The Khmer Rouge Top Secret Santebal (S-21) Archives
The digitization of historical materials is making research ever more easy, however I still find that I make my greatest “discoveries” by looking around in actual libraries. Today, for instance,…
Chinese Rushed in Where Tamil Rubber Tappers Feared to Tread in Early-20th-Century Malaya and Sarawak
I recently read an article in The Sarawak Gazette from September 2, 1929 entitled “The Tamil Cooly” which contained the following passage: “Though the Tamil is an orthodox Hindu by…
Bengawan Solo Forever
“Bengawan Solo,” a song about the Solo River in eastern Java, was first composed by Gesang Martohartono in 1940. Recorded as a Kroncong song, it became popular on Java during…
Pen Ran’s Rusted Bachelor in 1970s Cambodia
Pen Ran (also written Pan Ron) was a famous singer in Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s, during the golden age of Khmer popular music. One of her most famous…
White Men and Brown Women in Semi-Colonial Siam
If you visit an English-language bookstore like Asiabooks in Bangkok you will probably find a shelf or two of novels that are all devoted to the same general topic –…
Tigers, Trains and Lunatics in Colonial Burma
I woke up at 3am this morning and couldn’t fall back asleep. So I decided to read some of the Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1897-98 to 1906-07,…
Hawaiian Music and National Culture in Indonesia
A while ago I wrote a blog piece on “Hawaii in Southeast Asia” in which I mentioned that there was some influence of Hawaiian music on a kind of music…
British and Muruts Roamin’ in the Gloamin’ in 1925
There is an article in The British North Borneo Herald from 1925 which describes a visit by some British officials to Kamabong [i.e., Kemabong] for a day of sports and…
The Cosmopolitan World of Horse Racing in British Colonies in Southeast Asia
I’ve been reading colonial-era newspapers from Southeast Asia for quite a while now, and I’ve always skipped over the sections on “turf club news,” that is, news about horse races,…
Conquest and Intermarriage in the Formation of the Annam Race
The concept of race is a concept that Vietnamese only came to learn about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once they had, some people tried to figure…
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