The Pre-Colonial Heritage of the South China Sea

The South China Sea has a long history as a conduit of trade, migration, and cultural flows across Maritime Asia. Historical documentation and archaeological finds from the late first millennium BCE onward provide important information on the activities of Asian maritime societies in this maritime zone. Beginning with Southeast Asians, followed by the Indians and Middle Easterners in the first millennium CE, and the Chinese by the early second millennium CE, the South China Sea came to be the location of shipping, commerce, and diplomacy, bringing together Asia’s civilizational and secondary societies along the eastern half of the maritime Asian Silk Road. As the various Asian states’ involvement in international trade and relations, for fiscal and political reasons, evolved, so too did the policies of these states pertaining to maritime trade and diplomacy change. These developments, in turn, had a fundamental impact on the vicissitudes of the activities that took place across the South China Sea. The nature of operations of the mercantile and merchant marine communities evolved in tandem with these changes. By the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century, the South China Sea was already an established maritime zone, with the West being the latest in a series of networks to begin operating in this space.