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,...
Read More
I am in the [never-ending] process of rebuilding this blog after having moved it to a new server. It is still pretty messed up in some places. . .
However, the goal is to have the latest posts appear below. Further down the page, you will find links to posts on various topics (still working on that section).
At the moment, the easiest way to find old posts is to click on “All Posts” above and then browse through the dates and categories on the left.
Yea, I know, it feels pretty “Internet 1997,” but what can a poor boy do. . .
If you come across a post which has garbled Chinese text, a working version can probably be found on this archive site: https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/.
The Latest Posts
From Chavannes to Sen: Yijing’s Journey through Southeast Asia (Part 1)
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...
Read More
The Potential of AI Films for Southeast Asian History
In the early 2000s, when I started teaching, I developed a course called “The World of the Mekong” that was about the histories of what is now Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos (with some Burma and southern Vietnam as well). My development of that course coincided with a kind of “golden...
Read More
From Pelliot to Wade: Jia Dan’s Itinerary Through Maritime Southeast Asia (Part 4)
By this point, it should be apparent to anyone who has read the previous three posts in this series that Paul Pelliot’s 1904 article, “Deux itinéraires chinois de Chine en Inde à la fin du VIIIe siècle,” is deeply and fundamentally flawed. That 1) Pelliot got fundamental information so fundamentally...
Read More
From Pelliot to Wade: Jia Dan’s Itinerary Through Maritime Southeast Asia (Part 3)
In these posts, we are looking at an itinerary through Southeast Asia that Chinese scholar-official Jia Dan recorded in the ninth century. Why is this important? It is important because although there is considerable information in Chinese sources about early Southeast Asia, it can be difficult to determine from that...
Read More
From Pelliot to Wade: Jia Dan’s Itinerary Through Maritime Southeast Asia (Part 2)
This post is a continuation of the previous post where we began to look at 1) Paul Pelliot’s 1904 article, “Deux itinéraires chinois de Chine en Inde à la fin du VIIIe siècle,” in which Pelliot examined a trade route from Guangdong through Southeast Asia and ultimately on to India...
Read More
From Pelliot to Wade: Jia Dan’s Itinerary Through Maritime Southeast Asia (Part 1)
In the eighth century, a Chinese scholar-official by the name of Jia Dan 賈耽 (730-805) recorded a great deal of geographic information about foreign lands as well as the routes to and through those lands. A few itineraries that he compiled are included in the New History of the Tang...
Read More
Sanfoqi & Srivijaya – Is it Time to Start Playing Hardball?
Roughly six years ago I started to write about my discovery that a placename that appears in Chinese sources called Sanfoqi signified “Kambuja/Kampuchea” rather than “Srivijaya” as scholars had claimed for the previous century. This discovery is revolutionary as it completely changes what we know about roughly 1,000 years of...
Read More
AI and the Coming of “Universal Knowledge”
In the past week, I’ve had a few “Wow!” moments related to LLMs, AI, and digital knowledge, and so I thought I’d document that here. The comments I will make refer to the paid version of ChatGPT (now with Thinking 4.2) and the free version of Grok, and I also...
Read More
Anton Zakharov’s Review of Rescuing History from Srivijaya (Part 1)
Three years ago, epigrapher Anton O. Zakharov published a detailed discussion of the first part of my “Rescuing History from Srivijaya” article, entitled “Srivijaya or Angkor? Notes on Liam Kelley’s Hypothesis.” It’s 17 pages of single-spaced Russian text! So that’s a significant piece of writing. I’ve long known that it’s...
Read More
Shepo 闍婆 was DEFINITELY in the Songkhla Area
Several years ago, I first suspected that a name that we find in Song-dynasty-era sources, Sanfoqi, referred to “Kambuja/Kampuchea” rather than what most of the rest of the scholarly world has always thought, which is that it referred to a polity called “Srivijaya” based at Palembang. In testing this idea,...
Read More
The Inland Water Route from Nakhon Si Thammarat to Songkhla
If you look at old European maps of the area of what is now southern Thailand, you will notice something odd. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, these maps make it look like there was a large island along the coast. And then at the end of the nineteenth...
Read More
Deciphering Siamese Placenames in Chinese
I recently upgraded some maps in Chinese that cover the area of Siam in the eighteenth century. In doing so, I did not update what we can know about the placenames on those maps as, at the moment, I simply don’t have the time. Instead, I shared information about these...
Read More
The Lake Songkhla to Kedah Trade Route in the 18th Century
For years, I have been arguing that the area between Lake Songkhla and Kedah was home to a trans-peninsular trade route of immense importance in the final centuries of the first millennium AD. This was the area that Arabs referred to as Zabag, and which Chinese referred to as Shepo...
Read More
Three 18th-Century Siam-Related Chinese Maps
In 2012, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan held an exhibition of historical maps in its collection and published a catalog of that exhibition entitled “Mapping the Imperial Realm, an Exhibition of Historical Maps” (河嶽海疆：院藏古輿圖特展). Three of the maps displayed pertained to places in Southeast Asia. These maps were labelled...
Read More
Southeast Asia in the Shunfeng Xiangsong
The Shunfeng xiangsong 順風相送 [Voyage with a Tailwind] is an early Chinese nautical navigation manual. It’s not clear when this text was created, however, one manuscript version of this text dates from the early seventeenth century, and it probably represents knowledge that was developed over time, starting at least in...
Read More
On this site, I have English-language translations along with the original Hán text of the following texts:
– The Outer Annals (Ngoại kỷ) of the Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đại Việt (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư)
– The Prefatory Compilation (Tiền biên) of the Imperially Commissioned Itemized Summaries of the Comprehensive Mirror of Việt History (Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục)
– The Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes (Lính Nam chích quái liệt truyện)
