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…
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…
In 1894, French Sinologist Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes translated a text written in the late seventh century by the Chinese monk, Yijing, entitled The Great Tang Biographies of Eminent Monks who Sought…
I have been writing about early Southeast Asia in Chinese sources for years now, and it is a very complex topic. Therefore, I decided to create a simplified version of…
Chinese historical sources contain valuable information about early Southeast Asia, however, it takes some effort to determine which exact places some of that information refers to.This task of determining which…
In the early 2000s, when I started teaching, I developed a course called “The World of the Mekong” that was about the histories of what is now Thailand, Cambodia, and…
By this point, it should be apparent to anyone who has read the previous three posts in this series that Paul Pelliot’s 1904 article, “Deux itinéraires chinois de Chine en…
In these posts, we are looking at an itinerary through Southeast Asia that Chinese scholar-official Jia Dan recorded in the ninth century. Why is this important?It is important because although…
This post is a continuation of the previous post where we began to look at 1) Paul Pelliot’s 1904 article, “Deux itinéraires chinois de Chine en Inde à la fin…
In the eighth century, a Chinese scholar-official by the name of Jia Dan 賈耽 (730-805) recorded a great deal of geographic information about foreign lands as well as the routes…