Hồ Chí Minh, Wikipedia, Blogs and Knowledge Production in the Digital Age
One of the reasons why I decided to start writing this blog back in 2010 was in order to share some of the things that I knew and thought, but…
Seeing Chinese Domination in the Vietnamese Past
A reader asked where the idea that the millennium when the Red River Delta was part of various “Chinese” empires can be seen as something like “1000 years of Chinese…
Trần Quốc Vượng and the Citing of Western Scholarship
After getting distracted by certain issues in the opening passage of an essay by Trần Quốc Vượng on Vietnamese culture (see the last post below), today I read through the…
Trần Quốc Vượng and Disrespect for the Past
I was reading an essay by the late Trần Quốc Vượng in which he talked about Vietnamese and Chinese culture. Trần Quốc Vượng states at the beginning of the essay…
The Silenced Mules of World War II Burma
In continuing to follow my interest in animals and animal-human relations in the Southeast Asian past, I was looking around the web site for the Imperial War Museums for information…
Remixing the Past: The Vietnam Hula
I remember having a conversation on Facebook with some friends/readers in which we talked about the connections in the 1960s between Hawaii and Saigon. In particular, we were talking about…
Water, Trần Quốc Vượng, and the Vietnamese Intellectual Tradition
I recently had an email exchange with a young scholar who, among other things, tried to define the concept of “the Vietnamese intellectual tradition.” That got me thinking about how difficult it is to describe something like a “Vietnamese intellectual tradition.” People in the past who have attempted to do so have used terms like “Confucianism,” and “Western ideas,” etc., but such terms are all so vague.
The way that Vietnamese intellectuals think today is the product of something more specific than such vague terms can describe. So how can we describe the way that Vietnamese intellectuals think?
Remixing the Past: Murdered Chinese in 1900 Sarawak
In reading issues of the Sarawak Gazette from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I repeatedly come across references to Chinese either killing themselves or getting murdered. Life for Chinese laborers…
Remixing the Past: Of Pigs and Men in 1920s Sarawak
Partly because I’ve been spending a lot of time in a forest that is inhabited by wild boars, and partly because sometimes when I’m out there I think about some…
King Thibaw’s Ascension to Rule Among the Gods
There is one episode in the history of modern Southeast Asia that I find endlessly fascinating, and that is the fall of the Burmese monarchy. Perhaps this is because Amitav…