History in the AI Age: A Self-Reflection
In the spring of 1994, during my first year of graduate school, I took a seminar on Chinese Intellectual History. In that seminar, in addition to weekly readings and discussions,…
Who Were the Yue?
In her Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BC-50 CE, historian Erica Brindley opens the book with a chapter entitled “Who were the Yue”?
That may seem like an easy question to answer given that starting from the final centuries of the first millennium BCE one can find many references in Chinese sources to “Yue” 越/粵 peoples who lived to their south, peoples who were sometimes also collectively referred to as the “Bai-yue” 百越/百粵 or “Hundred Yue.” So surely it must be possible to go through those sources and get a sense of who those people were and to piece together some of their history.
In actuality, however, that is not the case, and in this chapter Brindley clearly documents how little we can actually determine with certainty about the Yue from early Chinese texts.
Sargon and Hùng: Heroes of the Ancient World!!
I was amazed to find the other day on the French National Library’s web site that in 1892 a Frenchman by the name of Abel des Michels published a French…
Digitizing Cultural Heritage
A few years ago I was extremely pleased to see that the National Library of Vietnam was starting to digitize some of the Hán Nôm manuscripts that it holds. It…
Cold War Confucian Diasporas
The world we live in influences the way that we look at the past. Before the second-wave feminist movement in the US in the 1960s, the field of women’s history…