Blood Matters in Colonial Cambodia
I was looking at pictures that have been digitized by the French National Library and came across some interesting images of people from Cambodia that were taken by a photographer…
Hu Nim on Clandestine Radio in 1973 Cambodia
Alexander Hinton’s Why Did They Kill: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide is a fascinating study of the ideas that the Khmer Rouge employed to recruit supporters, and to then…
Ieng Sary and Radio Stung Treng
Ieng Sary, a man who served as the foreign minster of the Khmer Rouge, recently died at the age of 87. Seth Mydans has an article about him (here) in…
Bộ Đội and Watches at War’s End
A reader of this blog just made the comment that “it’s fascinating to look at period newspapers, because there often are bits of evidence that enrich, reposition and sometimes refute…
Daw Pyu the Mac Phsu Balm Queen
You may have heard of the two “Tiger Balm Kings” (Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par) that is, the two ethnic Chinese from Burma who went on to create…
Georges Coedès and the Sanskrit Inscriptions of Cambodia
I recently read a fabulous article by Alexis Sanderson, entitled “The Śaiva Religion among the Khmers (Part I)” in the Bulletin de l’Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient 90-91 (2003): 349-462. In this…
Visiting Democratic Kampuchea in November 1977
Someone told me recently that the archival materials that Chinese have on the Khmer Rouge will remain classified for 50 years. So we still have a couple of decades or…
The Progress of Khmer Women in Nagaravatta
Nagaravatta was a very important paper that was published in Cambodia in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It is a great source for gaining an understanding of the ideas…
The Khmer Rouge Ambassador to China
In August 1976, a message was sent presumably from the Australian Embassy in Beijing back to Canberra concerning the Khmer Rouge ambassador to China. The memo stated that “For a…
O. W. Wolters and the “Reading” of Angkor Wat
Academic fields have paradigms or themes which serve to focus scholarship and define the field. For instance, in the middle of the twentieth century, the idea that China had “responded”…