The Man in Pumpuang Duangjan’s Dream
Pumpuang Duangjan (พุ่มพวง ดวงจันทร์) was a very famous singer of lukthung, or Thai “country” music in the 1980s who died tragically young in 1992. What follows is a translation of…
Suraphol Sombatcharoen’s 16 Years
Following World War II, the US government invested heavily in “area studies” in an effort to gain knowledge about the world which it was seeking to dominate. Southeast Asia was…
1960s Thai Shadow Bands and the Burmese Axe Dance
On YouTube I came across some music that Sublime Frequencies put out on a CD a few years ago called “Shadow Music of Thailand.” This is what the Sublime Frequencies…
The Siamese Semicoloniamperial Gaze
The idea that Siam/Thailand was never colonized is one that is still expressed a lot in popular discourse but is no longer taken seriously by many academics. The evidence that…
Detergent, Sanitary Napkins, Air Hostesses and the Chinese Contribution to Modernity in Southeast Asia
I was looking at an issue from 1959 of a Chinese-language newspaper that was published in Bangkok, the Sing Sian Yit Pao (Xin Xian ribao 新暹日報), and I started to…
The Museum Siam and the Bronze Drum Museum
There is a museum that opened in Bangkok around a decade ago called the Museum Siam (some people call it the Discovery Museum). It was designed by Thai academics (and…
The Weirdness of Worcestershire Sauce in 1930s Siam
A long time ago I wrote about some advertisements for Worcestershire sauce that I found in a newspaper from Siam in the 1930s. At that time I looked on the…
Thai Stick, Sharing Resources and Killing Westerners in S-21
Several years ago I remember going to a talk by Peter Maguire about his book, Facing Death in Cambodia. That book is about the Khmer Rouge, why they killed, and…
The Map of the Great Savage Kingdom
A kind reader has encouraged me to look at an old Vietnamese map of the Mekong region known as the Đại Man quốc đồ 大蠻國圖 (Map of the Great Savage…
Going to Wireless School in 1960s Thailand
The video in the post below about the radio in Sarawak in 1961 got me wondering about the types of changes that the transistor radio brought to Southeast Asia in…