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Revisiting the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asian History
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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.
Description:
Date:
2023
Authors:
Liam C. Kelley
Publisher:
Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
