Date: 14 November 2023
Time: 17:00 – 18:00Venue: AM103, Alan MacDiarmid Bldg, Kelburn Campus VUW
Register: ChinaCentre@vuw.ac.nz

Abstract
The great Kingdom of Angkor based in north-west Cambodia was one of imperial China’s most important neighbours. It flourished from the ninth to the fifteenth century CE, and was preceded by a variety of polities dating back to the first century CE. During most of that time relations existed between successive imperial Chinese courts and both Angkor and it predecessors. Official and unofficial Chinese records tell us a great deal—though never enough—about Angkor and its antecedents, whose own records are much more limited. In this seminar Peter Harris reviews the available Chinese sources and what we can learn from them about early Cambodian polities, Chinese perceptions of them, and relations between them and imperial China. In doing so he draws on his latest book, The Empire Looks South: Chinese Perceptions of Cambodia before and during the Kingdom of Angkor.

About the Speaker

Dr. Peter Harris is a Senior Fellow of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre. Earlier, he was director of Asian studies at Victoria University and founding director of the Asia New Zealand Foundation, as well as a Representative of the Ford Foundation and an international consultant on governance and civil society. He has a Ph D in Asian history from Monash University and degrees from Oxford University in Chinese and International Relations. He has published widely on Chinese and Asian affairs. His earlier books include a new translation of Sun zi’s Art of War, Zhou Daguan’s Record of Cambodia, and new editions of Marco Polo’s Travels and Three Hundred Tang Poems.

Register: ChinaCentre@vuw.ac.nz