Bronze Age: Dong Son Culture (c. 5th–1st Century Bce) | Britannica

1st–10th century

There is good evidence of Indian contacts from the 1st century ce. Sites in southern Thailand have revealed a number of Indian etched beads, and early Pyu and Mon sites have yielded coins and beads from the early centuries ce. There is much to suggest that Hindu and Buddhist sites coexisted, with ritual objects associated with both religions having been recovered from the same settlement. Although Hinduism preceded Buddhism in the region, Buddhism appears to have been particularly popular among the Indian merchant classes. Traders established coastal and river-mouth settlements, where commercial contacts were established and spread to the hinterlands and islands. At these larger sites, monasteries were established under the patronage of local rulers. Images of the Buddha dating from as early as the 6th century and based upon Indian types were found in widely dispersed locales in Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. Many of these images may well have been produced in the kingdoms of the Mon people. It is because of inscriptions written in the Mon language, which are contemporary with Dvaravati art of the 6th–11th century, that this art style is often identified with the Mon peoples of northeast and central Thailand. By the 5th century the first Hindu kingdoms were 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 ce, was that of the Pyu people in the upper Irrawaddy River valley. Of the numerous Pyu sites identified, the fortified cities of Beikthano, Shri Kshetra (modern Hmawza, Burma), and Halin were three of the largest excavated by the 21st century. At Beikthano (200 bce–300 ce) the general absence of Buddhist statuary and relics and of Pyu inscriptions reflects an early phase of Buddhist development, whereas in Shri Kshetra a wealth of excavated objects assign the main period of occupation to the 5th–8th century ce and testify to a flowering of Buddhist development. (See below Burma.)

In the 1st century ce 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 what is now Peninsular Malaysia 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 to 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 a number of Theravada Buddhist city-states of Dvaravati flourished in central and northeast Thailand. The historical record of Dvaravati is very limited and provides a somewhat shaky basis for referring to it as a kingdom. Its wider geographical extent is not known. It is likely that a number of Thai city-states existed, one of which went by the name of Dvaravati. This entity flourished until the 11th century, when the Khmer captured it. 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.

Almost contemporary with Chenla was the rise of the central Javanese kingdom. Soon after 600 ce the earliest surviving Hindu temples were built. About 770 the Shailendra dynasty began its long series of superb stone-cut monuments, both Hindu and Buddhist, which culminated 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 what is now Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra and was centred at Palembang. The Javanese Shailendra ruled most of Peninsular Malaysia 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 about the 2nd century ce 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, 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 was always so strongly under the influence of China that it can best be characterized as a provincial Chinese style.