The Blessed Pigs of Burma
The picture below appeared on the front page of The Nation on 5 February 1962. The caption below the picture stated the following: GOOD DEED FOR EVERYONE’S GOOD: “If we…
Lạo Tử in Giao Chỉ
I was looking through the fourteenth century Brief Treatise on An Nam (An Nam chí lược) a while ago and came across a passage on “Lạo Tử” (獠子). This term…
Witch Doctors and Psychiatrists in 1960s Burma
I came across this fascinating article in the August 12, 1962 edition of The Nation from Burma. It is the text of a lecture given by Dr. Khin Maunt Latt…
A Burmese Fat Reducing Machine
I found this in a 1962 issue of The Nation from Burma. This is what the caption under the picture says. HOW TO REDUCE FAT AND GAIN SCHOOL-GIRL FIGURE: Daw…
Losing Land and Misquoting Tự Đức
At the turn of the twentieth century, Vietnamese intellectual learned a great deal about the West and began to transform the way they thought about themselves and their land. I…
Japanese Air-Conditioned Clothing
I found this advertisement in a newspaper from Burma, The Nation, for the year 1962. A few years ago I bought some shirts from the Japanese clothing story, Uniqlo, which…
Where Vietnamese Antiquity Came From
Keith Taylor began his 1983 work on early Vietnamese history, The Birth of Vietnam, with the following sentence: “The earliest traditions of the Vietnamese people, as revealed in the Lĩnh…
How the Hùng Kings Obtained a Citadel
The Hùng Kings are an invention. They were not invented out of nothing, but instead were fashioned out of extant written sources. This process of creation, however, was not clean.…
The Real Ông Trọng
Over a year ago I posted a blog entry on The Invention of Lý Ông Trọng in which I argued that there was no evidence that a man by this name had lived in the Red River delta in the third century B.C. and had gone off to fight the Xiongnu for Qin Shihuangdi. I argued instead that a Tang Dynasty administrator by the name of Zhao Chang had “imported” this story into the region and used it to create a story about a local spirit.
I still believe that this story about Lý Ông Trọng is an invention. However, I recently found some information which indicates that there once had been a man by the name of Ông Trọng who was connected to the Red River delta.
(more…)Killing Spirits and 17 Year-Old Girls in Medieval Vietnam
Gao Pian/Cao Biền was a Tang Dynasty official who was sent to the Red River delta in the 860s to put down disturbances caused by troops from the kingdom of…