Publication
Revisiting the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asian History
| dc.contributor.author | Liam C. Kelley | |
| dc.contributor.editor | Professor Lian Kwen Fee | |
| dc.contributor.editor | Assoc. Professor Paul J. Carnegie | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-11-06T04:02:47Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-11-06T04:02:47Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Chinese sources have played a very important role in the writing of early Southeast Asian history. However, scholars have struggled to understand the information in those sources and over the past century, there have been countless different interpretations that have been put forward. In this paper, we revisit the Chinese sources on early Southeast Asian history and do not simply offer a new interpretation, but also attempt to demonstrate why previous scholarship has been inaccurate. In particular, previous generations of scholars failed to recognize the way that Chinese scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries distorted information about Southeast Asia by (arbitrarily) equating historical placenames with the names of contemporary kingdoms. In doing so, they made false connections between placenames, thereby leading later scholars astray. In this paper, we return to the earliest sources and build our knowledge from scratch. What emerges is a new picture of early Southeast Asian history and one that is free of the many textual problems and contradictions that scholars have struggled with over the past century. | |
| dc.format.extent | 68 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://repository.ubd.edu.bn/handle/123456789/3608 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | 73 | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Southeast Asia—History—Sources | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | China—Relations—Southeast Asia | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Historiography—Southeast Asia | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Names, Geographical—Southeast Asia—History | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Southeast Asia—Civilization—Chinese influences | |
| dc.title | Revisiting the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asian History | |
| dc.type | Working Paper | |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication |
