Boni in Chinese Sources - Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre - iseas

Kurz: Boni in Chinese Sources NSC Working Paper No. 4The mass of the Dragon Mountain rises to its right. The land at its base is rich andspacious, and from the fields profits are drawn. 68 The summer months are rathercool, in the winter it is extremely hot. Their customs abound. Men and women styletheir hair into a topknot, they wrap a multi‐coloured cloth around their hips, and usecoloured gold brocade for shirts. They rigorously worship a Buddha statue 69 . Theyhave the utmost respect and affection for the people of Tang (the Chinese); if theyare drunk, then they help them return to their lodgings.The people boil seawater to make salt, and they produce alcohol by fermentingmillet. They have a chieftain, who selects from his country one man who cancalculate, to keep account books, calculate expenditure and income, and collecttaxes, without making the smallest errors. Local products are Longzhen [‐incense],bee’s wax, tortoise shell, and plum‐blossom and chipped camphor. This [camphor]tree resembles the fir or the juniper. They split it open and take out [the camphor].Before they do so, they must fast and bathe. For trade they use things like silver, redgold, coloured satin, ivory boxes, and iron vessels. 70The people in this Boni were Buddhists and living on the harvests from their fields. Theclimate is comparable to that described in earlier texts. For Nicholl, the Longshan or DragonMountain is Mt. Kinabalu 71 . His main reason to identify the Longshan with Mt. Kinabalu arelegends about the mountain and dragons. 72 Other than that he has no evidence to provethe correctness of his presumption, but nevertheless keeps working with it anyway. As wehave seen, the text is far from fixing the place anywhere else than close to a mountain,which in fact must not be Mt. Kinabalu at all. The problem is how to interpret the firstsentence in the entry. Is the right side of the mountain seen from the observer arriving on aship from the west? Then Boni would, in fact, have been situated north of the mountain.The other option is the visitor arriving from the east, which in my opinion is unlikely. Thetext was written for Chinese readers describing places to the east of them and thus Wang’sview is probably from China towards the east as well. At the same time, it is very doubtful if68 Rockhill translates ji yu xiong chang yuan tian huo li 基 宇 雄 敞 源 田 獲 利 as “... the land stretches out in a fineplateau. Its high‐level fields are a source of profit to it”. See Rockhill, “Eastern Archipelago”, 264‐265. I havenot been able to verify the translation of jiyu as plateau nor tian as high‐level field.69 The climate described certainly would have been detrimental to pictures, so that the term xiang 象 heremust mean something solid. Therefore I have chosen the present translation. Rockhill translates: “Theyworship images of Buddhas (or gods).”70 Wang Dayuan 汪 大 淵 , Daoyi zhilüe jiaoshi 島 夷 誌 略 校 釋 , Su Jiqing 蘇 繼 廎 (rev. and annot.) (Beijing:Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 148.71 Nicholl, “Brunei and Camphor”, 53.72 Nicholl, “Notes on Some Controversial Issues”, 28.23