Last Bender

South East Asian Historiography
Not long ago I finished William Southworth’s two volume dissertation on Champa. Since there is very little written in English about Champa I was excited to find it, and I was not disappointed, really, or at least, I had no right to be. I have also just finished reading Georges Maspero’s [...]

 Early Indonesian Commerce and the Nanhai Trade
Wang, Gungwu.
The Nanhai trade : early Chinese trade in the South China Sea
Singapore : Eastern Universities Press, 2003.
xviii, 165 p. : maps ; 23 cm.
(JOURNAL OF THE MALAYAN BRANCH OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. (COVERING THE TERRITORIES OF THE FEDERATION OF MALAYA, THE STATE OF SINGAPORE, THE COLONIES SARAWAK [...]

THE STONES OF AUSTRONESIA
 
Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula
By Paul Michel Munoz
Editions Didier Millet
Singapore
2006
 
Southeast Asia
from prehistory to history
Edited by Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood
RoutledgeCurzon
New York and Oxford
2004
 
I have been reading in Bellwood and Glover’s book Southeast Asia: From Pre-History to History and in Paul Munoz’s Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago [...]

The Golden Khersonese
STUDIES IN THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE
MALAY PENINSULA BEFORE A.D. 1500
By Paul Wheatley
Kuala Lumpur
University of Malaya Press
1961
An historical geography, in the hands of the right author, is an instance of what I would call the poetry of fact. Most poets are attracted to nonfiction. Blaise Cendrars, the great French writer, traveler, rogue, raconteur, [...]

The Rice Economies
 
By Francesca Bray
 
Basil Blackwell Ltd 1986
 
http://www.amazon.com/Rice-Economies-Francesca-Bray/dp/B001Q1YHAG/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233256698&sr=1-6
 
 
Just as any study of Vietnam in some way begins with Chinese written sources, any understanding of Vietnam must begin with rice. And the book on rice I started with is Francesca Bray’s The Rice Economies. Bray is not a great stylist or anything, but she is concise [...]

THE VERMILLION BIRD
 
T’ANG IMAGES OF THE SOUTH
 
By Edward H. Schafer
 
University of California Press
Berkely and Los Angeles, California
Cambridge University Press
London, England
Copyright, 1967 by
The Regents of the University of California
 
 
 
INTRODUCTION
 
“Although we know that high cultures were possible long ago in the dry hot lands of Egypt and Mesopotamia—partly because so many well-preserved museum specimens have been [...]