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

As we saw in an earlier post, there is a chronology for fourteenth-century Cambodian history that is recorded in a group of chronicles that we can call the Nong texts.

As we also saw, the Ming shilu, a Chinese historical source that contains information from the fourteenth century, contains a record about a king (Da-ma-lai-sha-na-a-zhe 怛麻來沙那阿者) that matches the name and date of a king in the Nong texts, a king by the name of Thommeasokareach (Dhammāśokarāja).

Unfortunately, the Nong texts do not contain much information beyond the names of kings and how long they ruled. However, there are other fragments of texts that provide more detailed information about this period.

One is known as the Ang Eng Fragment, and I will refer to the other as the 2/K.125 Fragment. Both of these texts are written in Thai (or Siamese). The Ang Eng Fragment is part of a Cambodian text that was granted to the Siamese king in 1796 and then translated into Siamese, while the 2/K.125 Fragment is part of a Siamese text that may have been compiled as early as the fifteenth century.

There are problems with the dates in these fragments, however, what I propose to do is to put those questions aside and just to see what we can possibly learn from the contents of these texts.

The contents of these two fragments add information to the basic chronology of the reigns of kings in the Nong texts. More specifically, the Ang Eng Fragment contains information about events in Cambodia prior to the second Siamese attack on, and capture of, Angkor in 1372-73, while the 2/K.125 Fragment contains details about events after the second Siamese capture of Angkor.

In particular, the 2/K.125 Fragment contains information about the unsuccessful efforts of a man known as Cau Ponhea Yat to recapture Angkor.

What interests me, however, is a certain detail that appears in both of these texts, and that is a reference to foreigners.

The Ang Eng Fragment records that at some point prior to the second Siamese attack on Angkor, the Phnom Penh region was attacked by “Chams and Khaek,” and that these people then tried to attack Angkor but were defeated.

The term “Khaek” แขก is now a colloquial (and somewhat derogatory) reference to Indians, and more broadly, to people from South Asia and the Middle East. In the Ayutthayan period, however, this term was used much more widely to refer to many different peoples, including people from island Southeast Asia, such as Malays and Javanese.

So, the Ang Eng Fragment mentions Chams and Khaek attacking the region before the second Siamese capture of Angkor. The 2/K.125 Fragment then mentions the presence of some non-Khmer peoples in the region in the years after Angkor was captured. These people are referred to as “phak” พรรค.

In the aftermath of the second Siamese capture of Angkor, the 2/K.125 Fragment talks about the Siamese attempting to defeat the “mahaphak” มหาพรรด, a term that we can translate as “great phak,” along the route between Angkor and Phnom Penh, which in those days must have meant the water route across the Tonle Sap and down to the Mekong.

The 2/K.125 Fragment also records that Cau Ponhea Yat gained support in his effort to regain control of Angkor from a man called “Maharang-kaek of the phak tribe.”

Here the phak is referred to as a “phao” เผ้า, a term which means something like “tribe” or even “race.” The 2/K.125 Fragment also mentions the “great phak tribe,” or “phao maha phak” เผ้ามหาพรรด.

The use of this term led Michael Vickery to conclude that the phak were an ethnic group, and he presented an elaborate scenario in which chroniclers had misunderstood this term and misrepresented it, but that it originally had referred to the Pear, an ethnic group that inhabits an area of northwestern Cambodia.

While I find Vickery’s explanation implausible, he fails to explain why this ethnic group was spread along the water route from Angkor to Phnom Penh, and that weakens his argument as well.

Finally, if we look at the Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya, we find that it also contains information about foreigners attacking Cambodia. This information comes from an undated passage, which is placed in a section on King Ramesuan’s second reign, which the chronicles date as 1388-95.

There is nothing in this passage that enables us to date the information, and therefore there is no way to conclude that it occurred between 1388-95. Instead, the passage appears to record the same information about an attack on Cambodia that the Nong texts place in the late 1360s or early 1370s right before the second Siamese attack on Angkor.

Nonetheless, again, we are not going to worry about the dates, but will just consider the content.

The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya record that the “Yuan,” a name we will discuss momentarily, attacked Angkor, and that at first the inhabitants were able to resist, but that when the “Yuan” attacked in greater numbers, the people of Cambodia struggled to defend themselves.

The term, “Yuan” ญวน, has been translated by scholars as “Vietnamese” or “Cochinchinese” because this is a term that is present in the Thai and Khmer languages today, as a somewhat derogatory referent for the Vietnamese.

The presence of this term in a text recording information about the fourteenth century has confused scholars, as there is no evidence of Siamese and Vietnamese contact before this point that could have led the Siamese to have already developed this name for the Vietnamese. As such, Vickery wrote that “this was too early for Vietnamese intervention in Cambodian affairs and shows that the passage is corrupt.” (306)

In making this declaration, Vickery essentially “threw the baby out with the bath water,” in that he did not consider this issue any further.

However, if we put aside the problem with these terms, and just look at the most basic elements that we have here, what we can see is that we have three texts that all record something about foreigners attacking Cambodia.

Further, these three texts appear to all be referring to the same attack, and/or the same people. Yes, they use different names for those foreigners, and yes, the term “Yuan” may have been added later to replace some other term, and thus constitutes a “corruption” of a text, but. . .

. . . we have three texts all mentioning foreigners attacking Cambodia.

I think we should take that information seriously. So, let’s take a look at the Ming shilu accounts of Sanfoqi to see if they can reveal anything about who these foreigners may have been.