Connecting the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea : A Scaler View from the River, 1850–1945

Although flanked by the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, mainland Southeast Asia sees more of its territories under the sway of the river than of the ocean. The port cities act as hubs of horizontal connectivity across the coastal rims, yet looking from the vantage point of the river, the region’s economic and cultural spaces are also informed by the way rivers provided mobilities of people, products and transregional imagination across the territories that connect the two seas. The port cities of Rangoon or Hong Kong, for example, acted as a great network of connectivity and mobility around the coastal rim across the mingled water of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, but the rivers Irrawaddy and Pearl carried coastal influence deep inside the mainland in myriad directions. How do we measure the economic and cultural entanglement on the scale of the river while considering the implications of the important oceanic spaces? My paper argues that locating South China Sea as a distinct yet tangled cultural and economic space requires as much attention to the rivers that lead to it as to the neighbouring oceanic waterbodies. In particular, the paper will track the mobility of transregional merchants, migrants and explorers who used the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Pearl and Yangtze rivers to reach further inland while also creating circulatory overland pathways that connected the Bay of Bengal with the South China Sea.