This is a guest post by Andrew Chittick. The author bio is below.

The Digital Orientalist has proven to be a fine resource for many in the field of Asian Studies, but so far it has not offered much for those interested in Maritime Asia. While I am primarily a Sinologist, my research of late has focused on Chinese-language texts that address Southeast Asia and the maritime world in the first millennium CE. A few of these materials have been translated, but only in piecemeal fashion many decades ago (e.g. Pelliot 1903; Wang 1958; Wheatley 1961 and 1983), without comprehensive source-critical approaches, and prior to the many discoveries in Southeast Asian archaeology that have been made in the last half-century. The lack of modern translation and scholarship is a serious shortcoming for Southeast Asian scholars, most of whom do not read classical Chinese. In an effort to help the field, I am working on a long-term project to translate and interpret many of these texts, especially in light of new archaeological materials, and make them accessible for researchers.

I was sold on the ESRI StoryMap platform for this purpose when I first encountered the excellent online translation of the thirteenth-century Chinese text, the Zhufan zhi (Gazetteer of Foreign Lands) by Shao-yun Yang. Thanks to a research fellowship from NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in 2022-23, I completed work on a StoryMap-based translation of material from two third-century CE works: the Wushi waiguo zhuan (Account of Foreign Countries in the Wu Period) and the Nanzhou yiwu zhi (Record of Unusual Things from Southern Lands). These texts are some of the earliest substantive written sources on Southeast Asia. However, they currently exist only in fragments, of which just a few have been translated; the entire corpus has never been analyzed together, and certainly not in light of what is known from recent archaeology. The complete StoryMap site, titled Maritime Asia in the Third Century CE: a Translation and Analysis of the Wushi waiguo zhuan and Nanzhou yiwu zhi, brings together textual and archaeological materials about regions stretching from northern Vietnam throughout maritime Southeast Asia, North and South India, and as far as the Middle East and Mediterranean.

Network analysis of sites referenced in the texts

Advantages of working in StoryMap

There are multiple advantages to doing this work in a StoryMap format. First, it allows you to make maps for locations and travel routes. These maps are interactive and dynamic: viewers can zoom in on the aspects that interest them, or pan over to other regions to orient themselves. There are several places where I have pre-set a zoom that I think viewers will find helpful, and linked it from the text. Second, it allows you to integrate images into the translation. Some of these show archaeological sites and material culture, while others are illustrative or suggestive; some are placed centrally, others more peripherally, depending on their significance. Third, the site is readily navigable: it has a clickable table of contents at the top, and is cross-linked between passages. This is especially helpful with fragmentary texts, since interpreting one passage often means making a close comparison with another passage that may be in a different section of the overall work. And, like any online resource, StoryMap facilitates linking to other scholarship or further references. Finally, the site remains open and easy to edit in response to reader feedback or new discoveries. I initially circulated a “beta” version to a few colleagues and made numerous corrections and clarifications, and I have made further updates since first going fully live in late 2023.

Map of sites on the coast of central Vietnam

Using the Maritime Asia site for research

The StoryMap is a uniquely useful and accessible tool for research. First, it is solely focused on a pivotal but poorly-understood period of Southeast Asian history. Up to around the third century CE, scholars of Southeast Asia rely primarily on archaeological evidence, since the only surviving writings about the region are scant, fragmentary, and composed by outsiders. In the fifth century we start to see significant inscriptions in Sanskrit, Old Malay, Old Khmer, and other local languages that advance our understanding of local cultures. The third to fifth centuries CE thus sit at an uncomfortable “hinge” between the pre-historic and historic periods. The period is of particular interest, however, because it marks the transition to more Indianized states in Southeast Asia, as signified by archaeological evidence of Hindu and Buddhist temples, sculptures, votive objects, and inscriptions (Murphy and Stark 2016, 335). The texts translated in Maritime Asia in the third Century, together with the many archaeological sites referenced, are able to offer an unusually comprehensive overview of this pivotal era.

Second, the site translates and interprets works that have not been addressed comprehensively in the past. The older tradition of Sinology typically treated classical Chinese historical and geographical texts as relatively reliable sources of factual information, which were believed to have been faithfully transmitted by later editors and copyists. Modern Sinology is much more source-critical, recognizing the wealth of errors and biases that Chinese texts contain. For example, my comprehensive work on the Account of Foreign Countries in the Wu Period shows that it contained a serious misunderstanding of the geography of the “southern seas,” which led to incorrect directions and distances. These were then quoted in later histories and encyclopedias, which further compounded the problem with additional errors and mis-quotings. Past researchers seeking to make sense of these passages in a piecemeal fashion have often been led astray, engaging in fierce debates with one another about how to interpret the texts and where to place certain locations. By dealing with the entire text in a comprehensive fashion, and comparing it to what is known from archaeology, I am able to offer much better-grounded hypotheses about what Chinese authors knew (and didn’t know) about early maritime Asia.

Third, the site is inviting and pleasurable to explore. It invites a wider audience to learn more about early maritime Asia, and to get a better sense of how traditional Sinological methods can be combined with archaeological research from Southeast Asia in a way that is broadly accessible.

References

Stephen A. Murphy and Miriam T. Stark, “Introduction: Transitions from late prehistory to early historic periods in mainland Southeast Asia, c. early to mid-first millennium CE,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 47, No. 3 (2016): 333-340.

Paul Pelliot, “Le Fou-nan.” Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 3 (1903): 248-303.

Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai trade: the early history of Chinese trade in the South China Sea (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998).

Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before AD 1500. (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1961).

Paul Wheatley, Nagara and Commandery: Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions (Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 1983).

Andrew Chittick is the E. Leslie Peter Professor of East Asian Humanities & History at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. A scholar of early medieval China and Sino-Southeast Asian maritime trade, he is the author of over twenty published articles and two full-length books, including The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History (Oxford University Press, 2020), a ground-breaking study of state formation and political identity in what is now south China in the 3rd-6th centuries CE. Most recently he has published an ESRI StoryMap, Maritime Asia in the Third Century CE, which translates and analyzes several important early Chinese texts on Southeast Asia. Over the past decade he has held research fellowships with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore; and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU.