Southeast Asia

• 1. Introduction

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  Southeast Asia covers about 4,500,000 square kilometres, which is 9.80% of Asia and only 3% of Earth's total land area. Yet that compact stretch of land and water holds nearly 800 native languages and hundreds of ethnic groups. It sits south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of mainland Australia. The Sunda plate runs beneath most of it, while the Pacific Ring of Fire and the Alpide belt meet inside Indonesia. The result is a place of frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

  A region this layered raises questions that take time to answer. Who lived here first, and what does the world's oldest rock art in the caves of Sulawesi and Borneo tell us about them? How did Indian Brahmins, Chinese monks, and Muslim traders reshape its courts and faiths? Why did European powers colonise nearly every part of it except Thailand? What happens to coastal cities like Jakarta when the sea rises three times faster than the global average along the Philippine coast? The answers run from Homo erectus to Angkor Wat to a sinking capital that a government has already promised to abandon.

• 2. Drawing The Borders

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  Howard Malcolm, an American pastor, first used the term "Southeast Asia" in 1839 in his book Travels in South-Eastern Asia. His definition included only the mainland and left out the maritime section entirely. The Allies gave the phrase its official weight during World War II, forming the South East Asia Command, or SEAC, in 1943. SEAC popularised the term even though its own boundaries were odd. It excluded the Philippines and much of Indonesia while including Ceylon. A roughly standard usage settled in only by the late 1970s.

  Earlier names tell their own story. Europeans called the region, along with part of South Asia, the East Indies or simply the Indies until the 20th century. Chinese sources called it Nanyang, meaning the "Southern Ocean". European geographers named the mainland Indochina because it sat between China and the Indian subcontinent and drew cultural influence from both. In the 20th century that term narrowed to the territories of former French Indochina: Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

  Geographers split the region into two halves. Mainland Southeast Asia, the Indochinese Peninsula, takes in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Maritime Southeast Asia holds Brunei, East Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Timor-Leste. Peninsular Malaysia sits on the mainland yet shares so many ecological and cultural affinities with the islands that it is often grouped with them. The edges stay disputed. Some definitions reach toward Taiwan, Hong Kong, or even Sri Lanka, while Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands lie on the Australian plate and the United Nations counts them as part of Oceania.

• 3. The First Inhabitants

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  Homo erectus reached the region roughly 1,500,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene. Much later, Homo floresiensis lived here until at least 50,000 years ago before going extinct. Distinct Homo sapiens groups arrived between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, some scholars argue even earlier. They left behind parietal art dating from 40,000 to 60,000 years ago in the caves of Sulawesi and Borneo. It is currently the world's oldest. During much of this time, lower sea levels joined Western Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula into a single landmass called Sundaland, with the dry Gulf of Thailand linking it to the mainland.

  A distinctive Basal-East Eurasian ancestry originated in Mainland Southeast Asia around 50,000 BC. It then spread south and north, giving rise to both Papuan-related Oceanian lineages and basal East Asian lineages related to the Onge and the Tianyuan man. One Holocene hunter-gatherer from South Sulawesi carried roughly 50% "Basal-East Asian" ancestry, modeled as Onge or Tianyuan-like. The individual sat genetically between the Andamanese Onge and the Papuans of Oceania. Samples from the Hoabinhian lithic complex, dated from about 10,000 to 2000 BCE, show the closest affinities to the Tianyuan man of northern China and the Jōmon peoples of Japan.

  In the late Neolithic, the Austronesian peoples migrated from Taiwan in the first seaborne human migration, the Austronesian Expansion. They reached the northern Philippines between 7,000 BC and 2,200 BC, then spread to the Northern Mariana Islands and Borneo by 1500 BC and to the rest of Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Vietnam, and Palau by 1000 BC. These seafarers sailed west to Madagascar and east into Micronesia and Polynesia. Gold from Sumatra is thought to have reached as far west as Rome, where Pliny the Elder wrote of Chryse and Argyre, two legendary islands rich in gold and silver.

• 4. The Indianized Kingdoms

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  Around 400 BCE, contact with the Indian subcontinent began a gradual process of Indianisation. Indian Brahmins and monks were invited by local rulers to live in their realms. Sanskrit and Pali became the elite language, making the region part of the Indosphere. Local rulers converted to Hinduism or Buddhism to reinforce their legitimacy and ease trade with South Asian states. The Pyu city-states of inland Myanmar, the region's first Indian-influenced polities, already existed around the second century BCE and served as an overland trading hub between India and China.

  The Funan states, centered in the Mekong Delta, formed in the first century and dominated mainland trade for about five centuries. As maritime routes through the Malacca and Sunda Straits grew, Funan declined and powers like Srivijaya rose. Srivijaya controlled both straits for more than five centuries until the Chola Empire of India invaded in 1025, taking the king captive and reshaping power across the region. The Khmer Empire then entered a golden age from the 11th to 13th century. Its capital, Angkor, hosts Angkor Wat and the Bayon, and satellite imaging has shown it was the largest pre-industrial urban centre in the world.

  Mongol invasions struck in the 13th century. The Mongols attacked Đại Việt and Champa in 1258, 1285, and 1287, failing each time, though both agreed to become tributary states of the Yuan dynasty. In Java in 1292, the Mongols demanded submission from the Singhasari kingdom, which injured their envoys. A local prince, Raden Wijaya, first helped the Mongols defeat the rival Kadiri, then turned on them and drove their fleet from Java. In 1293 he founded the Majapahit Empire. Its greatest ruler, Hayam Wuruk, reigned from 1350 to 1389, when its influence spanned parts of Sulawesi, Maluku, and the southern Philippines. Majapahit, the last major Hindu kingdom, collapsed around 1500.

• 5. The Coming Of Islam

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  Phra Ong Mahawangsa, the king of Kedah, became the first ruler in the region to abandon the traditional Hindu faith and convert to Islam, establishing the Sultanate of Kedah in 1136. Samudera Pasai followed in 1267. The King of Malacca, Parameswara, married the princess of Pasai, and their son became the first sultan of Malacca. Malacca then grew into a center of Islamic study and maritime trade, and other rulers followed. Islam had first touched the region in the eighth century, when the Umayyads opened sea trade, but it spread widely only centuries later.

  Muslim traders from South Arabia, specifically Hadhramaut, carried the religion through their large volume of trade, and many settled in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Gujarati Muslims played a pivotal role in establishing the faith. The Indonesian scholar Hamka, who lived from 1908 to 1981, wrote in 1961 that the development of Islam in Indonesia and Malaya was intimately related to the Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He. The reach of Islam impressed and alarmed European observers. Melchor Davalos, a Spanish officer in Manila, complained that Persians, Arabs, Egyptians, and Turks had brought the faith, and that Moors from Tunis and Granada had come as well.

  The Maluku Islands and New Guinea were never Indianised, and their people stayed predominantly animist until the 15th century, when Islam began to spread there. Some groups resisted conversion entirely and still hold their original animist beliefs, including the Dayaks in Kalimantan, the Igorots in Luzon, and the Shans in eastern Myanmar.

• 6. Empires From The West

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  Tomé Pires, a Portuguese writer, captured the value of the Strait of Malacca in his Suma Oriental: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice." Western influence entered in the 16th century with the Portuguese arrival in Malacca, Maluku, and the Philippines, the last settled by the Spaniards, who used it to trade between Asia and Latin America. Across the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch built the Dutch East Indies, the French built Indochina, and the British built the Strait Settlements. By the 19th century, every Southeast Asian country was colonised except Thailand.

  The deeper takeover came through commerce. European interests began as trade links, then evolved into annexation as traders lobbied for control to protect their activities. The Dutch moved into Indonesia, the British into Malaya and parts of Borneo, the French into Indochina, and the Spanish and the United States into the Philippines. Production shifted to serve market demand: rubber plantations in Malaysia, Java, Vietnam, and Cambodia, tin mining in Malaya, and rice fields in the Mekong Delta and the Irrawaddy River delta. Christian missionaries grew widespread, and by 2021 about 89 percent of the Filipino population was Christian.

  The United States took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, granted internal autonomy in 1934, and independence in 1946. During World War II, Imperial Japan invaded most of the former western colonies under the banner of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". The occupation brought live human experimentation, the "comfort women" system, the Manila massacre, and forced labour involving four to ten million romusha in Indonesia. A later UN report stated that four million people died in Indonesia from famine and forced labour. The decades since brought a long contemporary contest, including the Philippines challenging China at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which ruled for the Philippines in 2016.

• 7. A Living Frontier

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  The Wallace Line splits the Indonesian Archipelago along a tectonic plate boundary, separating Asian species in the west from Australasian species in the east, with a mixed zone called Wallacea between Java, Borneo, and Papua. On Borneo and Sumatra live the orangutan, the Asian elephant, the Malayan tapir, the Sumatran rhinoceros, and the Bornean clouded leopard. The Komodo dragon, the largest living lizard, inhabits Komodo, Rinca, Flores, and Gili Motang. The Philippine eagle, the national bird of the Philippines, is considered by scientists the largest eagle in the world. Three subspecies of tiger survive, all endangered, and the Javan rhinoceros faces extinction with only a handful remaining in western Java.

  The waters hold even greater abundance. Southeast Asian coral reefs have the highest biodiversity of any marine ecosystem on Earth. Conservation International reports that Raja Ampat in Indonesia records the highest marine diversity ever measured, and it dubs the Verde Passage the world's "center of the center of marine shore fish biodiversity". The Coral Triangle joins Indonesia, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea at the heart of the world's coral reef life. Yet the rainforest, the second largest on Earth after the Amazon, is being logged, especially in Borneo. Predictions hold that more than 40% of the region's animal and plant species could be wiped out in the 21st century.

  Haze has become a regular event. The worst regional hazes came in 1997 and 2006, caused mostly by "slash and burn" activities in Sumatra and Borneo. Several countries signed the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution in response. During the 2013 haze, Muar recorded an API level of 746 on the 23rd of June 2013 at around 7 am, a hazardous reading.

• 8. Riches And Rising Seas

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  Spices first tied this region to the world: pepper, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg drew Indian and Arab merchants, then Spaniards on the Manila galleon, the Dutch, the British, and the French. The overseas Chinese community shaped the region's economies, with roots in 16th-century migration from southern China and a rapid increase after the Communist Revolution of 1949. Some 30 million overseas Chinese live in Southeast Asia today. By the early 21st century, Indonesia had become the largest economy in the region and its only member of the G-20. By GDP per capita in 2023, Singapore led at US$84,500 nominal, followed by Brunei and Malaysia.

  The region's energy hunger more than doubled, rising from 458 TWh in 2003 to 1,258 TWh in 2023. By 2023-97% of the population had electricity access, but fossil fuels still made up 83.5% of the total primary energy supply. Coal remains central, and Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines still plan substantial new coal capacity. Under the ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation 2026 to 2030, member states aim for a 30% renewable share in primary energy and 45% in installed capacity by 2030. Installed solar of around 30.5 GW and wind of 8.3 GW remain less than 1% of theoretical potential.

  The sea is the sharpest threat. Along Philippine coasts, sea level rise runs three times faster than the global average, and 199 of Indonesia's 514 cities and districts could face tidal flooding by 2050. Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, and Jakarta rank among the 20 coastal cities projected to suffer the world's highest annual flood losses by 2050. Land subsidence sank parts of Jakarta by up to 28 cm a year between 1982 and 2010. By 2019, the Indonesian government had committed to relocating the capital to another city.