Maps of Islands in the West Philippine Sea from the 1770s
The Philippines is one of several Southeast Asian nations that is challenging China’s claim to various islands in what Chinese call the South China Sea, but what people in the…
Electrifying the Male Body in Early-20th-Century Singapore
A few months ago I wrote about an advertisement that I found in a Chinese-language newspaper from Singapore in the early twentieth century for a “manhood creator.” Today I came…
A French Barbie in the Bà Nà Hills
I’m not a big fan of museums. I think some are ok, but in general I just don’t enjoy looking at objects in glass cases. So whenever I find myself…
An Alternative Narrative of the Transition to Westernized Modernity in Early-Twentieth-Century Vietnam
When I first started to learn about Vietnamese history, I was taught a certain “narrative” about the Vietnamese past. That narrative argued that in the early twentieth century Phan Bội…
Sinn Sisamouth and the Emotional Imagining of National Space
Anh Tây Bụi just left a comment which mentioned the vast number of Vietnamese songs that have been written about ethnic minority peoples who live in the mountains. This reminded…
Teaching the Nation in 1969 North Vietnam
There is a 1969 North Vietnamese movie that I liked called The Highland Female Teacher (Cô giáo vùng cao). It’s about a 19 year-old Hmong woman who is sent up…
The Timing of the 1979 Chinese Invasion of Vietnam
I have read countless times that in 1979 the Chinese invaded Vietnam to “punish” the Vietnamese for having invaded Cambodia, a “client state” of the PRC. I think that is…
Kiều Chinh and the International Asian Film World in the 1960s-70s
I came across some articles from The Straits Times in 1975 that were talking about a movie that was being made in Singapore at the time called Full House. Apparently…
The Loyal An Nam Wives of Guizhou Men in the Sixteenth Century
I was looking around in a searchable version of the Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times (Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成), an encyclopedic collection of…
The Nidhi Model in Our Flattening World
I had a long conversation with a friend yesterday about knowledge, and I woke up today thinking about Thai historian and scholar Nidhi Aeusrivongse. Our conversation yesterday was about the…