Annamite Montagnards
I was reading an article that a French military officer wrote in the early twentieth century about the various peoples who lived along the basin of the Sông Lô, or…
Gia Long the Ming Descendant
Yesterday a bright young scholar offered me one idea he has as for why the Nguyễn Dynasty referred to themselves and some other people in the kingdom as Han. He…
The Han Style and Power Dressing in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
I pointed out a long time ago on this blog (here) that there are nineteenth-century Vietnamese texts that refer to Vietnamese as “Hán” 漢. In responding to a question by…
Training Translators and Interpreters in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
I was looking at the “nhu viễn” 柔遠 (cherishing men from afar) section of the Khâm định Đại Nam hội diển sự lệ 欽定大南會典事例 and I noticed that there is…
Formosan Savages and Southeast Asia
I’ve long felt that the indigenous peoples of Taiwan should be included as members of Southeast Asia. There are clear commonalities between their lifestyles and those of people in places…
Ammunition by Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century Labuan
Having recently read Alfred McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, I’m interested in pursuing further his claim that the “information…
A Vision of the Coming iHell
Ok, this isn’t really Southeast Asian history, but I came across something today as I was doing some research that I want to relate to Southeast Asian history. That research…
Defoliants in the Malayan Emergency
I was looking at materials that are now available online through the National Archives of the UK. Records from the Colonial Office have not been digitized, but “cabinet papers” have,…
Watermelons, Birds, Buddhists and a Vietnamese Legend
“The Tale of the Watermelon” (Tây qua truyện 西瓜傳, now referred to in Vietnamese as “Truyện Dưa Hấu”) is well known to Vietnamese today.
The story is about an official by the name of Mai An Tiêm who was purportedly employed by one of the Hùng kings. Mai An Tiêm, the story goes, was from a foreign country, and had been purchased by the Hùng king when he was a young boy. When Mai An Tiêm grew to become a man he was entrusted with various duties by the king. In due time he became wealthy and arrogant, and stated that “Everything here is because of my previous life. It is not because of the beneficence of my master.” For this lack of gratitude, the Hùng king exiled Mai An Tiêm to a remote island.
Plague in Penang in 1899
In a post below I talked about how the simplicity of telegrams could hide the complexity of the issues that they were referring to. Today I found a telegram that…
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