Racially Ambiguous Smokers in 1960s Burma
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…
O. W. Wolters and the “Reading” of Angkor Wat
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”…
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.…