Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

In a recent blog post, I talked about how in Song dynasty era sources, there is a “surname” that appears in numerous Chinese records about tribute missions coming from Southeast Asia — “Pu” 蒲 – that scholars have argued indicates the Arabic name “Abu” or certain Southeast Asian terms.

Among the Southeast Asian terms suggested are pu/po, a Cham honorific, and empu/mpu, a term found in the Malay-Javanese world where it was, as far as I can determine (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), used to refer to a master craftsman, such as someone who forged kris, or traditional daggers.

In much of the scholarship on maritime China and Southeast Asia, scholars have favored the “Abu” idea, and see the appearance of this term as a reference to a Muslim foreign merchant. More recently, scholars like Stephen G. Haw and Johannes Kurz have pushed back against this reading, and I agree with their arguments.

However, Haw and Kurz have not sought to determine exactly what the term meant in the Southeast Asian context beyond arguing that it was Southeast Asian, with pu/po and mpu both being possibilities. In the previous post, I examined the geographical distribution of the term as it appears in Song dynasty era sources, and argued that it is the Cham term, pu/po.

To continue that line of argument, I place below lists of the names of envoys from Champa and Java who journeyed to China in the late fourteenth century to present tribute. They did so under a new dynasty, the Ming dynasty, which was attempting to re-establish tributary relations with kingdoms in Southeast Asia, relations that in many cases had been broken during the preceding period of Mongol rule.

Like the case with the Song dynasty records, the Ming records show a pu/po-like term in many of the names/titles of envoys from Champa. In particular, we find the following characters: Pu 蒲, Bao 寶, Bao 保, Pou 婆, Bu 布, Bu 卜, and Bo 伯, all of which, I argue, are acceptably close to pu/po. Again, as was the case in the previous post, I’m not saying that every appearance of these characters in this list below is an exact match with pu/po, but only that it is possible. Some cases, however, seem very clear.

After the list of envoys from Champa, I provide a list of envoys from island Java during the same period. In those names, there is no evidence of pu/po. Instead, we can see evidence of well-known Javanese titles, like patih and sang arya.

The Romanizations are taken from Geoff Wade’s translation of the Ming shilu (https://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/).