Author: Le Minh Khai

The more I read the comments that eighteenth-century scholar Ngô Thì Sĩ made about the Việt historical record the more I like this guy. Ngô Thì Sĩ did exactly what…

There is a very famous story in the fifteenth-century collection of tales, the Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes (Lĩnh Nam chích quái liệt truyện), about…

There is one name that I’ve never been sure how to translate. It appears at the beginning of the fifteenth-century Việt history, the Complete Book of the Historical Records of…

After writing the post below about Ngô Thì Sĩ’s appraisal of Triệu Đà/Zhao Tuo, I came across a Wikipedia page in Vietnamese on the topic of “the problem of the…

I’ve been reading a text that was complied in the second half of the eighteenth century by Ngô Thì Sĩ (1726-1780). It is called the Former Compilation of the Historical…

Some of the earliest writings about the Red River Delta region were about its spirits. More specifically, they were about the appropriation of local spirits by the ruling elite. This…

I remember visiting a cave once near Lake Inle in Burma. It had a sulphur spring inside, so when you went into the cave it felt warm and you could…

It recently came to my attention that archaeologist Nam Kim from the University of Wisconsin has just published a book entitled The Origins of Ancient Vietnam. This is great news…