Zhou Qufei’s 周去非 1178 work, Lingwai daida 嶺外代答 [Representative Responses about the Region Beyond the Passes], is a very important Chinese source for information about maritime Southeast Asia at that…
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…
In the previous post, I mentioned that there was a tribute mission from the Chola Kingdom in 1015 that was led by a certain Suolisanwen (娑里三文) with a deputy envoy…
In Song dynasty era sources, there is a “surname” that appears in numerous records about tribute missions coming from Southeast Asia (and beyond), and that is “Pu” 蒲. This character…
Several years ago, when I first started researching about “Srivijaya” and quickly realized that a place name in Chinese sources (Sanfoqi) that scholars thought indicated that supposed polity on Sumatra…
I was reading a book that was published in 2022 called The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia. It contains a chapter on “Srivijaya” by Pierre-Yves Manguin.In that chapter, there…
THE 15TH ENGAGING WITH VIETNAM EVENT SERIESANNOUNCING THE GRAND EVENT:“Knowledge Production, Creative Industries, Education, and the AI Age in Vietnam: Looking Back and Moving Forward”, 10-13 December 2025, Hanoi, VietnamEngaging…
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…