Annam Students and a Martinique Boy on the Amazone in 1927
I was reading this journal that I mentioned below, the Du học bao, that was published by an organization in the late 1920s and early 1930s that sent Vietnamese students…
The Bình Ngô đại cáo and the Modern Emergence of Resistance Literature
A recent comment about the “Bình Ngô đại cáo,” a document that was written at the end of the Ming occupation of the Red River Delta in the early fifteenth…
Documenting Japanese Crimes in the Early Occupation of the Philippines
I came across a file in the National Archives of Australia that contained a translation of a captured Japanese document that recorded information about crimes committed by Japanese during the…
The “Missing Link” of Modern Conservativism in the Du học báo
I recently read a fascinating article by Nguyễn Nam about a Vietnamese journal that I had never heard of before, the Du học báo 遊學報 (Bulletin Bimensuel de la Société…
Trần Quốc Vượng and Vietnam’s Southeast Asian Cultural Foundation
I was reading a book that contains essays that the late Vietnamese scholar, Trần Quốc Vượng, wrote in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the essays is on the Vietnamese…
Identifying Betty Boop and Horseface after World War II in Southeast Asia
After World War II came to an end in Southeast Asia, the Allies tried to bring to trial Japanese who had committed war crimes there. They were particularly concerned with…
The Yao/Dao, the Việt and the Impossibility of Thoát Trung (Escaping from China)
I spent some time today looking through a journal that was published in Hanoi in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries called Revue Indo-Chinoise. This was a time when the French…
The Enchantment of 1948 Sarawak
In the early twentieth century, German sociologist Max Weber noted that one characteristic of modern societies was an increasing “disenchantment of the world.” By “disenchantment,” Weber meant that in modern…
The Daoist/ Mường View of the Spirit of Mount Tản Viên
[I haven’t written for a while, so I don’t feel like my thoughts below are expressed very clearly in this post, but I think the topic is an important one,…