In many (nationalist) renderings of modern Thai history, the two Chakri kings, Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, loom large as figures who are credited with almost single-handedly saving Siam/Thailand from colonization and modernizing…
Someone told me recently that the archival materials that Chinese have on the Khmer Rouge will remain classified for 50 years. So we still have a couple of decades or…
I came across this nice image in an early issue of the journal Phong Hóa. A wife is surprised to see her husbands powdering his face, and he responds that…
I was looking at an August 1966 issue of the magazine China Reconstructs. The first two articles in that issue dealt with Vietnam, and were entitled as follows: “China’s aid…
I got really depressed this weekend listening to a “senior scholar” in the field of premodern Southeast Asian history give a talk. The speaker is very well published, and has…
There is an emerging “field” in places like North America and Europe that people are calling the “Digital Humanities.” People who work in this field are employing digital tools to…
“Kẻ” is a Vietnamese word which many scholars have attempted to explain. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation. In this post here I am going to provide a…
I came across these pictures form the cover of the magazine Viet Nam from the early 1960s. That magazine was published in English by the North Vietnamese government as a…
The temperature is rising in Asia these days, and it has a lot to do with two countries that are very closely related but that pretend not to be –…
Some people are very defensive about the issue of the origins of people like Lý Công Uẩn and the Trần family that founded the Trần Dynasty. There are accounts that…