Last Bender

My interest in Champa was aroused by reading about the American War with Vietnam. As I read more and more history I came to think that Vietnam is most often viewed as being the object of other nations’ foreign policy. In this formulation Vietnam is the great, anti-colonial champion of the world. Histories stated that [...]

 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 Vietnam Project is comprised of 3 panels. The first of these is a novel I began years ago, about a grad student who hallucinates an alternate history of the American War with Vietnam. I am hoping to actually complete this novel one day. Part of that will be posting excerpts from books I’m reading [...]