The Trans-Contemporary Approach to Heritage at The Myst Dong Khoi

There is a new hotel in the heart of Saigon that is unique. It is called “The Myst Dong Khoi,” and what makes it unique is that it demonstrates that I would call a “trans-contemporary approach to heritage.”

Let me explain what I mean by that.

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7. Going Backwards: (Mis)Citing Lê Thành Khôi

In the second chapter of Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present author Ben Kiernan has a passage where he writes about Việt society in the third century AD.

His point in this passage is to argue that even after a long period of Chinese rule, indigenous social and religious practices persisted.

To quote, he states that,

“Even after three hundred years and fifty years [sic] of imperial rule in Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen, and even as Confucianism took root among the emerging elite, the Chinese were still able to rule much of the countryside only indirectly, if at all. Việt customs and gender relations persisted.” (92)

What were some of these customs and gender relations? One, Kiernan argues, concerned the involvement of women in the performance of certain religious rites.

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Snakes and Clothing in the Ancient Red River Delta

I was reading the Annotated Classic of Waterways (Shuijing zhu 水經注), a sixth century text that contains information about the Red River Delta region and came across a passage about snakes.

The text mentions a kind of snake called a “ranshe” 髯蛇 (literally, a “whiskered snake”) that was very large and could eat boars and deer.

The text then says that when people confront one, they throw women’s clothing on it (搏之以婦人衣投之).

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