To be able to understand the information that the Ming shilu 明實錄 (Veritable Records of the Ming) contains about Cambodia in the fourteenth century, we have to also get a sense of what that text records about the neighboring Siamese polity of Ayutthaya, because as we saw in the previous post, Cambodian chronicles record that the Siamese captured Angkor two times in the fourteenth century (1353 and 1373).
Therefore, these polities were in close contact, and to fully understand what happened in the region, we need to see events from all perspectives.
Back in 2000, historian Geoff Wade published an article entitled “The ‘Ming shi-lu’ as a Source for Thai History: Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries” in which he demonstrated precisely what the title suggests – ways in which the Ming shilu can illuminate Thai, or what I prefer to call “Siamese” for this period, history.
This is a very helpful article, and in this post, I will attempt to take some of the points that Wade brought up and develop them further.
Ayutthaya was officially established in 1350, and as is by now well known, it is inaccurate to think of Ayutthaya as a single, unified kingdom. Instead, Ayutthaya was more like a city-state that led a federation of city-states.
There were two other city-states that were particularly important in this federation, Lopburi (or Lavo) and Suphanburi. Indeed, the kings of Ayutthaya came from the families that ruled these two city-states.
One of the issues that the Ming shilu makes obvious is that after the Ming made contact with Ayutthaya, representatives from each of these three city-states sent tribute missions to China, and these missions arrived in close proximity to each other.
I used to have a set idea of how tributary relations worked. I believed that a kingdom had to obtain official recognition from China first and that after that point the Chinese would only accept tribute from representatives of that officially recognized kingdom.
This may indeed have been the ideal, but it was not the reality in the early years of Ming Dynasty rule. Instead, one gets the sense of something akin to a free-for-all, as various foreign peoples attempted to engage in tributary relations.
As for the Chinese, with one or two exceptions, they don’t seem to have cared too much about the exact identity of who presented tribute, as long as the tribute bearer claimed to represent the monarch in a given category: Xian-Luohu (Ayuttaya), Zhenla, Sanfoqi, etc.
As for the kings that these tribute bearers represented, the information in the Ming shilu provides us with enough information to identify the various Siamese kings mentioned in the Ayutthayan chronicles. At the same time, the Ming shilu also enables us to verify a certain chronology for the reigns of those kings.
Just as is the case with Cambodian history, there are differing dates in different Siamese manuscripts. In the case of reign dates, for instance, the various versions of the Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya, the main chronicles, are generally consistent. However, there are a couple of other sources that offer different dates, one is a Buddhist text compiled in the late eighteenth century and known as the Saṅgītiyavaṃsa and the other is a brief account of Siamese history that was written in the seventeenth century by a Dutch merchant by the name of Jeremias Van Vliet.
The table below shows the differences in the reign dates recorded in the Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya and Van Vliet/the Saṅgītiyavaṃsa. In particular, the shaded cells indicate where the Van Vliet/the Saṅgītiyavaṃsa differ.
In his article, Wade pointed out that information in the Ming shilu about the first reign of a king by the name of Ramesuan fits with the Van Vliet/Saṅgītiyavaṃsa chronology.
In fact, if Wade had analyzed this matter further, he would have found that the Ming shilu repeatedly supports the Van Vliet/Saṅgītiyavaṃsa chronology.
The table below shows the names of Ayutthayan kings as recorded by Van Vliet/the Saṅgītiyavaṃsa. On the right are the equivalent Chinese names in the Ming shilu for these kings, and dates when these names are mentioned. As will be obvious, the Ming shilu verifies the dates recorded by Van Vliet/the Saṅgītiyavaṃsa and demonstrate that the Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya are inaccurate.
Beyond this issue of chronology, there is another point that the above table illustrates, and that is what appears to have been a different relationship that members of the Suphanburi line of Ayutthayan rulers had with the Ming in comparison with their Lopburi counterparts.
For the names of kings from the Suphanburi line, the Ming shilu provides some of their royal names. Meanwhile, for kings from the Lopburi line, the Ming shilu only records a generic Siamese term for monarchs, Somdet Chao Phraya.
In addition, the Ming shilu mentions the granting of an official seal to a Suphanburi king but never indicates that an official seal was granted to a Lopburi king.
Further, there is one Suphaburi king who died in 1388, however, his death was not announced to the Ming until 1395, when another member of the Suphaburi line became king of Ayutthaya. In the intervening years when kings from the Lopburi line ruled, there is no information in the Ming shilu indicating that a new king had come to power.
In other words, if we imagine that tributary relations were only carried out between an officially recognized monarch and the Ming, then the information in the Ming shilu does not exactly support such a view. Instead, the Ming appear to have accepted tribute from the three main city-states of Ayutthaya, while only officially recognizing one line of kings, the Supanburi line, from that federation of city-states.
Finally, the other key point that we can learn from the Ming shilu is that the information it records does not support the chronology in the Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya, but instead, supports the chronology recorded by Van Vliet/the Saṅgītiyavaṃsa. This is very important because it means that something as basic as the duration of the reigns of kings in the Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya is not accurate.
