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…
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…
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…