Vietnamese are not that much like the Cambodians
A comment below suggested another book on Vietnamese history, which I am endeavoring to read in the near future. The comment also brought up issues relating to the ethnogenesis of the Vietnamese people, their relationship to the Yue (or lack thereof) and the Khmer, and also the Han Chinese. Obviously, I can’t speak to the […]
A clash of civilizations along the lower Mekong
The lower Mekong region is a fascinating zone from the perspective of human geography and ethnography. Divided between Cambodia and Vietnam, until the past few centuries it was, in fact, part of the broader Khmer world, and historically part of successive Cambodian polities. Vietnam, as we know it, emerged in the Red River valley far to […]
Indic civilization came to Southeast Asia because Indian people came to Southeast Asia. Lots of them
Reading Indonesia: Peoples and Histories. I selected it because unlike many books it wasn’t incredibly skewed to the early modern and postcolonial period. The author makes the interesting point that the Islamicization of western Indonesia and the rise of the great Javanese Hindu kingdom of Majapahit occurred around the same time. This, in contrast to […]