Southeast Asia Comprises of ??
Southeast Asia (or Southeastern Asia) is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic and volcanic activity.
Southeast Asia consists of two geographic regions: Mainland Southeast Asia, also known as Indochina, comprises Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand, Vietnam and Peninsular Malaysia, and Maritime Southeast Asia, which is analogous to the Malay Archipelago, comprises Brunei, East Malaysia, East Timor, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Geographically Hong Kong, Macau,and Taiwan are sometimes grouped in the Southeast Asia subregion, although politically they are rarely grouped as such. The same is true for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India, and occasionally regions of the Seven Sister States such as Manipur.
Mainland Southeast Asia includes:
| Maritime Southeast Asia includes:
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Looking into each region
North Australia "Aussie" is a colloquialism that was used during World War I to refer to Australian-born people of British or Irish ancestry. Initially used to describe a happy-go-lucky character capable of battling through hard times, the term was employed after World War II to distinguish those born domestically from "new" immigrants from western and southern Europe. | The Arnhem Land plateau is an enormous sandstone tableland, roughly the size of Switzerland, that lies in Australia’s tropical north. The western areas of this plateau are part of the World Heritage Kakadu National Park, and the larger eastern part lies in the west of Arnhem Land. This is country that has been home to Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years and the rock paintings found throughout the plateau are thought to represent the longest continuous record of human culture anywhere in the world. |
Brunei Darussalam | A tiny country with a small population, Brunei was the only Malay state in 1963 to choose to remain a British dependency rather than join the Malaysian Federation. It became independent in 1984 and, thanks to its large reserves of oil and gas, now has one of the highest standards of living in the world. Its ruling royals, led by the head of state Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, possess a huge private fortune. |
India (Andaman Nicobar Islands ) | In the Andaman Islands, the various Andamanese people maintained their separated existence through the vast majority of this time, diversifying into distinct linguistic, cultural and territorial groups. By the 1850s when they first came into sustained contact by outside groups, the indigenous people of the Andamans were:
The indigenous people of the Nicobars (unrelated to the Andamanese) have a similarly isolated and lengthy association with the islands. There are two main groups:
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Cambodia | The fate of Cambodia shocked the world when the radical communist Khmer Rouge under their leader Pol Pot seized power in 1975 after years of guerrilla warfare. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died during the next three years, many from exhaustion or starvation. Others were tortured and executed. Today, Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the world and relies heavily on aid. Foreign donors have urged the government to clamp down on pervasive corruption. |
China (Hainan) | China is the world's most populous country, with a continuous culture stretching back nearly 4,000 years. Hainan has always been on the fringe of the Chinese cultural sphere. Traditionally, the island was a place of exile for criminals and disgraced officials. As a frontier region celebrated by such exiled poets as Su Dongpo, Hainan acquired an air of mystery and romance. The influx of large numbers of mainlanders after 1950 - particularly in the 1970s, when young Chinese from southern Guangdong were assigned to state farms to help develop Hainan, and in the 1980s, when thousands more came to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered - has perpetuated the frontier atmosphere on the island. |
East Malaysia | Malaysia boasts one of south-east Asia's most vibrant economies, the fruit of decades of industrial growth and political stability. Its multi-ethnic, multi-religious society encompasses a majority Muslim population in most of its states and an economically-powerful Chinese community. |
East Timor | East Timor's road to independence - achieved on 20 May 2002 - was long and traumatic. The people of the first new nation of the century suffered some of the worst atrocities of modern times. An independent report commissioned by the UN transitional administration in East Timor said that at least 100,000 Timorese died as a result of Indonesia's 25-year occupation, which ended in 1999. |
Indonesia | Spread across a chain of thousands of islands between Asia and Australia, Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population. Ethnically it is highly diverse, with more than 300 local languages. The people range from rural hunter-gatherers to a modern urban elite. Indonesia has seen great turmoil in recent years, having faced the Asian financial crisis, the fall of President Suharto after 32 years in office, the first free elections since the 1960s, the loss of East Timor, independence demands from restive provinces, bloody ethnic and religious conflict and a devastating tsunami. |
Thailand | Thailand is the only country in south-east Asia to have escaped colonial rule. Buddhist religion, the monarchy and the military have helped to shape its society and politics. The 1980s brought a boom to its previously agricultural economy and had a significant impact on Thai society as thousands flocked to work in industry and the services sector. |
Laos | Laos, one of the world's few remaining communist states, is one of east Asia's poorest countries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 it has struggled to find its position within a changing political and economic landscape. Communist forces overthrew the monarchy in 1975, heralding years of isolation. Laos began opening up to the world in the 1990s, but despite tentative reforms, it remains poor and dependent on international donations. |
Christmas Islands | The Territory of Christmas Island is a territory of Australia in the Indian Ocean. It is located 2,600 kilometres (1,600 mi) northwest of the Western Australian city of Perth, 360 km (220 mi) south of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, and 975 km (606 mi) ENE of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. |
Cocos (Keeling) Islands | The Territory of Cocos (Keeling) Islands, also called Cocos Islands and Keeling Islands, is a territory of Australia, located in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Christmas Island and approximately midway between Australia and Sri Lanka. The territory consists of two atolls and twenty-seven coral islands, of which two, West Island and Home Island, are inhabited with a total population of approximately 600. |
Philippine | Philippine culture is a combination of Eastern and Western cultures. The Philippines exhibits aspects found in other Asian countries with a Malay heritage, yet its culture also displays a significant amount of Spanish and American influences. Traditional festivities known as barrio fiestas (district festivals) to commemorate the feast days of patron saints are common. The Moriones Festival and Sinulog Festival are a couple of the most well-known. These community celebrations are times for feasting, music, and dancing. Some traditions, however, are changing or gradually being forgotten due to modernization. The Bayanihan Philippine National Folk Dance Company has been lauded for preserving many of the various traditional folk dances found throughout the Philippines. They are famed for their iconic performances of Philippine dances such as the tinikling and singkil that both feature the use of clashing bamboo poles. |
Singapore | Racial and religious harmony is regarded by the government as a crucial part of Singapore's success and played a part in building a Singaporean identity.Due to the many races and cultures in the country, there is no single set of culturally acceptable behaviours. People in Singapore are generally well educated, and although the country is socially conservative, some liberalisation has occurred. Foreigners also make up 42% of the population in Singapore and have a strong influence on Singaporean culture. A.T. Kearney named Singapore the most globalised country in the world in 2006 in its Globalization Index.The Economist Intelligence Unit in its "Quality-of-Life Index" ranks Singapore as having the best quality of life in Asia and eleventh overall in the world. |
Important Physical Geographic Points about Southeast Asia 2. Southeast Asia is conventionally divided into two cultural, linguistic, and geographic regions: a. Mainland Southeast Asia - the countries of Thailand, Laos, Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam; b. Insular Southeast Asia - the island or peninsular countries of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, East Timor. 3. While many countries in Southeast Asia today have dense populations, in the past the region had considerably lower population density than major Asian countries like India, China and Japan. The low population density placed a premium on the ability of leaders and rulers to attract people to various population centers. River valleys, deltas, and major maritime trading ports that were well-positioned along trading routes between India and China were the areas where early population centers, major kingdoms, and great temples first arose. Southeast Asian maritime skills were highly developed in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The combination of rice agriculture and maritime skills led to the development of two different kinds of classical Southeast Asian states: inland states, based on rice agriculture, and maritime states, based on trade and raiding. | |
Upland and Lowland Distinctions in Southeast Asia: Just as the great civilizations of Southeast Asia were located along rivers, deltas, coastal areas or geographic locations suitable for intensive rice agriculture, there are similar geographic contrasts in the characteristics of peoples who live in the lowland areas versus the highland areas. Generally, upland areas can be characterized as having lower population densities, greater heterogeneity in languages, cultures, and ethnicity, greater political fragmentation, and slash burn cultivation of root or grain crops. Slash and burn cultivation, or swidden agriculture, is based on a system wherein standing tropical forest is cut and cleared before the rainy season begins. After the timber dries, farmers burn the cut area, which leaves a thick layer of ash on the soil. When the ash is mixed with the soil, it provides important nutrients and phosphate that increase soil fertility and hence the productivity and size of crops. The rainy season further pushes these nutrients into the soil. After one or two years of cultivation, the farmer needs to cut down a new area of the forest and abandon the original plots for 10-15 years so that the forest will grow back. Slash and burn cultivation usually necessitates some mobility of the population over time, hence requiring a fairly large area of land per person. Wet rice agriculture, in contrast, is a form of permanent agriculture that involves radically transforming the landscape. Farmers must build terraces and irrigation canals to regular the flow of water from streams and rivers. Nutrients are provided through the algae that form in the water of the rice paddies. This type of rice agriculture is more intensive, and responds well to increased labor inputs. Hence, since in tropical lowland areas a farmer can get two seasons a year of rice without difficulty, wet rice was the support base for many Southeast Asian states. | |
| Modern environmental pressures: In 1997, 13 of the world's most polluted cities were in Asia. One-third of Asians did not have access to clean water; one-half did not have access to adequate sanitation facilities. The financial crisis in Asia during the 1997-99 period halted or slowed the fairly recent efforts by Southeast Asian states to invest in greater environmental regulations and conservation efforts. Even as environmental budgets were cut by many governments whose currencies lost value during this period, the need for foreign exchange created powerful pressures to export ever-larger quantities of fish, minerals, agricultural and plantation products. Furthermore, while many states already have lost most of their primary forest cover, additional incentives now exist to increase commercial tropical timber production and export. Total forest plantations in Indonesia covered 3.8 million hectares in 1994, and the Indonesian government hopes to increase this amount to 8 million hectares by 2005. Similarly, the Philippines already has lost 99% of the forest cover it had 100 years ago. In Indonesia, illegal fishing (dynamite fishing, cyanide fishing for aquarium fish exports) also appears to have increased during this period of financial crisis. Some economists view the devastation to the forest and marine resource environments of Southeast Asian countries to be a more serious, longer-lasting problem than economic recovery and banking reforms in the region. |
Stability and Instability in Southeast Asia
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| Impact of Colonialism Six countries: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, and the United States, had colonies in Southeast Asia. Portugal The Portuguese had the least impact on Southeast Asia. They captured Malacca in 1511, holding it until the Dutch seized it in 1641. Otherwise, they maintained only a small piece of territory on the island of Timor, southeast of Bali. Spain Spain ruled the Philippines from its conquest of Cebu in 1565 and Manila in 1571 until its defeat in the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Netherlands Dutch colonialism falls into two periods. the first, that of the V.O.C., or Dutch East India Company, lasted from 1605 to 1799. The V.O.C. had little interest in territorial administration; its primary concern was to maximize profits through trading monopolies. When the V.O.C. collapsed in 1799, the Dutch government took control of its assets in 1825, after the Napoleonic Wars, and began to bring the Indonesian archipelago under its administrative authority. This process was completed during the 1930s. At the end of the Second World War, the Dutch had hoped to retain the Netherlands East Indies as a colony, but the Indonesians opposed the return of the Dutch, setting up a republic in 1945. In 1949, after four years of fighting, the Indonesians gained their independence with the assistance of the United Nations which served as a mediator between the Indonesians and the Dutch. Great Britain The British conquered Burma, fighting three Anglo-Burmese Wars in 1824-26, 1852, and 1885-86. Unlike other colonies which maintained their ethnic identity, Burma was a province of British India. The Burmese, therefore, had two sets of rulers, the British at the top with the Indians in the middle. In 1935 the British agreed to separate Burma from India, putting this agreement into effect in 1937. Burma was able to negotiate its independence from Great Britain in 1948. Penang (acquired in 1786), Singapore (founded by Raffles in 1819), and Malacca (Melaka, acquired in 1824), were governed by Britain as the Straits Settlements. The Straits Settlements served as a base for British expansion into the Malay Peninsula between 1874 and 1914. When the Malay States entered into negotiations for their independence--achieved in 1957--Penang and Malacca became part of Malaysia as did Singapore in 1963. However, Singapore was asked to withdraw from the federation in1965. Singapore has been an independent city state since that date. Sarawak and Sabah which joined Malaysia in 1963 continue to remain members of the federation. France France moved into Vietnam in 1858, capturing Saigon in 1859. Using the south, then called Cochin China, as a base the French moved west and north completing the conquest of Indochina by 1907. (Indochina--the five territories under French authority: Cochin China, Annam, Tongking, Laos, and Cambodia.) The French also wanted to retain their colony after the Second World War. The Vietnamese rejected French rule, and after defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu, obtained their independence at the Geneva Conference in 1954. The United States The United States moved into the Philippines as a result of the peace settlement with Spain in 1898. The Filipinos were granted a Commonwealth (internal autonomy) government in 1935, and their independence in 1946. Thailand Thailand continued to be independent. It was the only Southeast Asian state to remain independent during the colonial period. |
Nobel Prize Winners · Aung San Suu Kyi Daughter of Aung San; · Leader of National League for Democracy Burma Bishop Belo Important church leader who fought for national freedom and democracy · East Timor Jose Ramos Horta Professor; International spokesperson for national liberation East Timor |
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