A Working Paper on the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asia

I’ve recently published a working paper entitled “Revisiting the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asia.”

I started looking at the Chinese sources for early Southeast Asian history a few years ago, and discovered a lot of problems with the ways that modern scholars have understood and written about those materials.

In early 2022, I published the first part of a two-part article entitled “Rescuing History from Srivijaya: The Fall of Angkor in the Ming Shilu (Part 1)” in which I discuss some of these issues. The second part of that article will come out in early 2024.

In the meantime, for anyone interested, this working paper likewise revisits the Chinese sources on early Southeast Asian history and provides a new rendering of the past.

This working paper can be accessed here, and the abstract is below.

Chinese sources have played a very important role in the writing of early Southeast Asian history. However, scholars have struggled to understand the information in those sources and over the past century, there have been countless different interpretations that have been put forward.

In this paper, we revisit the Chinese sources on early Southeast Asian history and do not simply offer a new interpretation, but also attempt to demonstrate why previous scholarship has been inaccurate.

In particular, previous generations of scholars failed to recognize the way that Chinese scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries distorted information about Southeast Asia by (arbitrarily) equating historical placenames with the names of contemporary kingdoms. In doing so, they made false connections between placenames, thereby leading later scholars astray.

In this paper, we return to the earliest sources and build our knowledge from scratch. What emerges is a new picture of early Southeast Asian history and one that is free of the many textual problems and contradictions that scholars have struggled with over the past century.

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