In the previous post, we saw that in various Chinese texts dating from the Song to the Ming periods, there was a kingdom called Sanfoqi that was located in the area of what is now Cambodia.
What we didn’t talk about in that post, is the fact that during the Ming period (and in the 15th century, to be exact), that kingdom came to be located in some Chinese texts in a different place – on the coast of the island of Sumatra.
This is important because in the twentieth century Western scholars developed a history of an imagined polity on Sumatra called Srivijaya, and they used information about Sanfoqi to do this. However, Sanfoqi was not a kingdom on Sumatra. It was “Kambuja,” that is, the Cambodian empire of Angkor.
Nonetheless, the name “Sanfoqi” did eventually become associated with Sumatra in Chinese sources. This post will (partially) explain how that happened.
There were three steps to this “re-location.” First, Sanfoqi “disappeared.” In particular, after the Ming was established in 1368, it received some tribute missions from Sanfoqi in the 1370s, but none after that. Further, no one visited Sanfoqi and wrote about it either.
So, with no textual evidence of its existence, Sanfoqi became invisible to people in later centuries who sought information about it.
The second step was that scholars in these later periods then claimed that Sanfoqi was an earlier name for a polity that existed in their times, a place called Old Harbor (Jiugang 舊港).
The first people to do that were a couple of men who participated some of the Zheng He voyages that passed through Southeast Asia in the early fifteenth century, Ma Huan and Fei Xin. These men never visited a place called Sanfoqi, however, they did visit a place called Old Harbor, and they claimed, without citing any reason or evidence, that it had formerly been called “Sanfoqi.”
Where exactly was Old Harbor? That was step three of Sanfoqi’s re-location. While this name appears in at least one text before Ma Huan and Fei Xin wrote their accounts of the foreign lands that the Zheng He voyages learned about, that text does not indicate where it was.
Fei Xin, however, recorded that Old Harbor was eight days from Java, and Ma Huan said it was also called “Bolinbang” 浡淋邦, a name that scholars have seen as indicating “Palembang.” Taken together, these two brief comments indicated that Old Harbor was probably Palembang on the island of Java.
Later, there was a map that was created based on information from the Zheng He voyages (see the above image). Known commonly as the Mao Kun map, it records that there was a place along the coast of Sumatra that was called Old Harbor. It also indicates that there was an inland polity on Sumatra by that name as well.
However, this map, and all other information that we have, indicates that the members of the Zheng He voyages never visited that inland polity. As such, while they were familiar with a location on the coast of Sumatra that they called Old Harbor, they did not have any firsthand information about the polity that was some 75 kilometers up the Musi River, and which they variously referred to as Old Harbor or Bolinbang (Palembang).
In other words, in the century after Sanfoqi disappeared from Chinese sources and knowledge, an idea emerged that it was the former name of a place called Old Harbor. However, 1) no evidence for this was provided, 2) the only Old Harbor that Chinese knew about was a place on the coast of Sumatra for which there is no evidence that it had once been a kingdom.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
None of this makes sense. After centuries of being located in Chinese texts on the Southeast Asian mainland near Champa, suddenly in the fifteenth century, Sanfoqi became the old name for a place called Old Harbor which was either a place on the coast of Sumatra or an inland polity that the Chinese who wrote about Old Harbor never visited.
Why did this happen? The answer, like all good answers, lies with a murder mystery and a Chinese pirate. That will be the topic of the next post.
