In reading issues of the Sarawak Gazette from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I repeatedly come across references to Chinese either killing themselves or getting murdered. Life for Chinese laborers…
Partly because I’ve been spending a lot of time in a forest that is inhabited by wild boars, and partly because sometimes when I’m out there I think about some…
There is one episode in the history of modern Southeast Asia that I find endlessly fascinating, and that is the fall of the Burmese monarchy. Perhaps this is because Amitav…
I have started making “soundscapes” to accompany blog posts that I write about historical events or phenomena in Southeast Asian history. I am not sure why I started to do…
I just came across an amazing story from the early twentieth century in a newspaper from Hawaii, The Pacific Commercial Advertiser. The article is entitled “The Awful Fate of a…
I was looking through a book called An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States. This book was published at least three times (in 1910, 1911 and 1920), and is…
In the 1890s, the British government commissioned a report on the use of cannabis (i.e., marijuana) in British India, which at that time included Burma. The report that this “Indian…
Periodically there are articles that appear in the Vietnamese press about the “ancient Việt script” (chữ Việt cổ). There are people in Vietnam who are determined to show that there…
I’ve seen several articles and events recently about the publication of a new book in Vietnam - a Vietnamese translation of Le Thanh Khoi’s Histoire du Vietnam: Des origines à…
For several years now I’ve come across articles on the Internet that mention a book called Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia by Stephen Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer…