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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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.…
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…
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…
I usually refrain from “advertising” on this blog, but a project came to my attention today that I feel, for various reasons, that I simply have to “advertise.” A few…
There was a theory that emerged in the early twentieth century which argued that at the end of the first millennium BC, Vietnamese migrated to the Red River delta from an original homeland in what is today southeastern China.
This idea was suggested first by Edouard Chavannes in 1901, and was then developed further by Leonard Aurousseau in 1923. Today this theory is no longer upheld, although one can still find it mentioned. Nonetheless, I don’t think that many people are aware of why this theory does not make sense.