In the late nineteenth century the Qing Dynasty official, Zhang Zhidong, coined a phrase that became very famous – “Chinese learning for substance and Western learning for function” (中學為體，西學為用 Zhongxue…
A long time ago I criticized the scholars who translated the Đồng Khánh địa dư chí into Vietnamese (here), because in that work the people whom we would today refer…
I recently read a fabulous article by Alexis Sanderson, entitled “The Śaiva Religion among the Khmers (Part I)” in the Bulletin de l’Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient 90-91 (2003): 349-462. In this…
As part of the diplomatic negotiations that took place after the Qing were defeated by the Tây Sơn, the Qing emperor, Qianlong, agreed to recognize Quang Trung as the “King…
There is an interesting post on the blog Archeological*Highlights about a stone inscription that was recently found in Bắc Ninh Province. Dated to 601 CE, it is now the earliest…
Historian Keith Taylor made the comment a few decades ago in his The Birth of Vietnam that the Vietnamese “learned to articulate their non-Chinese identity in terms of China’s cultural…
In 1979 Claude Jacques published an essay entitled “‘Funan,’ ‘Zhenla’: The Reality Concealed by these Chinese Views of Indochina.” His point in this short work was to argue that Western…
In the early twentieth century, Vietnamese historical writing changed dramatically. After producing historical scholarship for centuries that highlighted the achievements and failures of monarchs, in the early twentieth centuries some…
A few months ago I wrote a post on a scholar from the early twentieth century, Dương Bá Trác, and his ideas about the origins of the Vietnamese race as…
I just saw an announcement on an email listserv that I’m on for a site which has translations of texts that deal with early Vietnamese history. The site has English-language…