Off and on over the past few years, I have been researching about a place called “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊. This is a name that appears in Chinese sources from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, and it was clearly a very important trading center in Southeast Asia.
Since the early twentieth century, scholars have believed that this name refers to a kingdom, or political center, on the island of Sumatra at Palembang called “Srivijaya.”
From the moment I first started researching this topic, it was clear to me that this was not true. What I quickly came to understand is that the name Sanfoqi is the word “Cambodia,” and I could see that it was located in the area of Cambodia. [I’ve published on that here.]
However, there is another placename in Chinese sources that refers to Cambodia, and that is “Zhenla” 真臘.
I have struggled to figure out the relationship between Sanfoqi and Zhenla and where exactly they were located.
I initially thought that Sanfoqi was in inland Cambodia and that Zhenla was somewhere in the lower Mekong region or even on the coast near where the Mekong flows into the sea.
I now am convinced of something resembling the opposite of that relationship. Further, I am also convinced that I have located Sanfoqi.
I will make my case here by discussing information in the following three texts:
1) Zhao Rukuo 趙汝适, Treatise on the Various Barbarians (Zhu fan zhi 諸蕃志), early 13th century.
2) Zhou Daguan 周達觀, Record of the Customs of Zhenla (Zhenla fengtu ji 真臘風土記), late 13th century.
3) Wang Dayuan 汪大淵, Brief Treatise on the Island Barbarians (Daoyi zhilue 島夷誌略), 1349.
One piece of information that appeared to contradict my claim that Sanfoqi was in inland Cambodia was the fact that a guy by the name of Zhou Daguan visited Angkor in the late thirteenth century and wrote an account of that journey called the Record of the Customs of Zhenla.
If this guy said he went to Zhenla, then how could I claim that the inland polity of Cambodia was called Sanfoqi by the Chinese?
Actually, it’s more complex than that. The only time Zhenla is mentioned in this text is in the title, which could have been added later by someone, and in a preface, which in fact was written later by someone.
Therefore, one can make the case that Zhou Daguan never said that he went to “Zhenla,” and that this was later added to his text.
I have made that case before because there is so much other evidence which shows that 1) Sanfoqi was in Cambodia and that 2) it appears to have been much more important than Zhenla (from the perspective of the Chinese sources where these names are recorded).
Believing that the most important place in Cambodia in the past must have been Angkor (I mean, look at all of those temples! How could it not have been the most important place?), I kept thinking that Sanfoqi must be Angkor.
And so, when I saw that Zhou Daguan’s account of a journey to Angkor has the name “Zhenla” in its title, I thought, “No, that can’t be right.” So, I made the case that the title, like the preface, must have been added later.
However, I have never been happy with that explanation. In general, I find explanations that rely on supposed scribal errors or mistakes, etc. to be weak. Fortunately, I have now found evidence that allows me to assume that Zhou Daguan came up with the title for his travel record, and to locate Sanfoqi in a specific place in Cambodia.
I now see that Chinese used the term “Zhenla” to refer to a polity in inland Cambodia, and that Sanfoqi was a place that was closer to the coast.
During the period of the Song dynasty (960 – 1279), Angkor was at the peak of its power, and it was the most populous polity in Southeast Asia. However, there are almost no records about Zhenla (inland Cambodia) in official Song dynasty sources.
The History of the Song, for instance, only records the arrival of two tribute missions from Zhenla, one in 1116 and one 1120. It then states that “as it was a long journey by sea, it did not pay tribute again.”
In the early-thirteenth-century, scholar-official Zhao Rukuo compiled a book about foreign lands entitled the Treatise on the Various Barbarians. This is what he recorded about Zhenla:
真臘接占城之南，東至海，西至蒲甘，南至加羅希。自泉州舟行，順風月餘日可到。其地約方七千餘里。國都號祿兀。
Zhenla connects with the south of Zhancheng [Champa]. To the east it reaches the sea. To the west it reaches Pugan [Bagan]. To the south it reaches Jialuoxi [Grahi]. Setting sail from Quanzhou, with favorable winds it can be reached in a little over a month. Its land covers approximately 7,000 square leagues. The capital is called Luwu [Lovek].
Please remember this passage because we are going to return to it again below.
Lovek (Luwu 祿兀) is between Phnom Penh and the southern end of the Tonle Sap. Therefore, in this time period, “Zhenla” either indicated Lovek, or that was the furthest inland that Zhao Rukuo obtained information about.
Further, it definitely took more than a month to reach the inland areas of Cambodia from China. In a month, one could reach the coast where the Mekong enters the sea.
From Zhou Daguan’s late-thirteenth-century Record of the Customs of Zhenla we see that the journey from the coast to Angkor took around another month and required switching to a smaller boat and eventually traveling overland.
This demonstrates that it was indeed difficult to reach Angkor, and that explains why there are so few records in official Song dynasty sources of contact with Zhenla.
And yet, surely the most populous polity in Southeast Asia must have engaged in trade with the outside world, and surely the Chinese court must have participated in that trade.
So where did that trade take place?
It took place with Sanfoqi.
Where was Sanfoqi? From various sources, we can see that the Mekong River was a difficult river to navigate as one needed to be aware of the constantly changing sandbars and other hazards.
Therefore, besides the distance from the coast to Angkor, or even to Lovek, the Mekong River was also an obstacle to trade, and we therefore do not initially find Chinese records of trade on that river. In the late Ming dynasty period, there is evidence of Chinese visiting a port on the southern branch of the Mekong River, however not before that time (as far as I can tell).
What I have now discovered is that in the period of the Song and early Ming dynasties (960 – ca. 1400), the place that was referred to in Chinese sources as Sanfoqi was reached from the southern coast of the Indochinese Peninsula by traveling inland from where Hà Tiên is located today.
Let us look at the evidence.
Zhao Rukuo, the first person to record location information about Sanfoqi, did so in his Treatise on the Various Barbarians by stating the following:
三佛齊，間於真臘、闍婆之間；管州十有五，在泉之正南。冬月順風，月餘方至凌牙門，經商三分之一始入其國。
Sanfoqi is between Zhenla and Shepo. It administers fifteen regions. It is to the south of Quanzhou. With favorable winds in the winter months, in just over a month Lingya Gate can be reached. [Merchants] sell off a third of their goods before entering this kingdom.”
I have already documented in a working paper [see here] that Shepo 闍婆 was an important trading center and rival of Sanfoqi, and that it was located in the area of Lake Songkhla, across the Gulf of Thailand from Hà Tiên.
Zhao Rukuo recorded that the distance from Quanzhou to Sanfoqi was roughly the same as the distance from Quanzhou to Zhenla. Given that this was a reference to the coast of Zhenla, this puts Sanfoqi in the general area of what is now southern Vietnam.
While I entertained the idea that Sanfoqi might have been on the lower reaches of the Mekong, the reference to “Lingya Gate” (Lingya men 凌牙門), led me to suspect that it was on the southern coast of the Indochinese Peninsula where there are karst formations that jut out of the water which one could interpret as resembling a gate.
One possibility I found was Hòn Rễ Lớn and Hòn Rễ Nhỏ, or “Big Root Island” and “Little Root Island,” just off the coast of what is now Kiên Giang Province.
These two islands form a gate and are located at a place that would clearly serve as an important landmark for navigators voyaging around the southern tip of the Indochinese Peninsula heading for the port of what is now Hà Tiên, where there is a river that flows into the sea.
“Lingya” appears to represent an indigenous term, however it was later rendered into Chinese in Wang Dayuan’s 1349 Brief Treatise on the Island Barbarians, as “Dragon Teeth Gate” (Longya men 龍牙門), a term that emulates the sound “lingya” but makes sense in Chinese.
Many historians believe that Dragon Teeth Gate was a place near what is now Singapore, and there are indeed references to a place by that name in that area in later writings.
However, Dragon Teeth Gate is a generic term that easily could have been applied to more than one location. Wang Dayuan mentions the term “Dragon Teeth Gate” three times in his text. In one of these cases he does indeed refer to the Dragon Teeth Gate near Singapore. However, it is clear to me that in the other two cases he was referring to a different location.
In one of these other cases, Wang Dayuan mentions a Dragon Teeth Gate in reference to Sanfoqi, and states that, “From Dragon Teeth Gate, you move away for five days and nights and then reach this kingdom” (zi Longya men, qu wu zhouye zhi qi guo 自龍牙門，去五晝夜至其國).
The character that I have translated perhaps awkwardly as “move away,” qu 去, is one which Wang appears to have used in instances when there was no question about which direction one could go.
For instance, he says of a place called Danmiao 淡邈 (Tavoy) that it was several leagues “moving away” from an estuary (qu haikou shu li 去海口數里), and he states that Tianzhu 天竺 (India) was more than two hundred leagues “moving away” from the sea (qu hai erbai yu li 去海二百餘里).
Both of these examples indicate a movement inland away from the coast and I think that this is also what was meant when he wrote about “moving away” from Dragon Teeth Gate and proceeding to Sanfoqi.
Further, Zhao Rukuo’s statement cited above about Sanfoqi that “[Merchants] sell off a third of their goods before entering this kingdom,” indicates a setting where there was a coastal port where one first engaged in trade and then entered an inland kingdom, perhaps by moving one’s remaining goods onto a smaller local boat.
I therefore argue that it is possible to read the above passage in Wang Dayuan’s Brief Treatise on the Island Barbarians as indicating a movement inland from the sea for five days and nights to Sanfoqi.
There is another piece of evidence that points to movement in the opposite direction, namely, from Zhenla, in inland Cambodia, to the coast.
Zhou Daguan’s late-thirteenth-century Record of the Customs of Zhenla contains a preface that was written later, probably in the early Ming period, when this account was included in a compendium of texts.
Whoever wrote this preface cited the same passage about Zhenla in Zhao Rukuo’s early-thirteenth-century Treatise on the Various Barbarians that we cited above – the one I asked you to remember because we would return to it again.
However, the information cited was different (and there’s a long explanation I can provide about the textual history of the Treatise on the Various Barbarians and why there could have been different versions, but that’s not essential for our purposes here).
Here is what it said:
按諸番志稱其地廣七千里，其國北抵占城半月路，西南距暹羅半月程，南距番禺十日程，其東則大海也。
According to the Treatise on the Various Barbarians, [Zhenla’s] land spans 7,000 leagues. Its kingdom reaches Zhancheng [Champa] to the north, a half-month overland; to the southwest it is separated from Xianluo [Siam] by a half-month journey; to the south it is separated from Panyu by a ten-day journey; to its east is a great sea.
The “standard” version of the Treatise on the Various Barbarians, the one I cited above, mentions Champa to the north, Bagan to the west, and Grahi to the south.
The version of the Treatise on the Various Barbarians cited in the preface to Zhou Daguan’s Record of the Customs of Zhenla, however, mentions Champa to the north, Siam to the southwest, and Panyu to the south.
Further, and this is very important, it lists what appears to be overland distances. More specifically, it indicates that there were overland, or riverine and overland, routes from Zhenla to Champa, Zhenla to Siam, and Zhenla to a place to the south called “Panyu” 番禺.
This name, Panyu, is written here exactly like the name of a famous city in what is now Guangdong Province. This was obviously not a reference to that city.
So, what was it a reference to?
As mentioned above, Wang Dayuan recorded the term “Dragon Teeth Gate” three times in his 1349 Brief Treatise on the Island Barbarians. There is one record that clearly indicates the Dragon Teeth Gate near Singapore, and there is the record we mentioned above that says that one reached Sanfoqi by “moving away” from Dragon Teeth Gate for five days and nights.
The third reference to Dragon Teeth Gate is in relation to a place with a name that sounds very similar to Panyu – Banzu 班卒. And this is what Wang Dayuan wrote about Banzu:
地勢連龍牙門後山，若纏若斷，起凹峰而盤結，故民環居焉。
Its territory is connected to the mountains behind Dragon Teeth Gate. Sometimes winding, sometimes severing, there is a hollow in the mountains that [the terrain] wraps around. Therefore, the people reside around its midst.
This is a perfect description (shockingly perfect, actually – see the image above) of the landscape one sees just before reaching the Big Root and Little Root islands (Hòn Rễ Lớn + Hòn Rễ Nhỏ) when traveling from east to west towards Hà Tiên. There one finds today mountains with a hollow in between them where people live.
It is a very recognizable feature of the coastal landscape.
Therefore, this information about a ten-day journey from Zhenla to “Panyu” was likely indicating a journey to the coast, with the recognizable landmark of Banzu as a reference point.
Indeed, Dragon Teeth Gate and Banzu were basically right next to each other.
So, setting off from Dragon Teeth Gate the waterway inland to Sanfoqi would have begun at what is now Hà Tiên.
It certainly cannot be a coincidence that the Vĩnh Tế Canal that the Nguyễn dynasty ordered dredged in the early nineteenth century likewise extended inland from Hà Tiên. Indeed, it is clear to me now that the Nguyễn “re-opened” the ancient waterway to Sanfoqi.
But where exactly was the political center of Sanfoqi? I have to leave that to archaeologists to decide, but a logical guess would be to place it at or near Angkor Borei, the capital of Funan, an ancient polity that supposedly came to an end somewhere around the ninth century. . . roughly around the time that the term Sanfoqi starts to appear in Chinese sources. . . Hmmm, what a coincidence!!
While I have been “searching for Sanfoqi” for the past few years, I have always known that Sanfoqi is the word “Cambodia” and that it therefore must be in Cambodia.
Since Sanfoqi appears much more frequently in Chinese sources than Zhenla, I assumed that it must have been the more important political center in Cambodia, and that of course would have meant Angkor.
However, in seeing how difficult it was to travel to Angkor, or even to Lovek, I realized that Sanfoqi appears more frequently in Chinese sources because it was the part of Cambodia that traded with the outside world.
Then seeing how difficult it was to navigate the Mekong, I started to look at the southern coast of the Indochinese Peninsula, and as I did so, I found that the references about Dragon Teeth Gate, a place connected to Sanfoqi, fit the geography of that region perfectly.
Seeing now that Sanfoqi, one of the most important trading centers in Southeast Asia from the tenth to fourteenth centuries, was a polity that was probably based around Angkor Borei and which interacted with the outside world through a water route that led to what is now Hà Tiên makes complete sense.
This, after all, is where the ancient kingdom of Funan was. What we can now see is that “Funan” never “disappeared.” It is simply that 1) the way Chinese referred to that area changed, and 2) modern scholars followed the idea that the name “Sanfoqi” referred to a place on the island of Sumatra called “Srivijaya” and did not see the evidence for the continued presence of a powerful kingdom in that part of Cambodia.
Of course, if we could see the actual detailed history of the region, we might find that the political center of this powerful kingdom moved or changed over time, but the fact that there was a powerful polity in this area didn’t change (think of Inwa/Ava, Amarapura, and Mandalay in Burma).
As I see it, the strongest description of the past is the one that can reconcile the most pieces of historical information. The use of information about Sanfoqi in the “Srivijaya” narrative left numerous pieces of unexplained and/or unexplainable historical information, and as such, led to an extremely weak description of the past.
In figuring out the relationship between Sanfoqi and Zhenla, and in locating Sanfoqi, I have now reconciled what were for me a couple of the last questions I had about this topic.
I rest my case.
This Post Has 20 Comments
Dear Dr Kelly,
Congratulations on such brilliant research! Your work will alter the history of Southeast Asia. I have placed a notice of your efforts on my blog. …Life is good Tom
Life is good, Tom! Thank you for the nice comments!!
Congratulations Liam Khai! Christopher Columbus was also looking for Kattigara or Cattigara or Ôc Eo as documented since Ptolemy times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattigara
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I haven’t looked closely at the references by Ptolemy before, but from the little I’ve seen, they seem to be really difficult to work with. . .
Speaking of Ptolemy, I have recently encountered this image https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Silk_Road_in_the_I_century_AD_-_en.svg on the Silk Road page of Wikipedia. As I have read about your theory of the overland transporation route over the Kra Isthmus region, I was surprised that there is a big image including that route on a popular Wikipedia page about history. I was digging a bit and it seems that the origin of that image is this 2006-made image https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Transasia_trade_routes_1stC_CE_gr2.png by some Chinese-speaking user with claims that it’s based on Ptolemy’s works. Moreover, I also wonder if the inclusion and position of Óc Eo and a now-Tonkin-Gulf port are correct and well-sourced. In short, I am not sure what to make of these informations now.
Thanks for the comment!!
As I see it, people found different places to cross the Kra Isthmus over time, starting from place in the north, and moving southward. One of the earliest is the one listed on these maps. It would have gone between what is now Phang Nga to Surat Thani in Thailand. Later there was probably one that went from the west coast to what is now Nakhon Si Thammart. Then finally by say 900, there were a couple of routes that went from the west coast to the Lake Songkla area.
Was the route from Phang Nga to Surat Thani working in the first century AD as this map indicates? I’m not sure. I think it’s possible that there were overland routes further north in this really early period. However, certainly by say 500 AD that route was working.
As for Oc Eo, I think the first map is where everyone has assumed it was (or where you traded with Oc Eo), and this is where I’m saying here that trade with Sanfoqi took place.
But as for that place in Tonkin and sailing to the north of Hainan island. . . I don’t know about that. I haven’t looked at, or come across, information about such early navigation. That certainly was not the case later. From say 500 onward, it looks to me like the main route to China was from Champa over to Hainan, skipping the Tonkin Gulf. It could be though that in really early periods, people stayed close to the coast all of the way. However, I don’t know where information showing that is (or if such information exists).
Thank you for the response. About the overland trade routes, do I understand correctly that it’s settled in scholarship that those trade routes existed and worked in the first millenium (just to be extra coverring) ? If yes, it would be nice to read more about it through some sources. Moreover, given those early existences, I wonder why historians settled later that those routes mostly disappeared and the maritime routes passing Melaka and Java became prominent. I believe this is one of the indirect evidences that Sanfoqi’s “imagined” place and history was so quickly accepted.
There’s a book called “The Malay Peninsula: Crossroads of the Maritime Silk Road (100 BC – 1300 AD)” that has a chapter on overland routes. I have a lot of problems with parts of the rest of the book, because the author uses Chinese sources without being able to read them and follows the Srivijaya narrative and a lot of other flawed ideas, but that chapter is helpful.
As for your question: “I wonder why historians settled later that those routes mostly disappeared and the maritime routes passing Melaka and Java became prominent,” that’s a good question. I don’t have the answer, but let me make some guesses.
1) Today ships can go all over the world; 500 hundred years ago, Europeans could sail all of the way from Europe to Asia; and 1,000 years ago there were Arab/Persian ships that could sail all the way to China.
I think we see things like this and think that it’s normal. However, I think those were the exceptions for much of history. Most ships did not sail that far.
Further, we have historical information about the ships that could go a long ways, because those were the ships of rich/important people, but we don’t have much information about the smaller more local ships (When the Europeans arrive, they mention local shipping, but you can’t find much information before that time). So, the historical record is biased in that sense.
2) Perhaps when people think of overland trade, they imagine the same person sailing to one place, unloading goods, moving overland, loading goods onto a ship again, and then continuing by sea, and they imagine that later people would realize that it’s easier to just go by sea. . . And then that links with the above idea that the norm was to have ships that could cover long distances.
However, the way I imagine it is that most overland trade was probably conducted by local people (and was controlled/monopolized/taxed by local rulers). They traded for goods at one side, and then brought those goods to the other side where they traded with someone else.
So, merchants on one side did not need to go to the other side. That’s the easiest/cheapest way to trade. You didn’t need a big ship. You didn’t need to worry about maintaining your ship over a long distance, etc., and you still got what you wanted.
As such, for much of history, there was no need for Chinese ships to sail all of the way to Java or Sumatra because they could get all of their goods by sailing to Shepo (Songkla area) where local ships brought goods from other places in the islands and beyond. And yes, there were Arab/Persian ships that went all the way to China, but I’m sure that there must have been others that just went to Kedah, and purchased Chinese goods that were delivered across the peninsula.
Over the last thousand years the Austronesians including the Micronesians, Polynesians, Maoris, … have covered AND settled on islands and lands from Hawaii to Easter islands to NZ to Madagascar. I suspect these achievements are mainly due to their sail rigging which allows their boats to go against the wind direction and most likely the ancestor of the so called “lateen” sails much praised by the early Iberic sea explorers. The first person to go around the globe is apparently not a European but an Austronesian, a slave of Magellan; a guy who can converse on practically 95% of the islands South of the Asian landmass!
Thanks for the comment!! I guess this is a reference to my statement that long-distance shipping was rarer than we think. Yes, Austronesians peopled the islands in the Pacific, however it took thousands of years for Austronesians to reach Hawaii from Taiwan, and hundreds of years to reach it from the western Pacific. The voyages they made were not the same as say that of an Arab sailing from the Middle East to China and back in one trip. Instead, they moved from one island to the next over a period of many years.
As for Magellan slave – he sailed on European ships, and he was brought on board for his linguistic ability. The better example to point to is a Tahitian navigator by the name of Tupaia who was taken on board by Captain James Cooke in the 18th century. Cooke and his men came to realize that Tupaia had vast knowledge of the Pacific, however, there was no evidence that he had actually voyaged to all of the places he knew about (or that he went on long voyages regularly). Instead, he gained knowledge from voyaging and from learning from people who had been to or heard about other places.
So, yes, people other than Arabs and Chinese, etc. could and did voyage. But voyaging over long distances was rare for everyone in comparison to local shipping. Just think today of the difference in number between international flights and domestic flights. Most flights every day in the world are domestic flights, not international flights. My point is that shipping in the past was the same. And just as international flights and shipping are more expensive than other means, so was it the case in the past. However, the historical records that we have are mainly about those long and expensive voyages. That makes people think that this was the norm. As far as I can tell, there were only a limited number of ships that made those kinds of journeys each year, whereas you probably had hundreds that made shorter journeys.
Dear Dr. Kelley
This is a very promising theory! There’s just one problem, there are ten stone inscriptions documenting the laws of Srivijaya and the punishments for breaking the law. The oldest known stone inscription is the Prasastasi Kedukan Bukit, located in Palembang. Another inscription is the Prasasti Telaga Batu (which discusses the origins of Srivijaya). Other than that this is a very interesting theory.
Yours truly
S.S.
Dear S.S., Thank you for your comment!! However, you are confusing the issue here.
The existence of those stone inscriptions has nothing to do with what I write in this blog post and therefore is not a problem for what I say here.
I am writing about a place that Chinese referred to as Sanfoqi, and I am demonstrating that it was a polity in Cambodia.
As for the issue of Srivijaya, historians have used the information in Chinese sources about Sanfoqi to write about Srivijaya. However, since the time, in 1918, when George Coedes put forth the idea that Sanfoqi was Srivijaya, that connection has never been proven. And for anyone who can read Chinese, it is very clear that the information in Chinese sources about Sanfoqi is not about a place on the island of Sumatra. Therefore, the issue of where exactly Sanfoqi was is one that has long needed to be addressed. That is what I have done here, and in other writings.
Pretty much all of the information about Srivijaya’s maritime history comes from information in Chinese sources about Sanfoqi (And Shilifoshi, which also wasn’t Srivijaya, and I write about that in the working paper that I linked to above).
In demonstrating here that Sanfoqi was in Cambodia (and I provide more evidence in the published article linked above), what this means is that historians cannot use Chinese records about Sanfoqi to write about the history of Srivijaya because Sanfoqi was not Srivijaya.
Historians can certainly use those 10 inscriptions to write about the history of Srivijaya.
While I don’t talk about this here, I do think that the place mentioned in those inscriptions was mentioned in Chinese sources. However, I don’t think it was based in Palembang, but instead, was around the Lake Songkla area (the inscriptions found around Palembang, and mentioning a planned campaign against Java were at the southern end of this empire’s control), and it was the main rival of Sanfoqi. I write about that in the working paper linked above.
Therefore, those inscriptions are not a problem for what I wrote. Instead, what I wrote is a problem for people who have used Chinese sources about Sanfoqi to write about Srivijaya.
I hope that makes sense, and thank you again for your comment!!!
Well done, professor!
Excellent research, fascinating write-up…
Thank you, Liam!! It’s been a while. I hope you’re doing well!!
Hi Liam
I will be in VN the whole month of March coming. Would you by any chance happen to be there also? As you can suspect I love Cham culture and technology and co-wrote a book on basket boats under Lê Nguyên Khanh and am researching on the Ghe Bầu / ghe mành and also nước mắm which I suspect came from the Mediterranean thru India and brought to Asia by the Funanese/ Chams.
Hello Ken, at the moment I don’t have a plan to be there. But what’s the name of that book?
Thuyền thúng Việt Nam, Quách Giao & Lê nguyên Khanh. Nxb Đà Nẵng
I see. Thank you!!
Dear Dr Kelly,
After reading some of your articles I have a new perspectiv. But there’s something that’s bothering me, namely the Saylendra Dynasty, have you written about the Syailendra dynasty? And what do you think about that? Because that is an important thing in terms of Java and Srivijaya
Thank you for the comment, Roland!!
I completely agree with you!! However, I do not have the ability to fully investigate that issue. I would want to put aside everything that people have said, and to look at the inscriptions and the archaeological evidence, and to then collate that with what I have found in the Chinese sources. However, I don’t have the linguistic ability to read the inscriptions and my knowledge of things like the artistic styles of remains is also extremely limited.
However, I completely agree that this is a very important piece of the puzzle.