Bali's history is as colorful as its culture and landscape - a vivid tapestry of absorbing, adopting, and adapting.
Famous since at least the sixth century A.D., when a Chinese monk, returning from his studies in Eastern India, recorded the "Splendid Buddhist island of Bali." The island's name has featured much as a far-flung Shangri-La in the annals of South East Asian history. Marco Polo, Francis Xavier, Kublai Kahn, Sir Frances Drake, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are just a few of the super-stars of last millennium who have helped etch Bali indelibly in the great almanac of the exotic.
Few people realize that before the end of the last ice age, Bali was "Land's End" for the Chinese Mainland, a sort of prehistoric California for the "Beautiful People," of the earliest human migrations from the North. At the end of the last Ice Age, rising sea levels formed the string of islands that is modern day Indonesia. Around 2000 B.C., Bali continued to attract settlers from the Javanese motherland to west, and even lured emigrants from such far off lands as Assam, Yunnan and Tibet. These Neolithic migrations were followed by the opening of trade routes with China and India, the two great civilizations of that era.
Evidence strongly suggests that cultural influence between China and Bali must have been strong by the year 500 A.D. It is known that by the year 700 A.D., as a result of what one scholar coined "Colonization by Contagion" many of the island states in the archipelago were already practicing a system of government originating in India.
Over the course of the following 800 years, great Hindu empires (along the lines of the Indian Gold King) thrived in Sumatra, Java and Bali until, after centuries of of cross-fertilization and rivalry between the three islands, the East Javanese Majapahit Empire conquered the island of Bali in 1343. This union, spurred on by the fall of the Majapahit to Islam in 1515, and the subsequent exodus to Bali of priests, artists and artisans, unleashed golden era of architecture, art, literature and stagecraft. The diamond-studded veil of Javanese court ritual was firmly laid over the already glittering culture of Hindu-Buddhist-Animist Bali. Today, more than 95% of Balinese still practice this unique form of Hinduism.
Bali is now one of the 27 provinces of the Republic of Indonesia, an island nation almost encompassing what was known as the Spice Islands or the Dutch East Indies during era of European colonization. The population of Bali is currently around four million, and the island is divided into eight regencies, plus the municipality of Denpasar, which follow the boundaries of the last Balinese kingdoms prior to Indonesian independence in 1945.