Roughly six years ago I started to write about my discovery that a placename that appears in Chinese sources called Sanfoqi signified “Kambuja/Kampuchea” rather than “Srivijaya” as scholars had claimed…
In the past week, I’ve had a few “Wow!” moments related to LLMs, AI, and digital knowledge, and so I thought I’d document that here. The comments I will make…
Three years ago, epigrapher Anton O. Zakharov published a detailed discussion of the first part of my “Rescuing History from Srivijaya” article, entitled “Srivijaya or Angkor? Notes on Liam Kelley’s…
Several years ago, I first suspected that a name that we find in Song-dynasty-era sources, Sanfoqi, referred to “Kambuja/Kampuchea” rather than what most of the rest of the scholarly world…
If you look at old European maps of the area of what is now southern Thailand, you will notice something odd. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, these maps…
I recently upgraded some maps in Chinese that cover the area of Siam in the eighteenth century. In doing so, I did not update what we can know about the…
For years, I have been arguing that the area between Lake Songkhla and Kedah was home to a trans-peninsular trade route of immense importance in the final centuries of the…
In 2012, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan held an exhibition of historical maps in its collection and published a catalog of that exhibition entitled “Mapping the Imperial Realm, an…
The Shunfeng xiangsong 順風相送 [Voyage with a Tailwind] is an early Chinese nautical navigation manual. It’s not clear when this text was created, however, one manuscript version of this text…
I’m in the process of translating a fourteenth-century text, Wang Dayuan’s 1349 Brief Treatise on the Island Barbarians (Daoyi zhilue 島夷誌略), and I do this by putting passages in Grok,…