Monthly Archives: November 2020

Until recently, I had never spent much time reading Chinese sources for Southeast Asian history (other than Vietnam).Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to make sense of…

The biggest story in premodern Southeast Asian history is the story of the centuries-long rivalry between Singora and Angkor.Are you familiar with that story?No, you are not, because you’ve never…

In order to help readers understand how I came up with the idea that there was no maritime empire called “Srivijaya” and that the main place name in Chinese sources…

In researching about “Srivijaya” and in talking to colleagues, one thing that has become obvious to me is that we have developed a habit of accepting that there are passages…

Now that my mind has re-oriented and I can see that Sanfoqi was Angkor, there is so much that needs to be re-researched. There are the Chola attacks on “Srivijaya”…

[2025 Update: Yea, way back when I wrote this, I followed this idea that the character "Pu" that appears in the name of a lot of envoys in Song dynasty-era…

[2025 Update: Yea, way back when I wrote this, I followed this idea that the character "Pu" that appears in the name of a lot of envoys in Song dynasty-era…

In the previous post (Srivijaya in Inscriptions), I tried to explain how George Coedès made the argument in 1918 that the term “Srivijaya” should be understood to refer to a…

It all began with Sanskrit inscriptions. . .Over the past few posts, I have been examining (and deconstructing) information in Chinese sources that has long been used to support the…

In the previous post, I made the argument that a place in Chinese sources that is referred to as “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊 indicates “Kambuja/Cambodia,” which in turn indicates “Angkor.” However, there…