The Empire Looks South: Chinese perceptions of Cambodia before and during the Kingdom of Angkor

“It’s always worthwhile, opening a book,” wrote the early Chinese poet Tao Yuanming, and this wisdom particularly applies to the present one: in the maze of centuries of accounts by Chinese ​‘envoys, officials, Daoists, Buddhists, and others’ — including Zhou Daguan​’s description of Zhenla (Chenla) and the less referred-to Zhao Rugua’s [1] Zhu fan zhi (Treatise on the Various Foreigners) –, the author leads us into a journey where we are invited to reconsider our vision of Ancient Cambodia.

With a rich apparatus of notes, appendices and a useful Index (a tool too often neglected in nowadays publication), The Empire Looks South combines the accounts from official sources, from Buddhist monks, from Daoists in search of immortality, and from merchants only looking for terrestral rewards. 

Even if Chinese emperors have kept geographical observations and official mission records, so many sources have been lost that historians keep guessing about the real size and structure of Funan and Chenla. For instance, what exactly wrote Zhu Zhi, also called Zhu Jian’an, who authored in the late 5^th century Funan ji (A Record of Funan), of which only few parts have been saved? And when Zhou Daguan listed ten jun (prefectures) of late 13^th century Cambodia — Zhenpu, Zha’nan, Bajian, Moliang, Baxue, Pumai, Zighun, Mujinbo, Laigankeng and Basili –, to which territories and cities was he referring to?

For each name, the author offers only suggestions: Zhenpu was ​‘a frontier town on the southeastern coast of present-day Vietnam’ [Oc Eo?]; Zha’nan ​‘a Mekong River town, perhaps the present-day town of Kompong Chhnang’; Bajian ​‘was south of Zhenpu’; Moliang, or Malan, ​‘may refer to a place in Battambang’; Baxue ​‘perhaps Pakse in the south of present-day Laos’; Pumai ​‘likely to be Phimai in present-day Thailand”; Zighun ​‘possibly Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh Ville’; Mujinbo, ​‘location unknown’; Laigankeng, ​‘location unknown’; Basili, or Bosilan, ​‘south of Zhenla’. 

Sometimes, etymology fails us when trying to understand realities that impressed Chinese travelers and were recorded as distinctive traits of Ancient Cambodia. For instance, both Zhao Rugua (circa 1220) and Zhou Daguan (1296−7) were fascinated by ​“three hundred dancing girls presenting food to the Buddha every day“in the temples of Angkor, and the former called them a’nan 阿南, ​‘a term of unknow derivation’. The author suggests they were devadasi, ​‘Hindu temples dancers associated in palace rituals’ who he himself witnessed performing in the Jagannath temple in Puri, Odisha, India. The devadasi, persecuted by the British colonial authorities who considered them as mere prostitutes, were girls dedicated to temples, a traditional system that was abolished by the 7 Oct 1947 Madras Devadasi Act in independent India. 

[1] Sinologist Pascal Medeville contests the transliteration of Zhao Rugua for 赵汝适, claiming that it should be Zhao Rukuo.