Decentralized Control in the Red River Delta Prior to Han Dynasty Rule
What I’ve come to realize is that in order to understand information about the Red River Delta region in early Chinese sources, one has to view that information from the…
Biblical and Mathematical Refutations of the Hồng-Mang/Hồng Bàng Dynasty
The first Westerners to examine Việt history were Jesuit missionaries. By the time that Jesuit missionaries started to work in the Red River Delta in the seventeenth century, one of their colleagues in China had already made an enormous discovery, namely that Chinese history pre-dated the time of the Biblical flood.
The scholar who came to this determination was Jesuit missionary Martinio Martini who stated in his 1658 work, Sinicae Historiae [Chinese History], that “outermost Asia was inhabited before the deluge.” The way he came to this conclusion was by calculating when various astronomical phenomena mentioned in ancient Chinese texts should have occurred. From these calculations he determined that Fu Xi, whom he saw as the first verifiable Chinese ruler, had lived before the time of the Flood.
Southeast Asian Rice and Vietnamese Ultranationalism
In the previous post I wrote about this Vietnamese ultranationalist idea that there was an ancient divide in Asia between agriculturalists (= the ancestors of the Vietnamese) and pastoralists (=…
The Great Agricultural (Nông Nghiệp) – Pastoral (Du Mục) Divide, or how Kim Định and Trần Ngọc Thêm Distorted Will Durant’s Ideas
One of the core tenets of Vietnamese ultranationalism is the idea that there is a fundamental division between Han Chinese and Vietnamese. In particular, the argument of Vietnamese ultranationalism is…
“Huyền Thoại” – A Little Word with Big Historical Significance
Vietnamese music expert and blogger Tây Bụi just drew my attention back to a topic that I have been thinking about for a long time now - Where does the…
Interspecies Sexual Encounters in the Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5jhFY9azR8
There was Never a Kingdom Called “Âu Lạc”
I’m really getting tired of seeing people mention the “Âu Lạc Kingdom” (甌貉國). That was never the name of an actual kingdom, but I keep seeing people mention it again…
WTXT’s Late Night Textual Healing Show: The Sơn Tinh and Thủy Tinh Episode
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9-Hrm7d654 This is a video of a radio broadcast from WTXT radio, located somewhere in the Pacific, about the Vietnamese story about Sơn Tinh and Thủy Tinh (the mountain spirit…
A Pure-Blooded French Woman and a Dark-Skinned Native in Colonial Indochina
The Internet Archive has obtained some digitized American radio broadcasts from the 1940s called “The Pacific Story.” One broadcast was about Hanoi and was entitled “Hanoi Perfume and Gunpowder.” That…