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Crocodiles and the Sinking of Premodern Vietnamese History

I have been trying my hardest not to comment on Ben Kiernan’s recent book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. However, a sense of morbid curiosity keeps leading me to open the covers of that book, and each time I look inside I can’t believe what I see (this is after all a book published by Oxford University Press in 2017).

For instance, I recently opened the book to the following passage (pg. 173):

“The first extant text written in Vietnamese was composed in 1282, in the nôm script. Its author, Nguyễn Thuyên, addressed this poem to crocodiles that had appeared in the Lô branch of the Red River, and Emperor Trần Nhân Tông ordered the text thrown in the river in the hope of driving the reptiles away.”

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The Ming-Occupation-Period Origins of the Lĩnh Nam Chích Quái?

One of the earliest texts that contains information about Vietnamese history is a fifteenth-century work known as the Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes (Lĩnh Nam chích quái liệt truyện 嶺南摭怪列傳) [“Arrayed Tales” for short]. This text contains stories about various famous people from Vietnamese history.

However, there is something strange about its preface. The preface is written from what we could call a “Chinese perspective.” Here is how it begins:

“Although the Cassia Sea is in [the area of] South of the Passes, marvelous mountains and streams, potent land, outstanding people, and miraculous affairs perhaps can all be found there.”

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A Review of Jonathan Saha’s “Among the Beasts of Burma”

For several years now I have admired the work of a young UK scholar by the name of Jonathan Saha. Having started out conducting research on criminality in colonial Burma, Saha is now more or less pioneering an emerging field of “Southeast Asian animal history,” or more specifically, of the history of human-animal relations in Southeast Asia.

Beyond that, Saha maintains an impressive blog in which he shares his research-in-progress.

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Happy Lunar New Year from Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog

It’s a new year, and we’re getting ready here at Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog to live life in this new year to its fullest.

After seven years, Le Minh Khai has finally revealed his true identity on the About page.

And after seven years, Le Minh Khai has decided that it’s finally time to take on the extremely important topic of the influence of the Nhân văn – Giai phẩm Affair on historical scholarship in North (and later, unified) Vietnam through text and video.

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Colonial Vietnam from a Bovine Perspective

A few weeks ago I drove through a town in northern Vietnam that sold local milk products. As someone who grew up on a dairy farm but who is now lactose-intolerant, it felt somewhat surreal to watch my Vietnamese travel companions happily slurp down freshly made goats’ milk yogurt while I stood and watched. . . but ultimately this all made me wonder about the history of the dairy industry in that region.

Clearly dairy farms are not a “traditional Vietnamese” industry, and therefore, it must be the case that this is an industry that was introduced during the colonial period, but I was curious to know some of the details about the actual history of the introduction of the dairy industry into Vietnam.

a cow

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