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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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 in the late 1960s and recorded a song with Ros Sereysothea, it would have sounded like “I Heard Them Say…
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…
The story of the overthrow of the Konbaung Dynasty by the British in the late nineteenth century is a complex one, but a simplified explanation of the events of that…
In the 1950s, scholars in North Vietnam started drafting a new history. They ran into troubles, however, in trying to write about early history because 1) there were not many…
In reading the 16 September 1904 issue of The British North Borneo Herald, I came across a reference to a band from Manila that passed through Sandakan. This is what…