Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

There is a general narrative about modern Vietnamese history which states that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the traditionally-trained educated elite failed to adapt to the changes of a modernizing Vietnamese society under French colonial rule and were replaced by a new generation. This new generation, the story...

In 1930, a Vietnamese teacher by the name of Trần Trọng Kim published a book called Confucianism (Nho giáo). Printed in four volumes, it covered the history of Confucian philosophers and ideas from the earliest times to the Qing Dynasty period (1644-1911) and concluded with a section on Confucianism in...

Read any history of modern Vietnam and you will undoubtedly come across the idea that in the early twentieth century the “traditional” elite failed to adapt to the changing society under French colonial rule. As this story is often told, these scholars ignored the threat of the Western world and...

The period from 1883-1885 was a dramatic time in Vietnamese history. The troubles began with the passing of Nguyễn Dynasty Emperor Tự Đức, an emperor who had ruled for over 35 years. In the two years that followed, four emperors would rise and fall before Emperor Đồng Khánh ascended the...

I have been trying to figure out the chronology of events that led to the establishment in 1896 of the Quốc học, a school in the Nguyễn Dynasty capital of Huế that was dedicated to teaching French to the children of the royal family and Nguyễn Dynasty officials. From what...

In 1896, the Nguyễn Dynasty established a school at the royal capital in Huế for teaching French. Known in Vietnamese as the Quốc học, its original name in classical Chinese was Quốc học trường 國學場, meaning the “national learning school,” and it was referred to in French as the “Collège...

I recently came across a fascinating text from the early twentieth century that contains a critique of the Dông Kinh Nghĩa Thục. The Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục (東京義塾, Tonkin Free School) is a school that was set up in Hanoi in 1907 where “modern” (Western) subjects where taught, and where...

One major “blind spot” that exists in our understanding of modern Vietnamese history concerns what happened at the Nguyễn Dynasty court in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For most of the nineteenth century, historians can consult compilations based on Nguyễn Dynasty court records that are known as “veritable records”...

The civil service examination was of course an extremely important institution in Vietnamese history, but it is a topic that has yet to be researched in depth. Indeed, trying to understand how that institution worked is a daunting task, and it is understandable that not many scholars have tried to...

Following the ideas of the previous two blog entries below, one of the main elements of the dominant paradigm of Vietnamese history is that Vietnamese have always felt patriotic towards their nation. Contrary to this assertion, we can clearly document the emergence of the concept of patriotism (ái quốc in...

Scientists have long noted that there is no biological basis for race. Races of human beings do not actually exist. They are social constructs. People create different categories of human beings that they call “races.” This way of viewing the world is one that emerged in the West, and was...

The Nguyễn Dynasty official, Hoàng Cao Khải, is usually regarded today as a traitor for having assisted the French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in their conquest and rule of Vietnam. While his political decisions can certainly be criticized, Hoàng Cao Khải does perhaps deserve some credit...

I posted a while ago (here) about a geographical text which was produced in the late nineteenth or (more likely) the early twentieth century which was unique in that it talked about the various “races” (nhân chủng) in Vietnam. The idea of “race” (chủng) is a concept which was unknown...

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 in this debate (on both sides) talk about “sovereignty” (chủ quyền/主權) prior to the twentieth century. “Sovereignty” is a WESTERN...

The concept of the nation, or a nationality, as consisting of a single people living within a defined territory speaking a single language and sharing a common culture is a concept which emerged in the West and then was adopted by many Asian societies in the late nineteenth and early...

At the turn of the twentieth century, Vietnamese intellectual learned a great deal about the West and began to transform the way they thought about themselves and their land. I was looking at one of the earliest Vietnamese texts to attempt to create a new history for Vietnam. It is...

River Books in Bangkok has just published a new volume entitled, Southeast Asian Historiography, Unravelling the Myths: Essays in Honour of Barend Jan Terwiel. The first chapter is an essay by Thongchai Winichakul called “Siam’s Colonial Condition and the Birth of Thai History.” The argument of this essay is that...