In the 1930s, after scholars had investigated the topic of “Srivijaya” for more than a decade, some of the core ideas in George Cœdès’s 1918 article, “Le Royaume de Çrivijaya,” were challenged.
The first person to do so was R. C. Majumdar, and his critique of Cœdès’s work was substantial. First, he introduced the idea that the two faces of the Ligor Inscription referred to different rulers, and from this, he argued that an original Srivijaya at Palembang had subsequently come under the authority of a Sailendra dynasty that had come from India and established itself on the Malay Peninsula.
Majumdar’s article led scholars to reconsider their view of the Ligor Inscription, its relationship to other inscriptions, and to think further about the issue of the Sailendras.
Second, Majumdar pointed to serious flaws in Cœdès’s use of the Arabic and Chinese sources. However, unlike his point about the Ligor Inscription, Majumdar’s statements about the Arabic and Chinese sources did not lead scholars to significantly reconsider their views. This is particularly the case with the Chinese sources.
Another person to challenge Cœdès’s 1918 views was H. G. Quaritch Wales in an article entitled “A Newly Explored Route of Ancient Indian Expansion” [Indian Arts and Letters 9, 1 (1935): 1-31.] I don’t have access to this article, but there is a summary of its ideas in a report on “Recent Archeological Research Work in Siam” in a 1938 issue of the Journal of the Siam Society.
Wales examined archaeological findings and art and architecture along the trans-peninsular crossing from Takua Pa on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula to the Bandon Bay in the east. According to the report on his findings:
The conclusions of Dr. Wales’ researches are, among others, that Professor Cœdès was wrong in placing the capital of the hinduized Malay Empire of Srivijaya, at Palembang on the East coast of Sumatra. Dr. Wales opines that Chaiya was the capital of Srivijaya and that from Chaiya radiated the cultural influence which produced the various art and architectural schools that flourished in Cambodia, Champa and Java. (242)
From later works, such as his “Culture Change in Greater India” [Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1948): 1-32.], one can see that Wales did not base his scholarship on texts, but instead, put forth historical arguments based on his understanding of art and architecture.
Meanwhile, J. L. Moens published a work in 1937 that likewise differed from Cœdès’s account of Srivijaya in his 1918 article (“Srivijaya, Yava en Kataha,” Tijd, 77 3 (1937), 317-486 and an abridged English translation in JMBRAS 17, 2 (1939): 1-108).
In this work, Moens reinterpreted inscriptions and information in Chinese sources (based on the flawed understandings of Pelliot, Shlegel, etc.), and combined that with extensive discussions about the geography in the region to argue that there was an “old Śrīvijaya” in Kelantan on the Malay Peninsula, and then a “new Śrīvijaya” that was based at Muara Takus on the Kampar River in central Sumatra. Further, Moens argued that from that new center, Palembang was attacked and taken, rather than serving as the original capital.
While these scholars put forth different ideas, one issue that they all shared, was that they could not read the Chinese sources. Majumdar could see that the Chinese sources did not support the Srivijaya narrative, but because he could not read those sources himself, he could not move scholarship on that topic forward.
Wales did not use the Chinese sources, but they do provide important information, so one has to use them if one wants to understand the story of “Srivijaya” and early Southeast Asian history more generally.
Finally, Moens just followed the flawed ideas about the Chinese sources that had been established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That is a dead end, because flawed ideas can never lead one to the truth.
As such, what the field of Srivijaya scholarship desperately needed, was a scholar who knew Chinese and who could see that Majumdar’s suspicions about the Chinese sources were right, and who would make the effort to look seriously into the Chinese sources and try to figure out what the early generation of scholars had gotten wrong.
O. W. Wolters
It is in this context that historian O. W. Wolters appeared in the early 1960s. Wolters had spent twenty years working as a civil servant in British Malaya, and theoretically he had learned Chinese. In 1957, he then went to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London where in 1962, he completed a dissertation on “Early Indonesian Commerce and the Origins of Śrīvijaya.” A year later, Wolters took up a position at Cornell University, then entering its “Golden Age” of training young Southeast Asianists.
Wolters’ dissertation was published as a monograph in 1967 by Cornell University Press, and he went on to write a second monograph on Srivijaya and several articles on that topic.
Wolters’s dissertation/monograph was the first book-length study of Srivijaya in English. Combined with his other writings, it is safe to say that Wolters “defined” subsequent scholarship on Srivijaya, not only in English, but I think in every language and everywhere. When people write about Srivijaya today, they are following a version of the Srivijaya narrative that they find either in Wolters’ writings, or in the writings of subsequent scholars who follow Wolters’ ideas.
That said, and given everything that I have written in all of these posts on the scholarship that led to and was part of “Srivijaya scholarship” before Wolters appeared on the scene, it is absolutely astonishing to note that at no point in his career, did Wolters ever realize that any scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had misunderstood the locations of key placenames like Shilifoshi, Sanfoqi, Moluoyu, or Shepo, nor did he ever question that Shilifoshi was a transcription of “Srivijaya,” nor did it ever apparently concern him that there is no link between the placenames Shilifoshi and Sanfoqi in Chinese sources. . .
Early Indonesian Commerce
In the first chapter of his dissertation/book, Wolters gives a brief overview of Srivijayan studies and this is how he deals with the scholarship in the 1930s that challenged Cœdès’s ideas:
A few attempts have been made to upset the view that Palembang was the original headquarters and to look for it in the Malay Peninsula, but this form of heterodoxy has never found favour with the veterans, and indeed in 1936 Professor Coedes felt moved to comment on ‘the strangest vicissitudes of the history of Srivijaya in these last few years’ and to call for a halt to the tendency to look for its original seat anywhere except at Palembang.[33] His advice was not immediately heeded, but today there is little inclination to break with traditional thinking on this subject.
[33] Coedes, A propos d’une nouvelle théorie sur le site de Srivijaya’, JMBRAS, 14, 3 (1936), 1-9. Heretic views are noted in note 81, Chapter 13. Professor Coedes had, however, called attention to the way in which scholars, including himself, lost sight of his originally cautious attitude in 1918 concerning Palembang as the permanent site of the Srivijayan capital; ‘On the origin of the Sailendras of Indonesia’, JGIS, I (1934), 63, note 4. The author’s views on the location of the capital of Srivijaya in the eleventh century are contained in the forthcoming volume of Artibus Asiae offered to Professor G. H. Luce in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday. Reasons are given for believing that the capital changed from Palembang to Jambi in the 1079-1082 period. (266, fn. 33)
[81] Dr. Quaritch Wales once thought that the presence of Srivijayan-type art remains in the isthmus of the Peninsula suggested that the empire was at one time based there; lAL, 9 (1935), 1-31. Moens, by an ingenious use of translations by Chavannes and Pelliot, proposed that the capital was first on the south-eastern coast of the Peninsula, then at Kampar on the east coast of Sumatra, and finally at Palembang; ‘Srivijaya, Yava en Kataha’, 8-20. Recently a Thai writer, Mr. Thammathat Phanit, has identified I Tsing’s city as Bodhi at Chaiya, on the isthmus of the Peninsula; Illustrated booklet of instruction. . ., Chaiya, 1961, 4. (335, fn. 81)
In his 1962 dissertation, the first footnote was slightly different (my emphasis):
(1) ‘A propos d’une nouvelle théorie’. I glance at heretic views, recently reinformed by a Thai scholar, in chapter 13. I am on the side of the veterans. Professor Coedes had, however, called attention to the way in which scholars, including himself, lost sight of his originally cautious attitude in 1918 concerning Palembang as the permanent site of the Śrīvijayan capital; ‘On the origin of the Śailendras’, 63, note 4. Pelliot and Professor Sastri are among those who believe that the capital in the Sung period was more likely to have been in Jambi than in Palembang; ‘Les grand voyages maritimes chinois au début de XVe siècle, TP, 30, 1933, 376-7; History of Śrī Vijaya, 90-1. Professor Wheatley has recently seen the force of this view; ‘Geographical notes on some commodities’, JMBRAS, 32, 2, 1959, 11-12. (23, fn. 1)
“Glance” is far too strong of a verb for Wolters’ examination of “heretic views” in chapter 13. Instead, in a passage discussing Yijing’s journey through Southeast Asia, Wolters merely wrote in the second half of a sentence that “not everyone has been prepared to believe that Śrīvijaya was already based on Palembang in 671” (450 in diss., 208 in book). And then in both his dissertation and his book he has the same footnote about Wales, Moens, and Phanit, a footnote which tells us nothing about what those scholars argued and why it was supposedly incorrect.
That said, what is utterly astonishing, is that Wolters never mentioned R. C. Majumdar’s 1933 study, in which he demolished the Srivijaya narrative on multiple fronts (and which we examined in the previous post). He cited the two articles in which George Cœdès mentioned Majumdar’s critique, that is, the articles where Cœdès wrote (to quote the passage in the second article) that, “the identification of Che-li-fo-che [Shilifoshi] with San-fo-ts’i [Sanfoqi] was certain neither phonetically nor historically. I would say here more precisely: historically, the two terms succeed one another; phonetically, they are not exactly superimposable.”
Therefore, Wolters must have known that there were major problems with trying to get the Chinese sources to support the Srivijaya narrative. And indeed, he does show an awareness of at least this one issue that Cœdès acknowledged, as he stated (again tucked away in a footnote like the above comments about “heretics”) that,
Dissertation (21, fn. 1)
I do not intend to involve myself in the question why the Sung [Song] Chinese changed the transcription from Shih-li-fo-shih [Shilifoshi] to San-fo-ch’i [Sanfoqi]. The name ‘Śrīvijaya’ survives the transcription Shih-li-fo-shih [Shilifoshi], and San-fo-ch’i [Sanfoqi] was on the same south-eastern coast of Sumatra as both Śrīvijaya’ and Shih-li-fo-shih [Shilifoshi].
Book (fn. 30, 265)
The question will be avoided why the Sung [Song] Chinese changed the transcription from Shih-li-fo-shih [Shilifoshi] to San-fo-ch’i [Sanfoqi]. It is sufficient to note that the name ‘Srivijaya’ survived the transcription Shih-li-fo-shih and that San-fo-ch’i was on the same south-eastern coast of Sumatra as both Śrīvijaya’ and Shih-li-fo-shih.
First of all, the expression, “survive the transcription,” is significant. We will see below that Wolters believed Cœdès’s contorted and untenable explanation for how Shilifoshi was equivalent to Srivijaya. That is what this is a reference to.
However, stop and consider what Wolters was doing here. Wolters’ Early Indonesian Commerce was first produced as a PhD dissertation at SOAS in 1962. Then it was published by Cornell University Press in 1967.
In both of these works, Wolters avoids talking about the extant scholarship that contradicts his own work, and instead, writes in a footnote that he will “not involve himself” in a core, fundamental issue that completely undermines the Srivijaya narrative that Cœdès had constructed.
So, apparently, to get a PhD in History at SOAS at the University of London in 1962, one did not need to address the core extant scholarship in one’s field? Was that really the case? If so, then my view of the University of London just went down the toilet.
Or was O. W. Wolters simply an intellectual lightweight who got a dissertation passed because his committee members were asleep at the job?
And Cornell University Press was ok with that too?
In his second monograph, The Fall of Śrīvijaya in Malay History (1970, Oxford University Press), Wolters likewise did not mention Majumdar’s critique. However, Wolters finally did so in an article in 1979, “Studying Śrīvijaya,” where he acknowledged that Majumdar had “introduced a theory whose influence has not entirely disappeared” that “although the ruler of Sumatran Śrīvijaya established himself on the Malay Peninsula by 775, his authority there was soon superseded by that of the Śailendra rulers, who, according to Professor Majumdar, might have recently come from India.” (7)
Here, Wolters also noted that Majumdar had employed inscriptions and Arabic sources in making his argument, however, he said nothing about Majumdar’s critique of the Chinese sources that had been used to construct the Srivijaya narrative, precisely the area which Wolters supposedly had the expertise to address, and yet. . . he never did.
Majumdar critiqued the kinds of issues that I have pointed out in many posts and in my published writings. I have been working with Chinese sources for 30 years, and I can verify that Majumdar was completely correct when he made comments like “the Chinese themselves never suggested that Che-li-fo-che [Shilifoshi] was the equivalent of San-fo-ts’i [Sanfoqi].”
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, O. W. Wolters was incapable of doing that. Was it because his linguistic ability was abysmal? Was it that he simply did not have the intellect of someone like Majumdar? Actually, with all due respect to R. C. Majumdar, a lot of his critiques were not difficult to notice.
Wolters and the Absurd
As I pointed out in the first post in this series, George Cœdès’s effort to equate the Chinese name Shilifoshi with Srivijaya, a key pillar in his overall effort to link the Srivijaya mentioned in inscriptions to Chinese sources, was utterly untenable.
His “strongest” argument was that people in Southeast Asia vernacularized “vijaya” as “bujai” and then the Chinese recorded that around 700 AD as “Foshi,” and then 300 years later, when they encountered a Cham polity that is recorded in inscriptions as “Vijaya,” somehow the Chinese remembered that 300 years earlier a vernacularized version of “vijaya” had been rendered into Chinese as “Foshi” so they called the Cham polity by that same name. . .
As I wrote in that post, this argument is batshit crazy. And yet, Wolters had no trouble with it, stating in his first book that “One of [Cœdès’s] reasons for equating Shih-li-fo-shih with Srivijaya was that Fo-shih was the Chinese name for the later Cham capital of Vijaya on the coast of Annam, an equation which was not in doubt.” (fn. 32, 265-66)
Who could not be in doubt about that?!! It’s utterly absurd. And yet, it is clear that the absurd was somehow logical to Wolters.
He repeated this again in his 1979 article, stating that:
Noting Chinese records of the Cham centre mentioned in several inscriptions as ‘Vijaya’ and known to the Chinese as Fo-shih, Coedès was able to restore the Arab toponym of Sribuza and the T’ang Chinese toponym of Shih-li-fo-shih as ‘Śrīvijaya,’ which he identified as a kingdom mentioned in a Bangka island inscription of 686, in an inscription of 775 from Ligor on the Peninsula, and in Cōḷa inscriptions of the eleventh century. Scholars instantly hailed Śrīvijaya as a major and enduring kingdom in early Indonesian history, for Coedès, influenced by Groeneveldt’s study of 1876, at first diffidently and then ever more confidently believed that the kingdom was Malay and that its capital was at Palembang. (1-2)
The mentioning here of early Dutch Sinologist Willem P. Groeneveldt takes us again into the realm of the absurd. Wolters mentioned Groeneveldt in the volume of Artibus Asiae offered to Professor G. H. Luce in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday, mentioned above in footnote 33 of Wolters’ first book, in which Wolters claimed to have provided evidence that the capital of Srivijaya changed from Palembang to Jambi in the 1079-1082 period.
That article is entitled “A Note on the Capital of Śrīvijaya during the Eleventh Century” and it was published in 1966.
After a brief statement recognizing Professor Luce’s contributions, Wolters then began his paper with the following paragraph:
During the period of its initial and far-flung expansion in the second half of the seventh century Srivijaya’s capital was certainly at Palembang, but scholars have suspected that, later in the long history of the kingdom, the capital was situated at Jambi, on the Batang Hari river about fifty miles from the estuary and approximately 140 miles north-west of Palembang in the low plains of southern Sumatra. Not until 1918 was San-fo-ch’i 三佛齊 identified as the Sung [Song] writers’ transcription of ‘Srivijaya,’ but as early as 1876 Groeneveldt recognised the name ‘Jambi’ in the Sung shih’s [History of the Song] statement that the king of San-fo-ch’i ‘is styled Chan-pei 詹卑.’ In 1904 Pelliot observed that Chou Ch’u-fei, writing in 1178, stated that in 1079 the kingdom of San-fo-ch’i sent an envoy of the kingdom of Chan-pei to bring tribute, and Pelliot suggested that in both the Ling wai tai ta and the Sung shih ‘Jambi’ was in fact the name of the country of San-fo-ch’i. Hirth and Rockhill, writing in 1911, noted that Chou Ch’u-fei mentioned a mission from Jambi in 1088 as well as in 1079, but they did not suggest that this information had a bearing on the inclusion by Chao Ju-kua in 1225 of Pa-lin-feng 巴林馮, or Palembang, among the dependencies of San-fo-ch’i; instead, they considered that Jambi became the capital of ‘eastern Sumatra’ after the Javanese conquest in or about 1377. Pelliot returned to the subject in 1933 and concluded that the conquest of Palembang in the Javanese campaign was not, as Hirth and Rockhill thought, the cause of the change of the capital of Srivijaya, which was an event that must already have taken place in Sung times; as a result ‘Jambi’ became known to the Chinese as ‘Srivijaya.’ Subsequent writers have been aware of the importance of Malayu, presumably the Sumatran kingdom ruled from Jambi, in Indonesian inscriptions and Chinese records referring to the 13th and 14th centuries, and they have become increasingly confident in accepting Pelliot’s opinion that even in Sung times the capital of Srivijaya was no longer always at Palembang. The exact time and circumstances of the change of the capital have not, however, been established. (225-26)
This is so typical of Wolters’ “scholarship.” It’s just a chaotic mess. There is absolutely no way that anyone who is not 100% familiar with the Chinese sources could possibly understand what Wolters was saying here, and when one does know the Chinese sources, it is completely obvious that Wolters had gotten completely lost following old flawed assumptions about the meaning of those key placenames.
That said, I suspect that most subsequent scholars who can’t read Chinese have viewed this opaque writing as a sign of erudition. Not being able to fully follow Wolters (no one can follow writing like this – it’s simply chaotic drivel), they can only assume that Wolters is correct, as he was “the expert.”
For those people, I say read what R. C. Majumdar wrote. It’s crystal clear. This topic is not so difficult that it is impossible to write clearly about it.
Meanwhile, I can also see that in his opaque writing, Wolters was also intentionally deceptive. Take for example this statement: “Not until 1918 was San-fo-ch’i 三佛齊 identified as the Sung [Song] writers’ transcription of ‘Srivijaya,’ but as early as 1876 Groeneveldt recognised the name ‘Jambi’ in the Sung shih’s [History of the Song] statement that the king of San-fo-ch’i ‘is styled Chan-pei 詹卑.’”
As we saw in the first post of this series, Sanfoqi has never been “identified” as Srivijaya. It, along with Shilifoshi, has been “imagined” to be “Srivijaya,” but no one has produced solid evidence to link those two Chinese names to the name “Srivijaya,” because there is no such evidence.
As for the second point, the account of Sanfoqi in the History of the Song makes the passing comment that “Its king is called ‘Zhanbei’” (其王號詹卑).
In translating that account in 1876, Groeneveldt translated this as “The king is styled Chan-pi,” and then wrote in a footnote that,
Our author probably makes a mistake here. We shall see by and by that San-bo-tsai [Sanfoqi] was for a long time the principal port on this side of the island, but that probably Palembang and Djambi existed long before San-bo-tsai was destroyed; we think that the author has heard the name of Radja Djambi, i.e., the king of Djambi, and that he has mistaken the name of the country for the name of the king.
This absurd (actually, “batshit crazy”) conjecture is what Wolters was referring to when he wrote that “but as early as 1876 Groeneveldt recognised the name ‘Jambi’ in the Sung shih’s [History of the Song] statement that the king of San-fo-ch’i [Sanfoqi] ‘is styled Chan-pei [Zhanbei] 詹卑.
Yes, it is true that Groeneveldt “saw Jambi” in that statement, but that was a nineteenth-century hallucination rather than a scholarly recognition, and as such, Wolters language here can only be seen as intentionally deceptive. What is more, this is by no means the only example where we can find such deception in Wolters’ writings. His decision to not include Majumdar’s critique in his dissertation/book is, of course, another example, but there are others as well.
The Catastrophe
O. W. Wolters Early Indonesian Commerce never should have been approved at the dissertation stage. A dissertation that does not address the extant scholarship is not qualified to pass.
Unfortunately, it did pass, and even more unfortunately, it was published by Cornell University Press, and then tragically, O. W. Wolters continued to write on “Srivijaya.”
The result has been catastrophic for the study of early Southeast Asian history.
Subsequent scholars largely took for granted that Wolters’ was correct in stating that any earlier views that differed from those of “the veterans” were “heretic” and one need not investigate them. Indeed, it is clear to me that most subsequent scholars never read much, if any, of the pre-Wolters scholarship.
And when Wolters failed to acknowledge Majumdar’s pointed critique of the use of the Chinese sources in the Srivijaya narrative. . . and when Wolters made no improvements on flawed and outdated scholarship, even when the original ideas supporting it were utterly absurd. . .
Again, the result has been catastrophic.
For anyone who has read these posts, it should be blazingly clear that the problem with scholarship on Srivijaya and early Southeast Asia more generally is that the initial identifications of the meanings of certain key Chinese placenames that were made by Groeneveldt, Pelliot and others were flawed.
O. W. Wolters, with his supposed ability to read Chinese, was handed a golden opportunity to rectify that situation. The problem had already been clearly pointed out by Majumdar in 1933. All Wolters needed to do was to follow up on the issue.
However, that is not what happened. Wolters either chose not to do so, or his intellectual and linguistic skills were simply not up to the task.
Therefore, instead of rectifying the errors in earlier studies and opening the door to a new age of scholarship on early Southeast Asia, one that could build from a solid foundation of knowledge about the Chinese sources, Wolters perpetuated the errors of his predecessors and enshrined them in English-language scholarship, the body of scholarship that came to dominate in the decades that followed.
Wolters as a colonial officer in Malaya had learnt colloquial Cantonese, but I doubt very much that he ever received any formal education in classical Chinese. I just checked and found that D.G.E. Hall supervised Wolters’ dissertation.
Thanks for the comment!
Yes, Hall should have demanded that Wolters carry out one of the most basic tasks of an historian – to carry out a proper literature review and address the extant scholarship.
Craig Reynolds wrote (https://www.academia.edu/536494/The_Professional_Lives_of_O_W_Wolters) that when Wolters joined the Malayan Civil Service, he “had been selected to study Chinese, and so he proceeded to Singapore, Macau, and Hong Kong where he spent two and a half years learning the language.” (3)
Reynolds then cites a book that gives an account of life in Hong Kong for new cadets: Robert Heussler, “British Rule in Malaya: The Malayan Civil Service and Its Predecessors, 1867-1942.” There is a pdf of this online, and the pages Reynolds pointed to were 160-61.
It’s clear from what Heussler wrote that how much Chinese, or Cantonese, one learned varied widely depending on the initiative taken by the learner.
Reynolds also writes (10), “From about March 1955 until November 1956, Wolters was head of the Psychological Warfare Section, a position that involved supervising the translation of anti-communist propaganda. In this task he worked closely with C. C. Too, a Malayan Chinese who has been described as ‘the brains’ behind the British strategies in psychological warfare against the communists.”
I find it quite amazing that in progressive Western academia, Wolters has been given a pass. By this point, one would think that at least SOAS or Cornell, in an effort to “decolonize knowledge,” would have condemned this alumnus/former faculty member for his active participation in British imperialism. . . but I haven’t heard/seen anything like that. For decades now, scholars have criticized the field of area studies for being “complicit in imperialism”. . . so why not criticize an historian who was an active participant in the British imperial project and who was endorsed/supported by SOAS and Cornell?
Is it because he was from SOAS and Cornell? Is it because he was the guy who promoted Coedes’s “Srivijaya” narrative? Why does Wolters get a pass?
The early reviewers of his 1967 book did not know Chinese either and were praising it a lot. E.H. Schafer did not, but his critique, concerning especially philologically issues, went unnnoticed. P. Wheatley, whose work The Golden Khersonese, Wolters had consulted quite a lot, naturally also wrote a splendid review. Wheatley, as must be remembered, used the help of a Chinese scholar for the translations in the Golden Khersonese. I think Wolters got away because Southeast Asian history is not a field hard core Chinese studies people usually go into. Even today there is perhaps a handful of sinologists that ‘do’ Southeast Asian history, and I have the impression, they are in some quarters regarded regarded as pariahs within Chinese studies.
Oh, I don’t know this about Wheatley getting help. Does he say that in his book? Or, if not, where does that information come from?
As for Sinologists who work on Southeast Asia being pariahs. . . I’m not quite sure who that would refer to, and it’s probably better to avoid throwing dirt around, as I can think of people who know Chinese who have written about Southeast Asia for different reasons (Charles Holcombe wrote a great article on Tang-era Vietnam, for instance).
That said, the one thing that I will say, and which will perhaps offend some, but I do think it is accurate, is that there is a definite hierarchy when it comes to Sinology.
I would put at the top things like the study of Daoist rituals. That is not easy.
Below that you have things like poetry.
Below that you have things like narrative history (what happened, when, where).
Below that you have maritime history (which product was shipped from where to where).
And at the bottom you have things like “British/Americans in China” where you can use English-language accounts.
Much of the “Sinology” that has taken place with regards to early Southeast Asian history is at the maritime history level, and I don’t know if O. W. Wolters was even at that level, because it looks like he primarily relied on what had already been written in French and English, like people in the “British/Americans in China” category did, and then he bluffed that he was doing the work himself.
A Mr Ho Kuan-chung assisted, for instance, in the translation of the description of Longyamen in The Golden Khersonese p. 83.
Paul Wheatley could read Chinese. He later went on to write “The Pivot of the Four Quarters” and “Nagara and Commandery.” He was an historical geographer. Did he read as well as the best-trained and experienced modern scholars, probably not. And some geographical terms are simply ancient and obscure, like the names of plants. But PW was trained first as a Classicist and he could read Greek and Latin and also Arabic. I know his son Julian, trained first in Burmese and who taught even ran the Chinese-language programs at MIT, Cornell, and NTU (and who has written several books on modern Chinese pedagogy) and who has said that his father learned spoken Chinese while teaching at the University of Malaya, in part, from short-playing record sets in the 1950s. PW had a command of modern European languages – French, Dutch, German, Spanish; Classical European languages – Greek, Latin; and Arabic and Chinese as well (he also wrote about Middle Eastern urbanism). Before we are too quick to smack people about the face, we should at least first acknowledge their accomplishments, the times in which they worked, the materials easily available (Wheatley working in Malaya during the Emergency), and how good the training at the time was. It’s also not a bad thing to acknowledge when one asks others for help or assistance in one’s labours. It’s obviously much worse not to!
Thank you for the comment.
Beyond what you said, I think one thing that negatively affected Wheatley’s book is the fact that he limited it to the Malay Peninsula. So, he took for granted the received knowledge, and then only looked at part of it.
To discover the flaws in the extant scholarship, what I found is that when I detected issues at one level, I could only resolve them when I zoomed out and looked at the information from an entire-region level (i.e., I couldn’t figure out Sanfoqi without figuring out Shepo, etc.). By focusing on what he thought was information about the Malay Peninsula, all Wheatley could do was to detect confusing information, but he couldn’t resolve it because you need to look wider, at, for instance, the information that is purportedly about Srivijaya and Java.
As a result, there is a lot that is wrong in that book.
Another point: as for your comment that we should acknowledge “the times in which they worked, the materials easily available (Wheatley working in Malaya during the Emergency), and how good the training at the time was,” oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if people would indeed do that!!!
However, the reality is that the work of people like Wheatley and Wolters and Pelliot has been accepted as gospel by people who have written on Southeast Asian history. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a single critique of any of those scholars from someone who works on Southeast Asian history or archaeology. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say to me, “But Paul Wheatley/O. W. Wolters/Paul Pelliot knew Chinese, and. . .”
I think what Lucas said is in part a reaction to the never-ending intransigence of scholars who write on Southeast Asia and in particular their refusal to ever consider the possibility that Wheatley, Wolters, and Pelliot might have been something even remotely less than godlike given that they “knew Chinese.”
If people recognized the limitations of Wheatley/Wolters/Pelliot, then they theoretically would be able to recognize that 1) perhaps they might have been wrong sometimes, and 2) perhaps people today might have advantages over them. However, I have seen absolutely zero evidence of either.
A few years ago, I had someone say to be in complete disbelief, “Do you think you are better than Pelliot???!!!”
Actually, to produce work that is more solid than Pelliot’s is not difficult to achieve in this age of digitization. And now with the better search functions that AI is providing. . .
I am in agreement with you here. And you are right that Wheatley limits himself to the Malay peninsular and this therefore leads to misleading results.
I do think it is strange that Pelliot, Wolters, Wheatley are treated like holy writ, and that subsequent scholars have not tested their claims. I suspect that this is at least in part because Wolters and Wheatley at least seldom demanded that their PhD students learn Chinese. If we think of the generation that went through Cornell in the 1970s and 1980s under Wolters – Ileto, Milner, the Andayas, Tony Day, etc. – none of them learned Chinese. It is why I have only ever accepted graduate students who already have Literary Sinitic if they want to work on the pre-modern period, since there are colonial and vernacular languages to acquire too, often along with Sanskrit.
If you were to write a narrative history of early modern Southeast Asia that includes the arguments you’ve been presenting, how would it differ from “standard” accounts? I’m thinking specifically of the Andayas’ A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830. I no longer have a copy of this book, but I vaguely remember that it included a discussion of Srivijaya.
Not asking for a 10,000-word manuscript, just the major points of difference. I’m assuming undergraduate and graduate students in Southeast Asia area studies courses are still taught Coedes, Wolters, etc. as settled fact.
Well, from what I can see, I wouldn’t try to do this yet, as there are still a lot of things that need to be revisited.
But in generally, the “standard” accounts have people going through the Strait of Malacca from very early on, and Palembang becoming a key place in the region.
What I see is trans-peninsular trade being the biggest story in the first millennium AD, as well as rivalry between different polities (Cambodia, the Chola kingdom in India, places on the Malay Peninsula) for control of that trade. Those stories don’t exist in the “standard” narrative.
The Mongols attacked Java in the 1200s, and that story has not been integrated well into Southeast Asian history, but I think that’s about getting access to spices.
Oh, wait, I just remembered that I wrote about all of this here (but didn’t talk about how it differs from the standard narrative:
https://leminhkhaiblog.com/what-i-now-know-about-early-southeast-asia-in-chinese-sources/
Standard histories see Ayutthaya and Majapahit on Java expanding their influence, but I argue that they both met in conflict in the area of Cambodia, so that would be different too.
So, the gist is that I see more importance for the Malay Peninsula and trans-peninsular trade, and I also see more violence!!