Elephants and Dragon Teeth Gate (Longyamen)
In developing the idea that Chinese sources provide evidence of a kingdom called “Srivijaya” at Palembang on the island of Sumatra, a placename called “Longyamen” 龍牙門, meaning “Dragon Teeth Gate,”…
An Insulting Assessment of My Work
I was looking around for something on the Journal of the Siam Society website and saw a new article by Pierre-Yves Manguin on “George Coedès and Śrīvijaya: From Epigraphy to…
The Seventeenth-Century Rise of Hà Tiên and Singora
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…
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…
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