Mahjong and Dondang Sayang
A few weeks ago I wrote about a new book with accompanying CDs called Longing for the Past: The 78 rpm Era in Southeast Asia. One of the songs in…
“Chinese” Movie Theaters in Early-1960s Bangkok
For those who don’t know about it, there is a wonderful web page/project called The Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project where someone is going around primarily mainland Southeast Asia, and…
Liễu Hạnh and Trần Hưng Đạo
I tried to experiment with Timeline JS. I couldn't get it to embed in Wordpress, and Vietnamese fonts do not look very good in it, but it’s obviously a powerful…
Ethnic Modernities in 1959 British Borneo
I was looking at a newspaper called the Borneo Bulletin. It started to be published in 1953 in Brunei, but it was directed at readers in Sawarak and Sabah as…
The Bách Việt and the Absence of Postcolonial History in Vietnam
Not long after many colonized peoples around the globe gained independence in the middle of the twentieth century, some scholars started to notice that in many ways colonialism still existed,…
The Ladies (and a few men) of Viet-Nam
There was a magazine that was published in North Vietnam from the late 1950s into the 1970s called “VIET-NAM.” It was published in foreign languages and was a kind of…
Mị Nương the Tai Monster
The text that I mentioned in the previous post, the An Nam chí nguyên, contains an entry on Mount Tản Viên which talks about a spirit there called Mị Nương…
An Important Text for Vietnamese History that Very Few People Read
In 1932, the École française d’Extrême-Orient published in Hanoi a text called the An Nam chí nguyên/Annan zhiyuan 安南志原. This publication contained an introductory study by Émile Gaspardone in which…
Crowdsourcing the Hồng Đức bản đồ
There are quite a few libraries these days that are using a technique called “crowdsourcing” to transcribe and digitize manuscripts that they have in their collections. Essentially what libraries are…
Making Money in World War II North Borneo
In 1945, the Australian Imperial Forces were given the task of retaking from the Japanese the former British territories on the island of Borneo. To do this, the Australians had…