The story of the overthrow of the Konbaung Dynasty by the British in the late nineteenth century is a complex one, but a simplified explanation of the events of that…
In the 1950s, scholars in North Vietnam started drafting a new history. They ran into troubles, however, in trying to write about early history because 1) there were not many…
In reading the 16 September 1904 issue of The British North Borneo Herald, I came across a reference to a band from Manila that passed through Sandakan. This is what…
I keep coming across writings that claim that there was a matriarchal society in the Red River Delta at some point in the distant past that was later replaced by…
Today someone posted a picture on facebook of an Anglo-Burmese actress by the name of Win Min Than who made a movie in the 1950s called The Purple Plain. A…
I came across a letter that José Laurel, the president of the Philippines when it was under Japanese occupation, wrote to the Japanese consul general in Manila on February 9,…
I came across this advertisement recently for a medicine for treating syphilis. The man in the picture is supposed to have third-stage syphilis. In reading about syphilis on Wikipedia, it…
The story of Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ is a very famous story in Vietnam today. In this story Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ marry and Âu Cơ gives birth to 100 eggs, all of which produce boys. 50 of the boys then follow their father into the sea, and 50 follow their mother into the mountains, where one of them becomes the first ruler of a kingdom called Văn Lang.
This tale first appeared in a larger story called “The Tale of the Hồng Bàng Clan” in a fifteenth-century text called the Lĩnh Nam chích quái. There are many other parts of this larger story that clearly came from, or were inspired by, information in extant texts. However, this story about the 100 eggs does not appear to have any textual precedent.
So where did it come from? Many twentieth-century scholars argued that it comes from the oral traditions of the Việt nationality (dân tộc) and that it was passed down orally for centuries until it was recorded in the fifteenth century.
I was reading an article in Nhân dân that prime minister Phạm Văn Đồng wrote in 1969 on the occasion of the death anniversary of the Hùng kings, the supposed…
I came across this advertisement in a 1933 issue (August 25) of the Union Times, a Chinese newspaper from Singapore. It is for Milkmaid Brand Condensed Milk, and it praises…