Nguyễn Phương’s Lost History
I’ve written briefly about the work of the historian Nguyễn Phương on this blog before. Nguyễn Phương published a book in Vietnamese in Huế in the 1960s called Việt Nam…
Forgotten Diplomats
Wars create refugees. In every war there are people who flee from the fighting, and people who flee from the victors. In the 1970s, the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia…
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ on North Vietnam and China in 1967
On 19 January 1967, Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ held a press conference at the Canberra Hotel during an official visit to Australia. He was asked a couple of questions…
Bovine Diplomacy in South Vietnam
In 1959, South Vietnam welcomed some new “immigrants” – 120 cows and 10 bulls from Sydney, Australia. I found some promotional photographs about this in the National Archives of Australia.…
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…
The Evilness of Money in Pre-75 Saigon. . .
In reading Huy Đức’s Bên Thắng Cuộc, I saw that in some parts he made extensive use of the newspaper, Sài Gòn Giải Phóng [Liberated Saigon]. I had never read…
DRV Youth in the Early 1960s
I came across these pictures form the cover of the magazine Viet Nam from the early 1960s. That magazine was published in English by the North Vietnamese government as a…
Representing Minorities in North Vietnam
These are some images from the early 1960s from the North Vietnamese magazine Viet Nam. The above pictures seem to represent the happy and idyllic traditional lifestyle of minority peoples.…
Competing Representations of the Nation in 1970s Vietnam
In the 20th century, the governments of many countries produced glossy magazines in foreign languages which were used to promote the nation’s image overseas. Recently I was looking at two…
The Red Chinese Colonization of North Vietnam
Did you know that the Communist Chinese colonized North Vietnam? That is what the Vietnam Press (Việt Nam Thông Tấn Xã) in South Vietnam reported in 1960. The report was…