In 1979, French archaeologist Claude Jacques published an article that has been frequently cited entitled “‘Funan,’ ‘Zhenla’: The Reality Concealed by these Chinese Views of Indochina.”
In this article, Jacques criticized historians for relying too heavily on employing Chinese sources in reconstructing the history of early Cambodia as he felt that Chinese writings concealed the complexity of Cambodia’s past.
Jacques stated that “the history of pre-Angkorean Cambodia was, to begin with, reconstructed much more on the basis of Chinese records than on that of inscriptions found in Cambodia itself. Later on, scholars attempted to fill in the gaps of the outline which had been created in that manner, by using new data supplied by inscriptions discovered from year to year. But this has happened as if they preferred to adjust the newly discovered facts to the initial outline rather than to call the Chinese reports into question.”
I both agree and disagree with what Jacques wrote. On the one hand, it is true that colonial-era French scholars used information in Chinese sources to create an outline of early Cambodian history, and that they then tried to fit information discovered later in inscriptions to that outline, and that in many cases, the information in inscriptions did not actually fit with what was recorded in Chinese sources.
On the other hand, many of the scholars who have written on early Cambodia couldn’t/can’t read Chinese, and therefore, their scholarship has relied on translations, some of which are poor and never get updated. Add to this a fixation held by colonial-era scholars (but perpetuated in the post-colonial era) to see a single kingdom of “Cambodia” over time, and what we end up with is evidence that the scholars who have employed (poorly translated) Chinese sources have been a bigger problem than the sources themselves.
Let us take as an example our beloved George Coedes. I came across this passage in his book, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, where he is talking about an early Cambodian polity known as Zhenla 真臘. Coedes says that the History of the Sui records the following information:
“Near the capital is a mountain named Ling-chia-po-p’o, on the summit of which a temple was constructed, always guarded by a thousand soldiers and consecrated to the spirit name P’o-to-li, to whom human sacrifices are made. Each year, the king himself goes to this temple to make a human sacrifice during the night.”
Coedes sees this as referring to the mountain at Vat Phou in southern Laos. Early in the twentieth century, a stone inscription was found there that mentioned a “Lingaparvata,” or “linga mountain.” The name of the mountain mentioned in the History of the Sui, Lingjiabopo 陵伽缽婆, can indeed be read to indicate “Lingaparvata.”
However, Lingaparvata is a very generic name. Was the linga mountain at Vat Phou really what this passage was referring to? To determine that we need to look at what the rest of the information indicated. But first, let’s see what Coedes had to say.
Coedes goes on to talk about the spirit mentioned in this passage and says that “As for P’o-to-li, we can recognize here the first two syllables of Bhadresvara, which was the name of the god venerated at Vat Ph’u.”
Maybe Coedes thought he could see Bhadresvara in Potuoli 婆多利, but I sure can’t. Whenever I have to deal with Chinese transcriptions of Sanskrit terms, I always consult A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms by William Edward Soothill and Lewis Hodous to give me a sense of what might be possible.
What I can see in that work is that the first two characters of Potuoli 婆多利 often appear in words where they represent the sounds “va ta.” It’s possible for the first character to represent the sound “bha,” and I guess the second one could indicate “da,” however, the third character then creates problems.
It is usually pronounced as “li” or “ri.” Alternately, it can represent a single “r” when it comes after a vowel. So, it would be possible for these three characters to represent the sound “Bha-da-r.” That’s the closest those characters can get to Bhadresvara. However, that would be an awkward way of transcribing that name, and it also requires that we believe that the second half of the name got cut off.
So, something doesn’t seem right here, and that’s what always leads me to look at the source the author is citing. As it turns out, Coedes was not actually citing the History of the Sui (Suishu 隋書), a text that was completed in 636 AD and which was written in a language (Chinese) that he could not read, but instead, he cited an 1883 French translation of Ma Duanlin’s 1319 encyclopedia, the Wenxian tongkao (文獻通考), which contains a passage from the earlier History of the Sui (with some altered information).
Coedes faithfully reproduced what was in the 1883 French translation, but that translation was incorrect.
Here is what the History of the Sui records:
近都有陵伽鉢婆山，上有神祠，每以兵五千人守衞之。城東有神名婆多利，祭用人肉。其王年別殺人，以夜祀禱，亦有守衞者千人。
“Near the capital is Lingjiabopo Mountain. There are spirit shrines on its peak. Each one is guarded by 5,000 troops [Ma Duanlin has 2,000, the French translation has 1,000]. To the east of the citadel is a spirit called Potuoli. Human flesh is used in making offerings to it. The king kills someone each year to pray for blessings at night. [This spirit] also has guards, 1,000 men.”
So, in contrast to the information in the 1883 French translation, on the top of this mountain were multiple shrines, not just one. We can see this because the text states that “each” (mei 每) was guarded.
The French translation also incorrectly translates the number of guards these shrines had, but that’s not necessarily a big deal unless, of course, we’re doing research on the popular topic of the demographics of spirit guards in early Cambodia. . .
Finally, whereas the translation has a temple dedicated to Potuoli on top of the mountain, the History of the Sui (and Ma Duanlin’s Wenxian tongkao) state that this spirit was “to the east of the citadel,” by which we should understand that this is where the shrine to that spirit was located. Further, the citadel here must be a reference to the wall around the capital.
In other words, what this text describes, and what Coedes built his ideas upon, are not the same.
This is important because Coedes used the “evidence” that he thought he found in the History of the Sui to make the argument that the capital of Zhenla was in the area of what is now southern Laos. He then went on in his book to connect information from inscriptions (from different times and places) to this idea that Zhenla was based that area.
However, other than the generic term “linga mountain,” which could easily refer to someplace other than the mountain at Vat Phou, none of the other evidence that Coedes provided is valid, either because the translation he relied on was incorrect, or because Coedes himself was too eager to see what he wanted to see (Bhadresvara) in the evidence before him (Potuoli).
Later, Michael Vickery questioned this claim by Coedes, but Vickery also couldn’t read Chinese, and talked in circles trying to find some other mountain top where Bhadresvara was worshiped. . .
So, to return to Jacques, we can see that there are more problems than the one he pointed to. First of all, the outline of Cambodian history that scholars created based on Chinese sources is flawed because some of the scholars who created it couldn’t actually understand what those sources recorded.
Second, yes, if we looked here at the way that Coedes connected all manner of information from inscriptions to his imagined understanding of the passage in the History of the Sui about Zhenla, then we would agree with Jacques that there has been a problem of scholars forcing information from inscriptions to fit an outline based on Chinese sources, but again, it’s a false outline created by scholars who, in the case of Coedes, could not read those sources.
Finally, there has been a long-standing problem of scholars looking for a single “Cambodia” when that was clearly not the case.
Let us turn to that issue now and consider what Chinese sources can reveal. We will do so by looking at the names of various kingdoms, starting with Zhenla.
The term Zhenla first appears in Chinese sources in the History of the Sui. This work was completed in 636 AD. That’s roughly 150 years before the establishment of Angkor. This text states that Zhenla was to the southwest of the Cham polity of Linyi and that it was formerly a vassal of Funan, the name of an ancient polity in the lower Mekong region (真臘 國在林邑西南，本扶南之屬國也).
Zhenla is mentioned in the subsequent Old History of the Tang (Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書), compiled in 974 AD, or roughly 150 years after the establishment of Angkor. Actually, in this text two Zhenla’s are mentioned, a “Water Zhenla” (Shui Zhenla 水真臘) and a “Land Zhenla” (Lu Zhenla 陸真臘).
Then finally, in the History of the Song (Songshi 宋史), compiled in 1345 AD, there is only one Zhenla mentioned, but there is the name of a new kingdom that appears – Sanfoqi 三佛齊, a kingdom that was said to be “neighboring Champa” and between Zhenla and a place called Shepo (與占城為隣，居真臘、闍婆之間).
Today it is common to transliterate this name as “Sanfoqi,” however the final character in this name can be pronounced in four different ways, as “qi,” “ji,” “zhai,” and “zi.” An historical reconstruction for how this name may have been pronounced around the time it first appeared in Chinese sources would produce something like Sam fhut tshiaj/tʂaj/thsiaj/tsz.
This gets us very close to Jianpuzhai 柬埔寨 (kyan-phu-tʂaj), the name for “Cambodia” that started to be used in the Ming period, and which was based on the word “Kambuja.”
When I look at the above information, I see a clear progression. In the seventh century AD, there was a polity in the lower Mekong region that Chinese called Zhenla. Then as Angkor gradually emerged, Chinese referred to the polity in the lower Mekong as Water Zhenla, as it was located in the watery world of the Mekong and its tributaries and side branches, and they referred to the new inland polity of Angkor as Land Zhenla.
Still later, as Chinese merchants and envoys became more familiar with that inland polity, they started to refer to it by its name, as Kambuja, which they most likely recorded as “Sanfozhai” (Sam fhut thsiaj), like Jianpuzhai, using the pronunciation of “zhai” for the final character.
That said, Sanfozhai is still different from Jianpuzhai, so how can I claim that these are the same words?
When Chinese recorded the names of foreign words, they usually did so by using characters that do not have meaning when they are placed next to each other. Jianpuzhai 柬埔寨, for instance, does not make sense when one reads the character for meaning. Neither do names like Zhenla 真臘 or Shepo 闍婆.
By contrast, the characters for Sanfozhai 三佛齊 do make some sense. The first character means “three” and the second means “Buddha.” As for the third character, when it is pronounced as “zhai,” it serves as a simplified version of another character pronounced “zhai” 齋 which is used in Buddhist terminology.
If we combine the first two characters (sanfo 三佛), we get “three Buddhas.” If we combine the final two characters (fozhai 佛齊/齋) we get a term that referred to a Buddhist puja, or a ceremony that involved offerings and chanting and other such ritual activities.
When we read the three characters together, we do not get a coherent term but there is clearly something Buddhist that is conveyed by this name. It is not like other foreign names where the characters do not convey such a feeling, but instead, are just meant to indicate sounds.
Again, this is not a “normal” way of recording a foreign name. However, my guess would be that it was intentional and that someone tried to communicate the religious “feel” of Kambuja by using terms associated with religion to transliterate its name, and Buddhist terms were the ones that were most familiar to literate Chinese.
The previous historical writings on Cambodia have not seen Land Zhenla and Sanfoqi/Sanfozhai as indicating Angkor. Instead, scholars have viewed Zhenla as the only Chinese word for “Cambodia,” and there have been long discussions about why and how Cambodia “divided” into two parts (Water and Land Zhenla) during the Tang period and then “re-united” again later.
However, “Cambodia” didn’t divide and re-unite. Instead, Chinese sources demonstrate that the area we now refer to as Cambodia was home to multiple polities. Some, like Zhenla, predated others, like Land Zhenla/Sanfoqi.
As such, to return to the critique by Jacques, I would argue that Chinese sources reveal more about the Cambodian past than historians have realized. The problem has lied with historians who have fixated on finding a single “Cambodia” that matches a single Chinese term.
The Chinese made contact with “important” polities that could be reached easily by water. In early Cambodia, Zhenla and Sanfoqi were two such polities, but there were undoubtedly many other smaller polities in the region, and many of those other polities undoubtedly left behind inscriptions, such as the one in southern Laos.
Further, some Chinese terms served more like an administrative category than the name of an actual place. I see this as being the case for Zhenla.
The name Zhenla was used for roughly 1,000 years. I don’t think that we have evidence of a single polity existing in one place in the lower Mekong region for that amount of time. Instead, my guess would be that Zhenla was used by Chinese in different periods to refer to whatever polity in the lower Mekong region was the most powerful, or most convenient to establish tributary relations with, at a given time.
We’ll see this clearly when we look at what was recorded about Zhenla and Sanfoqi/Sanfozhai in the Ming Veritable Records (Ming shilu 明實錄), a topic we’ll turn to next.
