Decentralized Control in the Red River Delta Prior to Han Dynasty Rule
What I’ve come to realize is that in order to understand information about the Red River Delta region in early Chinese sources, one has to view that information from the…
Biblical and Mathematical Refutations of the Hồng-Mang/Hồng Bàng Dynasty
The first Westerners to examine Việt history were Jesuit missionaries. By the time that Jesuit missionaries started to work in the Red River Delta in the seventeenth century, one of their colleagues in China had already made an enormous discovery, namely that Chinese history pre-dated the time of the Biblical flood.
The scholar who came to this determination was Jesuit missionary Martinio Martini who stated in his 1658 work, Sinicae Historiae [Chinese History], that “outermost Asia was inhabited before the deluge.” The way he came to this conclusion was by calculating when various astronomical phenomena mentioned in ancient Chinese texts should have occurred. From these calculations he determined that Fu Xi, whom he saw as the first verifiable Chinese ruler, had lived before the time of the Flood.
Southeast Asian Rice and Vietnamese Ultranationalism
In the previous post I wrote about this Vietnamese ultranationalist idea that there was an ancient divide in Asia between agriculturalists (= the ancestors of the Vietnamese) and pastoralists (=…
There was Never a Kingdom Called “Âu Lạc”
I’m really getting tired of seeing people mention the “Âu Lạc Kingdom” (甌貉國). That was never the name of an actual kingdom, but I keep seeing people mention it again…
A Woman’s Breasts, A Vomiting Dog and the (Un)Importance of High School History
There is a big discussion going on in Vietnam these days about high school history. The Ministry of Education and Training wants to subsume the topic of history at the…
Rocking the Home Team with a Lot of Hot Poop in WW II Malaya
I was looking through digitized materials in the Australian National Archives when I came across this “mirror typed letter” that was sent to Captain J. L. Chapman, a member of…
Summer is Here
It's time to contemplate the meaning of life. . . or maybe just to get some work done rather than make videos all the time. . . Le Minh Khai's…
2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here's an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about…
Taking a Break
I'll be taking a break from posting to this blog until sometime in January. Thank you to everyone for reading and commenting. See you again next year!!
The Bình Ngô đại cáo and the Modern Emergence of Resistance Literature
A recent comment about the “Bình Ngô đại cáo,” a document that was written at the end of the Ming occupation of the Red River Delta in the early fifteenth…