The first fifty years of scholarship on “Srivijaya” was conducted through the study of inscriptions and texts. Then in in 1974, a group from Indonesia and America supported by the Indonesian Archeological Institute, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the Field Museum of Natural History conducted excavations at Palembang from July to September.
Bennet Bronson, the assistant curator of Asiatic archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum, reported on this excavation in an article entitled “A Lost Kingdom Mislaid: A Short Report on the Search for Srivijaya” (Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, April 1975, Vol. 46, No. 4, 16-20) as follows:
Yet we found nothing really old except inscriptions and statues. Although we managed to locate one city, one town, one monastic community and several dispersed villages, none of these settlements can be older than the 14th century. None was inhabited by the people who made the statues and wrote the inscriptions. (19)
When Bronson had returned in the fall of 1924, the Field Museum had reported that the group had discovered “a splendid cave high in the jungle-covered mountains of central Sumatra,” and that “Bronson claims to be almost as pleased at not finding the Srivijayan capital (it is a critically important negative discovery) as he is at finding his prehistoric cave.” (Vol. 45, No. 10, 16).
Others did not take this “negative discovery” as well as Bronson, particularly people in Indonesia who had a much bigger stake in Srivijaya than Bronson did.
As a result, later in the 1970s, the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) organized a Project on Archaeology and Fine Arts (SPAFA) that held four Consultative Workshops on Research on Srivijaya.
In addition to scholars from Indonesia, representatives from Thailand and the Philippines were included in these projects. It looks like three of the four reports have been digitized.
In the fourth report, from 1985, Thai archaeologist Pisit Charoenwongsa has a paper where he wrote the following:
Why do we think that Srivijaya was a big empire rather than a small state? Because George Cœdès (1918, 1923) said so. Why do we think it lasted a long time? Because Cœdès felt that the Shih-li-fo-shih [Shilifoshi] and San-fo-ch’i [Sanfoqi] mentioned in the Chinese records must be the same place. Yet Shih-li-fo-shih disappears from Chinese sources very early, by about 730 A.D., while San-fo-ch’i appears almost 100 years later. That the two kingdoms were identical is far from clear. (105)
One can sense frustration in these lines, and indeed, Professor Pisit had every reason to be frustrated. Here he was in 1985 participating in a project on “Srivijaya” some sixty-seven years after Cœdès had proposed that Shilifoshi and Sanfoqi were “Srivijaya,” and yet a convincing case for that basic point that served as the foundation for the “Srivijaya is a kingdom at Palembang that was referred to in Chinese sources as (Shili)Foshi and Sanfoqi” narrative had still not been made.
Another Thai scholar, M. C. Chand Chirayu Rajani, published an article in five parts between 1974 and 1976 in the Journal of the Siam Society entitled “Background to the Sri Vijaya Story,” where he likewise expressed his dissatisfaction with the unconvincing writings of scholars like O. W. Wolters and Paul Wheatley who he referred to as “the latest practitioners of Cœdès’s school of acrobatics.” (174)
As for Cœdès’s argument, Rajani wrote that,
This hypothesis, since its inception, bas become an article of faith among a number of scholars working in the field to the extent that unbelievers are scoffed at rather than argued with. But, like many articles of faith, this hypothesis plays havoc with reality, defying geography and meteorology, archaeology and written evidence, both internal and external. Those scholars, however, do not seem to be discouraged be these enormous inconsistencies. Instead, they are prompted to ever more dazzling feats of intellectual contortionism. With all due recognition of their skill, it seems to be time to call a halt and root out this orthodoxy. (174)
In his article, Ranjani sought “to argue that Chaiya and, Nakorn Sri Thammaraj in peninsular Siam, rather than Palembang in Sumatra, were the centres of a medieval civilisation.” (174) While he makes valid points, Ranjani was still limited, like all others, in not knowing Chinese, and therefore, he could not identify and resolve the many flawed assumptions that scholars held about the meanings of key placenames mentioned in Chinese writings.
That said, Rajani was right on the money when he said that the faithful followers of Cœdès were “prompted to ever more dazzling feats of intellectual contortionism,” and nowhere is this more evident than in the writings of historian O. W. Wolters in the 1970s and 1980s.
Intellectual and Textual Contortionism
In these years, Wolters participated in some capacity in the above SPAFA project, visited Sumatra, and published articles in the Cornell journal, Indonesia, such as the 1975 “Landfall on the Palembang Coast in Medieval Times,” the 1986 “Restudying Some Chinese Writings on Sriwijaya,” and other works.
Further, I strongly suspect that these articles, published in a Cornell University journal where Wolters worked, were never peer-reviewed, for as we will see below, Wolters’ writings in this period did not meet even the lowest bar for acceptable historical scholarship (I only discuss one article below, but the points I make hold for his other articles in this period as well).
In “Landfall on the Palembang Coast in Medieval Times” Wolters discusses an itinerary that is recorded in the New History of the Tang in the account of the Piao 驃 kingdom. This itinerary extends from a place in southern Burma to Shepo 闍婆, which I have argued a million times by now was somewhere in the greater Lake Songkhla region.
I recently wrote about that itinerary and the Piao kingdom here. In this post, I will present my translation of that itinerary again, and then we will look at what Wolters wrote.
繇彌臣至坤朗，又有小崑崙部，王名茫悉越，俗與彌臣同。繇坤朗至祿羽，有大崑崙王國，王名思利泊婆難多珊那。川原大於彌臣。
From Michen to Kunlang, there is also the Lesser Kunlun tribe, whose king is named Mangxiyue; its customs are the same as those of Michen. From Kunlang to Luyu there is the kingdom of the Great Kunlun King, whose king is named Sili Boponanduoshanna. Its rivers and plains are greater than those of Michen.
繇崑崙小王所居，半日行至磨地勃柵，海行五月至佛代國。有江，支流三百六十。其王名思利些彌他。有川名思利毗離芮。土多異香。北有市，諸國估舶所湊，越海即闍婆也。
From the place where the Lesser Kunlun king resides, after half a day’s travel one reaches the stockade of Modibo; by sea, after five months [5 days?], one comes to the kingdom of Fodai. There is a river there with 360 [?] branches. Its king is named Sili Xiemita. There is a river called Sili Pilirui. The land produces many unusual aromatics. To the north there is a market where merchant ships from various countries gathere; crossing the sea from there, one reaches Shepo.
十五日行，踰二大山，一曰正迷，一曰射鞮，有國，其王名思利摩訶羅闍，俗與佛代同。經多茸補邏川至闍婆，八日行至婆賄伽盧，國土熱，衢路植椰子、檳榔，仰不見日。
After fifteen days’ travel, crossing two great mountains, one called Zhengmi and the other Shedi, there is a kingdom whose king is named Sili Mohouluozha [Sri Maharaja]; its customs are the same as those of Fodai. Passing through the Duorongbuluo River and proceeding to Shepo, after eight days’ travel one reaches Pohuijialu. The land of that kingdom is hot; coconut and areca palms line the roads so thickly that when one looks up one cannot see the sun.
王居以金為甓，廚覆銀瓦，爨香木，堂飾明珠。有二池，以金為隄，舟檝皆飾金寶。
The king’s residence uses gold for bricks; its kitchens are roofed with silver tiles; fragrant wood is used for fuel; the halls are adorned with bright pearls. There are two ponds with embankments made of gold, and the boats and oars are all decorated with gold and precious stones.
As can be seen, there are a couple of numbers in this itinerary that cannot possibly be correct: a five-month journey by sea, and a river with 360 branches. For the first number, it is possible to imagine that it should be five “days” rather than five “months” as the character for day 日 is similar to the one for month 月, particularly in handwriting, and it is possible to envision a copyist making an error for that. However, it is difficult to see where the 360 could have come from.
In any case, with the five-month sea journey being a five-day journey, this itinerary makes sense as indicating a route to the Malay Peninsula, particularly as it ends with overland and riverine travel.
Wolters, however, wanted this itinerary to lead to “Srivijaya at Palembang,” and to get this passage to indicate that, he engaged in a considerable about of intellectual and textual contortionism.
Before we look at what he wrote, I should note that Sinologist Edward Schafer had written a scathing review of Wolters’ first book, Early Indonesian Commerce, in which, among numerous other critiques, Schafer faulted Wolters for employing modern Mandarin rather than using reconstructed Tang-era pronunciations. That critique appears to have registered with Wolters, however his response was illogical.
In particular, in this paper, Wolters employed Hugh M. Stimson’s 1966 The Jongyuan in Yunn: A Guide to Old Mandarin Prounciation, which reconstructed the pronunciations in a Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) rhyme book, whereas the above itinerary was probably recorded somewhere around 800 AD. Meanwhile, Bernard Karlgren had produced reconstructions of Middle Chinese (~Sui to early Song) decades earlier that, although in need of updating, were at least attempting to indicate the sounds of the time the passage Wolters was examining was produced.
So, with that odd decision of Wolters in mind, here is what he wrote:
The text mentions Fo-tai [Fodai] (B’iu ət-d’ậi), said to be one of the Pyu dependencies. B’iu ət-d’ậi appears in the list of dependencies right after Lâ-iuět, or “Laut,” referring to Singapore island and its immediate vicinity. B’iu ət-d’ậi is said to be an important shipping center, and one sailed from it to Java. B’iu ət-d’ậi seems to be the same place as Fo-shih [Foshi] (B’iuět-ziäi), the T’ang transcription of Vijaya, or Śrīvijaya, and the miscellaneous information about it is consistent with the equivalence. D’ậi and Ziäi are more similar than their modern Mandarin sound suggest. Perhaps a copyist’s error has crept into the text. Alternatively, the -d’ậi maybe attributed to the Pyu pronunciation of “Vijaya.”
B’iu ət-d’ậi was reached by sea from a port on the Gulf of Martaban. The journey was said to take “five months,” but Pelliot thought that “five days” was intended. Perhaps the text should instead be emended to read “two months.”
. . .
Two rivers are mentioned, but only one by name. This is Si-lji-b’ji-ljie-nziwäi. Perhaps the last syllable is a scribal error for -piwↄng, an almost identical character. If this is so, the river’s name is remarkably close to “Srī Palembang”; only the consonant “m” is missing in -ljie-. Again, if Chinese geographical orientations are maintained in this text, the location of the shipper market and the port of Java should be understood to be not to the “north” but to the “east.” The text omits to identify the center “south” (= west) of the port. Perhaps the port was to the east of the ruler’s residence, known as B’iu ət-d’ậi (= Vijaya). (52-54)
HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!!!!!
In 2008, historian Craig Reynold’s wrote in an essay entitled “The Professional Lives of O. W. Wolters” that “By the 1970s, O. W. Wolters was unarguably the most influential historian of early Southeast Asia writing in the English-speaking world.” (1)
That statement is undoubtedly true. However, whereas Reynold’s intended it as a statement of praise, it is actually a scathing critique of the mediocre state of the field of scholarship on early Southeast Asia not only in the 1970s, but right up to the present, given that almost no one has ever challenged the drivel that Wolters produced in work after work like this.
To go through the above paragraphs line by line (and indeed, there are flaws in every single line), would take pages. Rather than do that, I have simply highlighted here the times where Wolters claimed the text was wrong, as that is already far more than enough to demonstrate his incompetence and deception.
One can’t simply declare that a text is wrong because it doesn’t record what one wants it to, and then to change it to say what one wants it to say. However, that is precisely what Wolters did over and over here. Further, while there are times when we can identify errors in texts, like the statement about a 5-month sea journey, we can’t just replace that error with something we like. Instead, we have to have a logic for indicating a possible alternative.
There is a logical reason why Pelliot and I both argued that the five-month journey could have been a five-day journey. It is because the characters for month and day are similar, and therefore, easy to potentially miscopy. There is no such logic for replacing the five with a two, other than that such a number would help the text fit Wolters’ preconceived ideas about what he wanted the text to indicate.
Wolters may have unarguably been influential in the 1970s, but he was also unarguably the worst historian that the field of Southeast Asian history has ever known, and indeed, undoubtedly among the worst that the entire history profession has ever known.
I would label the writings that Wolters produced in the 1970s and 1980s as “fantasy scholar fiction.” Unlike “historical fiction,” where authors seek to learn about the past and then create a fictional story that nonetheless closely follows the historical context, Wolters began with a fictional story and then fantasized how a scholar might have written an erudite study of it.
Pierre-Yves Manguin
While essentially everyone has fallen for Wolter’s fantasy scholar fiction, he gained a particularly loyal fan in French archaeologist Pierre-Yves Manguin.
Manguin served as a consultant at one point for the SPAFA project and in the 1987 issue of the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, he published an article entitled “Palembang et Sriwijaya : anciennes hypothèses et recherches nouvelles (Palembang Ouest)” in which he argued back against Bronson. More specifically, Manguin argued that there was evidence of a polity at Palembang that corresponded with Srivijaya.
To quote, he wrote that,
Thus, in one and the same area—West Palembang—we find gathered together: numerous royal inscriptions dated to the late seventh century (even if they are often fragmentary); a substantial number of monumental stone statues (even if they are in poor condition), many of which do indeed appear to be close to Indian models and contemporary with those inscriptions; and numerous imported ceramics that are generally agreed, albeit still imprecisely, to date from the eighth and ninth centuries. This threefold presence in a single place seems to me to indicate, without further ambiguity, that these sites were not only occupied, but that they were occupied either by a religious community in regular contact with India, or by the court of a ruler whose commercial and religious connections extended at least from China to India (the one does not exclude the other). If one adds to these observations, based solely on the archaeological remains found on the ground, all the solid philological and historical arguments in favor of Palembang advanced by the “veterans” and their successors, we are compelled to conclude that the ruler of Sriwijaya remains by far the best—if not the only—candidate for this position for the period extending from the seventh to the eleventh–twelfth centuries. To borrow Wolters’s words, one may “identify the whole of the Bukit Seguntang area [the West Palembang of this article] with that part of Sumatra which constituted the very heartland of Sriwijaya.” (361)
Now, here is the problem: early on, Manguin saw archaeological evidence of a polity at Palembang, and in his subsequent writings, he has assumed that the textual information about places like Shilifoshi, Sanfoqi, etc. is about Palembang.
Meanwhile, I see no evidence that Manguin has ever actually examined any of that textual information, nor can I find evidence of him actually understanding the issues surrounding the textual evidence.
Instead, we can repeatedly find Manguin citing entire studies by O. W. Wolters, for instance, such as Wolters 1966, 1967, 1979, 1979a, 1983, 1984, and 1986, as Manguin does in his 1993 article, “Palembang and Sriwijaya: An Early Malay Harbour-City Rediscovered.”
I can never understand what this form of citation means. For example, in citing Wolters 1966 or Wolters 1979, does this mean that Manguin agreed with the absurd claims that Wolters’ made in these articles, as we discussed in the previous post? Was Manguin even aware of how absurd Wolters’ (and Cœdès’s) “logic” was?
My point is that, and as I have demonstrated across all of the previous posts, the extant scholarship on the Chinese sources is deeply flawed, and places like Shilifoshi and Sanfoqi did not refer to Palembang. What Manguin seems to think is that archaeological findings at Palembang support the textual information, but the textual information is not about Palembang.
I think we can get a clear sense of this disconnect in Manguin’s mind by looking at a more recent writing, one from 2017, entitled “At the Origins of Sriwijaya: The Emergence of State and City in Southeast Sumatra.”
In that work, Manguin mentions an ancient polity called Gantuoli 干陁利, and for his understanding of that polity, he cites Pelliot 1904 and Wolters 1967. Let us look at what Pelliot wrote in 1904 about this polity, then what Wolters wrote in 1967, and then what Manguin wrote in 2017.
Pelliot
Kan-t’o-li 干陁利 or Kin-to-li 金陁利 is one of the last two countries in which M. Aymonier likewise seeks Funan. “This country,” he says (p. 374), “which sent embassies between 454 and 520, has been identified by some sinologists, M. Schlegel among others, with the land of Kandari or Kenderi, in the Palembang region, island of Sumatra. It seems to us that the homophony between the name of this country and that of the old kingdom of the fifth century may be purely accidental and can provide only a very weak argument. If we apply our method to the Kan-to-li of Ma Duanlin, we immediately notice several traits common to this country and to that of Chih-t’u, whose name, moreover, appears only later, in the seventh century, and which occupied, as is known, the lower basin of the Menam, which has now become the kingdom of Siam. Thus the customs of Kan-to-li are similar to those of Lin-yi and Funan; it may therefore have belonged to one of these kingdoms, doubtless the latter. The kings of Kan-to-li, like those of Chih-t’u, are distinguished by their attachment to the cult of Fo. Finally, in 502, the king of Kan-to-li had among his titles the two terms Kiu-tan, which we find identically in the names of the king of Chih-t’u. One may therefore believe that this designation Kan-to-li was applied for some time to the country which was later to be called Chih-t’u, ‘Red Earth,’ that is to say, the middle and lower basin of the Menam.”
Such are the arguments that M. Aymonier had already set forth, in almost the same terms, in his first article on Funan, and he is surprised that I passed over them in silence. I shall tell him quite frankly the reason. It is that, although I do not believe it proven that Kan-t’o-li was Palembang, it seems useless to me to exchange one hypothetical opinion for another that is just as hypothetical.
If the name Kandari or Këndëri were actually attested for Palembang, then, less skeptical than M. Aymonier, I would consider the current opinion sufficiently well founded. But Këndëri is a restoration by Schlegel based on the fact that many place names in the Malay Archipelago are plant names, and that këndëri in Malay designates a kind of wisteria; M. Aymonier is mistaken in believing that this name is currently applied to the Palembang region. To the embassies already noted from 454 to 520, one must add one in 563; in no case is any indication given of the country’s location, except that it was on an “island” in the southern seas; but that is only a clue, since the word zhou 洲, “island,” is sometimes applied to the continent. We are therefore reduced to the Chinese tradition which places the ancient Kan-t’o-li at Palembang. M. Groeneveldt supposed that this tradition might have been transmitted without interruption from the time when Kan-t’o-li was directly known, and the editors of his Notes added that this identification was confirmed by Van der Lith in the Livre des Merveilles de l’Inde; but there is nothing of the sort in the Livre des Merveilles de l’Inde, and I have not found the identification of Kan-t’o-li with Palembang earlier than the Ming period (1368–1644). The commonly accepted solution is therefore far from certain, but the same is true of M. Aymonier’s solution.
Customs similar to those of Lin-yi and Funan are attributed by the Chinese to a number of Indianized peoples of trans-Gangetic India, and the same is true of the “cult of Fo,” that is, Buddhism. The “title” K’iu-t’an, “in which some (MM. de Rosny, Schlegel) believed they saw the Chinese transcription of Gautama, one of the names of the historical Buddha” (p. 664), rather recalls for M. Aymonier “the Chao-Than of the present-day Tai” (p. 671). But MM. de Rosny and Schlegel are right, and beyond any possible doubt the king of Kan-t’o-li who sent the embassy of 502 was named Gautama Subhadra. This name Gautama among partially Buddhist populations is not very distinctive. Thus, even supposing that Ch’ih-t’u was in Siam, it would be possible that Kan-t’o-li was there as well; but it is no less possible that it must be sought elsewhere, and it is even more probable, in the absence of any contrary evidence, that it was situated, as the Chinese texts say, on an island. (401-402)
Wolters
Kan-t’o-li. . . It has a recorded history from 441 to 563 and is the kingdom of the fifth and sixth centuries which seems to have made the most significant contribution to the history of early Indonesian commerce. Yet, of all the kingdoms in question, its location in Indonesia is the least well established. Indeed, its identity as an Indonesian kingdom rests on a passage in the Ming shih which states that it was formerly called San-fo-ch’i, the Sung and Ming name for Srivijaya. Here is obviously a flimsy basis for establishing the identity of Kan-t’o-li. . . (162)
[Wolters has in a footnote, “Pelliot never doubted that Kan-t’o-li was in Indonesia,” and he cites the above passage (!!!) where Pelliot definitely did not say that. Wolters also cites Pelliot, TP, 22 (1923), 244, note 2. His bibliography has for that entry, ‘La theorie des quatres Fils du Ciel’, TP, 22 (1923), 97-125, where obviously there is no page 244. . . Man, it just gets worse and worse the more you look.]
Manguin
The rather flimsy textual identification of Gantuoli guo 干陁利國, with a recorded history from 441 to 563 CE, was largely based on a much later Ming reference to it being the forerunner of Sriwijaya. The new discoveries in the field, and the fact that some of the proto-historic sites in Air Sugihan survived into historic times have turned this Gantuoli into a more secure candidate for the Musi delta sites. Rulers of this polity carried Indian sounding names and played host to Buddhist monks [Pelliot 1904: 401-402; Wolters 1967: 162, 222].
While I can find plenty of flaws in Pelliot’s scholarship, one point that he deserves credit for is bringing together as much of the relevant records about a topic as he possibly could. In doing so, he demonstrated that we cannot place Gantuoli at Palembang.
It’s impossible to know where exactly Gantuoli was located, but a reference in the History of the Liang (636) to its customs being similar to those of Funan and Linyi would place it up on the Southeast Asian mainland, not surprising given that all of the evidence from that early period points to Chinese only engaging with the area of the Indochinese Peninsula and the northern half of the Gulf of Thailand (as we have seen in the series on Jia Dan’s itinerary).
Wolters does not go into any of the detail that Pelliot did, however he apparently thought that he was putting forth a different view from Pelliot when he said that there was “flimsy evidence” to identify Gantuoli as an Indonesian kingdom. In fact, that was Pelliot’s point.
Manguin, meanwhile, cited both Pelliot and Wolters, and then stated that “new discoveries in the field. . . have turned this Gantuoli into a more secure candidate for the Musi delta sites.”
It doesn’t work that way. Just because we dig something up from the ground in the area of Palembang, doesn’t make historical information that is not about Palembang suddenly be about Palembang. This is a key point that Manguin does not seem to understand.
If Pelliot and Wolters had put forth solid evidence demonstrating that the information in historical sources for Gantuoli points to a location at Palembang, then that would have been a different matter. However, their arguments were that we cannot associate Gantuoli with Palembang, therefore, whatever is dug out of the ground there, is irrelevant to the question of where Gantuoli was located.
Manguin does not understand this (and we can see this point repeated in an article from earlier this year), and I think the reason why he does not understand this is because he simply knows nothing about the textual sources and all of the problems with them, and even when he looks at what others have written about them, he doesn’t seem to understand what they wrote, as the above case demonstrates.
Archeology and the Texts
Since the 1970s, archaeologists have conducted research in the area of Palembang and they have made findings, but what is it that they have found? Have they found the heartland of Srivijaya?
That’s one possibility, but the historical sources that scholars have been working with about Shilifoshi, Sanfoqi, Zabag, etc., are not about Palembang, so we can’t combine the archaeology of Palembang together with the textual information about Shilifoshi, Sanfoqi, Zabag, etc. Those are two very separate matters.
As such, we cannot argue that the archaeological findings at Palembang point to “a major actor in world economy between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries,” as Manguin has claimed Srivijaya was (“Srivijaya: Trade and Connectivity in the Pre-modern Malay World,” 2021, 87), as the archeological findings do not tell us that. The information that was used to create that narrative comes from Chinese sources, and those sources are not about southern Sumatra.
As I’ve shown in the series on Jia Dan and Yijing, Chinese did not record information about the area of southern Sumatra and Java until about the 1200s. Therefore, it is possible that the archaeology and inscriptions that mention “Srivijaya” found in the area of Palembang in the seventh and eighth centuries were about a polity that existed there by that name at that time, but we will not find supporting evidence for that polity in Chinese sources.
That said, what Chinese sources do record information about are places to the north, along various trans-peninsular trade routes on the Malay Peninsula, where another inscription that mentions “Srivijaya” has been found, and that is also the area that the Chola attacked in the eleventh century, including a place called Srivijaya/Srivishaya.
Therefore, ultimately the “Srivijaya question” can only be solved by bringing together scholarship on texts, inscriptions, and archaeology. However, that can only happen when we recognize the flaws in the extant textual scholarship, particularly the scholarship on Chinese sources.
That in turn requires that people be able to read the Chinese sources, and that is what the field has lacked for well over a century (and if anyone still thinks after reading these posts that O. W. Wolters could “read Chinese” then let’s politely agree that we inhabit separate universes and let’s go our separate ways).
Further, certain academic trends in the past few decades have moved scholarship away from the deep engagement with texts.
Conclusion: The Lazification of Scholarship
In 2003, historian Geoff Wade published a working paper for the Asia Research Institute in Singapore entitled “The Pre-Modern East Asian Maritime Realm: An Overview of European-Language Studies,” a compilation of writings in Western languages on premodern maritime Asia.
I had Grok create some statistics about this piece, so take these numbers with a grain of salt, but they seem generally accurate.
Wade compiled 412 studies, 365 of which were in English, and 47 were in other languages (30 of which were in French). Further, the articles covered the following time span:
1890s: 5
1900s: 6
1910s: 8
1920s: 12
1930s: 18
1940s: 9
1950s: 38
1960s: 45
1970s: 72
1980s: 89
1990s: 92
2000s (2000–2003): 16
What this shows, and the point that I am trying to make, is that there was an expansion of English language scholarship from the 1950s onward, and as the above decade counts indicate, the biggest expansion took place in the 1980s-1990s (and, of course, it continues to the present).
This expansion of English-language scholarship facilitated what I would call a “lazification” (i.e., “becoming lazy”) of scholarship. As more and more scholarship became available in the English language, and as libraries transitioned from card catalogs to computerized catalogs in the 1980s making it easier for scholars to find all of that English-language scholarship, more and more scholars chose not to make the effort to examine sources and secondary scholarship in languages other than English.
As such, it is not a coincidence that “grand synthesis” works like Anthony Reid’s two-volume Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (1988, 1993), Victor Lieberman’s two-volume Strange Parallels (2003, 2009), and Barbara Watson Andaya’s The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast (2006), appeared when they did and were produced by these scholars.
While all of these scholars may have employed Southeast Asian sources to some degree early in their careers, they then transitioned to producing works that were primarily based on secondary scholarship in English, as well as primary sources in Western languages. Hence, my use of the term “lazification.”
As such, it should come as no surprise that there has been no major revision of the claims of Cœdès or Wolters. How could there be when for decades the trend in academia has been to rely ever more heavily on recent English-language secondary scholarship, and when many of the scholars leading the field are the most reliant on such scholarship?
As such, Srivijaya studies, and the study of early Southeast Asia more generally, are stuck at a dead-end. Flawed understandings of the Chinese sources that date from the nineteenth century still dominate the scholarship, and it is only a small number of scholars from outside these fields who have looked in and noticed what a mess has been created.
Meanwhile, from inside, and as it has been since the 1960s, it’s still full speed ahead with Pelliot, Cœdès, and Wolters. . .
My old archaeology professor, the sadly recently late John N. Miksic, was a Srivijaya skeptic. Not so much in print, where he toed the conventional line, but in lectures he would talk about his participation in the excavations around the Air Musi and Bukhit Senguntang and how little they revealed of the existence of a great Palembang-centred Srivijayan empire. I am sure LIDAR of the area shows no monumental architecture of anything Ankorean in scale. It was pretty clear that John thought Srivijaya was all more or less a chimera. Early Southeast Asianists, such as the buffoon KW Taylor, to the right of Walt Rostow or Robert McNamara on the Vietnam war, have often had a penchant for illegitimately combining semi-digested Chinese-language texts with archaeological remains (like Bronze Drums) to prove that there existed great dynasties, like the Hùng Kings with their kingdom of Văn Lang. I noticed with great dismay that “The Birth of Vietnam” has recently been translated into Vietnamese where the same third-rate nationalist myth-making scholarship derived from nationalist Vietnamese wartime scholarship will be fed back to Vietnamese but with the imprimatur of a retired Cornell professor. Taylor is another fabulist with mediocre Chinese who also looked up to Wolters.
Yea, I remember reading Miksic’s entry on Srivijaya in his historical dictionary and it was quite balanced. He made it clear where the scholarship is weak. At least that is what I recall from reading it.