Getting Strength from the Life Glands of Monkeys in 1950s Burma
I was looking at this Chinese newspaper from Burma in the early 1950s and came across this advertisement below. It is an advertisement for a product which claims to be…
Felling Lizards in Medieval Vietnam
Aren’t Buddhists not supposed to harm living things? Isn’t that one of the most basic concepts of Buddhism? That’s what I thought anyway. Then I read the following passage about…
Smoking in 1960s Laos
Ever wonder what people in Laos were smoking in the 1960s as they cruised around in their new Mazdas? Well here is the answer. Consulate cigarettes, for one, a brand…
The Evils of Quốc Ngữ #5
One of the first problems I noticed with quốc ngữ translations is that they add the words “China” (nước Tàu or Trung Quốc) or “in China” (ở bên Tàu, etc.)…
The Evils of Quốc Ngữ #4 continued
Continuing on the issue of the translation of the character “đôi” (碓) in the Đại Việt sử lược as “hùng,” a reader kindly sent me a copy of Trần Quốc…
Twentieth-Century Events From a Tai Perspective
In the late 1940s and early 1950s two of the most important events in the twentieth century took place on the Asian mainland. In 1949 there was a revolution in…
The Wex Habit in 1950s Burma
In the 1950s, Burma had just recently become independent. Its citizens were engaged in the monumental task of building a post-colonial nation. This took daily effort, but fortunately the Burmese…
The Evils of Quốc Ngữ #4
There is a text known as the Việt sử lược or the Đại Việt sử lược which was reportedly compiled in the fourteenth century. During the Ming occupation, it was…
The Geo-Body of Vietnam
In 1983, Benedict Anderson argued in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism that nations are “imagined,” and that one of the ways they are…
Wikipedia and Vietnamese Historical Scholarship
Ok, I know Wikipedia is not “scholarship,” but I’m going to use it to talk about scholarship anyway, because I just read an entry on the Vietnamese version of Wikipedia…