Vietnam

Đông Sơn bronze drums are beautiful artifacts that attest to the sophistication of the people who made them, but how were those people related to the people who eventually came to refer to themselves as the Việt?

I was thinking about this question while reading an entry in Lê Tắc’s fourteenth-century Brief Treatise on An Nam (An Nam chí lược) about the “Lạo Tử” (獠子).

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Having just written about Eurasians in Singapore during World War II, let us now take a look at how Eurasians come about – through interracial relationships. I came across some…

So the Fourth International Conference on Vietnamese Studies is taking place at the moment in Hanoi (or perhaps just coming to an end right about now). The theme of the…

A couple of weeks ago I met someone who told me about Bác sĩ Kiều Quang Chẩn and said that she had heard him give an interesting talk in California…

In the late nineteenth century the Qing Dynasty official, Zhang Zhidong, coined a phrase that became very famous – “Chinese learning for substance and Western learning for function” (中學為體，西學為用 Zhongxue…

As part of the diplomatic negotiations that took place after the Qing were defeated by the Tây Sơn, the Qing emperor, Qianlong, agreed to recognize Quang Trung as the “King…

There is an interesting post on the blog Archeological*Highlights about a stone inscription that was recently found in Bắc Ninh Province. Dated to 601 CE, it is now the earliest…

Historian Keith Taylor made the comment a few decades ago in his The Birth of Vietnam that the Vietnamese “learned to articulate their non-Chinese identity in terms of China’s cultural…