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…
The Thai-ification of an Ovaltine Ad
Sometimes when I look at old newspapers I come across the same advertisement in newspapers from different places and in different languages. I think this one here is interesting. The…
The 18 Generations of Hùng Kings
Everyone knows that the Hùng Kings supposedly ruled for 18 generations. However, where does that information come from? The earliest sources on the Hùng Kings are the Lĩnh Nam chích…
Mang Savages in the Red River Delta
I have long wondered about place names like Phù Đổng. This is the name of a village in the Red River delta. Many of the place names there are in…
A Remedy for Fugu Poisoning in 1895 Sarawak
I came across and article in the Sarawak Gazette from 1895 entitled “Poisoned by the Buntal Fish.” In Sarawak there is a fish, the buntal fish, which is like the…