Author: Le Minh Khai

In the eleventh century, a place in Southeast Asia called “Srivishaya” was attacked by a kingdom from southern India known as the Chola kingdom.We know about this from inscriptions in…

In early 1292, Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor of the Yuan Dynasty in China, gave orders to three of his officials to lead troops to attack the island of Java.Why…

Yes, you read that correctly. Marco Polo visited Thailand.Ok, I know that there was no place called “Thailand” in the late thirteenth century when Marco Polo traveled across Southeast Asia…

Ok, I think I have finally found “Malayu”!!!The term, “Malayu,” and the related terms of Malaya and Malāyur appear in several historical sources before the 1400s, and they clearly refer…

Having shared the translations of some of the information in Arabic texts about Southeast Asia in the last post, let’s take a look at what they have to say about…

In recent posts, I have been talking about information in Arabic texts. There are a group of texts in Arabic that provide information about Southeast Asia starting in the ninth…

As stated in the previous post, there were two “Javas” in the past in Southeast Asia. These two Javas are referred to in Arabic, Chinese and other sources variously as…

One issue that has confused historians for over a century is the fact that there is more than one place that was referred to as “Java” (or something close to…

There was a Chinese Buddhist monk by the name of Yijing 義淨 (635–713) who traveled to India in the second half of the seventh century and stayed there for 11…

The belief that there was historically a dynamic and important maritime kingdom on the island of Sumatra called “Srivijaya” has created an incalculable number of problems for scholarship on premodern…