Lương Trúc Đàm, Education, and the Knowledge of the West and the Center
The words that we use have a tremendous influence on how we see and understand the world, and this is particularly the case with the names of nations. As soon…
The words that we use have a tremendous influence on how we see and understand the world, and this is particularly the case with the names of nations. As soon…
I was in the Rangoon airport a while ago when I came across this scene here. It is a space for some kind of public phone, but there is no…
I came across this “wanted” poster in the January 2, 1900 edition of the Sarawak Gazette. Eight (possibly) Teochew Chinese were wanted for the murder of pepper planter Liong Ten…
In the early nineteenth century, Nguyễn Dynasty official Lê Quang Định compiled a kind of geographical text called the Hoàng Việt nhất thống dư địa chí. Essentially what this work…
I’ve written briefly about the work of the historian Nguyễn Phương on this blog before. Nguyễn Phương published a book in Vietnamese in Huế in the 1960s called Việt Nam…
In 1965 there was a coup in Indonesia. Sukarno was overthrown, and the coup was blamed on Communists. A purge of suspected Communists then ensued, and some half a million…
On 21 October 1945, Lord of Thailand Tengku Abdullah Osman sent a letter to “Mr. D. Headley, Lieutnent (sic) Colonel & Chief Commander Civil Affairs, Trengganu Government.” Headley probably found…
Following on the post below, here is an attempt at making a map of military posts in French Indochina in World War II. On the map page you can switch…
A few days ago I wrote an entry about a secret report about Caodaism from 1944. I found that report in a text called the Gazetteer of Indochina. This gazetteer…
I’ve written before about how the concept of “identity” is understood in radically different ways in Vietnam and in certain places outside of Vietnam. I’ve recently come to realize that…