Srivijaya 02: Sanfoqi = Samfhutshiaj = Jianpuzhai = Angkor??

As discussed in the previous post, in 1918 French scholar Georges Coedès came up with the idea that there had been a maritime kingdom in Southeast Asia from roughly the seventh to fourteenth centuries called Srivijaya and that the Chinese referred to this kingdom as first Shilifoshi 室利佛逝 and then as Sanfoqi 三佛齊.

As I pointed out in the previous post, Shilifoshi was not a name for Srivijaya, but for something called Sri Budhjeta.

What exactly was Sri Budhjeta? It’s difficult to say. This place is mentioned in the writings of a Tang Dynasty monk by the name of Yijing, and what I have discovered in examining Yijing’s writings is that the names he gave to places were all rendered in Sanskrit/Buddhist terms (see the previous post for more details).

Meanwhile, by the Song Dynasty period, quite a bit of information about places in Southeast Asia starts to appear in official dynastic histories. However, the names for places in those writings are different. This is because in those writings many there are place names in Southeast Asia that are rendered according to Chinese pronunciation.

As I mentioned in the previous post, to understand how a name was pronounced 1,000 years ago, one needs to reference historical reconstructions, such as in books like Edwin G. Pulleyblank’s Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation: In Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin.

I just checked what Sanfoqi would sound like in Middle Chinese, and I came up with something like “Samfhutshiaj.”

That sounds suspiciously like “Jianpuzhai” 柬埔寨, a name for “Cambodia,” that was first used during the Ming, and that would have sounded close to Samfhutshiaj.

Wait now, has a century of scholarship on Srivijaya really just been about Angkor??

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  1. Kimi

    You tried to find same vowel between Indian Script and Chineese, you could never find it.
    many country were named not exactly, Egypt = Mesir, Greece = Yunani, Nihon = Japan, etc.

    I think you must read more before post something.

    1. Anh Tran

      Your premise is absolutely wrong as the name Yunani of Greece came from Ionia, a region inside the classical Greece polis. And Nihon is indeed Japan (both are reading of 日本 but by different dialects, the ancient /p/ sound of Japan in Old Japanese coressponds to the modern /h/ in Nihon).

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