The Map of the Great Savage Kingdom
A kind reader has encouraged me to look at an old Vietnamese map of the Mekong region known as the Đại Man quốc đồ 大蠻國圖 (Map of the Great Savage…
French Foreign Legionnaires and their Indochinese Sexual Partners
I’ve become hopelessly addicted to the British Imperial War Museum’s web page, and have spent hours listening to the recorded interviews that they have there. This one, by a British…
Going to Wireless School in 1960s Thailand
The video in the post below about the radio in Sarawak in 1961 got me wondering about the types of changes that the transistor radio brought to Southeast Asia in…
Three Women Remember World War II in Southeast Asia
I had never heard of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) until someone mentioned it to me today (THANK YOU). It is fabulous!! As more of a cultural/social historian of Southeast…
Tuning In to Radio Sarawak in 1961
A few months ago I read a couple of articles that I really liked. They were about the emergence of the radio in colonial Singapore and colonial Vietnam. I was…
Gia Long, Jiaqing, Qianlong, Gia Định and Thăng Long
On 31 May 1802, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, the first ruler of the Nguyễn Dynasty declared that Gia Long 嘉隆 would be his reign title (Đại Nam thực lục, 17/1a-2a). Many…
The Kachin Rangers on Film
During World War II, a group known as “Detachment 101” of the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the CIA) started to work inside Burma to gain intelligence about…
How Việt Nam Became Việt Nam
I keep coming across writings in English in which people talk about how Việt Nam came to be called Việt Nam, and nobody has the story right. Humility aside, the…
Photographing Southeast Asia for the CIA
I just came across a fascinating document in the US National Archives from 1961 called “Snapshots at Random” by Jane Schnell. I do not know the context in which the…
The Đại Nam nhất thống toàn đồ and the Mapping of the Mekong
I asked in a post below where the Đại Nam nhất thống toàn đồ (Complete Map of Unified Đại Nam) comes from. I see it a lot, and it is…