The “Truth” about the Mandala
Like any field, the field of Southeast Asian history maintains certain “truths” which the people in the field learn and teach others about. One such “truth” is the idea that…
Hoàng Cao Khải’s Social Darwinist Ideas
The Nguyễn Dynasty official, Hoàng Cao Khải, is usually regarded today as a traitor for having assisted the French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in their conquest…
Bản Sắc Văn Hóa = Ideological Position
I wrote a piece earlier (here) about how the term “bản sắc” is often translated as “identity” but that the way the term is used by Vietnamese has the opposite…
Sovereignty, Maps, etc.
To understand the past we have to know the history of ideas. If we do not know when the ideas we have about the world emerged, then we can easily…
Sinkesin in Indonesia!!
I have posted a couple of entries about the medicine Sinkesin (here and here). I first came across it in a Thai newspaper from the 1930s, and then in a…
Viet-Nam Music Explained to the Burmese
I was looking at The Nation newspaper from Burma for 22 October 1948 when I came across this article about “Viet-Nam Music.” It is supposed to be a “broadcast talk”…
Deconstructing Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Nationalist Propaganda
Whenever I feel the need to be reminded of how deceitful nationalist “scholarship” can sometimes be, I open up one of Trần Ngọc Thêm’s books and start to read. It…
Vietnamese Métis in 1863 Paris
In 1862, the Nguyễn Dynasty granted the French some land in the Mekong Delta, after it had been occupied by French and Spanish forces. A year later the Nguyễn court…
Malaysian Panorama
In the second half of the twentieth century, many nations around the globe promoted themselves through pictorial magazines. I don't know of any academic study of these works, but I…
Duplicate Translations and the Work of Colonized Scholars
In the early 1950s, some members (or employees) of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) microfilmed some of the materials which they possessed in their library in Hanoi. One item that…