Several months ago, I spent a couple of weeks quickly researching and writing about “Srivijaya.” That is the name of a purported kingdom that was based at Palembang on the island of Sumatra and which supposedly flourished from roughly the seventh to thirteenth centuries.
The posts that I wrote at that time pointed out that the Chinese sources that provide much of the historical evidence about this supposed polity are not about a place on the island of Sumatra, but instead, refer to “Kambuja,” that is, Angkor.
In particular, there is a name in Chinese sources, “Sanfoqi,” that scholars have argued refers to “Srivijaya,” but I have discovered that it refers to “Kambuja.”
Over the past couple of months, I’ve returned to this topic and researched it more closely. I’ve now written a 51,000-word article on the topic which will hopefully get published at some point in the not-too-distant future.
While my basic argument remains the same, there is a lot that I have discovered over the past two months, and so I thought that I would update what I wrote earlier by summarizing the main points in that article.
The first point to note is that information in Chinese sources about Sanfoqi changed over the course of the Ming period. In the early years of the Ming, sources record that Sanfoqi was a current kingdom in the area of Cambodia. By the end of the Ming, however, sources record that it was an historical kingdom that used to exist on the coast of Sumatra.
So, over the course of the Ming, Sanfoqi went from being an actual kingdom to a past kingdom, and its location moved from Cambodia to Sumatra. In the paper, I attempt to show how this change in knowledge happened.
In the article, I look at information about Sanfoqi in a text known as the Ming shilu (the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty). This text contains summaries of documents that were exchanged at the Ming court, and in the case of Sanfoqi, they record information about tribute missions sent from that kingdom to the Ming capital. In so doing, they also provide some brief information about Sanfoqi as well.
The Ming Dynasty was established in 1368. A Ming envoy was sent to Sanfoqi in 1370, and envoys from Sanfoqi delivered tribute to the Ming several times over the next few years. Then, however, the tribute missions stopped, and Sanfoqi was never heard from again. . .
Given that I argue that Sanfoqi was Kambuja, I then examine Cambodian, as well as Siamese, chronicles for that same time period to see what might have happened. By examining those texts alongside the Ming shilu, I have been able to discover information that no one has realized before.
Here is the gist of what I discovered.
The Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya was established in 1350. In 1352 it attacked Angkor, and captured it the following year. A few years later, the Angkorian ruling family regained control of that city-state.
Then in the late 1360s, some foreign peoples attacked the Mekong Delta. They appear to have captured the area around Phnom Penh, and then led their forces to Angkor but were defeated. However, they did not leave the region.
Then in 1372, the Siamese attacked Angkor yet again, and a year later they captured it. This time, however, the Angkorian ruling family did not regain control of that city-state. Instead, the world of the Cambodian ruling elite imploded.
For the next few decades, members of the Angkorian royal family struggled to regain control of Angkor, as they moved from one location to another in the eastern part of what had once been the Angkorian empire. In the process, they at times allied themselves with the foreign peoples who were still in the lower Mekong region and in the Mekong Delta.
[Update: I’ve changed my ideas on this narrative. I got some welcomed pushback from people who know the Siamese sources, and I was alerted to some Ryukuan sources from the 1430s that are like a smoking gun at a crime scene. I now agree that the Siamese captured Angkor again in 1431, so at some point after 1373, the Angkorian ruling family must have regained control of Angkor. I’ll post a revised summary of what I think happened when I get to the end of this series.]
While there appear to have been various foreigners in the region, one important group was Javanese. Indeed, I strongly suspect that the attack of the 1360s was led by Javanese forces.
Members of the Angkorian royal family sought to establish tributary relations with the Ming, but they had to rely on Javanese to serve as their envoys as the Javanese had the ships.
For some reason, a conflict developed between some Javanese and the Angkorian royal family, and that brought an end to all tribute missions from Sanfoqi.
The last mission was sent in 1377. By the end of the fourteenth century, Angkor was firmly under the control of the Siamese, and the Mekong delta was home to Chinese pirates. Admiral Zheng He heard about one such pirate who was active in the Mekong Delta as he set off on his first voyage in 1405. On his return voyage he found this pirate along the coast of Sumatra at a place called Old Harbor. Zheng He captured this man and delivered him to the Ming capital where he was decapitated.
In the years that followed, there were several other voyages, and two of the men who participated in those later voyages wrote texts about the foreign lands they either visited or passed by.
By the time those two men first passed through the region around 1410, Sanfoqi/Kambuja had long since “disappeared” in that it was now a vassal of the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya. Further, the Zheng He voyages never ventured into the area of Cambodia. Therefore, these men had no direct information about Sanfoqi either.
A place they did visit, was Old Harbor, and they included in their texts the historical information about the Chinese pirate whom Zheng He had captured there. They also claimed that Old Port had formerly been Sanfoqi.
While Sanfoqi/Kambuja did in fact “disappear” in the second half of the fourteenth century, as Angkor came under Siamese control, it is through the writings of these men who participated on the Zheng He voyages that Sanfoqi “moved” in Chinese writings from Cambodia to the coast of Sumatra.
Much later, in the twentieth century, this information about Sanfoqi supposedly having once existed on Sumatra is what Western scholars used to develop a history for “Srivijaya.” However, there was never a kingdom called “Sanfoqi” on Sumatra. Sanfoqi was Kambuja, and it always existed in Cambodia.
In what follows, I will post in more detail about this issue.
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I guess the Mekong Delta is present day southern most of south Vietnam and it had an ancient sea port archeologist called it “oceo” port. The european explorer referred to the Mekong delta as Cochinchin but Cambodianw refer to the Mekong Delta as Kampuchea Krom (Cambodia in the lower Mekong) untill present day.
The Mekong Delta was under Cambodia’s control untill early 17th century. It was leased to the Vietnamese war lord whose daughter married Cambodian King Chey Chetha II (reign 1618-1628).
On the attack by foreign force, I suspect the Java or Srivijaya or Java would not involves in the conflict. There in fact was a country called Champa which is right next to the Mekong delta and had been in conflict with Cambodia since the Angkor period or earlier. Champa located in present day Vietnam (from city of Hue in the north and border Cochinchin in the south). In 1177 Champa’s navy sailed through the Mekong and overrun Ankgor. So th attack on Mekong Delta could be made by Champa. On tbe other hand, Ayuthaya Kingdom could also be the attacker for it has developed good maritime trade with China. Naval blockade of Mekong Delta would weaken post Angkorian Cambodia and benefit the Siam.