Pierre-Yves Manguin

Education
After a brief period in an engineering school, he enrolled at the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes where he obtained a Diploma in Vietnamese Language and Civilisation in 1967. At the same time, he studied maritime history (Michel Mollat du Jourdin) and ethnology (with Georges Condominas) at the Sorbonne, the EPHE and the EHESS. In 1970, he obtained his Diplôme de l'Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes (IVth section) in the history of South-East Asia and in 1977 he obtained his doctorate in history (EPHE/University of Paris IV-Sorbonne). He received his “Habilitation à diriger des recherches” from the EHESS in 2003. 


Professional career
He joined the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient on April 1, 1970, and since 1977 has been posted several times to the EFEO Centre in Indonesia, where he lived for some fifteen years. He is now posted to the EFEO's Paris headquarters. At the EFEO, he has directed the research units "Southeast Asia : exchange, religions, state” (1997-2007) and "Ancient cities and spacial structuring in Southeast Asia” (2008-2011). He also coordinated the program "Ancient khmer space: Construction of a digital corpus of archaeological and epigraphic data” (funded by the ANR 2009-2011). Since 2012 he has been editor of the Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient. He retired in 2013, and has since then been an Emeritus Professor of the EFEO.

In 1984 he was one of the founding members of Lasema (Laboratoire Asie du Sud-Est et Monde austronésien/ CNRS-UPR 297). He was Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford University, in 1985, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, in 2007. He was co-founder and first elected Chairman (1984-1987) of the French Association for Research on Southeast Asia, a member of the board of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists (1992-2010) and Chairman of the European Association of Southeast Asian Studies (2004-2007).Between 2014 and 2019 he collaborated in the "Maritime knowledge for China Seas project", (ANR, EFEO and Academia Sinica) directed by Paola Calanca, during which three international conferences were organised and which is to result in the co-editing of a two-volume work entitled Of Ships and Men.  

Fields of research - Research in progress
His research focuses on the history of the maritime façade of pre-modern Southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on the study of merchant networks in the China Sea and Indian Ocean, and their role in the formation of political systems and urbanisation. In the course of various research operations, he has also studied the perceptions that coastal societies have of their history and their maritime environment, through the study of their vocabulary and their representations. He participated in a multidisciplinary research programme on settlement dynamics of Sumatra.Initially based solely on written documents, his research from the 1980s onwards made increasing use of archaeology to complete the missing historical data. These archaeological excavation programmes, carried out in cooperation with researchers in Indonesia and Vietnam, focused on both merchant ships and harbour cities in these two countries.He led archaeological missions in Sumatra on the harbour sites of the Srivijaya period (7th-13th centuries CE) and new surveys on these sites in 2010 and 2011. This research has made it possible to establish without question that G. Coedès was right to place the capital of Srivijaya at Palembang. Above all, they helped to establish a solid chronology for the history of this great maritime state and to demonstrate that the tradition of merchant cities in Southeast Asia dates back to the first millennium AD. His research then focused on the port site of Oc Eo in the Mekong Delta (1st-7th centuries CE). Finally, until 2007, he conducted a programme on the sites of Batujaya and Cibuaya (1st-7th centuries CE), in West Java. These last two programmes aim at better understanding a hitherto neglected period in the history of Southeast Asia, during which the region's first political systems, based on long-distance exchanges, developed and gradually adopted cultural models imported from India.