Not long after the French obtained control over the area around Saigon, Louis Gabriel Galderic Aubaret published a French “translation” of an early-nineteenth-century gazetteer of the region, Trịnh Hoài Đức’s…
In 1862, the Nguyễn Dynasty granted the French some land in the Mekong Delta, after it had been occupied by French and Spanish forces. A year later the Nguyễn court…
I was reading the Khâm Định Việt Sử Thông Giám Cương Mục and found some interesting entries in the year 1663. In the seventh lunar month of that year the…
One of the stereotypes which the Nguyễn Dynasty has suffered from is that it was “overly Sinitic/Confucian,” and that this made them impractical to the extent that they could not…
At the turn of the twentieth century, Vietnamese intellectual learned a great deal about the West and began to transform the way they thought about themselves and their land. I…
Oh if only I had the time and the ability. . . I was just looking at a text called the Ngự đề Danh thắng đồ hội thi tập (御題名勝圖繪詩集).…
In the nineteenth century, the Nguyễn Dynasty commissioned the compilation of a new official history of the kingdom. Emperor Tự Đức read this history and commented on various episodes. His…
I was reading a manuscript today called Random Accounts from a Mountain Residence (Sơn cư tạp thuật). It is supposed to date from the late 18th century, but I found…