Southeast Asia

Recently, I've been exploring how medieval Japanese kingship followed a symbolic grammar similar to that of the great Hindu-Buddhist empires of Southeast Asia. As was the case in places like Borobudur, Prambanan and Angkor, sprawling temple-palace complexes and monumental pagodas helped Japanese rulers—not necessarily emperors—assert an anthropocosmic connection between themselves and the divine. They were legitimising their rule based on foreign idioms of authority.