The Latest Posts

I FINALLY Found Sanfoqi!!

Off and on over the past few years, I have been researching about a place called “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊. This is a name that appears in Chinese sources from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, and it was clearly a very important trading center in Southeast Asia. Since the early twentieth

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Global Vietnam Book Series and Journal

This year, Phan Lê Hà and I, with the support of a wonderful team of associate series editors, editorial board members and a series editorial assistant, launched a new book series with Springer Nature called “Global Vietnam: Across Time, Space and Community.” Four volumes have already been published, and several

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The Great Dispersal: Academia Today

I always enjoy looking around me and trying to get a sense of what is happening in my profession. I’m an historian of Southeast Asian history, but I also have a background in Chinese history and world history, and I guess you could say Asian Studies as well. That professional

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This Should Be The Revision Age!!

One point that I keep bringing up, but I don’t find it getting recognized, is the fact that the capabilities that we now have when we conduct research in the Digital Age enable us to easily significantly revise, if not outright refute, the scholarship that was produced in the Analog

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Popular Confucianism/Culture in Premodern Vietnam

If there is one topic in Vietnamese history that I think people today have the hardest time understanding it is the topic of “Confucianism.” Why is that? Well, it’s a long story, but we can start with the Japanese. In the nineteenth century, some Japanese intellectuals tried to learn about

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This was a great idea until I just got too damn busy. . .

But at some point I will get back to making these videos. . .

Welcome to the 2020 version of Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More) [Beta Version]

The 2010s are now a part of the past. In the future when historians look back at that decade I think they will see it as one of the most transformative periods in human history.

While not much changed on the surface (no world revolutions, etc.),on a much more fundamental level, the way that human beings communicate changed dramatically.

Take a look at what this blog looked like at the beginning of the decade in 2010:

When Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog was launched in 2010, it inhabited a black-and-white world of text.

Then over the course of the 2010s images and video were added. As Facebook became more widely used, discussions about posts moved from the blog itself to its accompanying Facebook page.

Finally, throughout the decade I examined the analytics for the blog to gain a sense of what readers were actually viewing.

The changes that took place on this blog mirrored the dramatic changes that were taking place in human communication.

First, the rise of YouTube and Instagram made videos and images indispensable for the way we now communicate. Second, the emergence and spread of smart phones together with social media platforms like Facebook meant that communication could take place anywhere with anyone at any time. And finally, Google Analytics  showed people what was actually happening “out there” to their products and services, leading to a focus on “user experience” (UX).

Now as a new decade dawns, all of us who have been communicating digitally find ourselves inundated with “content.” Indeed, on this blog alone there are now over 1,000 posts, and its accompanying YouTube Channel has hundreds of videos.

The blog format is definitely not ideal for viewing such a large quantity of content. This new 2020 version of Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog has therefore been designed in an effort to overcome the limitations of the blog format so that readers can more easily visualize what is actually here and can browse through the archives in a more intentional and focused manner.

This new 2020 version of Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog has therefore been designed in an effort to overcome the limitations of the blog format so that readers can more easily visualize what is actually here and can browse through the archives in a more intentional and focused manner.

Below readers will find first the latest posts with a link to the full blog archive, in the traditional blog format style.

Following that I have visually presented, in the form of boxed icons, the various categories that posts on this blog fall into. Readers can click on a category and view the blog posts in that category. 

The category icons are also on the footer of each page to facilitate further exploration.

Finally, on this front page I have started to develop a narrative about the blog as a whole, in sections that have the same background color as this section here.

That narration is interspersed with more specific information about individual categories.

I will add to the narration of the blog on this front page in the weeks and months ahead.

Some readers will question what is new about any of this. After all, many blogs include lists of categories.

While that is true, I think that the changes that have taken place over the 2010s have made our brains much more attuned to looking for visual clues about content.

What is more, as the quantity of content grows, our reliance on visual aides increases as well.

In 2010 it was still possible to communicate on the web by relying solely on text. That’s not the case anymore, and that is why I feel this decade has been one of the most transformative in human history.

Finally, please be advised this is a beta version of this blog. Information is still incomplete, and some things are not functioning properly yet. Thank you for your patience!!

The Blog at a Glance

Below is a list of the categories of blog posts on this site. You can click on a category to see the posts, or scroll down to learn more about the kinds of content that we have here on Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog (+ More).

Regional & Country-Specific Posts

The Digital Future of Asian Studies

Popular Culture and the Arts

Ideas and Animals

Reviews

Series

Vietnamese Early History & Its (Mis)Interpretations

Vietnamese History By Period and Place

Vietnamese Historiography

Engaging With Vietnam

And so much
more. . .

I started this blog. . .

. . . in 2010. At the time I saw it as a place to put some of the information and ideas that I had acquired through teaching and research but that I didn’t plan to include in any publications.

So, for instance, in the early years I posted a lot about advertisements, because I spent a lot of time looking for visuals for my history courses, and advertisements are great for demonstrating how societies changed over time.

Old Ads

Cigarettes, soap, milk powder, a tonic made from the sex glands of langurs. . . You gotta love this stuff!!

Old Ads

Cigarettes, soap, milk powder, a tonic made from the sex glands of langurs. . . You gotta love this stuff!!

I also share ideas from my research.

At the time that I started this blog I was just beginning to do research on Vietnamese origins, and that led me to investigate and discover a lot of different issues.

Those issues fall under three separate but related categories:

  1. Vietnamese Early History
  2. Medieval Vietnamese Invented Traditions
  3. Fringe History

Vietnamese Early History & Medieval Vietnamese Invented Traditions

There are a lot of posts here under the category of “Vietnamese Early  History.” 

At the time that I started this blog I was just beginning to do research on Vietnamese origins, and that led me to investigate and discover a lot of different issues.

Much of the information about Vietnamese early history was first written down (in the way we know it today) in “medieval” times (~15th century AD), that information was reinterpreted and re-presented in the twentieth century in very nationalistic ways.

At the time that I started this blog I was just beginning to do research on Vietnamese origins, and that led me to investigate and discover a lot of different issues.

So on this blog there are a lot of posts about the above two points. Essentially what I have written about are:

  1. the ways in which Vietnamese early history is an “medieval invented tradition,” as well as
  2. the ways in which Vietnamese early history has been transformed and employed in the twentieth century for nationalist purposes.

These posts can be found in the categories “Vietnamese Early History” and Medieval Vietnamese Invented Traditions.”

Medieval Vietnamese Invented Traditions

Kinh Dịch / Yijing

Fringe History

Since the 1960s there has been a version of Vietnamese early history that is particularly nationalistic. This version of the past argues that the ancestors of the Vietnamese were the first people to inhabit the Asian mainland and that they essentially established the foundation for what we today think of as “Chinese” or “East Asian” culture.

Professional, or establishment, historians in Vietnam do not generally uphold this view of the past. I therefore label this form of history “fringe history,” as it inhabits a space on the fringe of established knowledge about the past.

Nonetheless, over the past 20 or so years, these ideas have increasingly made their way into Vietnamese universities, and can now be found in university textbooks and on university web pages.

The posts that deal with this topic are categorized as “Fringe History.”

Fringe History

In researching about Vietnamese history. . .

. . . and comparing what I see in the sources with what modern historians have written about the past, I’ve come across two issues that cause major problems for historians:

  1. The Evils of Quốc Ngữ and
  2. “The Great Transformation”

The Evils of Quốc Ngữ

Very few historians today can read Vietnamese historical sources in their original language – classical Chinese. They rely instead on translations in modern Vietnamese that are writtin in the Romanized script, Quốc Ngữ.

There are many, many problems with those translations. . .

The Evils of Quốc Ngữ

Very few historians today can read Vietnamese historical sources in their original language – classical Chinese. They rely instead on translations in modern Vietnamese that are writtin in the Romanized script, Quốc Ngữ.

There are many, many problems with those translations. . .

The Great Transformation

For me, the most important period in Vietnamese history is the period from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, because this is the time when “everything changed.”

This is also the period that historians have neglected the most.

Read more to find out why this is the case.

The Great Transformation

For me, the most important period in Vietnamese history is the period from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, because this is the time when “everything changed.”

This is also the period that historians have neglected the most.

Read more to find out why this is the case.

Then I turned to video. . .

Somewhere along the line I decided that writing is no longer sufficient for communicating in the twenty first century.

So I started making videos. By now I’ve made somewhere between 200 and 300 (I’ve lost count).

I have now CATEGORIZED the videos, so that it’s easier to find and see what is there. Come take a look!!

YouTube
Videos

Categorized
& Explained

It's the Digital Age!!!

While this is a blog about Southeast Asian history (+ more), ultimately everything here is here because we are in the digital age. The Digital Revolution has of course made blogs and YouTube videos possible, but it has done much, much more than that.

Most importantly, the Digital Revolution has radically transformed how most on this planet people communicate.

I am simultaneously fascinated by this transformation and frustrated to see the academic world I work in generally not transforming.

I find this resistance to change particularly frustrating given that the area studies/Asian Studies world that I am part of is clearly not faring well in this new age.

Increasingly over the past couple of years I have been blogging and making videos that discuss the decline of Asian Studies and the need for academia to transform.

These posts and videos can be found under the category of “Content Asian Studies.”

Content Asian Studies

A Series!!
Just like Netflix!!

Sometimes I have a lot on my mind. . .

. . . and so I end up writing a series of posts on a given topic.

To date I’ve written series on:

  1. The Bình Ngô Đại Cáo
  2. The Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia in the Early 19th Century
  3. The Nguyễn Dynasty’s Early-20th-Century Educational Reforms
  4. Governmental Reforms in Eighteenth Century Đàng Trong (Cochinchina)
  5. Ben Kiernan’s Viet Nam: From Earliest Times to the Present (i.e., Going Backwards)
  6. Racism in Vietnamese Scholarship

I love all forms of popular culture and the arts, and post on such topics.

Film

Popular Culture

Art

Popular Music

And there are a lot of posts about animals. . .

Animals

And there are a lot of posts about animals. . .

Animals

There is more that needs to be explained about the blog, and I will add to what I have written here in the weeks and months ahead.

Thank you for reading!!