Stone Inscriptions and Local Memories in Vietnam
There is an interesting post on the blog Archeological*Highlights about a stone inscription that was recently found in Bắc Ninh Province. Dated to 601 CE, it is now the earliest…
Ngô Sĩ Liên and the Articulation of Identity
Historian Keith Taylor made the comment a few decades ago in his The Birth of Vietnam that the Vietnamese “learned to articulate their non-Chinese identity in terms of China’s cultural…
The Myth of the Southeast Asian Reality Concealed by Chinese Views
In 1979 Claude Jacques published an essay entitled “‘Funan,’ ‘Zhenla’: The Reality Concealed by these Chinese Views of Indochina.” His point in this short work was to argue that Western…
Việt Nam’s Glorious History of. . . Conquest
In the early twentieth century, Vietnamese historical writing changed dramatically. After producing historical scholarship for centuries that highlighted the achievements and failures of monarchs, in the early twentieth centuries some…
Dương Bá Trác on the Historical Evolution of Vietnamese Society
A few months ago I wrote a post on a scholar from the early twentieth century, Dương Bá Trác, and his ideas about the origins of the Vietnamese race as…
Early Vietnamese History Translations
I just saw an announcement on an email listserv that I’m on for a site which has translations of texts that deal with early Vietnamese history. The site has English-language…
The Two Joan of Arcs of Việt Nam
I visited the Vietnamese language page of Radio France International and came across an article on the Trưng sisters. It was nationalistic, and like most nationalistic writings, it projected the…
Hoàng Cao Khải and Unilineal Evolution
A few months ago I wrote (here) about how we can see signs of Social Darwinist ideas in the Mirror of Southern History (Gương sử Nam), a 1910 work by…
Before Iban and Việt
I was reading Robert Pringle’s 1970 work, Rajahs and Rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak under Brook Rule, 1841-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) recently, and found some interesting information there about…
Choosing an Appropriate Form of Modernity for Siam in the Fourth Reign
In many (nationalist) renderings of modern Thai history, the two Chakri kings, Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, loom large as figures who are credited with almost single-handedly saving Siam/Thailand from colonization and modernizing…