Majapahit was one of the largest empires in Southeast Asia — a centuries-old fusion of Hinduism and Buddhism whose ruins still littered Java when Raffles surveyed the island in 1815.

0:14In the year 1815, the English colonial official Thomas Stamford Raffles would travel across the island of Java in what is today Indonesia. At this time, the world was torn by war. In Europe, the Napoleonic Wars were raging, and the Earth's oceans had become just another battlefront. The lush tropical island of Java had been until recently a Dutch colony, but the Netherlands had been conquered by Napoleon in his advance across Europe.

0:57And so the Dutch colonies had fallen under the control of the French. Now the British desired to take Java for themselves and strike a blow at Napoleon's overseas empire. In 1811, British Marines launched an invasion of Java, landing among its coral reefs and sky blue oceans, clambering through its shady mangrove forests and up its beaches of black volcanic sand, climbing the steep cliffs in the shadow of its towering volcanoes.

1:37From there they overwhelmed the inexperienced Dutch defenders and took the island for the British Empire. With them came the Englishman Thomas Stamford Raffles who later wrote about these events. Holland had ceased to be an independent nation and in the year 1811 the French flag was hoisted over Java. But on the 17th of September of the same year, a capitulation was entered into by which all the dependencies fell into the hands

2:12of Great Britain. Raffles was a lifelong sailor and had actually been born at sea on a ship commanded by his father off the coast of Jamaica. He became a clerk in the British East India Company at the age of 14 and from there became a true company man. He had spent the best part of the last decade furthering the interests of British colonialism in East Asia and had

2:43even become fluent in the language of Malay. When Java was captured by the British, partly as a result of his skill at languages, Raffles was granted the position of left tenant governor. At the age of just 30, Raffles found himself in charge of an island a thousand kilometers across, home to more than 6 million people. Raffles was fascinated by Java. He remarked on its dramatic landscape of

3:24soaring volcanoes and steamy rainforests, its fertile rice terraces and remarkable culture, as he wrote home to King George III. The gracious permission which I have received affords me an opportunity of interesting your royal highness in favor of the amiiable and ingenious people whose country they describe. A chain of very high mountains runs along the whole length of Java. Even in July and August, the atmosphere is refreshed by

3:57occasional showers and the landscape is at all times of the year covered with the brightest green. But most of all, he was fascinated by Java's antiquities. Everywhere among its forests and shaded rice terraces could be seen the remains of the countless temples, palaces, and even whole ancient cities left in ruins. A few years later, around 1815, he embarked on a journey around the island with the aim of surveying these ruins

4:37and writing a book. Although by then Java was an overwhelmingly Muslim land, Raffles found everywhere the remains of an older culture hiding just beneath the surface. As he writes in his work, the history of Java, the Muhammadan religion, as it present exists on Java, seems only to have penetrated the surface and to have taken but little root in the heart of Javans. But the antiquities of Java consist of