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…
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…
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…
An Example of How Helpful LLMs are Becoming
I’m in the process of translating a fourteenth-century text, Wang Dayuan’s 1349 Brief Treatise on the Island Barbarians (Daoyi zhilue 島夷誌略), and I do this by putting passages in Grok,…
Population in 15th-Century Vietnam – What We Don’t Know
From the late 1980s into the early 2000s, there was a trend in the field of early modern Asian history to write synthetic volumes that tried to document economic and…
The Decline of the Sense of Scholarly Self-Worth in the Digital and AI Ages
I recently wrote a blog post on how in the 2020s, what we can call activist/progressive scholarship has largely come to dominate in certainly the North American variety of Asian…
A Year of the Fire Horse View of Asian History/Studies and the Humanities
As I was having my morning coffee today, an announcement for the latest issue of the Journal of Asian Studies popped up on my screen. I took a look at…
Temasek is NOT Mentioned in the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư
The other day I was looking for information about “Temasek,” an early name associated with Singapore, and I came across a webpage hosted by the National Library Board (NLB) of…
A Translation of the 1304 Dade Nanhai zhi
The Gazetteer of the Southern Seas during the Dade Era (Dade Nanhai zhi 大德南海志), also known simply as the Gazetteer of the Southern Seas (Nanhai zhi 南海志) is a Yuan-dynasty…
Elephants and Dragon Teeth Gate (Longyamen)
In developing the idea that Chinese sources provide evidence of a kingdom called “Srivijaya” at Palembang on the island of Sumatra, a placename called “Longyamen” 龍牙門, meaning “Dragon Teeth Gate,”…