Bengawan Solo Forever
“Bengawan Solo,” a song about the Solo River in eastern Java, was first composed by Gesang Martohartono in 1940. Recorded as a Kroncong song, it became popular on Java during…
Pen Ran’s Rusted Bachelor in 1970s Cambodia
Pen Ran (also written Pan Ron) was a famous singer in Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s, during the golden age of Khmer popular music. One of her most famous…
White Men and Brown Women in Semi-Colonial Siam
If you visit an English-language bookstore like Asiabooks in Bangkok you will probably find a shelf or two of novels that are all devoted to the same general topic –…
Tigers, Trains and Lunatics in Colonial Burma
I woke up at 3am this morning and couldn’t fall back asleep. So I decided to read some of the Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1897-98 to 1906-07,…
Hawaiian Music and National Culture in Indonesia
A while ago I wrote a blog piece on “Hawaii in Southeast Asia” in which I mentioned that there was some influence of Hawaiian music on a kind of music…
British and Muruts Roamin’ in the Gloamin’ in 1925
There is an article in The British North Borneo Herald from 1925 which describes a visit by some British officials to Kamabong [i.e., Kemabong] for a day of sports and…
The Cosmopolitan World of Horse Racing in British Colonies in Southeast Asia
I’ve been reading colonial-era newspapers from Southeast Asia for quite a while now, and I’ve always skipped over the sections on “turf club news,” that is, news about horse races,…
Conquest and Intermarriage in the Formation of the Annam Race
The concept of race is a concept that Vietnamese only came to learn about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once they had, some people tried to figure…
If Herb Albert and Jimi Hendrix had Visited Phnom Penh. . .
If Herb Albert and Jimi Hendrix had visited Phnom Penh in the late 1960s and recorded a song with Ros Sereysothea, it would have sounded like “I Heard Them Say…
An Irish Buddhist Monk, an Indian Policeman’s Shoes, and a Burmese Nationalist Narrative
I spent some time today reading about someone I had never heard of before – U Dhammaloka, described on Wikipedia as “an Irish-born hobo (migrant worker) turned Buddhist monk, atheist…