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…
From Chavannes to Sen: Yijing’s Journey through Southeast Asia (Part 2)
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…
What I Now Know about Early Southeast Asia in Chinese Sources
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…
From Chavannes to Sen: Yijing’s Journey through Southeast Asia (Part 1)
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…
The Potential of AI Films for Southeast Asian History
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…