Phan Huy Chú on Ancient Geography
In the early nineteenth century, Phan Huy Chú recorded a lot of geographical information. He has a “Treatise on the Territory” section in his massive Cataloged Record of the Institutions…
Serving the Japanese in Southeast Asia during WW II
The National Archives of Australia has quite a few materials on the activities of Japanese in Southeast Asia during World War II as the Australians were involved in the effort…
Bovine Diplomacy in South Vietnam
In 1959, South Vietnam welcomed some new “immigrants” – 120 cows and 10 bulls from Sydney, Australia. I found some promotional photographs about this in the National Archives of Australia.…
Hu Nim on Clandestine Radio in 1973 Cambodia
Alexander Hinton’s Why Did They Kill: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide is a fascinating study of the ideas that the Khmer Rouge employed to recruit supporters, and to then…
Where was the Đông Thổ (東土)?
In the eleventh lunar month of the fifth year of Emperor Gia Long’s reign (1806), Minister of the Ministry of War Lê Quang Định submitted to the emperor a completed…
The Illustrated Treatise on An Nam
As readers of this blog will know, I’m not very interested in the big fight over the North Borneo Sea (or the Austronesian Sea, as I’ve called it here). However,…
Ethnicity South of the Yangzi
In his 1983 work, The Birth of Vietnam, Keith Taylor stated that by the time of the establishment of an autonomous polity in the Red River delta in the tenth…
The Yao versus the Việt
So the Yao (or Dao in Vietnamese) maintained a story about themselves which they got from early Chinese sources. This story claims that they are descended from a dog-man named…
The Yao and the Việt
I have never seen anyone compare the Yao with the Việt, but someone should. The Yao (or Dao in Vietnamese) are a people who lived in the mountains in an…
Burma in Blur
Driving from Pyin Oo Lwin down to Mandalay late one afternoon, the rays of the setting sun were lighting up parts of trees and catching a lot of dust that…