The Most Popular Topic in Premodern Vietnamese History Today
What is the most popular topic in the field of premodern Vietnamese history today?Which topic has seen more than 150 studies produced about it over the past 15 years, with…
The Tào Vận (Grain Shipment) System in 19th-Century Vietnam
In the 19th century, the Nguyễn dynasty set up a system for shipping grain from the northern and southern halves of the country to the capital at Huế. Historians refer…
Random Writings from a Pineapple Field (Part 2)
Today my wife, Le Ha, told me that there was going to be an opening of an art exhibit at the university library and that she wanted to go to…
Random Writings from a Pineapple Field
A couple of months ago I moved to Taiwan. Or perhaps I should say, I moved “back” to Taiwan, as I spent six years here back in the 1990s, and…
Emperor Minh Mạng’s Celebration of the Empress Dowager’s 60th Birthday
I recently read a really interesting article by historian Taga Yoshihiro on “Economic Aspects of Court Rituals and Ceremonies in Nineteenth Century Hue.”In the article, Taga examines the economics behind…
Vietnam had EMPERORS, not Kings!!
For years now, I keep coming across articles in English written by Vietnamese scholars in which Vietnamese rulers in the past are referred to as “kings.”King Gia Long, King Minh…
Chân Lạp as “Vô Ngoại”—What LLMs Reveal About the Past
In the previous post, I talked about how LLMs can do a better job of translating than humans can, and I gave an example of a factual mistake that ChatGPT…
AI and the End of Bad Translations: A Case from the Đại Nam thực lục
In the early years of this blog, I used to write about what I called “the evils of quốc ngữ.” By that I was referring to the problem of scholars…
The Fascinating Story of South Seas History at Taihoku Imperial University
One of my scholarly heroes has long been the Taiwanese scholar Chen Ching-ho (Chen Jinghe 陳荊和). Trained at Keio University and the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi in the 1940s,…
Google Now Knows More about 19th-Century Vietnamese History than any Human Being
The period of Nguyễn dynasty rule in the nineteenth century, particularly the reign of Emperor Minh Mạng (1820–1841), is richly documented in the official dynastic chronicle, the Đại Nam thực…
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