Southeast Asia
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.”
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (8): Who Exactly was Fighting Whom?
There is an extremely important text for the conflict in the 1830s between “Vietnam,” “Siam” and “Cambodia” that I have never seen an historian use
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (7): Opium and Gambling
One very interesting aspect about what historians have labeled “the Vietnamese annexation of Cambodia” in the 1830s is that from the perspective of the values
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (6): A Siamese Report on Clothing
Following up on the previous post, there is another source that mentions Cambodian officials and people wearing Vietnamese clothing – a Thai source known as
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (5): Clothing
The history of the relations between Cambodia and Vietnam is long and complex, and there are various elements of that history that make people today
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (4): Reordering the Power Structure
In 1834, Vietnamese and Cambodian forces succeeded together in driving the Siamese out of Cambodia, and King Chan, who had fled to Vietnam (see this
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (3): King Chan and Vietnam
In the early 1830s the Vietnamese fought a war with the Siamese: There was a rebellion that broke out in southern Vietnam at that time
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (2): Military Colonies and Vietnamization
The “tax issue” concerning how people in Cambodia were taxed when it was under Vietnamese control in the 1830s is very complex, and therefore, also
Revisiting the Vietnamese Annexation of Cambodia (1)
In the early 1830s a rebellion broke out in the Mekong Delta. The Siamese sent troops to support it, and then in 1834 the Vietnamese
