Sanfoqi in the Ming shilu
Many years ago now, in the 1990s, historian Geoff Wade translated the information about Southeast Asia in the Ming shilu (Veritable Records of the Ming), and then in the 2000s…
The Jawa – Cham Connection
I was recently reading an article by historian Nicolas Weber entitled “Malays in the Indochinese Peninsula: Adventurers, Warlords and Ministers” [Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society…
Locating Foluo’an 佛羅安
Over the past several years, I have been going through the Chinese sources for Southeast Asian history and reinterpreting them. One big issue that I have found is that people…
The History of Cambodia You Never Knew About
As I have been writing for years now, there is a place name in Chinese sources, Sanfoqi 三佛齊, which, for the past 100+ years, scholars have thought indicated a place…
The Lost Water Route between Songkhla and Nakhon Si Thammarat
Five years ago, I listened to a colleague at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Johannes Kurz, give a presentation on how problematic the scholarship on “Srivijaya” is, and in particular, how problematic…
Did Funan Have a Cham King?
I have recently been examining a fourth-century text Daoist text, the Grand Clarity Scripture of Divine Elixir Made from Liquid Gold (Taiqing jinye shendan jing 太清金液神丹經) attributed to Ge Hong…
The Surat Thani – Phang Nga Crossing in the Third-Fourth Centuries
In the third century, there were a couple of envoys who traveled to Funan and wrote accounts of the area. Namely, the following:Kang Tai 康泰, Account of Foreign Kingdoms in…
On NOT Crossing the Sea from Côn Đảo to Singapore
If you read the extent scholarship on Southeast Asia in the first millennium AD, you will find scholars repeatedly indicating that ships sailed across the seas between the area of…
The Chicken Tongue Aromatic (shejixiang) was NOT Cloves
There is an aromatic that is mentioned in early Chinese sources called the “chicken tongue aromatic” (jishexiang 雞舌香). From what I can tell, everyone who has mentioned it thinks it…
Ge Hong’s Five Kingdoms
In the previous post, I translated information about Southeast Asia in an early fourth-century text entitled Grand Clarity Scripture of Divine Elixir Made from Liquid Gold (Taiqing jinye shendan jing…