Chiang Kai-shek and Vietnam in 1945
Last year I wrote a post (here) in which I tried to refute the idea that Hò Chí Minh said in the late 1940s that “I prefer to sniff French…
Identifying War Criminals from WW II in Southeast Asia
When the Japanese occupied Southeast Asia during World War II, there were soldiers who committed war crimes. Convicting those people of crimes was an extremely complex process. There are a…
A 1944 Secret Report on Caodaism
I came across a “secret” report that the Indochina Section of the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Ministry of Information in New Delhi filed in 1944. It is an…
Japanese War Criminals in Labuan
So much has been written about World War II. People know all about the battles and the dropping of the atomic bombs, etc. However, to me the most fascinating period…
Betraying Eurasians in WW II Singapore
I think it would be safe to say that anthropologist Ann Stoler is one of the pioneers of the study of “mixed-race” peoples in colonial settings, and in European colonies…
The Two Joan of Arcs of Việt Nam
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…
Nazis in the Netherlands East Indies
For more than twenty years now scholars have recognizing that when we talk about colonialism, we have to realize that it was much more complex than a simple story of…
Hồ Chí Minh Said What???
There are many books in English about Vietnam that claim that in 1946 Hồ Chí Minh stated that “I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese…
Indian Nationalists and the Vietnamese Women who Loved Them
I posted an entry here recently on the visit to Hanoi in December 1945 by British military officer, Lieutenant Colonel P. J. F. Chapman-Walker. In particular, I wrote about what…
March 9, 1945 – The Day of Vietnam’s Liberation
I love reading historical documents because they never fail to demonstrate how so much of what people think today is a recent invention/construction. I was reading a history that was…