| Abstract: |
This chapter discusses the important political entities in the interior of mainland South-East Asia that were known to the Chinese during the seventh and eighth centuries. At the turn of the twentieth century, these and other South-East Asian historical sites were scarcely known to Western scholars, who were beginning to rediscover the toponyms buried in the Chinese annals of the Tang period (AD 618-907). Paul Pelliot, in his monumental 1904 article, repeatedly expressed hesitation as he tried to identify such place names, and a careful reading of his work shows that he did not expect his conclusions to be definitive. Successive Western scholars, however, have simply accepted works such as those of George Coedès, which depended on the provisional conclusions of earlier twentieth-century sinologists such as Pelliot. Instead of doing so, scholars would have done better to review and reassess the tentative geographical identifications, perhaps once every few decades, in the light of new archaeological findings and ethno-linguistic research. In this regard, it can also be useful to re-examine abandoned theories.
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