The spoils of conquest were scattered over his great imperial temple, known today as Brihadishvara.
In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tons of rice annually from the conquered territories of southern India (today you would need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to transport that much rice).
This allowed Brihadishwar to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, a tool of the Chola state that intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast wealth into new irrigation systems, expanded cultivation, and vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few states in the world could imagine economic control on such a scale and depth.
The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, forged alliances with the Tamil trading corporations: a partnership between traders and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company—the powerful British trading corporation that would later rule much of India—that was to come more than 700 years later.
In 1026, Rajendra put his troops on merchant ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the world trade in precious woods and spices.
While some Indian nationalists have heralded this as a Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology offers an entirely different picture: the Cholas do not appear to have had a navy of their own, but had a wave of Tamil navies under them. traders from the diaspora spread across the Bay of Bengal.
By the end of the 11th century, these traders were running independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in modern-day Myanmar and Thailand and working as tax collectors in Java.
