L. Kurz, Johannes
(2014)
Boni In Chinese Sources From The Tenth
To The Eighteenth Century.
International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (IJAPS), 10 (1).
pp. 2-32.
ISSN ISSN: 1823-6243
Abstract
The present national history of the Sultanate of Brunei includes a
fabricated history of official Brunei-China relations that extends as far
back as the sixth century AD. The present paper treats the subject of Boni,
a place well documented by pre-modern Chinese sources starting from the
tenth century. It attempts to address some major issues in the use of these
sources to establish Boni as a precursor of modern Brunei. Since the late
1970s writers within Brunei, foremost among them Robert Nicholl, have
contributed to the project of a long history of pre-modern Brunei by
interpreting the available Chinese sources very narrowly. Based on a close
reading of the original texts, this essay argues that the majority of the texts
until the Ming dynasty quote from the first extant source in the tenth
century. Hence, official Chinese perception of Boni did not increase over
time, but in fact did stagnate. Consequently, identification with a specific
location in Borneo, as Nicholl and C. Brown suggested, is impossible.
What the essay suggests is that with the extant official pre-modern Chinese
texts Boni cannot be established as Brunei, but that more likely, Boni under
different dynasties referred to various places on the north coast of Borneo
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