Last year I wrote a couple of blog posts on a term, “Pu” 蒲, that appears in Song dynasty sources: “When the Cham Ruled the Seas” and “More Evidence for the Cham Pu/Po in Chinese Historical Sources.”
“Pu” appears in Song dynasty era texts as a surname, and there has long been a belief among Western scholars that it signified the Arabic “Abu.”
That idea is absolutely idiotic, and thankfully scholars like Stephen Haw and Johannes Kurz have pointed out its flaws, although it is unfortunate that this obvious point was not adopted in Li Tana’s recent A Maritime Vietnam. . .
While scholars like Haw and Kurz have clearly shown that Pu cannot mean Abu, they have not attempted to pinpoint exactly who it referred (but they did point out that it was a term in a Southeast Asian language) and why it emerged in the Song.
In the two blog posts that I wrote, I argued that it was the Cham honorific “po” (Haw and Kurz both listed that as a possible term among others, if I remember correctly), and I demonstrated that there were many diplomatic missions that were led or accompanied by someone with the “surname” of “Pu/Po.”
It appeared to me at the time, that when the Song dynasty came to power, Cham mariners in Southeast Asia were in a position to serve as middlemen, and they helped polities across the region make contact with the Song.
While I still stand by those views, previously I didn’t have an argument for why “Pu” suddenly appeared in Song dynasty sources.
Now I do.
As I explained in the previous post, “Zhenla in the Tang and Song,” there was a very important change that took place during the Tang-Song transition which scholars have overlooked.
During the Tang dynasty period, Chinese accessed the Cambodian world through an overland trade route that extended from territory they controlled in what is now central Vietnam to Cambodia.
At the end of the Tang, the Chinese lost control of that territory, and as a result, they had to find another way to access “Cambodia” (and places beyond). Of course, there were probably always Chinese mariners who had headed down into that region, but what is reflected in Chinese sources is the “official” contact, and that official contact clearly changed.
During the Tang, the overland trade route crossed over from “Vietnam” towards “Cambodia” somewhere around where a kingdom called “Linyi” was located. As I have explained in “Locating Linyi,” this was NOT “Champa,” and it was NOT a place in the Thu Bồn River valley. Instead, it was probably based to the north of the Hải Vân Pass near what is now Hue.
During the Song, having lost control of “Vietnam” and its trade route to “Cambodia,” Chinese accessed the other end of that overland trade route, where it entered the sea probably around Ha Tien. To get there, they followed a maritime route from China that passed Hainan island and then crossed over to the area of the Cham world, south of the Hải Vân Pass, before continuing further south.
NOT SUPRISINGLY, it’s precisely during the Song that “Zhancheng” 占城 (“Champa”) starts to get mentioned a lot.
And there is terminology in Song-era texts that make it clear that this was something new.
Zhao Rukuo’s thirteenth-century Zhu fan zhi 諸蕃志 (Treatise on the Various Barbarians), states of Zhancheng the following:
占城，東海路通廣州，西接雲南，南至真臘；北抵交趾，通邕州。自泉州至本國，順風舟行二十餘程。其地東西七百里，南北三千里。國都號新州，有縣鎮之名；甃磚為城，護以石塔。
Zhancheng: By the eastern sea route it connects to Guangzhou; to the west it borders Yunnan; to the south it reaches Zhenla; to the north it abuts Jiaozhi, with routes leading to Yongzhou.
From Quanzhou to this kingdom, traveling by boat with favorable winds takes a little over twenty stages.
Its territory measures seven hundred leagues from east to west and three thousand leagues from north to south.
The capital is called Xinzhou [lit., “New Region”], and it bears the designation of a district town. Its city walls are built of brick, and it is protected by stone towers.
How could the capital of “Champa” be referred to as Xinzhou [New Region]? That’s an entirely Sinitic term. Surely the Cham ruling elite who lived there did not refer to their polity as “Xinzhou.”
Why then would the Chinese refer to it that way? If this was the “New Region,” then was there an “Old Region”?
Yes, there was. The “Old Region” gets mentioned in Wang Dayuan’s fourteenth-century Daoyi zhilue 島夷誌略 (Brief Account of Island Barbarians), where he states of Zhancheng that “Its land occupies a strategic maritime chokepoint, and it is adjacent to Xinzhou [New Region] and Jiuzhou [Old Region]” (地據海沖，與新、舊州為鄰。).
So, of course, this is not completely clear as one record says that New Region was the name of Zhancheng’s capital, and the other says that Zhancheng was adjacent to New Region and Old Region.
However, if we take a step back, I think we can see something significant here.
If we consider that 1) these are Sinitic terms (and therefore, they are terms that the Chinese came up with to describe something from their perspective), and that 2) they were referring to places somewhere in the area of “the greater Cham world,” that 3) Chinese used to control places not that far away, and that 4) Zhancheng was described as a “strategic maritime chokepoint” whereas earlier, during the Tang period, we can see that the Chinese were contacting the Cambodian world overland from places nearby that they controlled. . . then I think we can understand “New Region” to be the new area that the Chinese were dealing with during the Song dynasty period.
Having lost “Vietnam” and its overland route to Cambodia, the Chinese were now having to reach that world through the maritime route. This meant passing by the New Region where Zhancheng was located, and no longer accessing places near or through the Old Region of perhaps Linyi (a place that “disappears” after the Tang and is not mentioned in Song-era sources) where the overland trade route crossed over to Cambodia from.
In dealing with this New Region to the south of the Hải Vân Pass, the Chinese also started engaging more closely with the people who were dominating the maritime trade in that area – Cham mariners whose names had the Cham honorific “po.”
Hence, the sudden emergence in Song dynasty sources of people “surnamed” “Pu.”
These were NOT Arabs! They were Cham. And in this historical context of changing trade routes, it makes perfect sense why Cham would suddenly start appearing in Song dynasty period texts.
