For the past decade or more I’ve observed a clear decline in interest on the part of students at my university in “Asian Studies” (by
A few years ago someone I met in Kuching kindly gave me a cookbook that had just been published by the Sarawak Eurasian Association called
As I’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog, there is an idea that is of central importance to Vietnamese ultra-nationalists, and that is that in
The above video is meant to introduce a new book – Erica Fox Brindley’s Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern
This is a very brief introduction to the following new book: Erica Fox Brindley’s “Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern
Last summer I wrote a blog post on the South Vietnamese philosopher, Lương Kim Định, that I entitled “Vietnam’s Greatest (unknown/unrecognized) Historian.” Although a philosopher
One among the many topics in Vietnamese history which scholars have not examined in much detail is a spirit writing (giáng bút) “movement” which took
I came across a document that contains a list of movie theaters in French Indochina in 1951. The distribution of theaters is predicatable: 14 in
I’ve written quite a lot on this blog about the South Vietnamese philosopher, Lương Kim Định, and his ideas about history. What was Kim Định’s
I was saddened to learn yesterday that South Vietnamese historian Tạ Chí Đại Trường has passed away. I never had the good fortune of meeting
Last summer (2015) at the Engaging With Vietnam conference that was held in Hanoi, scholar Trần Trọng Dương gave a keynote presentation on “The Utility
I’ve long wondered why the Yijing (the Classic/Book of Changes) is so important for ultra-nationalist ideas in Vietnam. Extreme nationalists in Vietnam today regard the
UPDATE: If you cannot see the above video, either click where it says “Watch on YouTube” or click here. This is an audiovisual version of
For an explanation of this video, see the post below.
By the time medieval Việt scholars first started to compile historical records, Chinese scholars had already produced a considerable amount of historical information about the
In looking at all of the racialized/essentialist/Orientalist concepts that Trần Ngọc Thêm employs in his textbook, Searching for the True Nature of Vietnamese Culture (Tìm
Having developed a racialized/essentialist argument that Eurasia is divided into two main racial/cultural groups that can be described through various binary categories – East/West, Southeast/Northwest,
In his 1978 book, Orientalism, Edward Said documented how Western scholars and writers, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, produced knowledge about “the Orient”
Having argued, by distorting the ideas of Soviet ethnologist Nikolai Nikolaevich Cheboksarov, that humankind was divided into two main racial groups in the early Paleolithic
So I was reading Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Searching for the True Nature of Vietnamese Culture (Tìm về bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam), a textbook
A few days ago, Donald Trump made an incendiary comment in public about the supposed actions of an American military officer in the Philippines more
What I’ve come to realize is that in order to understand information about the Red River Delta region in early Chinese sources, one has to
The first Westerners to examine Việt history were Jesuit missionaries. By the time that Jesuit missionaries started to work in the Red River Delta in
In the previous post I wrote about this Vietnamese ultranationalist idea that there was an ancient divide in Asia between agriculturalists (= the ancestors of
One of the core tenets of Vietnamese ultranationalism is the idea that there is a fundamental division between Han Chinese and Vietnamese. In particular, the
Vietnamese music expert and blogger Tây Bụi just drew my attention back to a topic that I have been thinking about for a long time
I’m really getting tired of seeing people mention the “Âu Lạc Kingdom” (甌貉國). That was never the name of an actual kingdom, but I keep
This is a video of a radio broadcast from WTXT radio, located somewhere in the Pacific, about the Vietnamese story about Sơn Tinh and Thủy
The Internet Archive has obtained some digitized American radio broadcasts from the 1940s called “The Pacific Story.” One broadcast was about Hanoi and was entitled
The more I read the comments that eighteenth-century scholar Ngô Thì Sĩ made about the Việt historical record the more I like this guy. Ngô
There is a very famous story in the fifteenth-century collection of tales, the Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes (Lĩnh Nam
There is one name that I’ve never been sure how to translate. It appears at the beginning of the fifteenth-century Việt history, the Complete Book
After writing the post below about Ngô Thì Sĩ’s appraisal of Triệu Đà/Zhao Tuo, I came across a Wikipedia page in Vietnamese on the topic
I’ve been reading a text that was complied in the second half of the eighteenth century by Ngô Thì Sĩ (1726-1780). It is called the
In the post below, I wrote about some information in an inscription that was inscribed on a bell at a Daoist temple in the Red
Some of the earliest writings about the Red River Delta region were about its spirits. More specifically, they were about the appropriation of local spirits
I remember visiting a cave once near Lake Inle in Burma. It had a sulphur spring inside, so when you went into the cave it
It recently came to my attention that archaeologist Nam Kim from the University of Wisconsin has just published a book entitled The Origins of Ancient
There is a big discussion going on in Vietnam these days about high school history. The Ministry of Education and Training wants to subsume the
The Annan zhiyuan, a fifteenth-century gazetteer of the greater Red River Delta region that Ming Dynasty officials created contains a section on “people” (人物), or
When I was growing up, my only “window” to other societies and cultures was National Geographic, a magazine that arrived once a month and which
Today I read about Trần Ích Tắc on Wikipedia. Trần Ích Tắc was a Trần Dynasty prince who submitted to the Mongols when they attacked
When it comes to the period of the Ming occupation of the Red River delta in the fifteenth century, there is one source that is
I’ve long argued that the 15th century document, the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” (Great Proclamation on Pacifying the Ngô), does not represent a “declaration of
I was looking through digitized materials in the Australian National Archives when I came across this “mirror typed letter” that was sent to Captain J.
As an historian, I find the end of wars to be fascinating historical moments, because they are times when one world comes to an end
Anne Scahill is an American woman who served in a non-governmental organization in South Vietnam from 1970 to 1973 called the Vietnam Christian Service (VNCS).During
“I Am Sitting in a Room” is a very famous piece of experimental music which composer Alvin Lucier created in 1969. What Lucier did was
