The Pyu, Tircul, Javanese, and Shepo
In the history of Burma, scholars have written about what they have perceived as a people who inhabited parts of Upper Burma in the first millennium AD that they refer…
Circus Problems and the Colonizer-Colonized Convergence in Late Colonial Burma
I recently came across some images from the 1930s that were advertising “giraffe-necked women.” Apparently in the 1930s there were Padaung women from Burma who were put on display at…
Dr. Francisco Africa and the Burmese Mission in WW II Southeast Asia
I was looking at a report that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) compiled during World War II about Filipinos who were collaborating with the Japanese. One of the people…
A Documentary about U Dhammaloka, the Ex-Alcoholic Irishman who became the First Western Buddhist
I usually refrain from “advertising” on this blog, but a project came to my attention today that I feel, for various reasons, that I simply have to “advertise.” A few…
The Silenced Mules of World War II Burma
In continuing to follow my interest in animals and animal-human relations in the Southeast Asian past, I was looking around the web site for the Imperial War Museums for information…
King Thibaw’s Ascension to Rule Among the Gods
There is one episode in the history of modern Southeast Asia that I find endlessly fascinating, and that is the fall of the Burmese monarchy. Perhaps this is because Amitav…
Remixing the Past: An Indian Guard, High on Ganja, at a Bus Station in Colonial Burma
In the 1890s, the British government commissioned a report on the use of cannabis (i.e., marijuana) in British India, which at that time included Burma. The report that this “Indian…
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,…
An Irish Buddhist Monk, an Indian Policeman’s Shoes, and a Burmese Nationalist Narrative
I spent some time today reading about someone I had never heard of before – U Dhammaloka, described on Wikipedia as “an Irish-born hobo (migrant worker) turned Buddhist monk, atheist…
Mattie Calogreedy, Anna Leonowens and Marie Vannier – Hapa Women at Mainland Southeast Asian Courts in the Nineteenth Century
The story of the overthrow of the Konbaung Dynasty by the British in the late nineteenth century is a complex one, but a simplified explanation of the events of that…
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