Racism in Vietnamese Scholarship (Part 2)
Having argued, by distorting the ideas of Soviet ethnologist Nikolai Nikolaevich Cheboksarov, that humankind was divided into two main racial groups in the early Paleolithic that then led to the…
Having argued, by distorting the ideas of Soviet ethnologist Nikolai Nikolaevich Cheboksarov, that humankind was divided into two main racial groups in the early Paleolithic that then led to the…
So I was reading Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Searching for the True Nature of Vietnamese Culture (Tìm về bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam), a textbook on Vietnamese culture that has…
A few days ago, Donald Trump made an incendiary comment in public about the supposed actions of an American military officer in the Philippines more than a century ago. In particular, he repeated a myth that an American officer by the name of John Pershing had ordered that Muslims be executed with bullets that had been dipped in pig’s blood.
I had never heard of this myth, and I’m not sure where it came from, but in looking at some information about John Pershing one can get a sense of how such a myth could have been created.
What I’ve come to realize is that in order to understand information about the Red River Delta region in early Chinese sources, one has to view that information from the…
The first Westerners to examine Việt history were Jesuit missionaries. By the time that Jesuit missionaries started to work in the Red River Delta in the seventeenth century, one of their colleagues in China had already made an enormous discovery, namely that Chinese history pre-dated the time of the Biblical flood.
The scholar who came to this determination was Jesuit missionary Martinio Martini who stated in his 1658 work, Sinicae Historiae [Chinese History], that “outermost Asia was inhabited before the deluge.” The way he came to this conclusion was by calculating when various astronomical phenomena mentioned in ancient Chinese texts should have occurred. From these calculations he determined that Fu Xi, whom he saw as the first verifiable Chinese ruler, had lived before the time of the Flood.
In the previous post I wrote about this Vietnamese ultranationalist idea that there was an ancient divide in Asia between agriculturalists (= the ancestors of the Vietnamese) and pastoralists (=…
One of the core tenets of Vietnamese ultranationalism is the idea that there is a fundamental division between Han Chinese and Vietnamese. In particular, the argument of Vietnamese ultranationalism is…
Vietnamese music expert and blogger Tây Bụi just drew my attention back to a topic that I have been thinking about for a long time now - Where does the…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5jhFY9azR8
I’m really getting tired of seeing people mention the “Âu Lạc Kingdom” (甌貉國). That was never the name of an actual kingdom, but I keep seeing people mention it again…