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Paper short abstract

This paper examines myth, folklore, and fantasy in Ma Huan’s Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, showing how travel writing blends cultural imagination, moral lessons, and ethnography, using legends like the Krasue and Buddha’s curse to explore identity and otherness in the Indian Ocean.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the interplay of myth, folklore, and fantasy within premodern travel narratives of the Indian Ocean world, with particular attention to The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores by Chinese traveller Ma Huan. By analyzing origin myths and urban legends documented in these accounts—such as the tale of Sakyamuni Buddha’s curse on the Nicobar Islanders and the Southeast Asian legend of the Krasue—the study reveals how travel writing becomes a site of cultural imagination, moral instruction, and ethnographic projection. Drawing on both indigenous frameworks (such as the Jataka tradition) and Western theories of myth (notably Mircea Eliade’s concept of sacred history), the paper argues for a hybrid interpretive approach that respects the narrative complexity of non-Western oral traditions. The fantastic, far from being a peripheral literary device, emerges as central to shaping perceptions of the self and the other, naturalizing difference, and managing social anxieties through symbolic storytelling. The paper ultimately suggests that travel writing in the Indian Ocean offers a rich archive for folklore studies, reflecting how myths and legends adapt across space, language, and cultural contact zones.

Keywords: Indian Ocean, Ma Huan, travel writing, myth, urban legend, Jataka, folklore, fantastical narrative, Krasue