you think history's a bunch of names and dates that never change and your history teacher who hates you makes you memorize them for no reason at all wrong history is alive storms are constantly finding new documents artifacts archaeology stories translations what if i told you one of the most powerful trading empires of all time was all but lost to history until a hundred years ago today even the people living on top of it didn't know anything about it talking about a sea based trading empire powerful enough to serve as the main trading post between india and china today's illustrated example the sri vijaya empire what up i'm ben freeman from freemanpedia.com where i try to translate ap world modern to people like you around the world and in that pursuit i find holes in the content where there's not a lot of resources for you that's where we here at a lustre of examples step in and so today i'm taking a relatively obscure trading empire that was only found a hundred years ago and breaking it down but it's way too early in the morning to start yelling words like thalisocracy and mahayana at you so let's get some context contextualization is just taking something rather specific and putting it into the grander story of world history it's the star wars crawl you know it's that thing at the beginning of the movie where they put it up there to let you know what's going on before you're just thrown into some random action fighting and killing you need some background who's this guy what's that about why am i talking about this at all that's contextualization on your essays you're going to need to let the reader know what you're talking about in what context you're talking about as opposed to just specifically describing one thing you need to put it into the greater picture i've said this a thousand times this is a mandatory skill saq dbq leq most of the cues are going to have this is a thing you need to do so make sure that you are contextualizing whatever it is you're saying in any essay you're writing okay one minute on the clock okay freeman keep it brief don't ramble like an idiot you look like an idiot every time you put up a minute clock and you can't do it even though you have the power to edit and easily cut it down you've got to do it come on let's go ap world history starts with two units both covering the era 1200 to 1450. the first one is called the global tapestry and it's a global check-in on the different regions like today we're in southeast asia unit 2 is networks of exchange which is all of the connections that weave the global tapestry together you see what i did there and two of the biggest regions in the entire course are india and china in this period india is dominated by a thing called the delhi sultan centered in delhi it is an islamic sultanate that rules over northern india while southern india is dominated by a collection of hindu states china on the other hand is a bit trickier with three different dynasties rolling over it and if you think that's confusing and oh no there's three different groups ruling over china the mongols will be here soon and it'll just be them so that'll make it easier on you so if you jump from unit one where you're just checking in on the places to unit two where you see the networks of exchange you're gonna see between india and china the most famous is gonna be the silk road connecting them over land but don't sleep on those maritime trade routes that take you through southeast asia as the course begins there's no bigger player in the trade game than the srivijaya empire srivijaya was a trading empire that lasted 700 years and served the trade route between india and china srimaji had dominated the waterways of southeast asia for 700 years as a trading empire that also served as a buddhist center of learning for india southeast asia and china all right did i do it that was the sink i took it from this big broad the opening units of the group and i took it down to a specific trade empire talking about what's important about it along the way did i do it did i do it this is impossible you know i control the timer you think i would just edit it down make myself look good i just don't think it's possible i think it's physically humanly not possible for someone to speak for under a minute on the srivijaya empire and its context so don't worry i guess those close anyways keep your contextualization short and to the point don't ramble on and on like i do it's only worth a point but it is worth the point so make sure you do it all right enough contextualization let's just get to the example today's example takes us to southeast asia and i'm not talking mainland southeast asia vietnam cambodia none of that stuff talking about you head out to the sea out to the island up to the archipelago and for us today that's the srivajya empire okay heads up i'm gonna use a very scary word here so if you need to cover your ears and come back and watch this later that's fine this is a big scary word but it shouldn't scare you because it's an awesome word and you can use it all the time and sound historical okay srivajya was a thalisocracy did you get that a thallisocracy that's how you describe srivajaya come i know i know calm down it just means an empire where most of your empire is overseas i think the british empire the dutch empire the phoenicians that's a thalassocracy srivajaya was a thalassocracy and for survija it's all about real estate location location location if you're in a boat and you're trying to get from india to china you have to go through sri vijaya if you're in a boat and you're trying to go from china to india you have to go too sure of ajaya if you're in a boat and you're trying to go from champa to india you got to go through sri vijaya if you're in a boat and you're trying to go from india to cambodia you've got to go to sri vijaya if you're in a boat and you're trying to go from japan to india you've got to go to sri vijaya if you're in a boat and you're in east africa and you're trying to go to china you gotta go to sri vijaya if you're in the water going from the indian ocean to east asia you gotta go through srivajya and because of that location between india and china it became the primary trading hub between the two the capital we call it today palimbang back then the chinese called it jugang which of course means yeah you said it giant harbor that's how they referred to it it's a giant harbor where we trade our stuff so your capital is now named big trading harbor and that's where we'll go trade our stuff and it wasn't just one port or a couple ports it was massive a persian trader said with his fastest ships he couldn't reach all of the places within the srivajya empire it would take well over two years to do that so this isn't one little trading post empire with just a few little spots along the way this is a massive network the location that brought them all the trade was two straights that they controlled first the sun district second the malacca street look at that map try to get between india and china and not go that way what are you gonna do papua new guinea australia come on wasting your time you're going to go through stravagai and shrivajjaya was southeast asia's hottest trading spot this place had everything rice cotton indigo silver aloe resin camphor ivory rhino tusk 10 gold ratan timber gems exotic birds iron sandalwood pepper cinnamon ceramics cardamom they even had you know the thing like how the dutch are all obsessed with spices and they go find this place and they call them the spice islands they didn't discover the spice islands there were people on the spice island they called them the banda islands and that's the only spot on earth where you could get clove or nutmeg so don't act like you're super special dutch people you're basically columbus you found something that people already found and they weren't just a series of random people peddling on the streets this was organized they had huge warehouses where they brought in all of these products and stored them for an ease of transfer at the markets that made shrivashai the go-to market in the region my favorite part about this trading empire is that the chinese when they went to southeast asia just assumed that everything there was from trivijaya and that trivia giants made all of this stuff imagine going into walmart and being like wow y'all make all this stuff here i gotta trade here more often they don't make a lot of stuff there it's just that's where it's being traded but don't tell the chinese that because then they could just go get it themselves so due to their rising power srivajya quickly became a tributary to the song empire along with other local powers like the champa remember champa choppa rice the fast rice do you remember that but here's what's weird college ward doesn't care about them as a trading empire they don't they're the most massive trading empire one of the most recent major archaeological finds in the history of the planet and they don't care about the trade at all they don't care about the the list of all the things i said what they do want you to know is that it's an example of a buddhist state meaning it is run by buddhists for buddhists with buddhist interests at heart and buddhist missionaries and trips to india and china it is at first a trading empire but also it's run by buddhists i mean think of it they are the trading hub between india where buddhism is ram and china where buddhism is raging at the time and trade routes after all don't just bring trade and gold intent they also bring ideas and one of those ideas was buddhism before we get into any about how buddhism is important in southeast asia and why they're illustrative let's talk about the elephant in the room for a minute 101 years ago no one even knew this place existed people that lived on top of the ruins just assumed they were some other kind of ruins and had no clue that this was actually an ancient buddhist trading empire because it was 100 years ago in 1920 a french historian started connecting the dots of all the different evidence out there of other empires other people other traders other leaders talking about this one place where there was all of this trade going on accounts of indians indian monks indian leaders sri lankan leaders chinese emperors persians buddhists all these different groups of people are going around talking about this one place the problem is they're all using a different name so if you're just randomly flipping through history you're going to be like oh there are eight different places to go trade but in reality those eight places were one so what the chinese called sanfoki or foshi and what the javanese called suvarnabhumi and the arabs called sribouza they were all the same thing and it's not just linguistics and spellings and pronunciations that were different so you have these people back home in their places talking about how this is where we go trade this is the trade spot to go and that could be any number of places but luckily there are people who actually went there and wrote a lot and merchants aren't necessarily always writing down about cultural things around them but i tell you who does do a lot of that those are religious pilgrims and in this case the buddhist monks and seeing how much this was such a maritime trade route you can imagine all the other world travelers you'll learn about in later sections are going to go through this area talking about your iphone battutas your marco polos etc so i could be like your stupid textbook and be like here's a source from this guy and here's what this guy said and here's what some other random guy said but no we're going to talk to one guy and see what he says his name yi zhang yi jing was a chinese buddhist monk who was one of the hundreds of chinese buddhist monks who made the journey from china to india this is a global dude he was from china he took a persian boat from guangzhou to sri vijaya to get to india this guy is in some scrub pilgrim this guy's going to the number one buddhist university on the planet at the time it was called nalanda university and at the time it was the number one spot for any buddhist pilgrim to congregate and learn more about buddhism near the homeland of buddhism and i know i wasn't going to mention anyone else but this is where juan zhang meant if you know anything about the monkey story or journey to the west very famous chinese story this is one of the spots he stated i think he stayed there for about two years but armani jing stayed there for 11 years think about the way the great scholars and athletes of today flock to clemson university it's kind of like that clemson would destroy nalanda at football i'd love to see that but nalanda would destroy clemson in buddhism so maybe not anyways back to yi jing he spent 11 years studying buddhism here at nalanda university and i know i keep saying university it's not a university in the sense you would think it's more a collection of libraries and scholars learning together more than say like a campus with dorms and terrible food so eugene spent 11 years here with the purpose of studying buddhism collecting texts translating text here's the problem though if you're going from china to india that's quite a long trip especially back then srivaji is a perfect place to stop and india is not always accessible by seat the monsoon winds are no joke so some people chose to wait out the monsoon season by hanging out in trivijaya yi jing was one of those guys he stayed there not only on his trip to india but on his trip back both times for over six months and this isn't just some random hotel where he's flipping through books he noticed that there were a ton of buddhists here and in fact this was the one spot in southeast asia where buddhist scholars congregated along merchant trade routes you wonder why trojan wasn't found so early on they didn't leave that much stuff behind but the stuff they didn't leave behind are buddhist stupas and statues and other buddhist stuff just all over srivijaya and sumatra so in writing about srivijaya yijing said this quote in the fortified city of palumbang buddhist priests number more than one thousand whose minds are bent on learning and good practice they investigate and study all the subjects that exist just as in india their rules and ceremonies are not at all different if a chinese priest wishes to go to the west in order to hear and read the original scriptures he had better stay here one or two years and practice the proper rules end quote so in the global tapestry unit if your teacher's like students please tell teacher of an example of a buddhist state in southeast asia in the global tapestry period you better respect yi jing let your teacher know about the once forgotten the lassocratic great trading empire of srivijaya but how can this actually help you out you're in luck i have found two examples from recent ap world history exams where you could flex your new srivajya knowledge and earn yourself some points so let's look at some exam examples all right so like i said there are two examples from recent years that you can use here so we'll go through them they're both leq examples now shivaji doesn't pop up by name it is a relatively new thing kind of like past things that we've been going through the illustrative examples the ones i've been choosing to make these videos on tend to be the newer ones so this one wouldn't have popped up as an example 10 years ago but i was able to find two from the past three years and last year was the weird pandemic dbq so that doesn't count so the last two full tests they've given there have actually been two of these in the leq section so let's take a closer look all right back in 2018 second leq remember 2018 that was nice anyway the second leq reads like this so they give you a little background on a little background knowledge and the period 600 to 600 different factors led to the emergence and spread of new religions and belief systems such as buddhism confucianism and christianity thanks for that college board now you can show me the prompt develop an argument that evaluates how by the way develop an argument get used to seeing that that's something they want you to do an argument is imagine you're in a debate and you need to pick a side and on that side you need to stand up and make points that support your argument that's all they want these leqs is you to make this argument and support it with information develop an argument that evaluates how such factors led to the emergence or spread of one or more religions in this time period so they're asking about different factors that led these religions to spread well the growth of trade is the primary answer they're actually looking for on these and the trade routes the only problem on this one though is our good friends at trivijaya started it around 650 ce that's going to put us on the other side of it now depending on the question and how they decide to score them that may be close enough but that may be too far away however this was before the new curriculum so maybe in future iterations of the test you can see 600 bc that's old in future iterations of the test they may have something to the effect of from 600 ce to 1450 ce and then that's trivishai time but otherwise it's the same concept if you just said that trade was one then you're going to get a thesis and you throw some background in about trade routes like i did in my contextualization a minute ago and then you start adding evidence you're going to be fine the other ones from 2019 also in laq let's look at that in the period 600 bce to 600 ce so once again we're kind of out of luck here on the time span but otherwise it's the same idea so again in future iterations of the test they will not go back this far so uh you're going to be looking for 600 probably 600 ce to maybe 1200 if they wanted to do like an early thing i doubt they would but if they wanted to go 600 to 14.50 that would probably make more sense so imagine that we're doing that because again the course has changed so the rise of large-scale empires led to increasing regional and trans-regional trade okay interesting now here comes the prompt develop an argument told you you're going to start developing arguments develop an argument that evaluates the extent to which the rise of one or more empires contributed to an increase in trade in this time period hmm one empire rose and built a large trade network that helped everyone around it by being the new trade center in the region so those are two again the curriculum has changed recently so the time periods are a little bit off but if you're looking for one of these ideas and you need an illustrative example of a buddhist state or even a trading state sribajaya gets you both there all right thanks for watching and once again i'm ben freeman from freemanpedia.com i hope these videos are helping i hope this actually helps you out if you google around maybe you can find better uh videos but i think these are pretty good and kind of focused on you the ap world history modern student if not say something in comments make suggestions down below tell me what i should be including or what's not good about this or what is good about this or my teacher made me do this i hate my teacher help me destroy them anything like that just give me some feedback i'm going to keep making them because again this stuff isn't out here if you're googling stravage eye empire you're going to get a lot of weird stuff so i think this is more focused on you you know exactly what it's for what the college board wants from you so if you like this stuff then hit subscribe that helps me out otherwise uh good luck on the ap test in may and i will see you next time [Music] you