A few days ago, I posted a translation of information about maritime Southeast Asia in Zhou Qufei’s 周去非 1178 work, Lingwai daida 嶺外代答 [Representative Responses about the Region Beyond the Passes].
In that work, Zhou Qufei describes the route from to China from Sanfoqi, a place that I argue was Kambuja, but pretty much everyone else in the world says was a place called Srivijaya at Palembang on the island of Sumatra.
He also describes the route to China from Shepo, a place that I argue was located around Lake Songkhla, but pretty much everyone else in the world says was island Java.
This is what he wrote:
三佛齊者，諸國海道往來之要衝也。三佛齊之來也，正北行，舟歷上下竺與交洋，乃至中國之境。其欲至廣者，入自屯門。
闍婆之來也，稍西北行，舟過十二子石而與三佛齊海道合於竺嶼之下。
Sanfoqi is the central hub along the sea routes of the various kingdoms. Ships coming from Sanfoqi travel due north, passing through Upper and Lower Zhu [Shang Xia zhu 上下竺] and the Jiao Ocean [Jiaoyang 交洋] before reaching the Chinese coast. Ships destined for Guangzhou enter via Tunmen 屯門; those going to Quanzhou enter through Jiazi Gate 甲子門.
Ships from Shepo travel a bit northwest, passing the Twelve Sons Rocks [Shi’erzi shi 十二子石], and merge with the Sanfoqi route below Zhu Islet [Zhuyu 竺嶼].
A kind reader then pointed out that “it is generally agreed upon that Shangxiazhu [what I translated as ‘Upper and Lower Zhu’] is the Aur island north of Singapore,” that is, Pulau Aur.
Historian Roderic Ptak has a recent article on “Pulau Aur and Some Nearby Islands in Chinese Nautical Sources of the Ming Period.” In that article, Ptak notes that,
Pre-Ming textual sources refer to several toponyms which some scholars have linked to Pulau Aur, the easternmost island of the Seribuat Archipelago. This includes the following names (among others): Shangxiazhu 上下竺, Zhuyu 竺嶼, Tianzhushan 天竺山, and Dongxizhu 東西竺. They appear in important texts such as the Lingwai dai da 嶺外代答 (1178), Zhao Rukuo’s 趙汝适 (jinshi degree 1196; last character different transcriptions in the literature) preface to his Zhufan zhi 諸蕃志 (1225), in chapter 489 of the Song shi 宋史, and in the received version of the Daoyi zhilüe 島夷誌略 (prefaces and postscript 1349/50). According to other scholars, only one or several of the above toponyms, but not all of them, represented Pulau Aur, while the other names marked different locations, for example the Anambas and Natuna Islands. (141-42)
In this article, Ptak references a forthcoming piece which has now been published: “Possible and Confirmed References to Pulau Aur and the Seribuat Islands in Chinese Sources (c. 1150 – 1550),” to appear in Journal of Asian History 58. I don’t have access to that work, but it looks like the author is continuing to see this island as located at the end of the Malay Peninsula.
Let’s examine this issue on our own. As I said in the previous post on “Geographic Space in the Lingwai daida,” if we just look at the overall geographic space that the 1178 Lingwai daida is describing, when we see the Upper and Lower Zhu (Shang Xia zhu 上下竺) mentioned in that text as indicating Pulau Aur, we get this large empty space in the middle of the region about which there is no information. That seems odd.
We get that same sense when we see how this island is mentioned Zhao Rukuo’s 1225 Zhufan zhi. Here is what he wrote:
汝適被命此來，暇日閱諸蕃圖，有所謂石牀、長沙之險，交洋、竺嶼之限，問其志則無有焉。
I, Rukuo, having now received an imperial command to travel here, have, in my spare time, examined the Illustrated Compendium of Foreign Lands. Therein are mentioned the perils of the Stone Bed and the Long Sands, and the boundary [markers] of the Jiao Ocean and Zhu Islet. Yet sought out information in written accounts, there was none.
I think most (every?) scholar would see the Stone Bed and Long Sands as indicating places between China and the Jiao Ocean that was located between the island of Hainan and Vietnam. Here again, to see Zhu Islet as indicating Pulau Aur, we would have to make a leap far across geographic space. The preceding three places are logically close to each other, and then Zhu Islet is far, far away.
Let us now look at Wang Dayuan’s 1349 Daoyi zhilue. In this work, a Western Zhu (Xi Zhu 西竺) island is referenced in relation to Kunlun, that is, Côn Đảo, off the southeastern tip of the Indochinese Peninsula. There is also a section in this work on Eastern and Western Zhu (Dongxi Zhu 東西竺). While the entry on this island does not indicate its location, it does note that its inhabitants “wear cloth from Champa.” To quote:
昆侖
古者昆侖山又名軍屯山。山高而方，根盤幾百里，截然乎瀛海之中，與占城、西竺鼎峙而相望。下有昆侖洋，因是名也。
Kunlun
It is the old Mount Kunlun, also called Mount Juntun. The mountain is tall and level, with its roots winding about for several hundred leagues. It rises sharply from the sea. Together with Champa and Western Zhu 西竺, it forms the three legs of a tripod facing each other. Below it is the Kunlun Ocean where it gets its name.
東西竺
石上嵯峨，形勢對峙，地勢雖有東西之殊，不啻蓬萊、方丈之爭奇也。田瘠，不宜耕種，歲仰淡洋、米榖足食。氣候不齊，四五月淫雨而尚寒。俗樸略。男女斷發，系占城布。煮海為鹽，釀椰漿為酒。有酋長。地產檳榔、老葉、椰子簟、木綿花。番人取其椰心之嫩者，或素或染，織而為簟，以售唐人。其簟冬暖而夏涼，亦可貴也。貿易之貨，用花錫、胡椒、鐵器、薔薇露水之屬。
Eastern and Western Zhu
The rocky outcrops rise steeply, creating shapes that stand in opposition to one another. Though the terrain differs between east and west, it rivals the [mythical] marvelous scenery of Penglai and Fangzhang. The land is barren and unfit for cultivation; each year, the people rely on imports of rice and grain from Danyang to meet their needs. The climate is irregular. During the fourth and fifth months, there is constant rain and it remains cold. The customs are simple and somewhat rough. Men and women cut their hair short and wear cloth from Champa. They boil seawater to make salt and ferment coconut sap to brew liquor. There is a local chieftain. The land produces betel nuts, old leaves, coconut mats, and cotton flowers. The locals take the tender core of the coconut palm, either plain or dyed, and weave it into mats, which they sell to Tang people [i.e., Chinese]. These mats are warm in winter and cool in summer, and are considered valuable. Trade goods include patterned tin, black pepper, ironware, and rosewater.
Finally, the History of the Song, commission in 1343, mentions a Mount Tianzhu (Tianzhu shan 天竺山). This is included in information about the itinerary that a tribute delegation from the Chola kingdom took. I recently wrote about it here in the blog post “More Evidence for the Trans-Peninsular Crossing at Kedah – Songkhla.” The relevant passage is as follows:
又行七十一晝夜，歷加八山、占不牢山、舟寶龍山至三佛齊國。又行十八晝夜，度蠻山水口，歷天竺山，至賓頭狼山，望東西王母塚，距舟所將百里。又行二十晝夜，度羊山、九星山至廣州之琵琶洲。離本國凡千一百五十日至廣州焉。詔閤門祗候史祐之館伴，凡宴賜恩例同龜茲使。其年承天節，三文等請於啟聖禪院會僧以祝聖壽。明年使回，降詔羅茶羅乍，賜物甚厚。
[From Sanfoqi] Journeying on for 18 days and nights, he crossed the Mount Man estuary 蠻山水口, and passed Mount Tianzhu 天竺山, reaching Mount Bintuolang 賓頭狼山. Looking to the east, the Tomb of the Queen Mother of the West [was visible], about a hundred leagues from the ship’s position. Journeying for another 20 days and nights, crossing Mount Yang 羊山, Mount Jiuxing 九星山, he reached Pipa Islet in Guangzhou.
The usage of the character for mountain in these names is a bit odd, but we can nonetheless see that it mentions Sanfoqi, the “Mount Man estuary” (literally, the “Savage estuary,” perhaps a reference to the Mekong), Tianzhu (= Upper and Lower Zhu or Eastern and Western Zhu), and Bintuolang (Panduranga, in the Cham world).
From the above information, we can see that there is absolutely no question but that the Upper and Lower Zhu (Shangxiazhu 上下竺), Zhu Islet (Zhuyu 竺嶼), Mount Tianzhu (Tianzhushan 天竺山), and Eastern and Western Zhu (Dongxizhu 東西竺) mentioned in these sources was somewhere around the southeastern tip of the Indochinese Peninsula.
This is totally clear.
So, why do people think that these places indicate Pulau Aur?
In writing this post, I was looking around for version of the Daoyi zhilue and found an interesting version from the late Qing period. In this version, the editor has added comments.
The editor mentions the passage that I quoted at the beginning of this post from the Lingwai daida about the routes to China from Sanfoqi and Shepo. The passage about Sanfoqi mentions Upper and Lower Zhu [Shang Xia zhu 上下竺] and the one about the route to China from Shepo mentions Zhu Islet [Zhuyu 竺嶼], and this person states that this referred to Upper and Lower Zhu.
The editor then cites a nautical work that he calls the Navigational Route through the South Seas, which I’m guessing is actually Lu Diaoyang’s 呂調陽 late-seventeenth-century work, the Navigational Route through the Southeast Seas (Dongnanyang zenlu 南洋鍼路). In particular, the editor cites a passage where a after sailing from Pahang 彭亨, on the southeastern side of the Malay Peninsula, a place called Eastern and Western Zhu (Dongxizhu 東西竺) is passed.
So, in this note, the editor present information that he believed was about the same place, but as we’ve seen above, it is not. Why would this person think these two different places were the same?
This is the deal folks. There are distinct bodies of geographical knowledge in Chinese sources.
1) There is an earlier body of knowledge that consists of the information that we find in dynastic histories up through the History of the Song and in texts on foreign lands, like the Lingwai daida, the Zhufan zhi, and the Daoyi zhilue.
2) There is a later body of knowledge that comes from late Ming and Qing nautical texts, like Lu Diaoyang’s work mentioned above.
The dividing line is, I would say, roughly 1500 (this is a complex topic because it involves works that were created earlier, like the writings of men who participated on the Zheng He missions, for which we only possess versions that were published after 1500). By that point, tribute relations between the Ming and Southeast Asia had largely come to an end, so the new information that was obtained after this point came mainly from mariners.
In between these two relatively distinct bodies of knowledge is the information that we find in works like the History of the Yuan and the Ming shilu. These works fall more into the category of the first body of knowledge in that they were recorded by government officials, but because A) the Mongols attacked island Java, and B) big changes took place at that time (the fall of Angkor, etc.), there is some new knowledge in these works.
For the sake of simplicity, however, let’s just think about the two larger bodies of knowledge here.
The information in these two bodies of knowledge is not always the same, because A) the region changed over time, and B) mariners recorded information from a different perspective than government officials in China earlier had.
What this means is that as historians, we have to be very careful to understand each body of knowledge on its own terms first before we attempt to compare or connect information between these two bodies of knowledge.
That, however, is precisely what has not happened. Starting with Zhang Xie’s 張燮 early-seventeenth-century Dongxiyang kao 東西洋考 [Examination of the Eastern and Western Oceans], Chinese scholars made many assumptions about the connections between these two bodies of knowledge that are false, as we see in the comments of the editor of the late Qing version of the Daoyi zhilue above.
Then the orang putih arrived on the scene, the Westerners, and they followed Zhang Xie. Making everything much, much worse, they built on the false connections of Zhang Xie et al. to make yet more false connections of their own in creating the “Srivijaya was a kingdom at Palembang” theory.
The combination of the false connections that Chinese scholars from the late-Ming period onward made with the false connections that modern scholars have made through the Srivijaya theory and all of the misreadings of the sources that scholars have had to make to get the Srivijaya theory to make sense has led to the disaster that is our current understanding of early Southeast Asian history.
The case of people believing that the above passages refer to Pulau Aur is a perfect example of this. Yes, there is an island with that same name in Ming and Qing nautical works, but that island was clearly not in the same place as the one mentioned in Song dynasty era sources.
This should not surprise us given that the information comes from separate bodies of geographical knowledge, separate in type and time.
So, where exactly was Upper and Lower Zhu, Zhu Islet, Mount Tianzhu, and Eastern and Western Zhu during the Song dynasty period (and into the Yuan)? My guess would be that it is this island off the tip of the Indochinese Peninsula, currently known as Hòn Khoai (“Sweet Potato Islet).
For mariners traveling along the coast, and they were definitely traveling along the coast during this period, this would be an important marker.
And if we take all of the above information together, it would look something like this:
Again, everything was on a smaller scale than scholars have realized. That, however, makes good historical sense.
Oh, and did you notice where Sanfoqi is?
