As is very well known, on July 19, 1947, Burmese nationalist leader, Aung San, and six other members of his transitional government were assassinated. A rival politician, U Saw, was…
A few days ago a reader suggested that we take a look at another map, this one being of the Mekong Delta and Cambodia. That map is also included in…
Ros Sereysothea was the most famous female singer in Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s. Known as the “Golden Voice of the Royal Capital,” she recorded an enormous number…
The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has restored and digitized a seventeenth-century Chinese map known as “the Selden Map.” The map can be viewed here. A few weeks…
A kind reader has encouraged me to look at an old Vietnamese map of the Mekong region known as the Đại Man quốc đồ 大蠻國圖 (Map of the Great Savage…
I’ve become hopelessly addicted to the British Imperial War Museum’s web page, and have spent hours listening to the recorded interviews that they have there. This one, by a British…
The video in the post below about the radio in Sarawak in 1961 got me wondering about the types of changes that the transistor radio brought to Southeast Asia in…
I had never heard of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) until someone mentioned it to me today (THANK YOU). It is fabulous!! As more of a cultural/social historian of Southeast…
A few months ago I read a couple of articles that I really liked. They were about the emergence of the radio in colonial Singapore and colonial Vietnam. I was…
On 31 May 1802, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, the first ruler of the Nguyễn Dynasty declared that Gia Long 嘉隆 would be his reign title (Đại Nam thực lục, 17/1a-2a). Many…