In the early twentieth century, Vietnamese historical writing changed dramatically. After producing historical scholarship for centuries that highlighted the achievements and failures of monarchs, in the early twentieth centuries some…
A few months ago I wrote a post on a scholar from the early twentieth century, Dương Bá Trác, and his ideas about the origins of the Vietnamese race as…
I visited the Vietnamese language page of Radio France International and came across an article on the Trưng sisters. It was nationalistic, and like most nationalistic writings, it projected the…
A few months ago I wrote (here) about how we can see signs of Social Darwinist ideas in the Mirror of Southern History (Gương sử Nam), a 1910 work by…
I was reading Robert Pringle’s 1970 work, Rajahs and Rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak under Brook Rule, 1841-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) recently, and found some interesting information there about…
In the early 1950s, some members (or employees) of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) microfilmed some of the materials which they possessed in their library in Hanoi. One item that…
I have absolutely no desire to get involved in the Trường Sa/Hoàng Sa debate. Why? Because I’m an historian and as an historian I can't stand listening to the historians…
When medieval Việt scholars wrote the first histories of the Red River Delta region, they structured their histories around the political principle of an “orthodox line of succession” (正統, chính…
Gao Pian/Cao Biền was a Tang Dynasty official who was sent to the Red River delta in the 860s to put down disturbances caused by troops from the kingdom of…