from Champa and Java, thus giving to Khmer art a distinct new impetus. At another site, Sambhupura (Sambor), he built temples with sculpture based upon the old Funan-Chenla tradition. At Amarendrapura, about 800, he built a brick pyramid—an artificial mountain—to support a quincunx of temples.

Ruined temples at Angkor Thom, Angkor, Cambodia.Emil Muench/Photo ResearchersIt was Indravarman I (877–889) who laid the foundations of the fabulous temple complex known as Angkor. His plan was based on a rectangular grid of reservoirs, canals, and irrigation channels to control the waters of the river system. Later kings elaborated this original design to a colossal scale. Indravarman built the first great works of Khmer architecture: the Preah Ko, at Roluos, and at Angkor his temple mountain, the Bakong, ornamented with sculpture. Successive kings built their own temple mountains there, including the Bakheng (c. 893), Pre Rup (c. 961), the Ta Keo (c. 1000), and the Baphuon (c. 1050–66) and culminating in Angkor Wat, built in the first half of the 12th century by Suryavarman II. After a disastrous invasion by the Cham, Jayavarman VII undertook the most ambitious scheme of all, the Mahayana Buddhist Angkor Thom and Bayon (c. 1200). Thereafter, for a variety of reasons, including conquest by the Thai, no more large-scale work was done by Angkor and the country became Theravada Buddhist. The modern dynasty has adapted remnants of traditional splendour, and the craftsmen of Cambodia have remained capable of work in the same vein as but often superior to the Thai.

Hindu Javanese art continued to be made under the eastern Javanese dynasties (1222–14th century), although their structures are not nearly as ambitious as the central Javanese works. There are many temple enclosures and volcanic bathing places with modest stonecut architecture. Some of the stone sculptures from these sites, however, are now world famous. In the 21st century the east Javanese tradition still survives, modified by folk elements, in Bali, to which the east Javanese Hindu kings retreated in the 16th century to maintain their religious independence in the face of Muslim expansion. Muslim monuments in the form of mosques and tombs are found in various parts of Indonesia. They adapt older forms of Indonesian art.

In 1056 the great Burmese king Anawrahta decreed Theravada Buddhism to be the religion of his country, replacing earlier cults. He removed the Mon monks and artists from the capital of the old Mon kingdom in southern Burma, transporting them to his own northern capital, Pagan. There they built a city, with many large brick and stucco temples (pagodas) based on Indian patterns, that remains one of the most impressive sites in Asia. The Mongol invasion of 1287 put a stop to work there.

The Mon kingdom, Dvaravati, of southern Thailand, was annexed to the Khmer empire in the 11th century and Khmer imperial shrines were built there. After the decline of the Khmer and the Mongol invasion of 1287, a powerful alliance of racially Thai kings established the first major Thai empire, retaining Theravada Buddhism as the state religion. Thailand was divided into two principal regions, northern and southern, with capitals, respectively, at Chiang Mai and Ayutthaya, possession of the trade city of Sukhothai being an issue between them. In all the Thai cities, brick and stucco temples were built on variants of Indian and Burmese patterns. Many fine bronze Buddha figures, large and small, were cast in canonical Theravada Buddhist styles. Most of these figures were accommodated in monastery halls built in impermanent materials.

In both Burma and Thailand a very large number of monasteries, usually surrounding one or two principal pagodas, were constructed during the later Middle Ages and into modern times. The major cities of Rangoon (now Yangon), Mandalay, and Bangkok contain the most elaborate examples, although there are many elsewhere. Because the pagodas were repeatedly enlarged and redecorated and the wooden monastic buildings and their many smaller stupas continuously reconstructed and renovated, no absolute chronology has been established for the arts of this epoch.

In Laos and Vietnam Theravada monasteries, with brick stupas, were similarly built and rebuilt of wood. An outstanding stupa is the That Luang at Vientiane, in Laos, founded in 1566 but much restored in the 18th–19th centuries. In Vietnam local variants of Chinese styles were adapted during the Middle Ages to the planning and decoration of palaces and of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist temples.

The ancient styles that prevailed in the Philippines were modified by the conversion of various groups—the Moro people, especially—to Islam in the 15th–16th centuries. When, in 1571, the Spanish took control, Manila became the capital of a Spanish colony, and Roman Catholic Spanish art was adopted via Mexico. A local school of church architecture and figure sculpture flourished until the 20th century, when Manila became the centre of a modern commercial society, with its attendant architecture and art.


One date is crucial in the art history of Burma: ad 1056. In that year King Anawrahta of Pagan decreed Theravada Buddhism to be the state religion of all Burma. This signalled the unity of what had been a divided country, consummating tendencies apparent in earlier Burmese history.

6th to 11th century

The only major Burmese art known to scholars is based upon Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhist art. In the period preceding Anawrahta’s decree there had been three major historical eras in what is now Myanmar, the first two of which produced Indianized art known to scholars only fragmentarily: the rule of the racially Mon kingdom of the lower Irrawaddy (9th–11th centuries), the contemporaneous dominion of the Pyu people in central and Upper Burma, and the subsequent decisive incursion of racially Burmese people from the northeast (11th century).

The earliest concrete evidence of Indian culture in Burma is a Buddhist inscription from Pyè (Prome) dated c. ad 500. This and later inscriptions from the same area were cut probably in the western Mon kingdom, which followed Theravada Buddhism and was confederated with the Theravada Buddhist eastern Mon kingdom of Dvaravati (see below Thailand and Laos) in southern Thailand and part of Cambodia (ad 6th–12th centuries).

During this same period, in Upper Burma, the people called Pyu, speaking a Tibeto-Burman language and perhaps originating in Central Asia, built cities whose magnificence was known to contemporary compilers of the Chinese Tang dynasty history. In the 8th century one city was recorded as being some 50-odd miles (80 km) in circumference, containing 100 Buddhist monasteries lavishly painted and decorated with gold and silver. The Pyu were in direct contact with northeast India, where various forms of Mahayana Buddhism, which embraced philosophies and rituals unacceptable to the Theravada, flourished; their Ari priesthood was later proscribed by Anawrahta. Their capital city, Śrī Kṣetra (modern Hmawza, near Pyè), which was once larger than even Pagan or Mandalay, has been partly excavated. Three huge Buddhist stupas—one 150 feet high—survive there. They illustrate the pattern from which all later Burmese stupas were developed. Enshrining revered relics of Buddhist saints, they consist of tall, solid brick cylinders mounted on shallow, circular, stepped plinths and crowned by what was probably a tapering bell-like pinnacle. Other excavated halls, one on a square plinth with four entrance doors, follow Indian examples. A few Hindu fragments survive as well.

The Pyu were conquered by a neighbouring kingdom, probably before ad 900. During the following century their terrain and cities were infiltrated by the racially Burmese people. These people were of common tribal stock with the Thai and northern Vietnamese and were probably on the move under pressure of the Chinese colonization of their home terrain around the Gulf of Tonkin. They were converted to Buddhism by the Pyu and later by the western Mon; but they never completely abandoned their own original cult of nature spirits, known today as the nats. The nats are a mixed collection of spirits that act supernaturally, each according to its character. The nats were worshipped with orgiastic ceremonies and trance rites of spiritual possession. Certain mountaintops were sacred to them. Even in the 21st century the nats exerted a powerful influence on the lives of the ordinary people; every village had its own nat house—a fragile pavilion built into a tree, after the pattern of the tribal house, and adorned with shreds of coloured cloth, glass, and other offerings. The Buddhist temple in Burma is conceived essentially as an enormous nat house, a section of the domain of the spiritual located upon earth. And, since the Buddha was adopted as the last and greatest of the nats, the same symbols of supernatural splendour that adorn the nats adorn the Buddha’s images, and a nat-like spirituality attaches to the ubiquitous monks in whom the presence of Buddhism is experienced as an everyday reality.

11th century to the present

When King Anawrahta came to the throne, he captured the Mon city Thaton in Lower Burma and carried off its royal family, many skilled craftsmen, and most of the Theravada monks to his own northern city of Pagan. The king recognized the superior culture of the Mon captives; he established their main form of Buddhism by decree and gave them the task of organizing and civilizing the new united Burmese kingdom and producing for it a Buddhist art. Under Anawrahta’s successor, links with the Buddhist homeland were forged. Embassies were sent to Bodh Gaya, in Indian Bihar, and the Mahabodhi temple there—marking the spot where the Buddha achieved enlightenment—was restored with Burmese money and somewhat in Burmese taste. A smaller copy, with its large rectangular block crowned by the characteristic pyramidal, storied tower, was built at Anawrahta’s Pagan. It is there that the greatest achievements of western Mon art—a splendid profusion of architecture and decorative work—are probably to be found. After 1287, when Burma was sacked and garrisoned by the Mongols, new construction at Pagan was virtually abandoned.

In Pagan (founded c. 849), architecture is the dominant art; except for the big brick icons, mostly ruined, sculpture and painting play a subordinate role. Pagan contains the largest surviving group of buildings in brick and plaster of the many thousands that once stood in various parts of South Asia. The remains at the site, all religious buildings of one kind or another that must once have been surrounded by dense building in perishable materials, are in varying states of preservation. The inscriptions they bear indicate that royal devotees often turned their palaces over to religious use; so it is likely that palace and monastic architecture were very close in style. A few structures still stand that belong to the period before Anawrahta, some of them inspired by Mahayana Buddhism and one—the Nat Hlaung Gyaung (c. 931)—by Hinduism. Flanking the Sarabha Gate is a pair of small nat shrines with pointed, open windows—the earliest in Burma, perhaps 9th century.

The library at Pagan, now in Myanmar, c. 1058.Louis Frederic—Rapho/Photo ResearchersThe library, built about 1058 to house the books of one of the Buddhist monasteries, is one of the most important buildings in Pagan. It is rectangular, with a series of five stepped-in, sloping stone roofs crowned by a rectangular tower finial. The concave contours of the roofs are characteristic of much Burmese architecture. The eaves and corners of all the tiers are adorned with the typical Pagan flame ornament, or antefix.

Shwesandaw cetiya (a building that combines the attributes of both stupa and shrine), Pagan, now in Myanmar, 11th century.Louis Frederic—Rapho/Photo ResearchersThere are other buildings of the same general type among the ruins of Pagan. Far the most numerous and important, however, are the buildings—called cetiyas—that combine the attributes of stupa and shrine. These have a history and a line of evolution of their own, which can be traced from the Pyu stupa to the huge structural temple. The typical stupa, derived from the early medieval Indian form, is a tall structure consisting of a solid dome set on a tiered square plinth (often with miniature stupas at the corners) around which the faithful may perambulate. The dome is surmounted by a harmika, which resembles the small railed enclosure found on the oldest Indian stupas. In Burmese stupas, however, the harmika becomes a decorated cubical die, above which is a circular pointed spire; in memory of its distant origin in India, the spire is horizontally flanged (rimmed) with moldings in a series of honorific umbrellas of decreasing size. In later practice harmika and umbrella spire become a single architectural unit. The Burmese stupa dome, based on the tall, cylindrical Pyu prototype, has a spreading concave foot resembling a bell rim. The Lokananda and Shwesandaw at Pagan are two well-known examples. Because in recent times they have been coated with plaster, the finely detailed brick carving characteristic of early Pagan architecture has been obscured. Such carving is beautifully exemplified in the Seinnyet temple at Myinpagan (11th century).

Ananda temple, Pagan, Myanmar, dedicated 1090.Louis Frederic—Rapho/Photo ReseachersAnawrahta’s type of cetiya followed the general form of the early Pyu stupa. The main point of evolution was in the progressive elaboration of the terraced plinths on which the dome stands. The plinths became virtually sacred mountains, with a series of staircases running from terrace to terrace up each of the four sides. Perhaps inspired by vanished work in contemporary late-11th-century India, the Burmese began to open up the interior of the terraced base of the stupas with wide corridors and porticos, converting it into a roofed temple. The cylinder of the stupa dome was carried down through this temple space to its floor. Four large Buddha icons were added to the lower part of the dome, facing the four directions. Once this conception had evolved, it was possible to create around the central stupa a broad circuit of roofed enclosures, which from the outside would still suggest the traditional pattern of the stupa standing on its raised terraces, while the interior could be used for ceremonial, as in a true temple. Sculpture and painting, decorating the internal halls, corridors, and doorways, recounted the life of the Buddha and presented the example of his previous virtuous incarnations. The most famous example of this type of cetiya is the great Ananda temple at Pagan (dedicated 1090). It is still in use, unlike most of the old temples there, and so is kept in repair; it is painted a blazing white with lime stucco—which has, of course, obscured the finer detail of its old architecture. Its plan is square, with a broad, four-pillared porch hall added to all of the four doors in the four faces of the square. Its tower is a curvilinear pyramid resembling eastern Indian Hindu temple towers, and its enormous brick mass is pierced with two circuits of vaulted corridors. The sloping, curved terrace roofs have an elegant overall concave profile and flame antefixes along all the eaves.

Ananda Temple (left) and Thatpyinnyu Temple (centre), Pagan, Myan.Tim Hall/Getty ImagesAs time went on, Burmese brick and stucco architecture developed principally through the stiffening of masses into rectangular blocks and through the elaboration and often the coarsening of its ornament. The 13th-century Gawdawpalin temple at Pagan, for example, consists of a rectangular hall with a large closed entrance porch; the hall is surmounted by a tall but narrow second story whose decoration repeats that of the lower story; the whole building is crowned by a four-faced tower with a curved profile. Multiple moldings and decorative motifs are used as outlining elements and the doors are framed in elaborate upward-flaring hooded porches.

Until the Mongol conquest in 1287 much excellent work seems to have been done at Pagan. It is, however, impossible to form an adequate idea of the older styles of temple architecture at other sites in Myanmar, such as Yangon or Mandalay. Whereas most of the temples of Pagan were abandoned early on, so that even though they may be ruined they show their original characteristics, temples in modern cities have been repeatedly and drastically restored. Old stupas may have as many as eight successive casings of brick and stucco; temple walls and doors are constantly torn down and rebuilt; and stucco surfaces may be renewed almost annually. Such attentions to a religious building are popularly regarded as acts of merit; thus, revered architectural monuments suffer continually from well-intentioned but disastrous renovation. At the big stupa sites huge numbers of pagodas are constantly falling into decay and new ones are being built at great speed. Among them are variants, whose evolution cannot at present be traced, on the basic pattern of the long tapering bell, with a variety of transverse moldings, standing perhaps on a recessed plinth. Many are covered quickly with extravagant and gross stucco ornament. Ornate flaring porches and flame finials are added to gates, wall ends, and eaves corners. A tapering slenderness is the outstanding characteristic of all the different types.

Shwe Dagon (Golden Pagoda), Yangon, Myanmar, c. 15th century.R. Manley/Shostal AssociatesThe monastic architecture—patterned on the hall, with its elaborate doors—that surrounds the great stupa sites of Yangon and Mandalay is mainly in wood, built by simple pillar and architrave construction. The roofs are steeply gabled, with multiple gables riding over each other on immense carved pillars in the larger halls. The angles between pillar and architrave and the edges of roof gables, tiers, and terraces are filled with flamboyant cartouches (scroll-shaped ornaments) of pierced work, often lacquered and gilt; thus, the whole building may be smothered in repetitive ornamental curlicues. All this ornament has an otherworldly or spiritual significance. Other stupa sites in Myanmar, where less money has been spent and less ornament added to the buildings, may be more beautiful to the modern eye, with only a few flamboyant antefixes pointing the gables and punctuating the eaves. Throughout Myanmar similar buildings can be found; but, while many have been listed, they have been scantily surveyed, and no real study of their complex history has yet been attempted. There may well be a substantial Chinese influence in the construction of some of the wooden halls and pavilions.

Terra-cotta relief at the Petleik-Matangjakata temple, Pagan, now in Myanmar, late 11th century.J.A. Lavaud, ParisPaintings and sculpture in Theravada Burma do not seem to have reached the same heights of achievement as in other countries of Southeast Asia. They do not show the same originality and sense of life. The temples of Pagan contain the best examples, although even these are highly schematic, reminiscent in design of eastern Indian Buddhist manuscript styles. A number of early buildings at Pagan contain fragmentary terra-cotta (fired clay) reliefs or scraps of wall painting whose individual figures display some of the sensuous charm of their Indian prototypes (it is quite likely that Indian artists worked there). The 12th-century terra-cotta panels from the elaborate facings of the Ananda temple, however, show the beginnings of the petrifaction that overtook later Burmese figurative art. Both in reliefs and in wall paintings, the figure compositions are reduced to schematic groups of the minimum number of standard human and celestial types needed to tell a moral story, without any infrastructure of significant form and execution. The colossal Buddha images enshrined in the temples were usually built of brick and finished in stucco, gilded and ornamented. Such work is still done at high speed today. The technique is not a flexible one, and the emphasis of Theravada Buddhism on the exact imitation of ancient Buddha images gave the Burmese no aesthetic incentive to develop the expression of their figures or compositions. The repeated heavy gilding and repainting of older icons has almost entirely destroyed any formal vitality they may once have had.

From about 1700 to 1850 Burma excelled in the decorative arts, whose forms continually recall those of Theravada Sri Lanka. Burmese woven silks and embroideries are well-known. The carved wooden screens, panels, and brackets used inside temple halls, many devoted to representing the nats and the population of the spirit world, have benefitted from being outside the strict canon of Theravada Buddhist orthodoxy. The figure types follow fluid, slightly “boneless” conventions derived from classical Indianizing dance postures. The decorative goldwares and silverwares, which use much stereotyped decorative scrollwork, are also based on standard Indianizing iconography. Perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying works of the Burmese sculptors are the reliefs ornamenting the sutra chests that were used in monasteries to store the sacred texts of Buddhism. The gilt gesso (paste used for making reliefs) facings of these chests carry the schematic style of relief sculpture beyond its normal aesthetic limits. This is accomplished by the way they are compelled to set off their figures as an intelligible scheme of thin raised lines and inlay against a plain ground. The forms of the fine lacquer bowls and boxes used in monasteries, decorated only superficially with painted ornament, show the underlying formal sense of the Burmese at its clearest.

Interesting regional types of Burmese art are those of the Shan and Karen peoples, who live in the relatively remote northern hills. These areas have often produced extremely beautiful types of domestic and religious architecture, made of wood, on stone bases. They are a simpler and more austere version of the ancient pattern that underlies the halls and pavilions of the more sophisticated recent southern temple buildings, with their steep, gabled roofs. The peoples of the north also produce a variety of decorative arts. Notable among them are the textiles, which are characterized by banding, checkering, and triangular counterchanging of brilliant colours set off against black. The woven shoulder bags, particularly, are well-known in the West.

Thailand and Laos

Dvaravati Mon kingdom: 6th to 11th century

Archaeology has recovered in central Thailand substantial glimpses of the magnificent early layer of Indianized culture, which includes a religious art that was produced between the 6th and 11th centuries by the eastern Mon kingdom of Dvaravati. The art was created predominantly to serve Theravada Buddhism. Remains of Dvaravati architecture so far excavated include stupa bases: notable examples include the Wat Phra Meru in Nagara Pathama (Nakhon Pathom) and others at Ku Bua and U Thong, some of which have elephants supporting their bases, following a pattern that originated in Sri Lanka. The plinths of Buddhist assembly halls, which existed near the solid monumental structures, have also been discovered. Many terra-cotta and stucco fragments of decorative surface designs and celestial figures have also been found. The Wat Pra Meru, on a plan similar to that of the Ananda temple at Pagan in Burma (see above Burma), probably antedates the latter’s foundation (c. 1090). It is likely that many other ancient monuments are encased in later stupas that are still being used for religious purposes, for it was probably customary not to destroy an old sacred monument but to encase it in a new shell, maybe several times over, and perhaps to construct a small external replica of the encased original alongside.

At many sites, especially Lop Buri, Ayutthaya, and U Thong, fine Dvaravati sculptures have been found among the architectural remains. Particularly important are the seated and standing Buddha figures in stone and bronze. Many of the faces have characteristic Mon features, with lips turned outward (everted) and downward-curved eyelids marked by double channels. Some of these Dvaravati images may well have furnished models for later Khmer art in Cambodia.

Dvaravati sculpture shows close relations with several Indian styles, notably those of Amaravati, Gupta, post-Gupta, and Pala Bihar. It also was probably influenced strongly by the art of the enigmatic kingdom of Shrivijaya in Sumatra, as well as by central Javanese types (see below Indonesia). One outstanding masterpiece from Chaiya, of Dvaravati date, may well be a work produced in Shrivijaya. It is a bronze torso and head of a bodhisattva, for which a mid-8th-century date is suggested. The body and face are modeled with a plastic and delicate sensuousness; and the elaborate necklaces, crowns, earrings, and armlets are beautifully chased (decoratively indented by hammering). The Shrivijaya origin is made more likely by stylistic reminiscences of the sculpture of contemporary Indonesia, which was also under Sumatran inspiration.

Khmer conquest and Tai immigration: 11th to 13th century

Angkorian-style bronze finial from Cambodia, c. 1200; in the Honolulu Academy of Arts.Photograph by honolulu0919. Honolulu Academy of Arts, gift of the Academy’s Volunteer Fund, 1989 (5804.1)In the 11th century Dvaravati was captured by the Khmer of Cambodia and became a province of their empire. A number of Khmer shrines, probably intended as focuses of the Khmer Hindu dynastic cult, were built in Siam (Thailand). At Phimai (Bimaya) was the most important full-fledged Khmer temple, where one of the personal cult statues of the Khmer king Jayavarman II (see below Cambodia and Vietnam) has been found, together with bronze images, some of Tantric Buddhist deities. At Lop Buri the Phra Prang Sam Yot is perhaps the best surviving example in brick and stucco of Khmer provincial art in Thailand, its tall towers having complex rebated (blunted) corners and its porticoes high, flamboyant pediments (the triangular space used as decoration over porticoes, doors, and windows). Wat Kukut, at Lamphun, built by a Dvaravati Mon king around 1130, represents an adaptation of the Khmer stepped-pyramid temple base as pattern for the temple itself. The niches on its terraces are filled with images in a deliberately archaistic revival of the old Mon style.

Bodhisattva from Nanchao, an ancient Tai kingdom (now in Yunnan province, China), bronze, 13th century; in the British Museum, London. Height 44 cm.Courtesy of the trustees of the British MuseumDuring the period when the Khmer were taking over the southern Mon region of Thailand, the northern region was falling under the domination of immigrant Tai peoples. The Tai were a branch of the migrating population who invaded Burma as the Burmese and of the Sinicized Vietnamese who were then pushing southward into what is now Vietnam. The Tai seem to have professed an animist nature religion, resembling the early form of the Burmese cult of the nats (see above Burma). This whole group of peoples originated most probably as a tribal population in the region of Tonkin and Canton. In the course of their southward migrations they probably played an important role, as yet unclear, in a kingdom called Nanchao, in what is now the Chinese province of Yunnan. The rulers of this kingdom seem to have followed a Mahayana form of Buddhism, including the cult of a bodhisattva as personal patron of the king. Several smallish bronze icons of a bodhisattva with a nude torso and a strap round the upper belly are known from Nanchao, in a style reminiscent of the later Pallava art of the east coast of peninsular India. The date of these images is still uncertain. Tai kingdoms were gradually established farther and farther south. Some of their tribes gained experience of administrative techniques by living within the boundaries of the Khmer empire, with their own chieftains under Khmer officials. When the Khmer power was broken in the 13th century, the Tai moved into central and southern Siam, intermarrying with the Mon.

The Tai people normally built in perishable materials, wood and bamboo in particular. Their animist religion, which has no canonical group resembling the Burmese nats, is still very much alive today. The spirits of trees need to be pacified, and the ancestors can be powerful helpers. Shamans, in a state of trance, make contact with the spirit world to perform good or evil magic. In the wooden high-gabled houses of the northern Tai (Chiengmai province), even today, ornate lintels are carved with floral relief designs to sanctify and potentiate the inner domestic part of the house where the domestic spirits live. The animist religion gave ground partially to Buddhism, which was gradually assimilated among the people, and at some date, as yet uncertain, was adopted by the greater Tai kings as a dynastic religion. With the spread of Buddhism a special religious architecture in brick and stucco was established.

The Thai kingdom: 13th to 17th century

Seated Buddha, gilt bronze sculpture from Sukhothai, Thailand, 14th–early 15th century; in the Honolulu Academy of Arts.Photograph by L. Mandle. Honolulu Academy of Arts, gift of John Young, 1991 (6723.1)During most of its history, Thailand has been divided into two fairly distinct regions, a northern and a southern, the capital of the north at Chiang Mai, the capital of the south at Ayutthaya. Between the two lies the great trade-route city of Sukhothai, possession of which fluctuated between the north and the south. Sukhothai seems to have been the principal focus and source of Buddhist culture in Siam, for it retained direct touch with Sri Lanka, which, after the decline of Buddhism in India in the 12th century, became the principal home of Theravada Buddhism. By the 15th century the difficult art of casting large-scale Buddha figures in bronze had been mastered in the north of Siam, as well as in the south.


The Thai kings made repeated attempts to “purify” their conservative Theravada strain of Buddhism, importing patterns of art along with texts and learned monks from Sri Lanka and trying to wean their people from worship of the spirits. To retain the greatest spiritual potency, Buddha icons in Thai temples had to be as close in type as possible to a great original prototype that Buddhist tradition erroneously believed had been made during the lifetime of the Buddha; in practice, this meant the types the local craftsmen knew as the oldest and most authentic. There were at least three major successive efforts by Thai kings to establish and distribute an “authentic” canon for the Buddha icons, which were their prime artistic concern. Each type that became canonical and was known to be magically effective was imitated repeatedly. For it was regarded as an act of merit simply to multiply images of the Buddha, whether they were to be installed in temples or not; hence, in addition to icons, enormous numbers of small images—made of many materials, from bronze, silver, stone, and wood to terra-cotta—were kept in temple storehouses. The images followed canonical patterns established for the major temple icons.

Since their work had to be as similar as possible to the oldest sacred images of which they knew, the Buddhist sculptors in Siam adhered to strict formulas and diagrams; artistic development was never a part of their purpose, though of course gradual change did occur. There is no tradition in Theravada Siam in any way resembling the traditions of Mahayana art in, say, Cambodia or Indonesia, which encouraged artists to explore the possibilities of their mediums to express developing religious conceptions. Thus, Thai Buddhist sculpture consisted almost entirely of careful repetitions of the standardized types, which tended naturally, despite the artist’s desire to capture an authentic sense of style, to lose their older vitality. It also happened that the three main canonical patterns often lost their individuality, blending into each other. Perhaps the best works were made in the 15th century, but work of high quality was still being done in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

The first canonical types were the Sukhothai, which seem to have been evolved in the trade-route city of Sukhothai as an attempt to capture the quality of early-medieval Sri Lankan images and elements from Dvaravati sculpture. The developed versions of these types are marked by an extremely smooth, rounded modeling of the body and face, without any clearly defined planes. The outlines of hair, eyebrows, lips, and fingers are elegantly recurved, or S-curved, and the head is crowned by a tall, pointed flame finial. The entire figure gives an impression of great elegance. Full-fledged Sukhothai images of the full-round walking Buddha—an original Sukhothai invention—emphasize a kind of swaying, sinuous, boneless grace in the execution of the legs and arms. One of the most impressive colossal images of the type is the brick and stucco icon at the Wat Mahathat, Sawankhalok, another Sukhothai technical forte, dating probably to the 14th century. This type of image remained the most popular in Siam; an enormous number of imitations, of all dates, are preserved, many in Western collections.

Perhaps the Buddha types most successful aesthetically were those called after U Thong. They were produced originally in the southern capital of Ayutthaya, which took over Sukhothai in 1349, and represent a fusion of the Sukhothai types with vestiges of Khmer and Theravada Dvaravati traditions, whose Buddha types had been marked by a strong Mon sense of squared-off design and cubic volume. The latter may have been influential because they seemed to incorporate an older and more authentic tradition, since they were based upon patterns developed in eastern India, the true homeland of Buddhism. In the U Thong style the sinuous linear curves, loops, and dry ridges of the pure Sukhothai patterns are suppressed, and genuine modeling, with clearly defined planes and volumes, appears. In the northern kingdom a crude version of the Sukhothai type gained currency in the late 14th century. When, in the middle of the 15th century, King Tiloka of the northern kingdom re-established contact with Sri Lanka, images seem to have been imported directly from that country. They must have shown clearly how far the Sukhothai types had departed from the type used in the Buddhist homeland, because the third Siamese icon pattern, known as the lion type, attempted to recapture the stern simplicity of the genuine Sinhalese images. Most of the best examples were made between 1470 and 1565. Limbs and bodies are given a massive cylindrical strength, and the Sukhothai elegance is eliminated. It seems, however, that the native Thai genius is for the sinuous and unplastic curve, which may have expressed for them the same spiritual unworldliness as it did in Burmese ornament. Thus, in later examples reminiscent of the lion type, the curvilinear patterns of the Sukhothai style reassert themselves with more or less emphasis; and by the end of the 16th century the lion type had lost its distinguishing features and merged into the run of Sukhothai patterns.

Architecture and painting

Wat Chet Yot, Chiang Mai, Thailand, late 15th century.Louis Frederic—Rapho/Photo ResearchersThere are as yet few results of authenticated research available concerning the history of architecture during the early period of Thai supremacy. Many monasteries contain stupas, or cheddis, that either originated or were renewed in this period; but most of the monasteries themselves have been repeatedly overworked. Building complexes seem to have developed by accretion, rather than by the studied working out of space articulations. The oldest building in Ayutthaya, dating from the early 13th century, is the Wat Bhuddai Svarya, a towered shrine, approached by a columned hall. From the late 14th century onward, Sukhothai influence seems to have predominated everywhere. The architectural types included a bell-shaped reliquary stupa with a circular flanged base and onion finials, reminiscent of combined Sri Lankan and Burmese patterns; a stupa raised upon a cylindrical shrine as its drum; and a shrine with a plinth faced with images (usually later additions) above which rise one or more pyramidal towers reminiscent of the tower of the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya in Bihar, India. An example of the third architectural type is King Tiloka’s late-15th-century Wat Chet Yot at Chiang Mai, which has one large and four smaller pyramids mounted on a main block. The Thai kings also adopted something of the personal funeral cult of Khmer Angkor (see below Cambodia and Vietnam), for a custom grew of building bell-shaped brick stupas—which had earlier been used only for the relics of Buddhist saints—as the kings’ tombs, each approached by a colonnaded hall and surrounded by smaller stupas or shrines. In many of the brick and plaster or wooden monastic buildings of more recent centuries, such as the Wat Po in Bangkok, one can trace the distant influence of the Khmer styles of Angkor. Tall, gabled roofs, with steps and overlaps, the gables adorned with flame finials, are typical, exemplified by the Water Pavilion at Bang Pa-in.

Water Pavilion, Bang Pa-in, Thailand, 1294.Luc Bouchage—Rapho/Photo ResearchersThai painting of the early period (13th–16th centuries) demands a great deal more research and study than it has yet received. Although it is, of course, devoted to the canonical iconography of the Theravada, its fluent and relatively unschematic outline shows that it retained much of the original inspiration visible in the earlier work at Burmese Pagan (see above Burma). The oldest examples of Thai painting are the much-ruined frescoes in the Silpa cave, Yala, and some engraved panels from Wat Si Chum, Sukhothai, dated to 1287. Later paintings (dating to the 1420s) in the inner chambers of the Wat Rat Burana and Wat Mahathat at Ayutthaya show strong Chinese and perhaps Khmer influence in their high perspectives and landscape backgrounds with animals, combined with the native Thai clear outlines and bright, flat colours. By the 17th century at, for example, the Wat Yai Suwannaram at Phet Buri, large mural compositions—such as an elaborate scene of demons worshipping the Buddha—were being undertaken. In this later painting, theatrical stereotypes from the Thai dance-drama exerted a strong influence in the rendering of figures.

18th century to the present

Thai painted lacquer panel of a court scene, Bangkok style, mid-19th century; in the collection of Prince Piya Rangsit, Bangkok. Height 50 cm.Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-BadenIn the 18th century the Burmese invaded and conquered Siam. The Burmese king—in expiation, it is said, of his war guilt—ordered the construction of many Buddhist buildings in the current Burmese style (see above Burma). These made their impact on Thai art, and the gaudy gilding and inlay characteristic of late Burmese ornament were widely adopted. When the capital was moved to the present Bangkok, in 1782, no substantial artistic development took place, though large pagodas were built and filled with rows of images, many in gilt wood. A highly ornate interpretation of older, airily flamboyant Burmese decorative styles, featuring curved “oxhorn” projections, blunted the edge of architectural and sculptural quality. Without exception, the new large-scale icons were dull and inferior works of art; and the monstrous guardian figures of spiritual beings and lions decorating the major shrines are fantastic rather than aesthetically valuable. In the painting of wooden panels, some of them votive, and of historical manuscripts, the Thai retained a good deal of their older vigour. The figures illustrating legend and history are based upon the unworldly stereotypes of the court dance.

Vessel and cover in the shape of a sacred bird, gold decorated with filigree work and inlaid with rubies and imitation emeralds, 19th century; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Height 41.5 cm.A.C. Cooper/The Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonIn addition to the incorporation of European motives, many buildings and their ornamentation in Bangkok have a strongly Chinese flavour. This is attributable partly to the influence of the large expatriate Chinese population living there and partly to the influence of earlier expatriate Chinese craftsmen. The early 20th-century Pathamacetiya at Nagara Pathama (Nakhon Pathom), which is entirely orange, is a fine example of the many cheddis. Some tiles were certainly imported from China, but others were descendants of the fine pottery (of basically Chinese inspiration) that was produced at the kilns of Sawankhalok during the 14th and 15th centuries by expatriate Chinese craftsmen. This pottery imitated in its own materials Chinese Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) Cizhou and celadon wares (stonewares and porcelain with a glaze developed by the Chinese) with underglaze ornament and blue or brown painted decoration. Similar wares were made in the 15th century at kilns at Sukhothai and at Chiang Mai. Some of these pieces are, in their own idiom, as fine as native Chinese work. Later, during the 18th and 19th centuries, somewhat garish, flamboyant Ayutthaya figure designs in polychrome were applied to rice bowls and other vessels.



Cambodia and Vietnam




Cambodian kingdoms of Funan and Chenla: 1st to 9th century

Funan, which was in existence by the 1st century ce, was the earliest of the kingdoms that arose along the lower reaches of the Mekong River in response to Indian ideas. Its influence probably extended over long stretches of the coast of the Gulf of Siam, even as far as southern Burma, and corresponded with the range of the Mon peoples. Lying on the natural focus of land and sea routes linking eastern India and southern China to the islands of the South Seas, its geographical situation was ideal for a kingdom whose wealth was based on trade. At Funan sites even Roman, Ptolemaic Egyptian, and Sassanian Persian objects have been found, giving an idea of the extent of its trading interests.

The founder was probably a Brahmin trader from western India; for a local legend describes how the first king, a Brahmin, married the daughter of a local serpent deity, so establishing the ruling family. Serpents (nagas) in Indian mythology are the spiritual patrons of water; and the basis this kingdom laid for later kingdoms in the same area was an elaborate system of waterworks, canals, and irrigation channels controlling and distributing the waters of the Mekong River. Contemporary Chinese accounts refer to cities with splendid wooden buildings, carved, painted, and gilded. But nothing remains, save a few foundation piles. Probably during the 6th century ce the kingdom called Chenla was established in the upper-middle reaches of the Mekong River, in what is now Laos. The kings who ruled in Chenla were descended from the kings of Funan and took over much of the Funan domain. It seems that disastrous floods had finally ruined Funan, which had previously suffered from Indonesian aggression, and that the shift of power to Chenla represented a recognition of temporarily insuperable geographical difficulties.

Culturally, Funan and Chenla are continuous. Their artists produced some of the world’s greatest stone sculptures, most of which are large, freestanding icons, carved in sandstone. Intended to be installed in brick-built shrines, none of which survive, they usually represent the two major deities of Hinduism, Shiva and Vishnu. Sometimes both deities are combined into a single figure called Harihara; the right half of the body is characterized as Shiva, the left as Vishnu. A few examples of other figures are known, including some magnificent images of goddesses. The style of these sculptures is marked by an extremely smooth, continuously undulating surface, given strength by a system of clear, broad frontal planes and side recessions related to the foursquare block. Such images were meant to demonstrate the power and charm of a heavenly prototype to whom an earthly king appealed for his authority. The earliest images belong to the 6th century, and the series continues into the 9th.

In later Khmer times each king and sometimes each member of a royal house had statues of himself or herself in the guise of a patron deity set up in the family temple precinct. That the same custom prevailed in 6th-century India, particularly in the southeast, suggests that some of the early Funan and Chenla sculptures may have served the same function. A number of figures are Indian in style—some more markedly than others, which is probably more than a matter of date; for it is quite likely that Indian craftsmen occasionally traveled into this region to work. The style of the greatest of these early sculptures, however, is not Indian at all.

Similarly non-Indian are the magnificent sandstone lintels made for the doorways of the vanished brick shrines. Although distantly related to Indian prototypes of the 1st and 2nd centuries ce, they appear as full-fledged Indochinese inventions and may well have been developed in combination with a native conception of the lintel as a special attribute of the spirit shrine (see above Thailand and Laos). They are carved in relief with designs based on a pair of monsters, one at each end, which are linked by an ornate arched or lobed beam. The beam is adorned with figures inside foliate plaques, a long sequence of elaborately carved swags of jewels hanging beneath them.

Among the Funan-Chenla sculptures are a few Buddhist icons executed in sandstone, markedly less sensuous than the Hindu figures and close to the styles of Dvaravati (see above Thailand and Laos), though a number of small Buddhist bronzes representing bodhisattvas approach the delicacy of the Hindu work.

Kingdom of Khmer: 9th to 13th century

Late in the 8th century the kingdom of Chenla declined politically, perhaps because of dynastic disputes with the rising power of Indonesian kings, who were themselves also descended from the original royal dynasty of Funan. It seems that the Indonesians gave some assistance in establishing a new kingdom in the northern part of what had been the territory of Funan. In 802 a Khmer king, who took the title of Jayavarman II, established his capital near Phnom Kulen, about 20 miles (30 km) from Angkor. It was a rather unsuitable place for an administrative capital, but it was a mountain, and the peoples of Southeast Asia have always believed that gods and spirits dwell on mountaintops. The image of the sacred mountain thereafter remained the inspiration for all the later architecture of the Khmer around Angkor. Jayavarman, who built other temples in the vicinity, seems to have revived the Chenla style. A distinctively Khmer art, however, began to emerge under Indravarman I (877–889), who expanded the boundaries of the Khmer kingdom and finally settled its administration. Most important of all, he developed the initial plan of the colossal city of Angkor, whose mysterious ruins, lost in dense jungle until very recently, have tantalized Western travelers for centuries.

Towers of Angkor Wat reflected in a pond, Angkor, Cambodia.© Josef Beck/FPGAngkor was not only a city; more important, it was an immense technological achievement, from which the agricultural prosperity of the whole Cambodian plain derived. This plain was well watered naturally, but its rivers were subject to strong seasonal fluctuations. Controlled, they were capable of producing an enormous increase in fertility. Angkor was thus essentially an elaborate system of artificial lakes, canals, and radiating irrigation channels that watered a huge acreage of rice paddy; and it was the basis for the strength and prosperity of the Khmer empire. Since Angkor itself was the technical source of the life-giving agricultural water controlled by the king, it was regarded by the Khmer with religious reverence. Its temples and palaces were an expression of that reverence and at the same time an essential part of its supernatural mechanism. Royal intercession by numerous ceremonies, some of which re-enacted the primal marriage of Hindu divinity and native earth spirit on the pattern of ancient folk cult, ensured the continuing gift of the waters of heaven. The king, an earthly image of his god, was the intermediary who ensured that his kingdom would continue to receive divine benevolence in the form of water in controlled quantities. Courtiers played roles at once religious and administrative for the king, who believed that after his death he would be united with his patron deity. Dedicatory statues were often set up in his chief temple to commemorate his divinization.

In order to conform with mountain mythology, the Khmer kings built themselves a series of artificial mountains on the Cambodian plain at Angkor, each crowned by shrines containing images of gods and of themselves, their family, and their ancestors. The huge platforms of earth on which these buildings were founded probably consist of the soil excavated in forming the lakes, moats, and channels that not only divided up the city but also provided an easy means of transport. The temple mountains, like the city itself, are oriented east to west, the main gates facing east. Each king strove to outdo his predecessor in the height, size, and splendour of his temple mountain. The earlier ones, therefore, are relatively small, though beautiful, while the later ones, such as Angkor Wat and the Bayon, are of stupendous size.

In the basic pattern of the Khmer temple mountain the principal overall enclosure, which is square or rectangular, is at ground level. Within it the artificial mountain rises through a series of terraces and at least one further enclosure wall toward a flat summit. On the summit stands either a single shrine or a group of shrines, often a quincunx—five shrines, one at each corner and one in the middle of a square. Arranged along the terraces or within the enclosures there may be further shrines, whose arched doorway pediments refer to the rainbow bridge between heaven and earth. There may be other long buildings, perhaps used as libraries or administrative offices. A principal staircase runs directly up from the east gate to the summit, and sometimes subsidiary staircases run up from other gates at the cardinal directions.

The architecture of the shrines themselves is relatively simple; it is based upon patterns invented in India, though the ornament of the shrines is often highly developed and characteristically Cambodian. Fundamentally, each shrine consists of a cell whose internal space is cubic and whose external walls are marked by moldings at top and bottom. The shrine is roofed by a pyramidal tower composed of a series of similar but diminishing tiers, each of them a compressed version of the exterior pattern of the main shrine volume. Depending on which Indian pattern is followed, the cell has one main door with an elaborately carved portal or, if the plan is cruciform, four entrances. The earlier shrines were built of brick, most commonly with stucco ornament and figures on the outside. The later shrines were built of stone, with all their ornament and figurative sculpture carved in relief. The moldings on the roofs of the shrines and the decoration of the roofs of many of the subsidiary buildings are extremely elaborate. There are long panels of dense foliate ornament, and the niches in which the sculptured relief figures of celestials are set are framed in flamboyant ogival (contoured like a pointed arch) moldings crowned by no less flamboyant foliate ornament; the smaller architectural features, such as niche pilasters, are elaborately carved and molded. The figures themselves wear gorgeous jewelry and chignons. The massive stone icons that survive in some of the shrines and on the terraces do not have the subtlety or strength of the Funan-Chenla sculptures. Instead, they have an inflated massiveness, intended, no doubt, to make them awe-inspiring. Among the lesser relief figures of celestials, which decorate the walls of the shrines, one finds a more sensuous touch; for many of these celestials represent apsaras, the celestial girls of Indian mythology.

On some of the temple mountains there are also relief panels illustrating various aspects of the royal mythology. Episodic relief sculpture first appears on Banteay Srei (10th century). The relief centres on a series of Indian legends dealing with the cosmic mountain Meru as the source of all creation and with the divine origin of water. The chief artistic achievement of its architecture is the way in which it conceives and coordinates the spaces between the walls of the enclosures, the faces of the terraces, and the volumes of the shrine buildings. A most sophisticated architecture of full and empty space, it seems to have been influenced by that of the Hindu Pallava dynasty in southeastern India.

The earliest more or less complete example of a shrine complex devoted to deifying the ancestors of a king is the Preah Ko at Roluos, near Angkor, completed in 879. The earliest surviving temple mountain at Angkor itself is the Bakong, probably finished in 881. In the central shrine at the summit was a linga, the phallic emblem sacred to Shiva. Around the base of the terraced pyramid stood eight large shrines inside the main enclosure, with a series of moats, causeways, and auxiliary sculptures guarding the approaches to the exterior. The Bakheng, begun in 893, had an enormous series of 108 tower shrines arranged on the terraces around the central pyramid, which was crowned by a quincunx of principal shrines. The whole was intended to illustrate a mystical conception of the cosmos, very much on the lines of the great temple mountain at Borobudur in Java (see below Indonesia). Pre Rup, dedicated in 961, was probably the first of the temple mountains intended as a permanent shrine for the divine spirit of a king after his death. It, too, has a quincunx of principal shrines, but it is distinguished by the large number of auxiliary pavilions arranged along both sides of the inner enclosure wall.

Shiva and Uma, sandstone, from Banteay Srei, Angkor, Cambodia, late 10th century; in the National Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Height 60 cm.Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-BadenFrom roughly the same period is perhaps the most beautiful—and most beautifully preserved—of the early Khmer temples, Banteay Srei. This was actually a private foundation, built some 12 miles from Angkor by a Brahmin of royal descent. Its auxiliary buildings, all of sandstone, are adorned with a profusion of elaborate ornament and relief figure sculpture. The roof gables, in particular, are treated with antefixes of fantastic invention. Its principal icon, a huge sandstone sculpture of the god Shiva, seated with his wife Uma on his left knee, is perhaps the most impressive full-round sculpture from the whole Khmer epoch. It differs from 10th-century Khmer official sculpture, which began to take on a conventional and relatively insensitive massiveness.

The Baphuon temple mountain (1050–66) is unfortunately almost completely destroyed. It was a vast monument 480 yards (440 metres) long and 140 yards (130 metres) wide, approached by a 200-yard (180-metre) causeway raised on pillars. Its ground plan shows that it was no mere assemblage of buildings but a fully articulated structure. In this it must rank as the immediate prototype for the great Angkor Wat. Built by Suryavarman II in the early 12th century, Angkor Wat is the crowning work of Khmer architecture, the culmination of all the features of earlier styles.

Overview of Angkor Wat, a temple complex built in the 12th century, Angkor, Cambodia.Georg Gerster/Photo Researchers, Inc.The enormous structure of the Wat is some 1,700 yards (1,550 metres) long by 1,500 yards (1,400 metres) wide. Surrounded by a vast external cloister, it is approached from the west by a magnificent road, which is built on a causeway and lined with colossal balustrades carved in the likeness of the cosmic serpent, associated with the sources of life-giving water. The Wat rises in three concentric enclosures. The western gate complex itself is nearly as large as the complex of central shrines, and both are subdivided into smaller, beautifully decorated courts. Only five of the original nine towers still stand at the summit; although they follow the basic pattern of the Khmer roof tower composed of diminishing imitative stories, the contour of the towers is not rectilinear but curved, so as to suggest that the stories grow one out of another like a sprouting shoot. All the courtyards, with their molded plinths, staircases, porticoes, and eaves moldings, are perfectly articulated enclosed spaces. The symbolic meaning of the Wat is clear. Its central shrine indicates the hub of the universe, while its surroundings—the gate complex, the cloister, the city of Angkor itself, and, finally, the whole visible world—represent the successive outer envelopes of cosmic reality. That it is oriented toward the west—and not to the east, as was customary—indicates that its builder, Suryavarman II, intended it as his own mortuary shrine; for, according to Indochinese mythology, the west is the direction in which the dead depart.

The sculptors who worked at the Wat demonstrate little ability in carving in the full round. Such full-round figures as there are—the guardians on the terraces, for example—lack life. The relief sculpture, however, is magnificent and full of vitality. The open colonnaded gallery on the first story contains over a mile of relief carving six feet (two metres) high. Much of it was originally painted and gilded, which strongly suggests that there must have been a Khmer style of painting of which nothing is known. The subject matter of the carvings is taken principally from the Hindu epics, but there are also many scenes representing Suryavarman’s earthly glory. Working in relief only about an inch deep, the sculptors were able to depict an extraordinary complex of scenes of figures in vigorous action, full of complex overlaps to suggest deep space. The solid bodies are created mainly out of groups of convex curves; and everywhere there is the typical regional feeling for decorative spirals. Perhaps the most interesting group of figures are the apsaras, carved in relief, either singly or in groups, on the plain walls of the courtyards. These celestial beauties, whom Indian tradition describes as rewarding with their charms the kings, heroes, and saints who attain heaven, are carved with sinuous sensuality; but the most important part of their charm is their elaborate clothing, jewelry, and hairdressing or ornate, towering, jeweled crowns. Apparently, deep, downward-drooping curves standing far out from the body represented the height of Khmer chic. Skirts, stoles, and the long sidelocks of the hair all follow these curves, laid out flat on the ground of the relief. Symbolizing the erotic joys that are essential attributes of heaven, the apsaras were natural possessions of the king.

Angkor Wat, Angkor, Cambodia.© Getty ImagesIn many senses the Wat was the end of the road for Khmer art. The effort demanded of the people in constructing this colossal stone monument, along with its 4 miles (6 km) of stone-lined moat 200 yards (180 metres) wide, appears to have been too great. The irrigation system itself may well have been neglected in favour not only of shifting the building stone—as much in quantity as there is in the Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt—but also of dressing, carving, and ornamenting it. After Suryavarman’s death, the Cham, from the neighbouring kingdom of Champa (see below Vietnam kingdom of Champa), seized and sacked Angkor for the first time in its history (1177), thus shattering the confidence of the Khmer people in the protective powers of their Hindu deities. When Suryavarman’s son, Jayavarman VII, came to the throne he inherited a ravaged kingdom. In 1181 he succeeded in driving out the Cham; he invaded their country and seized their capital, thereby making Champa a province of the Khmer. Then, more than 60 years old, he embarked on a series of campaigns that extended the borders of the Khmer empire farther than ever before—into Malaya, Burma, and Annam.

Prajnaparamita, sandstone sculpture from Cambodia, Bayon style, c. 1200; in the Honolulu Academy of Arts.Photograph by L. Mandle. Honolulu Academy of Arts, purchase, Seldon Washington Bequest, 2003, 12,596.1The ruler of this empire naturally believed himself to be the greatest of the Khmer, and he set about demonstrating the truth of his belief by building his own city, Angkor Thom (c. 1200), and, at the centre of it, the biggest temple complex of them all—the Bayon (c. 1200). Breaking with all previous Khmer traditions, he took as his patron deity not one of the Hindu gods but one of the Buddhist bodhisattvas. Although Buddhism had flourished for several centuries in the whole of Indochina, it had not been adopted by the Khmer as an imperial cult. Now that the Hindu gods had been discredited by defeat, Jayavarman placed himself under the patronage of Mahayana Buddhism. The mythology according to which the Bayon was designed was thus another version of the old mythology of the celestial mountain and the divine origin of water. Only the central figure of his mythology, Lokeshvara, Lord of the World, was specifically Buddhist. The colossal masks that look out over the four directions of the world from the towers of the Bayon and from the gates of Angkor Thom are there to demonstrate the compassionate, all-seeing power of Lokeshvara and the king.

When Jayavarman VII set out to create Angkor Thom, he had to raze the fine older work of his predecessors, for the site at Angkor had become choked with nearly four centuries of grandiose temple building. Within Angkor Thom’s 10 miles (16 km) of moats he constructed huge complexes of building and made his city the focus of a final system of canals and irrigation, with additional lakes.

Ruined temples at the Angkor Thom complex, Angkor, Cambodia.Emil Muench/Photo ResearchersUnfortunately, the innumerable new shrines that surround Angkor Thom, the towers that crowd the Bayon, and the vast stone terraces faced with relief that surround the royal palace are in general much inferior in execution to the work of the earlier kings. Thus, today Angkor is dominated by the overwhelming presence of Jayavarman’s immense but relatively unrefined architecture. The king’s ambition was satisfied by size and quantity rather than artistic quality. Because sculptors were obliged to produce such vast quantities of work so fast, their standards deteriorated, and the huge vistas of narrative relief show signs of haste and slipshod workmanship. The real achievement lay with Jayavarman’s scholastic architects, who conceived and laid out a complex of mythical imagery in massive architectural symbols. Their stupendous overall plan illustrates the creation of the world, a cosmos spreading outward from the central mountain tower. The two roads leading from the tower are lined with mile-long rows of gigantic deities who are pulling on the body of the serpent naga. According to Hindu legend, the gods use the magical mountain Meru, symbolized by the mountain tower, as a churning stick and the body of the cosmic serpent as a churning rope to churn the world out of the milk of nothingness. Lake-sized fountains represent the healing waters of the Buddhist paradise, and allegories of salvation are realized in carved architecture. Perhaps the most impressive works of art associated with this last period of Angkor are some stone icons, such as the famous Leper King, in the Angkor Thom complex. Many excellent smaller bronze figures of deities have also been found among the ruins.

13th century to the present

After the death of Jayavarman VII, c. 1215, possibly as late as 1219, Angkor declined. The Thai population of Siam gradually pushed the Khmer down toward the Mekong Delta. Theravada Buddhism became the religion of the people, and the grandiose vision of a cultural unity based on sacred kingship disappeared. In the 15th century, Angkor was retaken from the Thai, and a few buildings were restored by the ancestors of the modern (now abdicated) Cambodian kings. Some of the buildings were used as monasteries, but the city, with its essential irrigation system, had fallen into ruin.

Vietnam kingdom of Champa: c. 2nd to 15th century

Artifact of the Champa kingdom.© Trinh Le Ngyen/Shutterstock.comThe kingdom of Champa existed alongside the Khmer kingdom, sometimes passing under its rule, sometimes maintaining a precarious independence. From the north it was continually subject to the pressure of the advancing Vietnamese, a people racially related to the Burmese and Thai, who were themselves under pressure from the Chinese. The Hinduizing dynasties who ruled Champa from the 6th century were obliged to pay heavy tribute to the Chinese empire. After 980 they were forced by the Vietnamese to abandon their northern sacred capital, My Son; thereafter, except for a brief return to My Son in the 11th century, their southern capital at Vijaya (Binh Dinh) became their centre. Under such disruptive circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that the Cham succeeded in creating and maintaining a dynastic art of their own. It was, however, always on a relatively modest scale, devoted to a conception of divine kingship similar to but far less ambitious than the Khmer.

The evolution of Cham art falls naturally into two epochs, the first when the capital was in the north, the second when it was removed to the south.

Art of the northern capital: 4th to 11th century

The form of the earliest temple at My Son, built by King Bhadravarman in the late 4th century, is not known. The earliest surviving fragments of art come from the second half of the 7th century, when the king was a descendant of the royal house at Chenla. The remains of the many dynastic temples built in My Son up until 980 follow a common pattern with only minor variations. It is a relatively simple one, with no attempt at the elaborate architecture of space evolved by the Khmer. Each tower shrine is based upon the central rectangular volume of the cell. The faces are marked by central porticoes that are blind on all but the western face, where the entrance door is situated. The blind porticoes seem to have contained figures of deities—perhaps armed guardians standing in a threatening posture. The porticoes are set in a tall, narrow frame of pilasters (columns projecting a third of their width or less from the wall), crowned with horizontally molded capitals that step out upward. They support a tall, double-ogival blind arch, crowned by another stepped in behind it. The arches are based on an Indian pattern and are carved with a design of slowly undulating foliage springing from the mouth of a monster whose head forms the apex of the arch. The faces of the walls are formed of pilasters framing tall recesses. The pilasters are carved with foliate relief, and elaborate recessed and stepped-out horizontal moldings mark their bases. The height of the pilasters and recesses gives a strong vertical accent to the body of the shrine. The principal architrave is carried on stepped-out false capitals to the pilasters. The roof of the tower is composed of three diminishing, compressed stories, each marked by little pavilions on the faces above the main porticoes. Inside the tower is a high space created by a simple corbel vault with its stepped courses of masonry. The chief portico was extended to include a porch, and the whole structure stood upon a plinth whose faces bore molded dwarfed columns (small columns) and recesses.

Panel of a pedestal altar showing a Cham ascetic playing a flute, sandstone, from My Son E1, Vietnam, second half of the 7th century; in the Cham Museum, Da Nang, Vietnam. Height 60 cm.Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-BadenThese temples have one distinguishing internal feature: a pedestal altar within the cell, upon which statues were set, sometimes, it seems, in groups. The pedestals themselves are often beautifully adorned with reliefs, and some of the best Cham sculpture appears upon them. The subjects are usually based on Indian imagery of the celestial court. The fact that the pedestal altars carried their sculptures in the space of the cell, away from the wall, meant that the Cham sculptors could think in terms of three-dimensional plasticity as well as relief.

The glory of Cham art is the sculpture of the whole of the first period. Much of what survives consists of lesser figures that formed part of an architectural decor: heads of monsters, for example, which decorated the corners of architraves, and figures of lions, which supported bases and plinths. These figures reflect the heavy ornateness of the Cham decorative style at its most aggressive; and many of them effloresce into the solid, wormlike ornament that is the Cham version of Indo-Khmer foliage carving and carries strong reminiscences of Dong Son work. The remaining fragments of the large icons suggest a double origin for Cham art traditions. On many of the capitals and altar pedestals are series of figures carved in relief in a sensuous style, which is nevertheless strictly conceptualized. This sophisticated work is reminiscent both of late Chenla art (see above Cambodia and Vietnam) and of Indonesian decoration, especially during the 11th-century return. Other figures are more coarsely emphatic in style, with the crudely defined cubic volumes and the heavy faces of Melanesian sculpture. It is thus probable that artists trained in the sophisticated Cambodian tradition worked for the Cham kings at one time or another, while Champa’s own native craftsmen emulated the work of the foreigners in their own fashion.

Apart from My Son there are one or two other sites in north and central Vietnam where Cham art was made in quantity. The most important of these is Dong Duong, in Quang Nam. It is a ruined Buddhist monastery complex of the late 9th century, conceived on the most beautifully elaborated plan of structured space in Champa. The architectural detail is distinguished from the My Son work by its greater emphasis upon the plasticity of architectural elements such as angle pilasters and porticoes. The circuit wall was about half a mile (1 km) long and once contained many shrines dedicated to Buddhist deities. It is possible that, when this complex of brick courts, halls, and gate pavilions was intact, it may have resembled very closely the contemporary Buddhist monasteries of northeastern India.

Art of the southern capital: 11th to 15th century

After 980, when the northern provinces were taken over by the Vietnamese and the Cham capital established at Binh Dinh in 1069, the kings maintained a gradually diminishing splendour. After the Khmer attack of 1145 they could claim little in the way of royal glory.

Although the Cham kings made a brief return to My Son from 1074 to 1080, most of their artistic effort was spent on shrines at Vijaya (Binh Dinh) and a few other sites in the south. The early 12th-century Silver Towers at Binh Dinh are simplified versions of the older northern towers, with corner pavilions added to the roofing stories and arches of pointed horseshoe shape. Throughout the 13th and early 14th centuries the architecture of successive shrines gradually declined. The plasticity of the old pilasters and architraves was suppressed into simple moldings, and the beauty of the buildings became largely a matter of proportion. By the mid-14th century even the temples erected at Binh Dinh amounted to little more than piles of crudely cut stones articulated only by reminiscences of the classic Cham style.

Sculpture shows a parallel decline. One or two reliefs at the Silver Towers do convey a sense of tranquillity and splendour, but an indigenous style of rigid cubical emphasis came progressively to dominate the iconic Hindu figures at southern sites. The curlicued design of earlier figures was gradually converted into a style of massive, scarcely carved blocks that convey, at their best, an impression of barbarous strength but without the refinement of first-class primitive art.

As was the case in Cambodia, this decline in art by the mid-14th century may be attributed to the people’s loss of confidence in the concept—and, with it, the imagery—of divine kingship. Theravada Buddhism, as a popular religion based upon numerous small, local monasteries, adopted probably from the Tai, was spreading all over the region. The northern Vietnamese, who had originally been organized in self-contained kingdoms without any concept of royal divinity, owing an intermittent administrative allegiance only to the distant Chinese emperor, found this ultimately suitable as a state religion after the final eclipse of Confucianism in the 17th century. They did incorporate echoes of older Hindu architecture, however, in details of the flamboyant ornament used on eaves and gables of their wooden monastery buildings.

Vietnam: 2nd–19th century

The great achievement of Vietnamese art, at least during the Le period (15th–18th centuries), seems to have been in architectural planning, incorporating Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist temples into the landscape environment. The plans themselves include halls for a multitude of images in the South Chinese vein and provision for a variety of rituals. There are no intact monuments of early Vietnamese architecture that are unrestored. Numerous fragments exist, however—either isolated stone bases, columns, stairways, and bridges or carved wooden members incorporated into later buildings—all of which are influenced to some degree by Chinese styles.

Tombs of generically Chinese type from the 2nd to 7th century contain bronze furnishings, in many of which, such as lampstands, the influence of the Dong Son style is clearly visible. There are no spirit images so typical of Six Dynasties (3rd–6th centuries) and Tang (7th–10th centuries) Chinese tombs. The Chua Mot-cot, Hanoi, has vestiges of a stone shrine probably dated 1049. The only old paintings, on rock, at Tuyen Quang (9th century), represent the Buddha, bodhisattvas, and donors. The Van-mieu at Hanoi (built 1070 but frequently restored) contains ritual bronzes in “barbaric” Chinese style.

Perhaps the most interesting early sculptures to survive are the stone fragments from the Van-phuc temple (9th–11th centuries), which are based on Chinese Buddhist imagery but in a style strongly Indianized, perhaps by Cham influence. The most important piece of old work still virtually intact is the portable octagonal wooden stupa kept in the hall of the But-thap, at Bac Ninh, east of Hanoi. It has wooden panels carved in a flamboyant 14th-century Chinese style; part of it bears a representation of the Buddhist paradise of Amitabha. Incorporated in many Buddhist temples of the Le period (15th–18th centuries), as well as in stone terraces, bridges, and gateways, is extremely elaborate carved and coloured woodwork in a style based upon the coiling dragon-and-cloud decoration of Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) China, but with a characteristically Vietnamese exaggeration of weight and curve.

At Tho Ha there was a potters’ village, where the glazed ceramic figures used on many types of Chinese temple were manufactured. The remains of many tombs, palaces, bridges, and Confucian and Daoist temples decorated in similar vein are known everywhere.

19th and 20th centuries

The beautiful imperial palace of Hue (final plan before 1810) contained vestiges of older architecture and many works of Sinicized art before its devastation in 1968. It consisted of a series of simple, rectangular, one-story pavilions, laid out among trees inside a group of courts. These buildings and their decoration were southern Chinese in basic conception.

Elsewhere in Vietnam, both religious and secular buildings were constructed in the 20th century in provincial versions of Chinese styles. There was little demand for the sculptor’s art beyond the carving of stereotyped Buddha icons, monsters, and guardians. In modern times southern Vietnam has adopted a decorative style partly derived from the active traditions of Bangkok. Religious sects abound, with hybrid native European and Chinese elements used in their iconic and decorative art. Because of political turmoil, no clear and individual modern Vietnamese artistic tradition has been able to emerge.


The islands that at the present day compose Indonesia probably once shared in the complex Neolithic heritage of artistic tradition, which also spread farther, into the islands of Melanesia and Micronesia. Beautifully ground Neolithic axes of semiprecious stone are treasured still in some countries. In many parts of Indonesia there are quantities of megalithic monuments—menhirs, dolmens, terraced burial mounds, stone skull troughs, and other objects. Some of these are undoubtedly of Neolithic date, but megaliths continued to be made in much more recent times. One stone sarcophagus in eastern Java, for example, is dated post-9th century. On Nias island, megaliths are still revered, and they are still being erected on Sumba and Flores islands. Thus, in Indonesia especially, different layers of Southeast Asian culture have existed side by side. The most impressive and important collection of megaliths is in the Pasemah region, in south Sumatra, where there are also many large stones roughly carved into the shape of animals, such as the buffalo and elephant, and human figures—some with swords, helmets, and ornaments and some apparently carrying drums.

These drums immediately suggest the drums characteristic of the mainland Southeast Asian Dong Son culture, which flourished c. 4th–1st centuries bce (see above General development of Southeast Asian art). This culture may well have helped to diffuse throughout the region styles related to Chinese Zhou and pre-Han ornamental work. Certainly, the Dong Son influence is clear in many of the ceremonial axes, as well as many of the ornamented bronze drums, that have been found in the islands. The bronzes were cast by a lost-wax process resembling that used in parts of the Asian mainland. The largest and most famous drum is “the Moon of Bali,” found on that island near Pedjeng. It has molded flanges, and cast onto its faces is extremely elaborate relief ornament consisting of stylized masks with ears pierced and lengthened by large earrings. Such drums were probably originally used in ritual—by the rainmaker, perhaps—and they may have been buried with the distinguished dead. No one knows the exact age of these bronzes; “the Moon of Bali,” for example, could be anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 years old. Similar small drums were used quite recently as bride prices; and many of the islands today produce textile designs and ceremonial bronzes that are strikingly reminiscent of Dong Son ornament.

Central Javanese period: 7th to 13th century

Buddha from Celebes, bronze, Amaravati style, 3rd–5th century; in the Jakarta Museum. Height 75 cm.Louis Frederic—Rapho/Photo ResearchersSometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries ce, Indianized principalities existed in Java. The chieftains who lived in their kratons (fortified villages) seem to have derived great inspiration, prestige, and practical assistance from the skills and ideas imported from India. In Sumatra there was the important but so far enigmatic Indianized kingdom of Shrivijaya, which, from its strategic position on the Strait of Malacca, exercised a powerful artistic influence in the whole region. Its great Buddhist centre, Palembang, might have had direct connections with the monasteries of southeastern India; for fine bronze Buddhas and bodhisattvas in a style reminiscent of Amaravati (2nd century ce) have been found in many regions where the influence of Shrivijaya might have been felt, including Mon Dvaravati (see above Thailand and Laos) and distant Celebes. Elsewhere among the islands were Indianized kingdoms still unknown to history.

Vishnu, stone, from Bali; in the Royal Tropical Institute Museum, Amsterdam. Height 80 cm.Courtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute, AmsterdamThe local dynasties of the kratons competed among themselves for power, and eventually the principal dynasties known to history came to the fore. The earliest major cultural assimilations from India took place probably during the 7th century, when the Hindu Pallava form of southeast Indian script was adopted for inscriptions in west Java. Thereafter, a central Javanese dynasty that worshipped Shiva made the oldest surviving artworks in stone. The last king of this dynasty retreated to east Java in the face of the rising power of another central Javanese dynasty, the Shailendra (775–864 ce). The Shailendra were followers of Mahayana and Tantric forms of Buddhism, although Hinduism, as manifested in the worship of Shiva and Vishnu, was by no means eliminated. This dynasty created far the larger part of the immense wealth of first-class art known today in Java.

Hindu and Buddhist candis

In Indonesia, the word candi refers to any religious structure based on an Indianized shrine with a pyramidal tower. This was the essential form on which virtually all the stone Indianizing architecture of Southeast Asia was originally based. The Javanese, like the Khmer, evolved an elaborate architecture of their own around the basic Indian prototype.

Central Javanese stone architecture did not use structural pillars, nor did its major stone monuments conceptualize hollow space in the way Khmer architecture did. Like Indian stonework, central Javanese stonework is fundamentally conceived as a solid mass, serving as a vehicle for figurative and symbolic sculpture. Its temples are centralized, with enclosures radiating around the central shrine. In eastern Java and Bali, however, the pattern of the shrine was influenced by older traditions and was usually conceived as an enclosure, the walled area of ground being the sacred element, while the buildings in it were of secondary importance. Old wooden buildings do not survive; but representations of wooden architecture in stone reliefs and the recent architecture of Bali show that eastern Indonesia was influenced by the ancient Southeast Asian tradition of constructing wooden pillared halls with tiered, sloping, and gabled roofs.

Because there are no inscriptions to supply dating points, the exact dates of the earliest Indonesian architectural monuments are not certain. The group of shrines generally believed to be the earliest is situated on the Dijeng Plateau. This is a high volcanic region, about 6,000 feet (2,000 metres) above sea level, where there are sulfur springs and lakes. The whole mountain seems to have been sacred to the Hindu deity Shiva, for all temples on the Dijeng are dedicated to him. There can be little doubt that during the 8th and 9th centuries the Javanese, who traditionally had interpreted the volcanic turbulence of their landscape as a manifestation of divine power, identified this power with the terrifying Shiva. On other Javanese volcanic mountains, also, groups of shrines are dedicated to him.

The temples on the Dijeng are single-cell shrines, roofed with diminishing stories. The exteriors of the temples are relatively plain; only around door frames and window frames are there distinctive passages of central Javanese ornament. Around the niches of Candi Puntadewa are perhaps the earliest surviving examples of the characteristic Javanese doorframe: across its lintel is carved a mask of the Indian Kala monster, which represents time; and down the jambs, as if vomited from his open mouth, run string panels of foliage. The foot of each jamb terminates in an elaborately carved scrollwork cartouche, which is itself a makara (water monster) head seen in profile. This candi, like others on the Dijeng, has a single approach stairway rising between curved balusters. A few stone images of Shiva from these temples have been found. In broad, vigorous forms they express the dangerous power of the god.

Two of the very finest early Javanese sculptures—virtually in the full round—come from yet another Shiva temple, Chandi Banon, near Borobudur (see below Borobudur). One, representing the god Vishnu (no stranger in syncretic Javanese temples of Shiva), has the extremely smooth, faintly amorphous suavity, the absolute convexity, and the lack of definition between planes characteristic of the classical central Javanese sculptural style; while the garment he wears, with its assortment of girdles, is closely reminiscent of late Pallava–early Chola Hindu styles of southeast India. Another icon, sometimes called Agastya but more likely the third deity of the Hindu trinity, Brahma, represents the god in the form of a bearded Brahmin sage. He has a large and, to Asian eyes, splendid potbelly. This icon was indigenous to southeast India. The great depth of the side recessions of these figures, although perhaps not so clearly defined as in the great Funan-Chenla style (see above Cambodia and Vietnam), gives them a bland massiveness. The lack of movement in the figures and the regularity of the designs, the impassive faces, and the slowness of the lines must have been part of the central Javanese conception of transcendent glory.

The Hindu temples of central Java are conceived simply as shrines to contain icons of deities for worship. The Mahayana and especially the Tantric Buddhist candis, however, were called upon to do far more. They were designed to express complex metaphysical theories. The challenge this presented to the central Javanese architects was met in a series of splendid monuments, completely original in conception. The culminating work of the series, Borobudur, is a highly evolved architectural image, whose subtlety and refinement were never matched, even at Angkor in Cambodia.

The first work of this Buddhist series is Candi Ngawen, near Muntilan. This candi consists of five shrines facing east, 12 feet (4 metres) apart in a row from north to south. Each shrine contained one of the five Buddhas who, according to Tantric Buddhist theory, presides over one of the five major psychological categories under which ultimate reality reveals itself. The shrines themselves are based on but more developed than those used for Hindu deities elsewhere in Java. Roughly square in plan and roofed with diminishing stories, they have pilastered projections on three faces and a portico on the east. Along the architrave are small triangular antefixes, and reliefs of Kala monsters vomiting floral scrolls hood the niches and portals.

The group of five Buddhas is familiar in the art of Tibet, Japan, and northeast India. Among them they compose what is called the vajra-dhatu, which means, roughly speaking, “the realm of total reality.” According to the old Javanese theology, above this group is another, called the deities of the garbha-dhatu. Garbha means “womb” or “innermost secret,” and its three deities personify the most esoteric realms of Buddhist speculation. At the centre of the group is the image of the single, undivided Buddha nature, which symbolizes the ultimate reality of the entire universe. From his right side emanates the bodhisattva Lokeshvara (Lord of the World), who is both compassionate and possessed of all power. From the left emanates the bodhisattva Vajrapani, who is the personification of the most secret doctrines and practices of Tantric Buddhism. One of Java’s greatest monuments, Candi Mendut, is a shrine expressly created to illustrate the combined doctrine of garbha-dhatu and vajra-dhatu.

Tjandi Mendut, near Borobudur, Java, c. 800.Louis Frederic—Rapho/Photo ResearchersMendut dates from around 800 ce and is thus, generally speaking, contemporary with Borobudur. It is formed as a single large, square chamber, roofed with the usual diminishing stories, and mounted on a high, broad plinth, which is approached on its northwestern face by a staircase with recurved balustrades. The exterior is in every way more ornate than that of any shrine so far discussed. In addition to floral diaper (an allover pattern consisting of one or more small repeated units of design connecting with or growing out of one another) and scrolls, there are numerous figures in relief representing male and female deities, the subsidiary principles of the combined doctrine of garbha-dhatu and Vajrapani. Cut into the fine ashlar (squared-stone) masonry are many relief panels with scenes from Buddhist literature, each panel self-contained and placed with consummate aesthetic judgment. Some represent mythical ideas, such as the wish-granting tree, others narratives from Buddhist legend.

The principal images were placed inside the cell chamber. Apparently, there were originally seven huge stone icons, but only three remain: the central Buddha, who also represented the ultimate Buddha nature of the garbha-dhatu, and his two emanations in the garbha-dhatu, Lokeshvara, and Vajrapani. When complete, the interior of Mendut must have been an even more awe-inspiring and spiritually moving place than it is now. The three great statues are seated on elaborate thrones, backed against walls, but the figures are carved virtually in the full round. The inflated, gently inflected forms of the figures give them a majestic presence. The types and carving technique, as well as the monumental scale of the figures, are reminiscent of contemporary work in the cave temples of the western Deccan in India.

On the west-east road from Candi Mendut to Borobudur stands a small, relatively plain temple called Candi Pawon, dedicated to the god of wealth. Pawon was probably a kind of anteroom to Borobudur, catering to the more worldly interest of pilgrims. The outside has fine reliefs of female figures, and the roof bears towers of small stupas. On the reliefs are wish-granting trees surrounded by pots of money, and bearded dwarfs over the entrance pour out jewels from sacks.


The stupa complex at Borobudur in Java, Indonesia.Robert Harding Picture Library/Photobank BKKBuddha sculpture and stupas at Borobudur, central Java, Indonesia.© MasterLu/FotoliaBorobudur is one of the most impressive monuments ever created by man. It is both a temple and a complete exposition of doctrine, designed as a whole, and completed as it was designed, with only one major afterthought. It seems to have provided a pattern for Hindu temple mountains at Angkor (see above Cambodia and Vietnam), and in its own day it must have been one of the wonders of the Asian world. Built about 800, it probably fell into neglect by c. 1000 and was overgrown. It was excavated and restored by the Dutch between 1907 and 1911. It now appears as a large, square plinth (the processional path) upon which stand five terraces gradually diminishing in size. The plans of the squares are stepped out twice to a central projection. Above the fifth terrace stands a series of three diminishing circular terraces carrying small stupas, crowned at the centre of the summit by a large, circular, bell-shaped stupa. Running up the centre of each face is a long staircase; all four are given equal importance. There are no internal cell shrines, and the terraces are solid; Borobudur is thus a Buddhist stupa in the Indian sense. Each of the square terraces is enclosed in a high wall with pavilions and niches along the whole perimeter, which prevents the visitor on one level from seeing into any of the other levels. All of these terraces are lined with relief sculptures, and the niches contain Buddha figures. The top three circular terraces are open and unwalled, and the 72 lesser, bell-shaped stupas they support are of open stone latticework; inside each was a huge stone Buddha figure. The convex contour of the whole monument is steepest near the ground, flattening as it reaches the summit. The bottom plinth, the processional path, was the major afterthought. It consists of a massive heap of stone pressed up against the original bottom story of the designed structure, so that it obscures an entire series of reliefs—a few of which have been uncovered in modern times. It was probably added to hold together the bottom story, which began to spread under the pressure of the immense weight of earth and stone accumulated above.

Stupas at Borobudur, central Java, Indonesia.© Anna Zhuk/FotoliaStupas at Borobudur, central Java, Indonesia.Medioimages©Photodisc/ThinkstockThe whole building symbolizes a Buddhist transition from the lowest manifestations of reality at the base, through a series of regions representing psychological states, toward the ultimate condition of spiritual enlightenment at the summit. The unity of the monument effectively proclaims the unity of the cosmos permeated by the light of truth. The visitor was meant to be transformed as he climbed through the levels of Borobudur, encountering illustrations of progressively more profound doctrines the nearer he came to the summit. The topmost terrace, whose main stupa contained an unfinished image of Buddha that was hidden from the spectator’s view, symbolized the indefinable ultimate spiritual state. The 72 openwork stupas on the circular terraces, with their barely visible internal Buddhas, symbolize incomplete states of enlightenment on the borders of manifestation. The usual way for a pilgrim to pay reverence to a Buddhist stupa is to walk around it, keeping it on his right hand. The vast series of reliefs about 3 feet (1 metre) high on the exterior walls of the terraces would thus be read by the visitor in series from right to left. Between the reliefs are decorative scroll panels, and a hundred monster-head waterspouts carry off the tropical rainwater. The gates on the stairways between terraces are of the standard Indonesian type, with the face of the Kala monster at the apex, vomiting his scrolls.

The reliefs of the lowest level illustrate scenes that show the causal workings of good and bad deeds through successive reincarnations. They show, for example, how those who hunt, kill, and cook living creatures such as tortoises and fish are themselves cooked in hells or die as children in their next life. They show how foolish people waste their time at entertainments. From these scenes of everyday life, one moves to the terraces above, where the subject matter becomes more profound and metaphysical. It illustrates important Mahayana texts dealing with the self-discovery and education of the bodhisattva, conceived as being possessed by compassion for and devoted wholly to the salvation of all creatures. The reliefs on the uppermost terraces gradually become more static. The sensuous roundness of the forms of the figures is not abated; but, in the design, great emphasis is laid upon horizontals and verticals and upon static, formal enclosures of repeated figures and gestures. At the summit all movement disappears, and the design is entirely subordinated to the circle enclosing the stupa.

A Dhyani-Buddha on one of the stupa terraces at Borobudur, Java, 8th century.Courtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute, AmsterdamThe iconography of Borobudur suggests that the legend of the royal bodhisattva recounted in many of the reliefs was meant to “authenticate” some king or dynasty. Yet it hardly seems possible that Borobudur was the focus of a specific royal cult, as there is no provision at all for the performance of royal ritual. It must have been, then, in some sense a monument for the whole people, the focus for their religion and life, and a perpetual reminder of the doctrines of their religion.

A considerable number of bronzes, some small, some large, have been found in Indonesia in a style close to that of the sculptures of Borobudur and Mendut. One fine, large standing image comes from Kotabangun in Borneo; but some come from Java. Many small cult images of the Buddha and Buddhist deities exist. Some are close in type to the early Pala images of Indian Bihar, the homeland of Buddhism, with which the Javanese must have maintained close touch. A few small but extremely fine gold figurines of undoubted Javanese workmanship have also turned up. For all their small size they must rate as first-class works of art. As well as images there are many beautiful bronze ceremonial objects, such as lamps, trays, and bells. These objects are decorated with the same kinds of ornament, although on a miniature scale, as the architectural monuments: scrolled leaves, swags, and bands of jewels.

Post-Borobudur candis

Post-Borobudur candis illustrate the Buddhist doctrine in different ways. Kalasan, for example, built in the second half of the 8th century, was a large, square shrine on a plinth, with projecting porticoes at the centre of each face. The roof was surmounted by a high circular stupa mounted on an octagonal drum, the faces of which bear reliefs of divinities. Topping each portico was a group of five small stupas, and another large stupa stood at each disengaged corner of the main shrine. The moldings were restrained and elegantly profiled. Each section of the exterior wall contains a niche meant for a figure sculpture. The decorative scroll carving is especially fine.

Another shrine from this period, Candi Sewu, consisted of a large cruciform shrine surrounded by smaller temples, only one of which has been restored. All of the temples seem to have had roofs in the form of tiered stupas, compressing the overall Borobudur scheme into the scope of a storied shrine tower. From Candi Plaosan came many beautiful sculptures, donor figures, and iconic images of bodhisattvas.

Perhaps the most interesting of the post-Borobudur Buddhist shrines of the 9th century is Candi Sari. It is an outstanding architectural invention. From the outside it appears as a large, rectangular, three-storied block, with the main entrance piercing the centre of one of the longer sides. The third story stands above a substantial architrave with horizontal moldings and antefixes. Two windows on each short side, three on each long, open into each story, though at the rear they are blind. The windows are crowned by large antefix-like cartouches of ornamental carving based on curvilinear pavilions hung with strings of gems. The uppermost windows are hooded with the Kala-monster motif. The roof bears rows of small stupas, and perhaps there was once a large central stupa. Inside, Candi Sari contains a processional corridor around three interior shrines that were possibly intended for images of the garbha-dhatu deities, as at Candi Mendut.

Temple of Shiva, the central temple of the Lara Jonggrang complex, Prambanan, Java, c. 900.Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-BadenThe last great monument of the central Javanese period, Lara Jonggrang at Prambanan, is indeed a colossal work, rivaling Borobudur. It was probably built soon after 900. Not Buddhist but Hindu, the shrine represents the cosmic mountain. There were originally 232 temples incorporated into the design. The plan was centred on a square court with four gates containing the eight principal temples. Facing east, the central and largest temple, some 120 feet (40 metres) high, was devoted to the image of Shiva. To the north and south it is flanked by slightly smaller temples devoted to the two other members of the Hindu trinity, Vishnu and Brahma. The smaller shrines contained many subsidiary images. The whole complex was enclosed, far off-centre, in an extremely large walled courtyard.

Although these are Hindu buildings, their high-terraced shrine roofs bear tiers of elongated and gadrooned stupas. The reliefs on these structures are especially beautiful. One series, representing the guardians of the directions, integrates the ornamental motifs with the plastic forms of the bodies in a most original way. The balustrades and inset panels abound with lively reliefs portraying various deities or scenes taken from the great Hindu classics, especially the Ramayana.

East Javanese period: 927–16th century

During the east Javanese period a very large number of monuments were produced at the eastern end of the island (after 1222) and in Bali (after c. 1050). Few single structures, however, are as impressive and as comprehensively planned as are the monuments of Borobudur or Lara Jonggrang.

Around the strange natural mountain with tiered peaks cut and built in stone called Mount Penanggungan there are 81 structures (10th century) of different kinds (now mostly in ruins). Prominent among these structures are bathing places. This mountain was identified by the people with the sacred Mount Meru, and its natural springs were believed to have a magical healing power and a mystical purifying capacity. Another such bathing place is Belahan (11th century). Made of brick, it, too, has extensive ruined temples. Belahan is supposed to have been the burial place of King Airlangga, who probably died about 1049. One of the greatest east Javanese icons formed the central figure against the back wall of the tank. Carved of red tufa (a porous rock), it shows the god Vishnu seated at peace on the back of his violently dramatic bird-vehicle, Garuda. It is said that the image represents the king himself in divine guise. Beside this image was a sculpture of a type associated with many of these sacred bathing sites. It is a relief of a four-armed goddess of abundance, her two lower hands holding jars pierced with holes, her two upper hands squeezing her breasts, which are also pierced; through the holes the sacred water flowed into the basin. There are many variants of this idea at the springs of Mount Penanggungan. On Bali the same kind of fountain sculpture appears at the Goa Gadjah, at Bedulu, in a spring-fed tank below a cave.

In both Java and Bali there are many rock-face relief carvings from this period (there are no secure dates). Some represent legendary scenes; others represent candis; the shallow chambers of others are thought to be royal tombs.

The structure that gives the best ideas of what the typical east Javanese shrine of the mid-13th century was like is Candi Kidal. The nucleus of the building is a square cell, with slightly projecting porticoes each hooded by an enormous Kala-monster head. But the cell itself is dwarfed both by the massive molded plinth upon which it stands and by the huge tower with which it is surmounted. The tower stands above an architrave stepped far out on tiered moldings. It is no longer composed of diminishing stories, as earlier towers were, but is conceived as a massive pyramidal obelisk made up of double bands of ornament spaced by stumpy pilasters and bands of recessed panels. The architectural projections and moldings distinguish Candi Kidal from earlier Javanese architecture, with its plain wall surfaces.

Many masterpieces of sculpture belong to the east Javanese period. Among them are some superb icons of Shiva and of a goddess of Buddhist wisdom from Singhasari and a splendidly “primitivist” image of the elephant-headed god of wealth from Bara, Blitar.

From the late 13th century onward a whole series of candis was created in eastern Java. As time went on the candis lost their monumental scale and became simply shrines within a series of courtyards on a pre-Indian pattern. From Candi Djago through Candi Panataran at Blitar (14th century) and Candi Surawana it is possible to trace the line of descent of the modern Balinese temple enclosures.

By the end of the 14th century, the figures in the relief sculpture at these shrines had come more and more to resemble the shadow puppets of the popular wayang drama. They adopt the stiff profile stance that presents both shoulders, while the trees and houses resemble the stereotype silhouette leather and wood cutouts used as properties in the shadow plays. The art of carving in the near-full round, however, did not follow the same course of evolution as the reliefs. Such work did become softer and more delicate in style, with accretions of broad floral forms, but well into the 15th century the icons retain something of the strength of older sculptural conceptions. Another plastic tradition that seems to have escaped domination by the wayang formula resulted in the production of beautiful small terra-cotta figures as part of the revetment (stone facing sustaining the embankment) of the east Javanese capital city of Majapahit. Like the reliefs, the many small excavated bronzes of Hindu scenes are under the wayang influence, three-dimensional though they may be. Curlicues proliferate, and the plasticity of bodies is virtually ignored.

16th century to the present

When Islam arrived in Indonesia, it used the repertoire of traditional ornament for its mosques and tombs; but, in conformity to Muslim custom, the representation of living creatures was excluded on religious buildings. The gates of the 16th-century mosque at Sendangduwur, Badjanegara, show a splendid example of this adaptation. The wings of the old Hindu Garuda, a colossal bird-vehicle of the high god Vishnu, frame the gate; the body and head are suppressed. Above the lintel are abstract tree-clad mountain forms recalling the imagery of the cosmic Meru; and legendary snakes hood the jambs. The 16th-century mosque at Kudus even has a gate based on the split-candi pattern used in Bali (see below Bali). Tombs such as that of Ratu Ibu at Airmata, on the island of Madura, add to their simple volumes elaborate but abstract variants of the scroll-filled antefixes of older architecture and of the petal-shaped aureoles of the larger east Javanese icons. In Sumatra the Muslim rulers encouraged a revival of the pre-Indian ancestor cult, along with its ancient and characteristic arts.


Pura Besakih, the mother temple of Bali, on Mount Agung, Bali, 14th century. In the centre is the 11-story meru dedicated to Shiva.Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-BadenThe rajas of eastern Java finally retreated before the Muslim invaders during the 16th century and departed to the island of Bali, where they remained. The old Javanese Indianized culture they brought with them survived and combined with animist folk elements. In Bali today that culture has bred a widespread popular art. There are now many hundreds of temples in Bali of varying age. Each family group has its own temple, dedicated to the ancestors; each village, too, has its temple, in which special attention is paid to a rich fertility goddess identified with the ancient Indian goddess of bounty, Shri. Special temples dedicated to the goddess of death stand near the cremation ground. There are numerous major temples—many associated with volcanic peaks—dedicated to different deities and spirits; they range in size and importance from Besakih on Mount Agung (where a megalith is incorporated as a phallic Shiva-emblem) to Panataram Sasih of Pedjeng (where the bronze drum called “the Moon of Bali” is preserved).

Balinese temples are conceived as multiple courts raised on terraces. The tall stone or brick and plaster gates are shaped like a candi-tower split down the centre; they are usually encrusted with ornament based upon deep multiple curlicues interspersed with simplified, two-dimensional relief figure sculpture. Fantastic three-dimensional guardians sometimes stand at the foot of the access staircase. Beyond the gates are one or two courts within which various ceremonies (including sacrifices and cockfights) may take place. The rearmost court backs onto the mountain, whence spirits descend temporarily when invoked. The court has no icons; at most, there is a seat for invisible deities. The structures in the court, mostly of wood and thatch, may be of many stories. (Such structures are called merus.) Sometimes the treasuries are ornamented with carving; and a few older stone meru towers in local shrines are carved with mythological figures.

Temple ceremonials, especially the cremation of distinguished people, evoked elaborate ritual art objects in precious metals, as well as in wood or fabric. All were characterized by exuberant and repetitive curvilinear floral ornament and by figures based on Indian legend, especially the Ramayana and parts of the Mahabharata. In the villages today, music, dance, sculpture, and painting are focused on the shrines and are practiced with an intensity unknown elsewhere in the world. Art is woven intimately into the life of the people. The masks carved of wood for the dances are specially refined, sometimes ornate versions of the masks used in the animist rituals of other Southeast Asian peoples. In the 20th and 21st centuries there have been numerous village sculptors and painters, who sell to tourists work based upon the old ceremonial arts. During the 1930s an outside impetus to develop their traditional legendary imagery in Western formats came from a German painter, Walter Spies, who lived on Bali. A landscape tradition was evolved, and the painters have been able to communicate something of the extravagant visual charm of their island, giving glimpses of luminous village and mountain landscape. The style of both sculptors and painters, however, is based upon gently undulating curves and is often highly ornamental, with repeated patterns. A repertoire of posture and gesture has been abstracted from the wayang. The work thus tends to prettiness rather than vigour; the sculptors create no truly intelligible volumes, and the painters fill their surfaces with naively structured shapes.

Java: 20th century

A conscious revival of traditional art was attempted in the 20th century, especially in Java, the main territory of modern Indonesia. There was government support for the resuscitation of old crafts—silverwork, for example. A number of artists adapted Westernized figure drawing to their own decorative compositions. The best known painter of Indonesia is the Javanese Affandi. He used oil paint to execute pictures of Indonesian subjects in a vividly coloured Expressionist impasto (thick application of pigment to the canvas). This European brushwork technique, however, contains a strong element of the sinuosity of Javanese tradition. As yet, Affandi is the only artist from Southeast Asia to have attained a personal worldwide reputation.

The Philippines

The population of this island group contains a number of different ethnic strata, the oldest of which shares in the general folk culture and its associated folk arts of the islands of Southeast Asia (see above Indonesia), with an emphasis on geometric simplification. An element in the Tagalog (a people of central Luzon) is perhaps descended from the oldest level of immigrants with a Paleolithic background. The Moro are Muslims who converted to Islam during the 15th and 16th centuries. Today they produce a decorative art in which old Muslim geometric motifs are combined with strong Chinese decorative influences (from Song times, Chinese ceramics and textiles were imported). The decoration is applied primarily to textiles, weapons, and containers to hold the betel nuts that are chewed throughout Southeast Asia.

San Agustin Church, Intramuros, Manila, the Philippines, 1599–1614.Bruce ColemanThe most important departure in Philippine art was the result of the Spanish conquest of 1571. Thereafter, the bishopric of Manila and all of Luzon became the focus for an elaborate development of Spanish colonial art, primarily devoted to the construction and decoration of Roman Catholic churches in the current flamboyant, highly ornate, and colourful colonial style. There is good colonial architecture in other islands, including Bohol and Cebu. A large quantity of religious sculpture of the canonical Christian subjects was imported from Mexico and from Spain itself. Sculptors and missionary painters also immigrated, and a powerful local school developed under the direct influence of the 17th-century Spanish artists Murillo and Alonso Cano. Local arts were encouraged in 1785 by the remission of taxes for religious artists. Because of the close colonial ties, the stylistic developments corresponded substantially with those elsewhere in the Spanish empire, and European prints served as models for local artists. Of the major early churches for which this sculpture and painting was executed, only San Agustin (1599–1614), in Manila, still stands; it was designed by Fray Antonio de Herrera, son or nephew of the great Spanish architect Juan de Herrera. During the 19th century the Neo-Gothic style was imported, mainly through the Philippine architect Felipe Roxas, who had traveled in Europe and England. San Sebastian in Manila is a notable example of this style. The Spaniard Hervas, Manila’s municipal architect from 1887 to 1893, favoured neo-Byzantine forms; e.g., Manila Cathedral (1878–79).

It was only in the later 19th century that any secular art flourished at all. Schools of fine art modeled on the European schools were set up between 1815 and 1820, and a number of painters began to work in versions of European academic styles, painting landscapes, portraits, and classical subjects. The best known among them are Juan Luna, Felix Resurrección Hidalgo, Antonio Malantic, and the genre painter Fabian de la Rosa. After the transfer of rule to the United States in 1898, industrialization began in earnest; the methods of the art schools were adapted, as in Europe, to the needs of modern commercial society. In the 1930s a substantial modern experimental school of Philippine architects began the remodeling of the industrial environment in terms of 20th-century architectural and design conceptions. Prominent names are Pablo Antonio, Carlos Arguelles, and Cesar Concio. Beginning in the 1930s but especially after World War II, artists in Manila adopted the Abstract and Expressionist styles current in the United States. After the devastation wrought by that war, Manila and other cities and towns were rebuilt, virtually anew, in local variants of the international style.

Folk arts

The arts of many regions in Southeast Asia remained either untouched or only slightly influenced by the Indianized arts of other regions. Such influence is found especially in regions where the gold trade flourished. In Sarawak (Bonkisam), for example, the remains of buildings similar to late Tantric east Javanese candis have been discovered. Among a few people (e.g., the Hmong of highland Vietnam), vestiges of Indian erotic temple imagery have been adapted to local fertility ceremonies, and most of the religious ideas of the region show at least faint traces of Indian influence.

Save for the megaliths and Dong Son bronzes, most of the known folk-art objects are relatively recent, although their inspiration and types belong to traditions far older and geographically more far-reaching than the Indianized traditions.

The two main non-Indian art styles in the whole region have been provisionally named the “monumental” and the “ornamental-fanciful.” They coexist virtually everywhere, though they probably represent two evolutionary phases. The principal manifestations of the monumental style are the megalithic monuments, although there is great variety among the megalithic customs of the many different populations in Sumatra, Laos, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines. The influence of the ornamental-fanciful style, which is characterized especially by the scrolled spiral, insinuates itself even into many of the decorative arts, particularly in the curvilinear and flamboyant inflection given to ornamental motives in the major Indianizing styles.

Ancestor figure from the Tanimbar Islands, Indonesia; in the Royal Tropical Institute Museum, Amsterdam. Height 38 cm.Courtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute, AmsterdamThe link between the two styles is probably the ubiquitous squatting ancestor figure, cocked knees supporting elbows, carved in soft wood or woven in cane or fibre. These figures may be either male or female. Under special social circumstances in recent times, very large wooden versions of the figure have been used as substitutes for more conventional, standing megalithic ancestral monuments (Sumatra and Sabah). The custom is probably an old one. There can be little doubt, for example, that the Theravada Buddhist images of Burma, Thailand, and Laos were accepted as special modifications of the ancestor image. The transition from revering numinous ancestor images whose identity had been forgotten to worshipping an Indianizing icon was easy for the tribal populations.

The complex significance of the original squatting ancestor figure enabled it to be used in a variety of contexts. It might have combined associations of the fetus, the fetal burial position, and female birth and intercourse positions, as well as a ceremonial posture assumed by the living. It came to be used primarily in wooden sculpture on all scales, but also in woven textiles (e.g., Iban), to represent the continuing power informing human existence, both in the purely ancestral sense of family continuity and identity and in the sense of the fertility of the land. Its earliest recorded appearance may be on Chinese Yangshao painted pottery (c. 2000 bce); but it appears in essentially the same form over a range of territory including Sumatra, Nias and Sunda islands, Java, Borneo, New Guinea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and out into northern Australia and Melanesia. It may be used purely as an ancestral image in a family shrine house or as a motif added to any one of a variety of implements to potentiate them; for example, large bowls (Sumatra), kris or sword handles (Java, Sumatra, Borneo), spoons (Timor, the Philippines), musical instruments (Borneo), and magicians’ staves (Borneo).

Gold kris, embossed scabbard and grip, from southern Celebes, Indonesia; in the Royal Tropical Institute Museum, Amsterdam. Overall length 40.5 cm.Courtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute, AmsterdamThe treatment of such figures may be invested with more or fewer of the characteristics of the ornamental-fanciful style, in those regions where this style prevails (e.g., Batak, Dayak). There are also special versions of the squatting figure that seem to belong especially to important magical crafts, such as the Javanese kris handle, on which miniature carvings can give an extraordinarily monumental effect. Sumatran Dayak hereditary magical staves may be carved with a “tower” or “tree” of such ancestor figures. On Nias, for example, along with the squatting figure, a standing figure in the bent-knee posture common in Polynesia also appears as a variant. In the Philippines similar variants are sometimes interpreted as vestiges from a remote Indian mythology, adopted probably for the sake of their cultural prestige. In southern Borneo the figure appears carved in the full round and as a pattern for woven textiles; it often has a protruding tongue and, sometimes, antlers—a combined motif known in the Changsha art of southern China (c. 300 bce). Antlers also appear on certain Sumatran knife hilt figures. A variety of designs, some of them “abstract,” are based on this figure. Among the Jarai of Vietnam, for example, a pattern of lozenges represents an abstraction from a group of these figures. Especially in the textiles of Sumba and other Indonesian islands, similar patterns, often referred to as decorated triangles, represent the same phenomenon. When, as in textiles, the anthropomorphic reference of the abstract pattern is lost, the male genitals may remain to assert the ancestor significance.

The association between the squatting figure and the widely practiced cult of the skull is manifested in the combined cult of ancestors, headhunting, and head worship. Among the Wa of Myanmar, for example, the squatting figure in a lozenge abstraction decorates the chests in which the severed heads of enemies are stored. Virtually everywhere among the early farmers of Southeast Asia, such heads were regarded as repositories of great spiritual power. The cult of the skull has produced a version of the squatting figure that is commonly known by the Indonesian word korvar; it is a figure with an ancestral skull in place of a carved head. Such figures are especially common in the more easterly island cultures. The ghostly power of the deceased ancestor can thus become present and available to his descendants—to give oracular advice, for example. A related idea is incorporated in the masks used in a wide variety of rituals and dance-dramas throughout Southeast Asia; for example, among the Batak of Sumatra and the Dayak of Borneo, where especially fine examples are made. There can be little doubt that the same idea (blended with imagery from the imported Hindu epics) underlies the range of elaborate masks that were once used in the Javanese and now can be seen in the Balinese wayang dances. It is possible that the flamboyant flame skull protuberances and winglike flanges ornamenting the head in so much of the Buddhist art produced in Myanmar and Thailand reflect a persistent but submerged interest in the cult of the skull.

Brass receptacle from Krui, Sumatra, in the shape of a naga (mythical serpent) in the Royal Tropical Institute Museum, Amsterdam. Height 5 cm.Courtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute, AmsterdamAnother major motif is the snake, which (even in areas where direct Indianizing influence was not strong) is frequently combined with imagery derived from the cult of the powerful, magical Hindu naga; often many-headed, this serpent is the patron and guardian of water and treasure, both material and spiritual. The snake motif has also been blended with images of the Chinese dragon, going back perhaps to Chinese Han ornamental designs. Outstanding examples are found on the elaborate relief-carved doors of Sumatran Batak houses; “flying” roof finials in many parts of Indonesia; and in much Borneo Dayak ornament, from tattoos to carved bamboos and bronze body ornaments. The snake is the magico-mythical creature that gives both its bodily shape (either straight or undulant) and its metaphysical power to the kris. Distributed from Malacca to Celebes, these swords (the earliest known dated 1342) reached their high point of artistic development in Java. A variety of other motifs originating on the mainland of Asia is found in many of the surviving folk arts of Indonesia. Among them are the “man in the embrace of an animal” (Dayak kris handles) and animals “stacked” one above the other (Timor, Indonesia).

The ornamental-fantastic style

Door, wood and shell from Kayan or Kenyah, Kalimantan, Borneo, 19th century; in the Honolulu Academy of Arts.Photograph by L. Mandle. Honolulu Academy of Arts, gift of The Christensen Fund, 2001 (10183.1a,b)The styles in which these variations on basic motifs are carried out vary principally according to the preponderance of the sinuous curves and spirals of the ornamental-fantastic style. This style serves as the basis for decoration and as a method of artistic phrasing. It may have made its way into Southeast Asia as late as the 1st millennium bce, being formally related to the spirals used in Chinese Neolithic, Shang, and Zhou bronze art. (It should, perhaps, be mentioned that Chinese art, certainly until well into the Common Era, was itself far more “tribal” than later Chinese tradition recognizes.) Probably connoting spirituality, the spiral imagery appears in Southeast Asian magical art at all levels, from the textiles of Java and the incised bamboo implements or carved doors of Dayak Borneo to the ornament on the costumes of sculptured dancers or deities at every major city site. Given a fiery upward inflection, it appears in the finials on major Indianized stone architecture and on the carved wooden gables of Burmese and Thai Buddhist halls. There is not always complete stylistic consistency within any one cultural group. For example, the fantastic snake-dragon creatures carved in deep relief on the housedoors of the Batak may be extravagantly sinuous, with many spirals, while their figure sculpture adheres to the sterner plastic idiom, virtually without any linear sinuosity. Among the Dayak of Borneo the fantastic style may be confined entirely to surface ornament. On Indonesian islands, ancestral figures may be relatively static and foursquare, while the decorative carving and textiles may display considerable linear fantasy. A special version of the ornamental-fantastic style characterizes the surviving Indianized arts of Bali and Java, intruding even into sculptural inventions derived from strongly three-dimensional medieval Indianizing patterns. Thus, the decoration on the wayang cutout leather puppets, with its somewhat stereotyped curlicues, has proliferated at the expense of the three-dimensional sense (see above Indonesia). Balinese wayang masks may be carved entirely out of curling surfaces and completed in paint with sinuous eyebrows and mustaches. In many parts of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Sumatra, and Indonesia, designs originally based upon Indian flowering-scroll patterns can be found in architecture, textiles, theatre costumes, musical instruments, and wooden utensils, all efflorescing with extravagant curling ornament. It is unfortunately true that only in a few of its most serious manifestations does this kind of ornament display substantial artistic invention, with carefully varied, asymmetrical, complementary, and counterchanged curves. Usually, it degenerates into repetitive space filling, without variety or formal meaning.


Javanese batik textile accented with gilding; in the Royal Tropical Institute Museum, Amsterdam.Courtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute, AmsterdamPerhaps the types of folk art best known in the West are the textiles, especially batik and ikat. Both names refer to techniques practiced by different groups of people, who must have learned it from each other. Essentially Javanese but known in other islands, batik may have resulted from the imitation with dyes of South Indian painted cloths, probably before 1700. The essence of the technique is that melted wax is poured from a small metal kettle onto areas of a plain cotton cloth, which is then dyed, only the unwaxed parts taking the colour. The process can be repeated with several different colours. The oldest basic colours are indigo and brown; red and yellow were used later. The possible patterns range from lozenges and circlets through a large repertoire of cursive animal and plant forms. The batik technique can produce sumptuous and complex designs that not even the most elaborate weaving techniques can duplicate. It was encouraged by the Muslim rulers as a major element of social expression in garments and hangings.

Ikat cloth from Sumba Timur, Lesser Sunda Islands; in the J. and R. Langewis Collection, Castricum, The Netherlands.Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-BadenIkat is known among the Batak, in Cambodia, and especially among the dispersed Dayak people. It, too, probably originated in India. The extraordinarily difficult ikat textiles (woven cotton and occasionally silk, especially in Cambodia) are made primarily for use in important ceremonials and were regarded by their makers as major works of art. Before being woven, the thread is tightly tied at carefully calculated points in the hank (coiled or looped bundle); this is then dyed, the tied parts not taking up dye. The process may be repeated for different colours. As a consequence of the predyeing, designs appear as the thread is woven. In most ikat only the warp (the series of yarns extended lengthwise in the loom and crossed by the weft) is so treated; but in southern Sumatra a tie-dyed floating weft is added to the plain weft. Naturally, ikat designs tend to be static and more or less rectilinear. In the finest ikat, however, birds and animals, spirits and houses, and, in Cambodia, a vestigial iconography of royal Buddhism may be formalized into extremely beautiful banded compositions.