Working Women and Exploitative States in Premodern Southeast Asia
As the field of Southeast Asian Studies developed (particularly in North America and Australia) in the second half of the twentieth century, one of the ideas that came to be…
Searching for the Trưng Sisters and Rain (Part 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZwd1_JwGuE&feature=youtu.be Transcript: Late afternoon in Hanoi in July. A day after going to the Trưng sisters’ temple in Mê Linh to pray for rain, it still hasn’t rained. In fact,…
Searching for the Trưng Sisters and Rain (Part 3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSjowhZZ8nI&feature=youtu.be Transcript: Morning in Hanoi in July. I get up early to try to get some work done, to beat the heat, but then the power goes out. Apparently there…
Searching for the Trưng Sisters and Rain (Part II)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a3Jh4KNpm4&feature=youtu.be Transcript: Late afternoon in Hanoi in July. Although it’s still incredibly hot, there are a lot of people out exercising. I suppose it’s good to sweat your brains out…
Searching for the Trưng Sisters and Rain (Part I)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRVz00zeha8 Transcript: Hanoi in July. . . It’s hot! It’s really really hot!! About the only people out on the street are people on motorcycles and they are just going…
What is Southeast Asia? (or How to Hunt a Jackfruit)
The question of “what is Southeast Asia” is one that garnered a lot of attention in “the West” in the years following World War II. In the end, after years…
The Báo cực truyện as a Collection of Buddhist Miracle Tales
An importance source for the early history of the Red River Delta is a text known as the Báo cực truyện 報極傳. This text dates perhaps from the late eleventh…
A British Haji in Sarawak and his England-Loving Malay Wife
A few months ago I wrote a post about an Irishman who became a Buddhist monk in Burma in the early twentieth century, and who was known as U Dhammaloka.…
Trần Quốc Vượng’s Selective Applied Approach to Studying the Past
I was reading an essay that is included in a collection of writings by the late Trần Quốc Vượng in which he encourages people to study about what he refers…
Le Minh Khai YouTube Channel Coming Soon
The post I wrote below about a new and exciting history documentary that is being made has inspired me to move ahead with a project that I have long been…