In the English-language scholarship on Vietnamese history, the Lý Dynasty (1009-1225), the first major Vietnamese dynasty, is usually presented as not being influenced by Confucian ideas and institutions. Instead, historians…
I do not know how many times I have heard or read that the Văn Miếu (Temple of Literature) in Hanoi was “built” in 1070 AD, but it’s a lot,…
An article that I wrote a year or two ago has just been published. It is called “Sinology in Vietnam.”There are people who would label anything that was written in…
I’ve recently published a working paper entitled “Revisiting the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asia.”I started looking at the Chinese sources for early Southeast Asian history a few years ago,…
The 14th Engaging With Vietnam Conference will be held in Hue (1-6 August 2023). The overall theme of the conference is “Living with Heritage, (Re)Creating Heritage: Vietnam and the World,”…
There is a thirteenth-century Chinese text called the Treatise on the Various Barbarian Lands (Zhu fan zhi 諸蕃志) that has information about a place on the island of Java that…
The 13th Engaging With Vietnam conference will be held next week, with the main academic part of the conference running from 26 - 28 October.To get a sense of what…
Last weekend I participated in a weekly online forum in Vietnam called “Midnight Talks.” The topic this past week was on “The Lost History of the Mekong Delta.”I presented together…
The scholarship on early Southeast Asian history that relies on Chinese sources is a complete mess.From the very beginning, scholars got a lot of things wrong, and then they just…
Chinese historical sources have long been used to try to gain an understanding of early Southeast Asian history.However, when scholars have made use of these sources, they have usually done…