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

I have written and talked in the past about how I think that the generation that developed the field of Southeast Asian history in the English-speaking world in the 1960s and 1960s brought certain biases to the study of the Southeast Asian past, and that these biases have influenced scholarship ever since.

The main bias I see has been to present Southeast Asia in very positive terms, as essentially the type of society that scholars in Western universities wish their own societies could be like. I have tried out different names for this phenomenon – “liberal bias,” “Baby Boomer politics,” “Baby Boomer lite politics” – and am still searching for the right term as none of these satisfy me.

At the same time, in writing about David G. Marr’s Tradition on Trial in the previous post, I was reminded of another bias in scholarship on Southeast Asian history that I can see evidence of starting with that same generation’s scholarship.

Here again, I don’t know what to call it, but it has to do with China, and things Chinese. It’s not really an “anti-China” bias. Instead, it’s more like a “dismissing China/Chinese” bias.

There were various colonial-era scholars who made use of Chinese sources to develop their understanding of the Southeast Asian past. However, among the generation of scholars who began to study about the Southeast Asia past in the 1960s and 1970s, there were very few who had the ability to read Chinese, and even fewer who could do so proficiently.

This created, I would argue, a kind of anxiety. There are many scholars who know that it is important to be able to read Chinese sources, but they can’t, and for what ever reason, they don’t try to learn.

At the same time, the emergence of the field of Southeast Asian history in the English-speaking world came at a time of decolonization when it was fashionable to reject the idea that Southeast Asia had been transformed by “outside influences” from places like China and India.

Therefore, this was a time when you had people who lacked an important skill (the ability to read Chinese) at a time when it was fashionable to reject the knowledge that came with that skill.

What developed out of this, I argue, is a particular approach in the field of Southeast Asian history in the English-speaking world to China and things Chinese. I have seen evidence of this approach countless times, in writings and in conference settings.

Historians of Southeast Asia in the English-speaking world have developed a way to make reference to Chinese sources, but then to quickly dismiss them. The way that this works is complex, but I have seen it played out countless times, and I will give an example of it here.

Below is a passage from a recent article by Barbara Watson Andaya [“Recording the Past of ‘People’s Without History’: Southeast Asia’s Sea Nomads,” Asian Review 32.1 (2019): 5-33]. While I will “pick on” Barbara Andaya here (because the example she provides is clear), the issues that I will point out are ones that I have come across in the work of many scholars.

This is an article about historical writings about the Orang Laut or “sea nomads” who inhabited the coastal regions of the Malay World.

On pages 12-13 of the article, Andaya makes the following points:

“Excerpts from early Chinese records show that the first reference to Orang Laut raiding appears in the 5th century, when the Chinese pilgrim Faxian described the seas around Singapore as being ‘infested with pirates to meet whom is death.’ (Wheatley 1961, 38) Later sources, like one from the 13th century, talk of fleets of ‘two or three hundred prahus’ operated by men who were quite willing to butcher the crews of ships they had pillaged. (Wheatley 1961, 82) Understandably, Chinese observers did not realize that these “pirates” were working in tandem with land-based overlords in a mutually beneficial arrangement by which booty was shared and sea-lanes monitored.” (12-13)

This is something that I have seen historians do many times. They cite Chinese observations/ideas about Southeast Asia as an example of a supposed misunderstanding, and then the historian goes on to dismiss the Chinese observations/ideas and to explain the “real story” about Southeast Asia that s/he “knows” but which the Chinese traveler in the past, according to the Southeast Asia historian, supposedly did not.

For instance, the idea that Chinese travelers saw “geographically-bounded kingdoms” (guo 國) in Southeast Asia when instead there were only “powerful centers” and loosely-connected vassal polities has been repeated many, many times.

In fact, in many contexts “guo” simply means a “political center,” and therefore, there was nothing wrong when Chinese travelers referred to Southeast Asian polities as “guo.” However, that point is definitely not common knowledge in the field of Southeast Asian history in the English-speaking world.

With the example we have here, we have Chinese talking about pirates, “to meet whom is death,” but then Andaya puts the word pirates in scare quotes and explains that the “Chinese observers did not realize that these ‘pirates’ were working in tandem with land-based overlords in a mutually beneficial arrangement by which booty was shared and sea-lanes monitored.”

In other words, a supposed Chinese misconception is used as a way to then talk about what was “really” going on back then. What was really going on, according to Andaya, was not that there were “pirates” but that there was a “mutually beneficial arrangement” between the Orang Laut and land-based overlords.

Ok, now that “mutually beneficial arrangement” of course excluded the Chinese who were attacked by the Orang Laut, and who therefore had every right to refer to them as “pirates,” but let’s not go down that road quite yet. I want to look more at how knowledge is being constructed here.

Faxian is quoted as having recorded that the seas around Singapore were “Infested with pirates to meet whom is death.”

Is it just me, or does that sound like slightly archaic British English? How can it be that Faxian recorded information in this way?

Andaya gets this information from Paul Wheatley’s 1961 work, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500.

This book contains information about the Malay Peninsula that is translated from Chinese historical sources. However, not all of the translations are Wheatley’s. The quote from Chinese monk Faxian’s record of a journey to India comes from a 1923 translation that Wheatley reproduced in his book (and the passage that is cited in Andaya’s article is most likely not about the seas around Singapore – Wheatley thinks it’s around the Andaman Islands, but that’s another road we won’t go down here.).

That 1923 translation was produced by Herbert Giles (1845-1935), a British diplomat and Sinologist. It is from Giles that Faxian obtained his slightly archaic British way of expressing himself.

Mystery solved!

Similarly, the quote about how in the thirteenth century, pirates would go out in “two or three hundred prahus” and the mention of how Chinese merchants might end up getting “butchered” also come from an old source. While Andaya again cites Wheatley (1961), Wheatley reproduced information from American diplomat W. W. Rockhill’s (1854-1914) translation of a fourteenth-century (Andaya incorrectly has the thirteenth century) account of places in Southeast Asia and beyond, Wang Dayuan’s Daoyi zhilue 島夷誌略. This translation was published posthumously in 1915.

In addition to presenting Chinese observations about Southeast Asia as misunderstandings, Andaya also presents the information that Chinese recorded in rather dramatic terms.

We have the Chinese talking about places being “infested with pirates to meet whom is death,” and fleets of “two or three hundred prahus,” and the potential of being “butchered.”

That’s some pretty dramatic stuff. It’s the type of stuff that a diplomat who is good at telling dramatic tales to entertain guests might have made use of in the early twentieth century. . .

Indeed, the phrases and words that Andaya latches on to (and this is definitely something that I have seen other historians do as well) are precisely ones that we can attribute to the outdated translations of Giles and Rockhill, rather than to Faxian and Wang Dayuan’s original texts.

Instead of saying that the seas were “infested with pirates to meet whom is death,” Faxian recorded something more like “In the sea, there are many looting bandits. If you encounter them, you won’t be able to maintain your life.” (海中多有抄賊，遇輒無全)

So, there is nothing “infested” here. Also, the term that Faxian used which Giles translated as “pirate” literally means “looting bandit” (chaozei 抄賊). As far as I can tell, this is not a common term, and it does not seem to have been used much in later texts. I would not use “pirate” to translate this term as it is too specific to this one text, and isn’t a widely used term. Therefore, we shouldn’t use a widely used English term either (especially one as loaded as “pirate”).

Turning to Rockhill, he translated Wang Dayuan’s text as recording that “two or three hundred pirate junks” (Wheatley changed this to “prahus”) can attack Chinese merchants, and that if the pirates capture a Chinese merchant ship, “the crews are all butchered.”

Meanwhile, Wang Dayuan referred to these ships using a generic term for a ship or boat, zhou 舟, but called them “bandit ships” (zeizhou 賊舟), using a word for “bandit” (zei 賊) that applied to people on land as well.

Finally, there is no “butchering” in Wang Dayuan’s text. Just people “dying” (si 死) if they are caught.

So, this is how I see the process working. For certain scholars in the field of Southeast Asian history in the English-speaking world, Chinese serve more or less the same purpose as a joker at a medieval court.

They’re people who you don’t take seriously, but who are called upon for a particular purpose.

The Chinese traveler to Southeast Asia is cited for making some “uninformed” or “foolish” comments, like the above mentions of “pirates” and getting “butchered.” Those comments are then dismissed, as is the need to actually know what is written in Chinese sources or to gain more updated information than what British and American diplomats produced over a century ago.

After all, like the jokers at a medieval court, they don’t really know anything. (They’re Chinese! What do they know about Southeast Asia?!)

What is more, the fact that their ideas can only be accessed by these historians through the semi-archaic and somewhat dramatic language of late-nineteenth-century England and America enhances the sense that Chinese observations are misguided and comical.

The historian then goes on to tell the “real” story of Southeast Asia. That story, in turn, is the liberal/Baby Boomer lite story that presents the Southeast Asian past in positive terms (“The Orang Laut weren’t really ‘pirates,’ they were. . .).

Again, I have seen this countless times in books and in conference presentations. I’m going to have to start documenting it so that I can develop a better argument, but I’m mentioning it here to get others to think about it.

I was reminded of this in writing about Tradition on Trial in the previous post because I think Marr also readily dismisses things Chinese in that book. Phạm Quỳnh translated a Chinese speech? Well, there’s no need to take that seriously or to make the effort to really figure out what the speech was about. After all, it was Chinese, and that is not important for Southeast Asian Vietnam. . .