Liam C. Kelley's Blog

There is a brief record in the main Vietnamese chronicles, the Complete Documents of the Historical Records of Đại Việt (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư 大越史記全書; hereafter “Complete Documents”), which states that in 1195 “the Three Teachings were tested” (Thi Tam giáo 試三教). This record has been mentioned many times in writings about Vietnamese […]

As I have said a million times by now, there is a placename in Chinese historical sources, Sanfoqi 三佛齊, that in the early twentieth century, French scholar George Cœdès claimed indicated a place called “Srivijaya,” a polity supposedly based at Palembang on the island of Sumatra. As I have also said a million times, Sanfoqi […]

Off and on over the past few years, I have been researching about a place called “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊. This is a name that appears in Chinese sources from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, and it was clearly a very important trading center in Southeast Asia. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have believed that […]

This year, Phan Lê Hà and I, with the support of a wonderful team of associate series editors, editorial board members and a series editorial assistant, launched a new book series with Springer Nature called “Global Vietnam: Across Time, Space and Community.” Four volumes have already been published, and several more will be published soon. […]

I always enjoy looking around me and trying to get a sense of what is happening in my profession. I’m an historian of Southeast Asian history, but I also have a background in Chinese history and world history, and I guess you could say Asian Studies as well. That professional world feels very different to […]

One point that I keep bringing up, but I don’t find it getting recognized, is the fact that the capabilities that we now have when we conduct research in the Digital Age enable us to easily significantly revise, if not outright refute, the scholarship that was produced in the Analog Age. I’ve spent a lot […]

If there is one topic in Vietnamese history that I think people today have the hardest time understanding it is the topic of “Confucianism.” Why is that? Well, it’s a long story, but we can start with the Japanese. In the nineteenth century, some Japanese intellectuals tried to learn about Western societies and they discovered […]

In the spring of 1994, during my first year of graduate school, I took a seminar on Chinese Intellectual History. In that seminar, in addition to weekly readings and discussions, we had to write and present a research paper. I chose to research a paper on “the Confucianization of Vietnam.” At that time, there were […]

I recently read a chapter by the late historian John K. Whitmore entitled “Building a Buddhist Monarchy in Đai Viêt: Temples and Texts under Lý Nhân-tông (r. 1072–1127)” and it made me think about the problem of looking at Vietnamese history from the perspective of Southeast Asia. That is what Whitmore does in this chapter. […]

A few years ago, I was invited to write a paper on the concept of “Tianxia” (Thiên Hạ) in nineteenth-century Vietnam, and that paper has now been published. The paper is called “Tianxia as Anticosmopolitan and Protoracial: A Case Study of Late Imperial Vietnam” and it is published in a book entitled Tianxia in Comparative […]