Text Mining the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư
There is an emerging “field” in places like North America and Europe that people are calling the “Digital Humanities.” People who work in this field are employing digital tools to…
Chen Jinghe’s 1950 Study of Kẻ
“Kẻ” is a Vietnamese word which many scholars have attempted to explain. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation. In this post here I am going to provide a…
DRV Youth in the Early 1960s
I came across these pictures form the cover of the magazine Viet Nam from the early 1960s. That magazine was published in English by the North Vietnamese government as a…
History and Anti-Foreign Discourses
The temperature is rising in Asia these days, and it has a lot to do with two countries that are very closely related but that pretend not to be –…
The Foreign Origins of Premodern Monarchs
Some people are very defensive about the issue of the origins of people like Lý Công Uẩn and the Trần family that founded the Trần Dynasty. There are accounts that…
When an Apsara Ruled the Universe
The apsaras, or celestial female spirits, of Hindu-Buddhist mythology are figures of grace and elegance. They are renowned for their beauty. . . but did any of those apsaras ever…
Khoa Học and the Bình Ngô Đại Cáo
Continuing from the entry below, there is another way to look at this same issue. Of course we can never be certain what a writer had in his/her mind when…
Why did bắc nam become Bắc Nam?
“Nước non bờ cõi đã chia, phong tục Bắc Nam cũng khác.” This famous line comes from the fifteenth-century “Bình Ngô đại cáo” (Great Proclamation upon the Pacification of the…
Is There a Purpose to this Blog?
Is there a purpose to this blog? I guess I would say “sometimes.” If there is a purpose to this blog it would be to counter the negative effects of…
Nazis in the Netherlands East Indies
For more than twenty years now scholars have recognizing that when we talk about colonialism, we have to realize that it was much more complex than a simple story of…