Chinese sources play an important role in the historiography of ancient Brunei. The earliest known description of Brunei can be found in the book of Liang. During the Liang dynasty in the 6th century AD, many Chinese monks sailing to India landed in Brunei. During the Ming dynasty, Brunei was described in accounts of various Chinese travellers, such as Huang Xingzeng’s book Xi Yang Chao Gong Dian Lu (Tributes from the Western Countries) and Zhang Xie’s book Dong Xi Yang Kao (Studies on the Eastern and Western Oceans).
Ancient ceramics, which are usually well conserved in tropical climates, constitute valuable evidence for the dating of excavation sites and the study of historic cultures and trade relations. Peninsular Malaysia was a stopover for merchants travelling from East to West and vice versa on the maritime Silk Road, and ceramics were also transported on the inland river routes. Excavations in Malaysia, especially in ancient ports, have revealed porcelain from various origins including China, India, the Middle East and several Southeast Asian countries.
Sumatra was influenced by Indian culture from the 6th century AD onwards. The kingdom of Srivijaya became an important centre of Buddhism. There are various archaeological traces of the development of Buddhism in Sumatra from the 7th to the 14th century AD, such as inscriptions, religious buildings and bronze and stone sculptures. Many of these artefacts have a Tantric character, which corresponds to parallel developments in East Java. Tantric Buddhism reached Sumatra already during the 7th century AD.
Ancient Korea was renowned for its textiles. It was probably closely connected to the emergence of sericulture, which had its centre in China in the nearby Shandong province. The English word “silk” might have its etymological origin in Ancient Korean. The Korean language was influenced by Western elements which reached the peninsula through China and Mongolia.
After the Portuguese reached China in 1514 and Japan in 1542, they soon started trading with porcelain from these countries. Other Europeans also started to engage in the ceramics trade. During the 17th and 18th centuries, most porcelain was exported to Europe in bulk to be used as tea and table ware. It was mainly blue-and-white, but there was also a smaller number of more costly overglaze painted ceramics.
The mural paintings in Ajanta constitute a unique example of ancient Buddhist art in Asia. They are the only well preserved mural paintings from this era in India. These paintings from the Gupta period had an important impact on the arts in the rest of India and Sri Lanka. Furthermore, the Indian pictorial tradition spread to the Northeast, East and Southeast Asia via the Silk Road. In the Himalaya, the Ajanta style had a very significant influence on Buddhist art.
In Buddhist art, two different ways of worshipping Shakayamuni have led to the emergence of two types of the triad format. From the Dharma cult, due to which the Dharma (the truth) is the essence of Buddha, has sprung the format of the Buddha surrounded by two attendants. In the context of Mahayana Buddhism, these attendants came to be represented as Mahayana Bodhisattvas. The Buddha cult, according to which there had been many other Buddhas before the birth of Shakyamuni, has given rise to a format showing three Mahayana Buddhas.
Indian society before the birth of Buddhism and Arab society before the birth of Islam share several characteristics, such as polytheism, the worshipping of idols and the existence of great social inequalities. The Buddha and the Prophet Mohammed were opposed to these. Both religions attempted to unite and find a balance between Eastern and Western elements, between the worldly, material side of life and its spiritual side, between the tangible and the intangible, the profane and the sacred.
The corpus of poems known as Sangam literature was produced over six centuries, from around 300 BC to 300 AD, by Tamils from very diverse social backgrounds. It was compiled in anthologies several centuries later. These works provide insight into early Tamil culture and into trade relations between South India and the Mediterranean, West Asia and Southeast Asia. Due to its codified nature and to the impossibility of establishing a precise chronology, the heroic Sangam poetry constitutes a difficult source for historic research.
Along the “Grand Route”, an ancient caravan route which used to link the Kashmir region to Nepal and Tibet across the Himalaya, a large number of monasteries and temples can be found. The numerous religious artworks in the area are rooted in diverse traditions. Various Buddhist and Hindi representations of deities can for instance be traced to prototypes from the prehistoric Harappan culture in the Indus valley.
