Author: Le Minh Khai

There is an aromatic that is mentioned in early Chinese sources called the “chicken tongue aromatic” (jishexiang 雞舌香). From what I can tell, everyone who has mentioned it thinks it…

In the previous post, I translated information about Southeast Asia in an early fourth-century text entitled Grand Clarity Scripture of Divine Elixir Made from Liquid Gold (Taiqing jinye shendan jing…

If you don’t know what this title means, then you can read these blog posts to find out more:“Yijing did NOT Visit Jambi/Srivijaya”“I Found “Malayu / Malaya / Malāyur!!!”The gist…

I have just shared a translation that ChatGPT and I made of the sections in Zhou Qufei’s twelfth-century Lingwai daida that relate to maritime Southeast Asia. I would like to…

In previous posts I have been challenging a long-held belief that a “surname” that appears in Chinese sources, “Pu,” indicates the Arab name, “Abu” or the Javanese-Malay title, “mpu/empu.”In this…

In a recent blog post, I talked about how in Song dynasty era sources, there is a “surname” that appears in numerous Chinese records about tribute missions coming from Southeast…

I have made the argument that there was a trans-peninsular empire/polity in the area of Songkhla – Kedah that foreigners referred to by the name “Java/Jaba,” and that it was…