From Cœdès to Manguin: Srivijaya and the Chinese Sources (Part 6)
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…
From Cœdès to Manguin: Srivijaya and the Chinese Sources (Part 5)
In the 1930s, after scholars had investigated the topic of “Srivijaya” for more than a decade, some of the core ideas in George Cœdès’s 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,”…
From Cœdès to Manguin: Srivijaya and the Chinese Sources (Part 4)
In his 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,” George Cœdès examined information from three types of sources—inscriptions, Arabic texts, and Chinese texts—to make the argument that there had historically existed…
From Cœdès to Manguin: Srivijaya and the Chinese Sources (Part 3)
By the time George Cœdès wrote and published his 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,” there were various false assumptions that scholars had created about certain placenames mentioned in Chinese…
The Pyu, Tircul, Javanese, and Shepo
In the history of Burma, scholars have written about what they have perceived as a people who inhabited parts of Upper Burma in the first millennium AD that they refer…
From Cœdès to Manguin: Srivijaya and the Chinese Sources (Part 2)
In thinking about how to explain the problems that we find in George Cœdès’s 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,” I realized that it would be helpful for readers to…
A Translation of George Cœdès’s 1918 Srivijaya Article
In writing about George Cœdès’s 1918 article, “Le royaume de Çrīvijaya,” it dawned on me that it would be difficult for many people to understand what I am talking about…
From Cœdès to Manguin: Srivijaya and the Chinese Sources (Part 1)
By the late nineteenth century, as I documented in the previous two series of posts, scholars had linked two placenames recorded in Chinese sources, Shilifoshi 室利佛逝 and Sanfoqi 三佛齊, with…
From Chavannes to Sen: Yijing’s Journey through Southeast Asia (Part 4)
In 1967, historian O. W. Wolters published his Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Srivijaya. In that work, Wolters mentions Yijing, the seventh-century Chinese monk who traveled…
From Chavannes to Sen: Yijing’s Journey through Southeast Asia (Part 3)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, various Western scholars started to investigate what Chinese historical sources recorded about places in Southeast Asia. As they did so, they were…