1
In most of the countries which we have been considering, the native civilization of the present day is still Indian in origin, although in the former territories of Champa this Indian phase has been superseded by Chinese culture with a little Mohammedanism. But in another area we find three successive stages of culture, indigenous, Indian and Mohammedan. This area includes the Malay Peninsula with a large part of the Malay Archipelago, and the earliest stratum with which we need concern ourselves is Malay. The people who bear this name are remarkable for their extraordinary powers of migration by sea, as shown by the fact that languages connected with Malay are spoken in Formosa and New Zealand, in Easter Island and Madagascar, but their originality both in thought and in the arts of life is small. The three stages are seen most clearly in Java where the population was receptive and the interior accessible. Sumatra and Borneo also passed through them in a fashion but the indigenous element is still predominant and no foreign influence has been able to affect either island as a whole. Islam gained no footing in Bali which remains curiously Hindu but it reached Celebes and the southern Philippines, in both of which Indian influence was slight[369]. The destiny of south-eastern Asia with its islands depends on the fact that the tide of trade and conquest whether Hindu, Moslim or European, flowed from India or Ceylon to the Malay Peninsula and Java and thence northwards towards China with a reflux westwards in Champa and Camboja. Burma and Siam lay outside this track. They received their culture from India mainly by land and were untouched by Mohammedanism. But the Mohammedan current which affected the Malays was old and continuous. It started from Arabia in the early days of the Hijra and had nothing to do with the Moslim invasions which entered India by land.