In the early nineteenth century, Nguyễn Dynasty official Lê Quang Định compiled a kind of geographical text called the Hoàng Việt nhất thống dư địa chí. Essentially what this work…
I’ve written briefly about the work of the historian Nguyễn Phương on this blog before. Nguyễn Phương published a book in Vietnamese in Huế in the 1960s called Việt Nam…
In 1965 there was a coup in Indonesia. Sukarno was overthrown, and the coup was blamed on Communists. A purge of suspected Communists then ensued, and some half a million…
On 21 October 1945, Lord of Thailand Tengku Abdullah Osman sent a letter to “Mr. D. Headley, Lieutnent (sic) Colonel & Chief Commander Civil Affairs, Trengganu Government.” Headley probably found…
Following on the post below, here is an attempt at making a map of military posts in French Indochina in World War II. On the map page you can switch…
A few days ago I wrote an entry about a secret report about Caodaism from 1944. I found that report in a text called the Gazetteer of Indochina. This gazetteer…
I’ve written before about how the concept of “identity” is understood in radically different ways in Vietnam and in certain places outside of Vietnam. I’ve recently come to realize that…
Any time I read something in English about the premodern history of the Red River Delta and find an author saying that a work from that region mentions “China,” I…
Last year I wrote a post (here) in which I tried to refute the idea that Hò Chí Minh said in the late 1940s that “I prefer to sniff French…
When the Japanese occupied Southeast Asia during World War II, there were soldiers who committed war crimes. Convicting those people of crimes was an extremely complex process. There are a…