Srivijaya

One of the first papers I ever published was called “Thoughts on a Chinese Diaspora: The Case of the Mạcs of Hà Tien” (2000). I wrote it as a final…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…