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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…