Ancient Indian Colonization in South-East Asia c7.73

c7.73

Far more plausible causes for the Hindu colonization are the improvements in navigation, particularly in the art of constructing large vessels which could carry six or seven hundered passengers. Of this we have clear evidence in Chinese texts. According to these texts, no Chinese vessels plied in the Indian Ocean at the beginning of the Christian era, but products of the western countries reached China by way of sea at the beginning of the first century B.C. and probably even somewhat earlier.11a We gather from a text of the first century A.D. that even then Chinese merchandise, and probably also Chinese merchants, had to be transhipped to the vessels of the barbarians which were big enough to carry six or seven hundred passengers. Who these barbarians were, has not been specified and there is no reason to think, as some European scholars do, that they were Persians, or that the technique of building large vessels originated in Persian gulf.¹² As a matter of fact, the known facts would certainly favour the presumption that the knowledge of the maritime developments referred to above should also be credited to the Indians, although we have no evidence from Indian sources. It is, however, easy to understand how such arts, even if they originate in certain countries, are quickly learnt by other countries in close contact with them. We know that, partly due to this reason and partly to the discovery of monsoon-winds by Hippalus, to be noted below, there was a large increase in the volume of trade and navigation between western countries and India in the early centuries of Christian era. We may hold that for similar reasons India, too, had developed her trade in the east about the same period, and this satisfactorily explains the beginnings of Hindu Colonization in South-East Asia during the early centuries of the Christian era.