Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

In 2021, archaeologist Pierre-Yves Manguin published an article entitled “Srivijaya: Trade and Connectivity in the Pre-modern Malay World.” At the beginning of the article, Manguin traces the history of the archaeological study of southern Sumatra as the site of “Srivijaya.” It is worth citing this section at length as it...

Over the past couple of months, I have written a lot of blog posts on the scholarship on “Srivijaya” that makes use of Chinese sources. In particular, I went back to the nineteenth century to see who the first scholars were to identify key placenames in Chinese sources that were...

One of the core inscriptions that is cited in the Srivijaya narrative, the Ligor Inscription, as well as some inscriptions from southern India, mention alongside the name “Srivijaya” the name “Sailendra.” This is the name of a dynasty/line of rulers that is also mentioned in an inscription on Java. For...

The first fifty years of scholarship on “Srivijaya” was conducted through the study of inscriptions and texts. Then in in 1974, a group from Indonesia and America supported by the Indonesian Archeological Institute, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the Field Museum of Natural History conducted excavations at Palembang from...

In his 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,” George Cœdès examined information from three types of sources—inscriptions, Arabic texts, and Chinese texts—to make the argument that there had historically existed a polity based at Palembang on the island of Sumatra called “Srivijaya.” As we have seen, his understanding of Chinese...

By the time George Cœdès wrote and published his 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,” there were various false assumptions that scholars had created about certain placenames mentioned in Chinese sources, particularly Shilifoshi, Sanfoqi, Moluoyu, and Shepo. As we saw in the previous two posts in this series, Cœdès worked...

In thinking about how to explain the problems that we find in George Cœdès’s 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,” I realized that it would be helpful for readers to have access to an English-language translation of that article. So, I made one with ChatGPT and shared it here. However,...

By the late nineteenth century, as I documented in the previous two series of posts, scholars had linked two placenames recorded in Chinese sources, Shilifoshi 室利佛逝 and Sanfoqi 三佛齊, with the area of Palembang on the island of Sumatra. As I also documented in those posts, those efforts to make...

In 1967, historian O. W. Wolters published his Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Srivijaya. In that work, Wolters mentions Yijing, the seventh-century Chinese monk who traveled through Southeast Asia on his way to India and back, 189 times!! From that number alone, I think we can...

In the second half of the nineteenth century, various Western scholars started to investigate what Chinese historical sources recorded about places in Southeast Asia. As they did so, they were confronted with unfamiliar names, like Shilifoshi and Sanfoqi. In trying to understand such terms, there was one placename that played...

In 1894, French Sinologist Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes translated a text written in the late seventh century by the Chinese monk, Yijing, entitled The Great Tang Biographies of Eminent Monks who Sought the Dharma in the Western Regions (Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan 大唐西域求法高僧傳). In that work, Chavannes argued that a...

I have been writing about early Southeast Asia in Chinese sources for years now, and it is a very complex topic. Therefore, I decided to create a simplified version of “what I now know” to help anyone who wants to try to understand what I have been writing about. So,...

Chinese historical sources contain valuable information about early Southeast Asia, however, it takes some effort to determine which exact places some of that information refers to. This task of determining which places in Southeast Asia early Chinese sources refer to is one that the first generations of modern scholars attempted...