I am well aware that many people are going to respond with immediate disbelief to the idea of the article that I am about to publish that there was no “Srivijaya” and that the information in Chinese sources about “Sanfoqi” that was employed to produce a history for “Srivijaya” is actually about “Kambuja,” that is, Angkor.

Beyond all of the textual evidence that I provide in my two-part article, I would argue that it is also important to consider the larger scholarly environment in which the study of “Srivijaya” has taken place, as that environment, I argue, is also responsible for the perpetuation of what I call the “Srivijaya myth.”

So, what is it about the scholarly environment of the larger field of Southeast Asian history that could enable the “Srivijaya Myth” to persist for so long? While there are many issues that have enabled this myth to persist, I have outlined some key points below.

1) Colonial-Era Scholars Were Not as Great as Many People Think They Were

Some of the first European scholars to produce work about Southeast Asia did so based on their examination of texts and inscriptions in languages like Sanskrit and classical Chinese. These are difficult languages to gain proficiency in and many historians today are not able to read those languages.

It is therefore quite easy today to feel a sense of awe at what some of those early scholars did. Further, when one is not familiar with the languages and texts which these scholars studied and wrote about, it is also easy to get lost in their writings with all of the unfamiliar names and references that get mentioned, and the fact that these guys basically made zero effort to communicate their ideas to anyone other than themselves.

As a result, I think a lot of the earlier scholarship has been given a pass, as scholars today who read it end up saying to themselves, “Well, I don’t know what they’re talking about, but they must be right because they could read those old texts and I can’t.”

In reality, however, there are enormous problems with the way that colonial-era scholars read texts. For instance, one common practice that we can find in the work of scholars who employed sources in classical Chinese was to develop intricate and improbable explanations for why a certain character should be read and understood differently from what was actually recorded in a text.

A scholar would come across a character that didn’t fit with the way that he was interpreting a text, and he would then create an extremely complex and improbable explanation for why that character should be a different one, namely, one that would fit his interpretation.

For example, this explanation might be that someone misread character A for character B and then miswrote it as character C, which was similar to a variant of character B, etc.

For another example, see this blog post:
https://leminhkhai.blog/the-yueviet-migration-theory-and-the-hidden-network-approach/

2) Baby Boomer Politics

The above approach is particularly common in colonial-era writings. However, it is also prominent in the writings of O. W. Wolters, a figure who traversed the colonial / post-colonial divide and who played a large role in promoting “Srivijaya” to a new group of scholars of the Southeast Asian past.

This new group hailed predominantly from the English-speaking world, and consisted largely of people who were born and grew up after World War II, a generation known as the “Baby Boomers.”

This generation took up a call to produce an “autonomous history” for Southeast Asia, one which would free it from Euro-centric perceptions and interpretations. This generation also generally had much weaker linguistic skills than their colonial-era predecessors.

As a result, they left it up to scholars like O. W. Wolters to get the details about “Srivijaya” correct (a tragic mistake), and focused on promoting “Srivijaya” as part of a liberal/progressive view of Southeast Asia as a place where women enjoyed more “autonomy,” where slaves were not really slaves, where warfare was not particularly deadly or violent, where the Vietnamese had possessed a unique identity since time immemorial, where the Thai had strategically chosen the most beneficial Western practices to modernize the kingdom, where everyone “localized” outside cultural practices and ideas. . .

The list goes on and on and on. . . and I have published on this topic here and here.

In this imagined vision of the past, “Srivijaya” fit perfectly, as it was an indigenous polity that had flourished in the centuries prior to any European contact and it had done so peacefully through trade, rather than conquest.

The fact that most of the scholars who promoted this idea could not actually read the sources on which the story of “Srivijaya” was built was irrelevant because their politics were right.

Right?

3) The Chinese as the Incompetent and Patriarchal Other

Something we can also see in both the colonial and post-colonial eras is an opportunistic down-playing, or at times outright dismissal, of information in Chinese sources.

As mentioned above, colonial-era scholars often developed interpretations of texts that were based on an imagined scenario of the incompetence of Chinese scribes (misreading and miswriting characters).

When I was first starting out, I read writings in Western languages before I had the ability to read classical Chinese texts, and I “absorbed” this idea. However, over the past 25 years, after learning classical Chinese well enough to be able to read primary sources, I’ve found case after case where the problem is not that there is a scribal error in the text, but that the modern scholar tried to get the text to support an idea or interpretation which it doesn’t.

Again, most people in the field of Southeast Asian history cannot see this, because they cannot read those texts. As a result, they have maintained this sense that the Chinese “got things wrong” about Southeast Asia, and under the influence of Baby Boomer politics, this idea has extended to include not simply supposed textual errors, but perceptions as well, as the “patriarchal” Chinese can’t possibly produce accurate information about the liberal/progressive Southeast Asian past that has been imagined over the past 60 or so years.

I’ve written a blog post on this topic here:
https://leminhkhai.blog/dismissing-china-the-chinese-in-the-field-of-southeast-asian-history-in-the-english-speaking-world/

Meanwhile, for people who do know Chinese and who have written about “Srivijaya” more recently, they have at times continued to attribute information that does not fit their interpretations to “Chinese mistakes,” but have also perpetuated existing interpretations that are based on that form of explanation.

To be fair, one can find errors in Chinese historical sources. From all of the years that I have worked with sources in classical Chinese, I’ve found, for instance, that there are certain types of information that are more unstable than others. Numbers are probably the most unstable, followed by transliterated foreign names. However, basic textual information is generally pretty stable.

As a result, when the History of the Song says that Sanfoqi, the place which scholars have interpreted to mean “Srivijaya,” was “neighboring Champa,” and all of the extant versions contain that same information, then we shouldn’t dismiss that information as a scribal error because it doesn’t fit our interpretation. Instead, we should investigate it.

However, that is not what historians have done. Why not?

4) Academia as an Identity or an Exclusive Club

When I first began studying in graduate school, I think I naively believed that universities were filled with really intelligent people who pursue knowledge wherever it takes them.

Over time, however, I came to realize that while there are definitely some people like that, for many others academia is a kind of exclusive club that they have entered and which forms part of their identity.

I think I first realized this through my study of the history of Sino-Vietnamese relations. Essentially, in researching my Ph.D. dissertation, I repeatedly found evidence that contradicted what had been written about the historical Sino-Vietnamese relationship. I then went back and looked at the extant scholarship and found flaws and biases.

So, I became aware that there were all kinds of ideas that were not true, but then I also observed how scholar after scholar would proudly recite these “truths” at conferences, seminars, and even in casual conversations (“Well, you know, the Vietnamese have been fighting off the Chinese for 2,000 years, so. . .”).

What this made me realize is that academia is like a kind of exclusive club. To enter the club, you first have to learn certain “sacred truths,” things like the ideas that in the past Southeast Asia was a place where women enjoyed more “autonomy,” where slaves were not really slaves, where warfare was not particularly deadly or violent. . . and where there was this amazing and peaceful maritime kingdom called “Srivijaya.”

You also have to learn that the Chinese didn’t really know what they were talking about when they wrote about Southeast Asia, and that “there are so few indigenous sources” for premodern Southeast Asian history, so there is no other option but to rely heavily on sources in European languages. . .

If you learn these “sacred truths,” you can enter the exclusive Southeast Asian history club. However, it is then extremely unlikely that, as a club member, you’ll ever discover the problems with the scholarship on “Srivijaya,” because by that point you will have too many forces and influences militating against that (both consciously and subconsciously).

Therefore, while I have written a two-part article that clearly documents that there was no “Srivijaya” and that the information in Chinese sources about “Sanfoqi” that was employed to produce a history for “Srivijaya” is actually about “Kambuja,” you have to turn to the logistics and politics of knowledge production in the broader field of Southeast Asian history to understand why the “Srivijaya Myth” has persisted for over a century and why the evidence in the paper will be so difficult for many people to accept, both in practical and personal terms.

That said, I think that the revelations in this paper provide us with a good opportunity to reflect on the larger issues affecting knowledge production about Southeast Asian history, as it should lead people to ask: “How is it possible that the ‘Srivijaya Myth’ could last so long?”