I recently received a copy of a new book entitled Ancient Vietnam: History, Art and Archaeology by Anne-Valérie Schweyer, a French scholar whose specialty is Cham epigraphy. It was published…
In the nineteenth century, colonial officials in Singapore were proud of their prison system, and particularly proud of their “convict prison.” This was a place for criminals who had been…
I was reading the Khâm Định Việt Sử Thông Giám Cương Mục and found some interesting entries in the year 1663. In the seventh lunar month of that year the…
One of the stereotypes which the Nguyễn Dynasty has suffered from is that it was “overly Sinitic/Confucian,” and that this made them impractical to the extent that they could not…
I just came across these articles in the Malay Mail about certain hip fashions in 1963. The first was for "the tent" which apparently girls were "falling for." Girls were…
The concept of the nation, or a nationality, as consisting of a single people living within a defined territory speaking a single language and sharing a common culture is a…
Archaeological Highlights, a Vietnamese blog on archaeology, history, methodology, and other issues, has an interesting recent post which questions how the archaeological materials that have been unearthed in Vietnam can…
So I was reading Wikipedia (“Bad historian!”) and came across the following line in an entry on “Vietnamese Daoism”: “Vietnamese Daoism is Daoism which became localized when it entered Vietnam…
I don't know much about Burma. I know that women historically did smoke cheroots. I could be wrong, but my sense is that today only elderly women smoke cheroots, and…
Academic fields have paradigms or themes which serve to focus scholarship and define the field. For instance, in the middle of the twentieth century, the idea that China had “responded”…