A couple of years ago, I published an article entitled “Rescuing History from Srivijaya: The Fall of Angkor in the Ming Shilu (Part 1).” A continuation of that article, “Rescuing History from Srivijaya: The Fall of Angkor in the Ming Shilu (Part 2),” has just been published, and at some point, there will be a Part 3 as well.
In these articles, as well as in a working paper that I published entitled “Revisiting the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asian History,” I overturn a belief about early Southeast Asian history that has been upheld for over a century.
That belief is that “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊, a term that appears in Chinese sources from the Song to Ming periods, referred to a polity based at Palembang on the island of Sumatra called “Srivijaya.” What I demonstrate, is that Sanfoqi was literally the name “Cambodia/Kampuchea,” and I document how the sources make complete sense when we understand that Sanfoqi was “Cambodia,” whereas when we try to read the sources with the belief that “Sanfoqi” was “Srivijaya/Palembang,” we encounter countless problems (which historians have spent the past century unsuccessfully trying to resolve).
Why does this matter? It matters because 98% of the historical information that has been used to create a history of Srivijaya comes from accounts of Sanfoqi in Chinese sources. So, if we subtract that information, we are left with the 2% of historical information about Srivijaya that comes from an extremely limited number of inscriptions. In other words, it means that we need to re-visit the history of Srivijaya (and I point in a direction to go in the working paper).
It also means that we need to re-visit the history of Cambodia and the lower Mekong region. Understanding that Sanfoqi was Cambodia means that we now have much more information about Cambodia than was previously believed. And that is completely logical, as it only makes sense that there would be considerable information in Chinese sources about the most dynamic region of Southeast Asia in that time period.
All of that is exciting, but before that can happen, the tedious work of precisely documenting what the sources demonstrate and how previous scholars have gone wrong has to be undertaken, and that is what I do in these articles.
The idea that Sanfoqi was a polity based at Palembang was based on brief comments in the writings of Ma Huan and Fei Xin, two participants in the Zheng He voyages of the early fifteenth century. These men claimed that Sanfoqi was an earlier name for a place called “Old Harbor” and that local people called it the “Bolin Polity.”
Modern scholars then made connections to Palembang and Srivijaya because there was a place on the coast of Sumatra that Chinese referred to as “Old Harbor,” and it was in that general area that one of the inscriptions that mentions Srivijaya was found. In other words, the connection between Sanfoqi and Srivijaya was that: Sanfoqi = Old Harbor = Palembang = Srivijaya.
However, sources from the time when Ma Huan and Fei Xin voyaged through the region, such as the Ming Shilu and the Rekidai Hōan, indicate that Sanfoqi, Old Harbor and the Bolin (or Baolin) Polity were all separate places that existed at the same time, rather than being different names for the same place. Therefore, the fact that Ma Huan and Fei Xin could be so wrong about such basic information is a sign that their works are not reliable sources.
I already pointed this out in Part 1 (and I explain further in Part 2 how/why they are not reliable). However, in this second part, I go on to document the existence of other “Old Harbors” in Southeast Asia (not surprising, given that this is a generic name). Further, these other Old Harbors were on the coast of the Southeast Asian mainland, and one of them had a clear link to Sanfoqi.
In other words, to return to the equation, Sanfoqi = Old Harbor = Palembang = Srivijaya, what I show is that Sanfoqi and Old Harbor were connected but were not the same, and that the Old Harbor that was connected to Sanfoqi was on the mainland, not at Palembang, and that, therefore, Sanfoqi and its connected Old Harbor were not a place called Srivijaya. Instead, Sanfoqi was Cambodia/Kampuchea.
This is one key point, but there are many other issues that I discuss in this article (and the previous article and the working paper), because in understanding that Sanfoqi = Cambodia, there are countless related issues that need to be re-visited and re-interpreted/explained.
A version of the paper can be found here.
Liam C. Kelley, “Rescuing History from Srivijaya: The Fall of Angkor in the Ming Shilu (Part 2),” China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies 6.2 (2024): 225-269.
This is fascinating!
Thank you very much for saying this, Shawn!!! I have been writing about this for years, and you are one of the first people to say something positive.
Professor, I’ve been following this for some time and can’t help but wonder if some of the information in your earlier posts on Sanfoqi and the p1 of this article are outdated by newer discoveries. Thanks,
Hello Unenstar,
I’m still fine with what I wrote in Part 1. I mentioned in passing somewhere near the beginning the an idea that “Srivijaya” might have indicated a person. I now know that this is not true. It refers to a place, and in the working paper I subsequently published I talk about where I think it was (https://www.academia.edu/102690878/Revisiting_the_Chinese_Sources_on_Early_Southeast_Asian_History).
As for blog posts, yes, there are things in earlier posts that I no longer believe. I’ve consolidated all of the posts here: https://leminhkhaiblog.com/sanfoqi-srivijaya/. The ones from the “3.0” series are still mainly ok. There is plenty of stuff in the earlier posts that is good too, but it’s mixed together with stuff that I no longer believe, so. . .
That said, if there is some particular point that you are wondering about, feel free to ask.
Do you understand you are challenging decades of scholarship? If Sanfoqi was in Cambodia someone wouldve noticed.
Thank you for the comment. Actually, I’m overturning more than a century of scholarship, not just decades worth of it. 🙂
To respond to your point, scholars have long “noticed” the problem that Sanfoqi does not make sense as a placed called “Srivijaya” at Palembang. They have done this by pointing out over the decades many “textual problems” in Chinese sources in trying to document a history of a place on Sumatra called “Srivijaya.” So, you could say that many people have actually “noticed” this. They just did not figure out what was wrong. Why is that?
1) First, Chinese sources are very important for premodern Southeast Asian history, but there have been very few people in the field who can actually read those sources and even fewer who have produced scholarship that is thoroughly based on the primary sources in Chinese. Paul Wheatley did that, but only looked at the Malay Peninsula. Geoff Wade did it for the Ming shilu and some Song dynasty sources, but he never wrote about Sanfoqi. . . He’s got articles on Ayutthaya in the Ming shilu, Champa in the Song huiyao, etc., but nothing focusing on Sanfoqi. Then you have more recent works by scholars like Stephen Haw and Johannes Kurz that point out plenty of flaws in the extent scholarship (hence, they have definitely “noticed” the problem) but they have not built an alternative overview of the larger history of the region. Other than that, people have largely just recycled flawed information in secondary sources.
2) Also, another point that is critical is that much of the work on the region was produced during the “analog age,” a time that was very different from the present when virtually all of the sources have been digitized. That makes an enormous difference. Yes, it was possible to notice a “textual problem” in the past, but you could not quickly look through a dozen other sources to check that point like we can now. What took days/week/months just 10-15 years ago, now takes seconds/minutes.
3) Further, you can’t solve this problem by just looking at part of the picture. You have to look at everything. That is what I have done. I have looked at Chinese (and other) sources over the 1000+ years from ~500 to the 1700s for the entire Southeast Asian region (again, that’s so much easier now when it’s all just a click away on your computer, including scanned copies of old manuscripts). It’s only in doing so that you can get a full sense of the mistakes that scholars have made and the ways in which the information fits together.
4) Finally, it is also essential to not follow the extant scholarship. The extant scholarship is filled with flaws built on flaws, built on flaws. You have to go back to the primary sources and start from scratch. That is precisely what I have done. And again, in doing so, it becomes extremely easy to see how/why previous scholars made the mistakes that they did.
So, there are clear reasons why nobody ever figured out what I have figured out. I think a lot of people have “noticed” the problem. Before I engaged in researching this project, I had known for many years that the Chinese sources don’t support the idea that there was a major trading center at Palembang. I think that is obvious to anyone who opens up an historical Chinese text and compares what is written there with what modern scholars have written. However, no one had ever undertaken a full-scale project to examine this issue. I have gone through all of the sources I am aware of about not only Sanfoqi (and I’m writing an article on the Song dynasty sources right now), but all related sources about maritime Southeast Asia, and clearly document every part of my argument by citing those primary sources. Everything I have said is based on primary sources, and I document all of it. So, if I’m wrong, it should be easy to demonstrate, because I am laying out all of the evidence for everyone to see. . .
To be honest, there are so many topics in premodern Southeast Asian history that can also be thoroughly redone/revised. Think of all of the information that has been produced about Cambodia based on inscriptions. For decades, people have relied on transliterations (and French translations) that George Coedes made. Obviously, scholarship should be based on the actual inscriptions themselves, rather than Coedes’s (or anyone’s) transliterations. Further, using our current technology, all of the extant inscriptions should be digitized, placed in a searchable database, and now AI could be used to help decipher passages that are difficult to make out, etc. If that was done, and scholars who are deeply competent in Sanskrit and Old Khmer examined them again (again, like the case of scholars competent in classical Chinese, there are not many such people), I guarantee you that we would come up with many new ideas and probably a radically new understanding of Cambodian history.
None of this should surprise anyone. To the contrary, this is what we should all be demanding and welcoming.
What should surprise us, by contrast, is when scholars today still produce the same information that the pioneering scholars did more than a century ago, and still employ (flawed) translations that were made a century ago.