Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

Chinese sources (the Ming shilu) record that in the late fourteenth century there was some kind of conflict between a place called Sanfoqi and Java, and that for some reason the Ming Dynasty emperor believed that Siam (Ayutthaya) was in a position to communicate with Java to alleviate this conflict (see the previous post in this series for details).

I am certain that Sanfoqi referred to “Cambodia.” So, how could it be possible that Cambodia, Siam, and Java were all somehow interconnected in the late fourteenth century?

To understand that, we need to turn to Cambodian and Siamese (i.e., Thai) sources. However, when we do so, we find that the Cambodian and Siamese sources for the fourteenth century have been questioned by scholars, particularly the Cambodian sources.

Indeed, in the case of the Cambodian sources, historian Michael Vickery argued in a 700+ page Ph.D. dissertation that he completed in 1977 called Cambodia After Angkor: The Chronicular Evidence that the information for this period was “fiction” and that it had been “lifted” from other time periods, or from the Ayutthayan chronicles, and modified.

This idea that the information in the Cambodian chronicles is fiction has persisted, however, I would argue that this argument itself is fiction and that it is the product of Vickery’s fundamentally flawed approach to studying premodern texts.

Vickery imagined a scenario where the Cambodian chroniclers were ordered by their monarch to go create a chronicle, and that the monarch more or less randomly ordered that the chronicles start in the fourteenth century.

So, off the chroniclers went, but then as they got to work, according to Vickery, they realized that there was no information about the fourteenth century (or so Vickery believed). This is what Vickery claimed happened next:

“When the decision was made to write a new chronicle, probably toward the end of the eighteenth century, the fourteenth century was chosen as its starting point, possibly in imitation of the Ayutthayan chronicles, new versions of which had just been composed. There were no records, however, for the earlier period. . . The solution to the new problem was to set Nibbanapad’s reign back approximately two hundred years and to fill up the intervening space with names and stories borrowed from other contexts. For the period between Nibbanapad and Bana Yat the method used was that of the ‘Chronicle of Ancient Kings,’ taking names and themes and stringing them together arbitrarily. . .” (294)

I’ve spent the past 20+ years examining premodern Vietnamese texts, and the scenario that Vickery describes here is one that I have not found evidence of in any text that I have ever read. Yes, we can see ways in which information from different extant sources was compiled together in premodern texts, but we cannot find evidence of information created out of nothing.

What Vickery imagined (and yes, he definitely “imagined” this) for the Cambodian chronicles, by contrast, was something very different. He imagined chroniclers given the task of creating a chronicle for a time period that contained no records, that is, for which there were no extant sources of any kind.

He thus imagined that these chroniclers had to create something out of nothing, and to do this, he argued that they “lifted” information from other periods.

However, Vickery did not provide convincing evidence of this. While he saw “parallels” between information in different time periods, those parallels were not actually visible in the Cambodian chronicles. Instead, they were “parallels” that Vickery imagined and created himself.

Here is one example. Vickery felt that the dates of the first king in the Cambodian chronicles, Nippean Bat (Nibbanapad; r., 1346-50) were modeled after those of a king who ruled in the sixteenth century, Ang Chan (Ang Cand; r., 1516-66).

Ang Chan had to contend for control of the realm, and in the process, he spent a few years in exile in Siam. As such, the dates of his rule (1516-66) are more an indication of when he was active, rather than when he actually ruled.

Different dating systems are employed in the Cambodian chronicles, such as an “animal” calendar (12-year cycle) and a Buddhist calendar. In the case of Nippean Bat and Ang Chan, Vickery detected a parallel in the animal years of their reigns.

In particular, Vickery stated that Ang Chan defeated one of his main rivals in a dog year (1526), “thereby making himself effectively king.” In fact, the Cambodian chronicles refer to Ang Chan as a monarch before this point, and it is only Vickery who decided that his rule as king “effectively” began in the dog year of 1526. Vickery then notes that Ang Chan died in a tiger year (1566).

Looking at Nippean Bat’s reign, Vickery found that it also began in a dog year and ended in a tiger year. However, Nippean Bat only ruled for 5 years, whereas following Vickery’s calculation, Ang Chan ruled for 41, thereby passing through 3 cycles of the animal calendar.

This is a key “parallel” that Vickery “discovered” in the Cambodian chronicles, and which he used as “evidence” that Cambodian chroniclers had “lifted” information from a later time period to “fill in” the blank fourteenth century.

However, as should be completely obvious, there is no parallel here. A parallel only emerges after one follows the steps that Vickery defined: 1) first you have to believe that Ang Chan “effectively” became king in a dog year, even though that is not what the chronicles record, 2) then you have to accept that Nippean Bat’s reign from dog to tiger years is modeled after Ang Chan’s reign (from dog to tiger years if we follow Vickery’s definition in #1 of when his reign began) even though Ang Chan’s reign was much longer, and then 3) you have to accept that the Cambodian chroniclers went through the same thought process that Vickery did, even though there is no evidence of this.

From the above starting point, Vickery then goes deeper, and the deeper he goes, the more improbable his argument gets. To quote (I added the emphases to the text),

“It is interesting now to take another look at the detailed day and month dates accompanying the opening statements about the reigns of Nibbanapad and Ang Cand, and which I stated above, page 46, to be incoherent, or incomplete. IF these statements were part of an original chronicle with true chronological information, and IF Nibbanapad is really Ang Cand, we SHOULD EXPECT the chronological statement accompanying Nibbanapad to fit in fact the reign of Ang Cand. Now this statement for Nibbanapad says that his reign began on Wednesday, the tenth of the waxing moon, in the month of pusya, the second month of the traditional calendar. The comparable statement for Ang Cand places his coronation in pusya too, but on Thursday, and the day of the moon is missing. We should note, however, that in traditional records such information was usually written in a formula in which the days of the week and the months were given numbers rather than names, with Wednesday and Thursday being ‘4’ and ‘5’ respectively, the two numbers which can most easily be confused. Thus it is safe to ASSUME, FOR EXPERIMENTAL PURPOSES, that two of the three crucial elements are identical in the statements concerning Nibbanapad and Ang Cand. IF ‘tenth of the waxing moon’ is then interpolated from the formula for Nibbanapad to that of Ang Cand, the latter becomes entirely coherent for the year of Ang Cand’s coronation; and there is a good CHANCE, although NOT PERFECT CERTAINTY, that original records dated Ang Can’s coronation on Thursday, tenth of the waxing moon of the month of pusya in the year of s. 1475, and that this statement was displaced, WITH AN ERROR, to the reign of Nibbanapad in the original Nong [chronicle].” (198-99)

What should be obvious here is that there is no textual “parallel” between the information about the reigns of kings Nippean Bat and Ang Chan. Instead, it was only through Vickery’s tortuous logic based on “ifs,” an error, and an imagined scenario of Cambodian chroniclers trying to “fill in” an empty chronicle, that Vickery apparently convinced himself of this parallel.

This is one small example of countless others that can be found across the 700+ pages of Vickery’s dissertation.

One of the main reasons why I think that Vickery’s claim that the information about the fourteenth century in the Cambodian chronicles is “fiction” has persisted is simply because he made it very difficult for readers to follow his arguments. My guess would be that most people who have attempted to read Vickery’s work have simply given up and assumed that he must have known what he was talking about.

However, if one persists and really makes the effort to see what exactly Vickery was arguing, and based on what evidence, then it becomes obvious, as hopefully the above example makes clear, that Vickery did not have evidence to support his claim that the information in the Cambodian chronicles about the fourteenth century is “fiction.”

Having clarified this point, let us now examine what the Cambodian and Siamese chronicles can tell us about the connection between Sanfoqi, Java, and Siam in the late fourteenth century.