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For centuries Indian culture overwhelmed Java and is still very much in evidence today-names of noodles, mystic vocabularies, even trains (the Bima) are named after heroes of the Indian epics. There are still Buddhist and Hindu religious symbols everywhere you turn. Islam extended itself first over the north coast starting in the 14th Century. The first strongholds eventually grew into a series of powerful commercial Islamic city-states. The days of the Hindu kingdoms were numbered. Then for a period of 200 years, beginning in about 1723, Java became the key island in the Dutch East Indies empire, paying its shareholders in Europe an average dividend of 18% per annum. For 40 years during the 19th Century all Java was cultivated like a huge work farm, run by a system of enormously profitable forced deliveries of cash crops. The peasants starved. The Javanese have said that the Dutch had good heads but cold hearts, and claim that they had lost all their lands because it was exactly the reverse with them.