Vietnamese cinema has only recently become known outside of the East Bloc countries. The first public showing of a Vietnamese feature film in the United States was that of When the Tenth Month Comes at the 1985 Hawai'i International Film Festival in Honolulu. At the 1987 Festival, a consortium of American film institutions was formed with Nguyen Thu, General Director of the Vietnam Cinema Department, to organize the Vietnam Film Project — the first attempt to introduce an entire new film industry to America. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief description of Vietnamese cinema along with an appreciation of its major characteristics and themes. I base my views on my two visits to the Vietnam Cinema Department in Hanoi — for one week in 1987 and two in 1988 — on behalf of the Hawai'i International Film Festival. During those visits, I was able to view a large number of documentaries and feature films and to discuss Vietnamese cinema with a number of department staff members. I was able to obtain more interviews during the visits of Vietnamese to the Hawai'i International Film Festival in Honolulu. This article cannot claim to be an adequate introduction to the history of Vietnamese cinema, a task I hope will be undertaken with the aid of my informants and the sources I list as completely as possible.

Historians of Southeast Asia have been inspired by Fernand Braudel's classic The Mediterranean because of its focus on the sea and multidisciplinary approach, and because it seems to solve two recalcitrant historiographical problems: the definition of time and space, and the reconciliation of local identities and external influence. But while Braudel's prose and intellectual ambition are justly seen as inspiring, conceptual confusion and analytic evasion limit his contribution.

Although Cold War propaganda is now the subject of close scholarly scrutiny, the main method by which it was communicated – language – has been overlooked. The Malayan Emergency illustrates how the British government grappled with the issue of political terminology within the broader context of anti-communist propaganda. This article will analyse the use of political language; the change from ‘bandit’ to ‘communist terrorist’; and the problems of delineating the Malayan from the international audience.

When Bangkok was named the capital of Siam it held an inconsiderable population of some fifty thousand. Now, two hundred years later, this capital city boasts some five million residents. A prodigious population increase, indeed: a hundredfold gain generated by an ever-increasing rate of growth, which, after gathering momentum only gradually during the greater part of the nineteenth century, rose rapidly around the turn of this century and has since soared. The foregoing compendious description is shown on Figure I as the curve which charts the march of the population of the built-up area of the city. I have calculated this particular population by reworking the numbers reported at particular times by certain “eyewitnesses”. Since the turn of this century, the “eyewitnesses” have been censuses and registration counts for administrative areas; earlier “witnesses” are the postal census of 1882 and the considered estimate of the population of the city proper in 1822 by the “very trustworthy” Dr John Crawfurd, Head-of-Mission to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China deputised by the Governor-General of India. I have forsaken all the many other pre-twentieth century eyewitness estimates of the population of Bangkok. Why?

Throughout Thai history there have been religious ascetics credited with the ability of precognition (mii yaan) as a result of accumulated virtues and meditation abilities. One such religious figure, perhaps the most widely acknowledged “saint” in modern times, was Phra Ajaan Man Phuurithatto (1870–1949). Of particular interest to this paper is the recorded prediction made by this ascetic monk shortly before his death, documented by a former disciple Phra Aajaan Wiriyang, that there would be a proliferation of self-proclaimed meditation masters and pupils and fragmentation into urban-based “cults” or religious movements (yaek pen kok pen lao).

Levels of urbanization in Southeast Asia are low by world standards, even by developing country standards. Figures taken from recent U.N. estimates are presented in Table 1. They take advantage of the 1980 round of censuses and differ substantially from estimates made five years earlier. Even so, inter-country comparability remains problematic, as indicated by the inclusion of an alternative set of estimates for Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia which the writer believes provides data somewhat more comparable with the other countries than the data employed by the U.N.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.

The records of Singapore abound in population censuses which have been quoted by demographers, historians and other writers. These censuses can be broadly divided into those taken before 1871 and those conducted since that year. In the first period census counts were undertaken rather haphazardly, mainly by the police at fairly regular and short intervals, viz. annually from 1824 to 1830 and from 1832 to 1834, and then in 1836, 1840, 1849 and 1860. The original publications pertaining to these census counts are no longer available and the figures can only be obtained from secondary sources. In the second period proper and systematic censuses, as understood in the modern sense, were conducted by trained enumerators at regular but longer intervals and the results published in their original form are still available. The first census of this kind was held on 2 April 1871, and thereafter censuses were conducted every ten years up to 1931. Owing to the Second World War the 1941 census was postponed until 1947, followed by one held in 1957. By and large, it can be said that the census records gradually improved in comprehensiveness and accuracy.

This essay suggests that one reason for the success of Theravāda Buddhism in early Southeast Asia was its appeal to women. The maternal metaphor, a prominent theme in Buddhist texts, was both familiar and relevant to the lives of all females, regardless of their social standing. Translated into a local environment, the interaction between motherhood and merit-making provided new opportunities for lay women to display their piety and strengthened their links with the monkhood.

The political concept of the Malays was essentially a product of the society they lived in. Before the British intervened in the Malay States in 1874, the Malay society was a feudal society par excellence. The Ruler, known as the Sultan, was eminently feudal and autocratic. He was responsible to none. He was assisted, in his capacity as Ruler, by senior and minor chiefs whose number varied from State to State. For example, in Pahang, there were four Major Chiefs, known as Orang Besar Ber-Empat. Under them there were the Orang Besar Lapan, the Eight Chiefs, and this group was followed by that of sixteen and thirty two. This was essentially a Hindu political pattern. In other Malay States this regular arrangement did not exist, but the main principle remained, namely, that there ran in descending order, from the Sultan downwards to the Penghulu, the village headman, an absolute autocracy. Each chief or Penghulu in his respective capacity was a sultan miniature.

Modernisation theory and political development theory played a key role in the formalisation of the study of Southeast Asia, while the dramatic transitions from colonies to nation-states in the region and the deepening war in Vietnam were also pivotal to the rise and transformation of modernisation theory. This article provides a critical historical overview of the rise and elaboration of theories of political development and nation-building between 1945 and 1975.

Anti-Chinese riots broke out in Rangoon on 26 June 1967. The riots, which resulted from Chinese students' defiance of the Burmese government's ban on wearing Mao badges in school, led to the deterioration of Sino–Burmese relations, symbolised by the cessation of ‘Pauk Phaw’ ties and the subsequent shift in China's foreign policy which included open intervention in Burma's civil war. The riots contributed to estranged relations between Beijing and Rangoon throughout the 1970s and 1980s despite the normalisation of bilateral ties in 1970. While the roots of the Rangoon riots lay in Burma's political economy and tensions within the local Chinese community in the context of Cold War international relations, Beijing bore primary responsibility, however, due to its export of the Cultural Revolution.

This article challenges the perceived image of ‘traditional’ Vietnam by viewing the polity's early history from the sea. A trading zone existed in the Gulf of Tonkin area, stretching to Hainan Island and northern Champa by sea, and overland to Yunnan and Laos. Commerce and interactions of peoples in this area played a crucial part in state formation for Vietnam.

This article compares how elite music was classicised or canonised as part of the process of constructing national culture in India, Indonesia and Thailand. Issues examined include the role of the middle class; homogeneity and heterogeneity in national culture; the rise of mass education and innovative forms of musical transmission; the institutionalisation of music theory and music scholarship; dynamic influences from the West; and transformations in the roles of musician, patron and audience.

In 1961 I published in this Journal a paper on the Islamization of peninsular and insular Southeast Asia. It was a paper I had presented to the first meeting of the conference of historians of Southeast Asia organized in January of that year at the University of Malaya in Singapore by the then Raffles Professor of History, K.G. Tregonning. It was a paper often referred to in discussions concerning the coming of Islam to the Malay world, and attracted its share of approbation and criticism.

Various students of Southeast Asian agriculture have been at a loss to explain the peculiar distribution of glutinous rice as a staple crop throughout northern and northeastern Thailand, Laos, and neighbouring regions of Yunnan, Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia (see map).1 Moerman has observed that, “Although this crop … helps to define and isolate a continuous culture area of about 200,000 square miles, it is given scant and inaccurate mention in the literature on rice.”2 He goes on to suggest that certain “environmental factors” have probably played an important role in establishing glutinous rice in this area.3 This environmental explanation of origins is echoed with equally little elaboration by Watabe,4 but the latter denies that physical geography alone can account for the continuing preference for glutinous rice over modern non-glutinous varieties of comparable suitability. He contends that the persistent cultivation of glutinous rice, “is primarily due to an acquired preference of traditional use in the local diet.” Moerman5 and others have recognized the inadequacy of dietary preference as a sole explanation for persistence, but have so far refused to proceed beyond environmental speculations, even though they have provided a wealth of relevant ethnographic data.

This article explains the ways in which power and factional struggles broke out and ended in post-independence Burma. In so doing, it argues that the key to a proper understanding of the situation resides in a careful examination of the internal power structure of an existing government. On the basis of the historical analysis as explicated in the article, it may be surmised that the existence of a hegemon that is able to mediate between factions while not relying on them in turn for his own influence and authority, yields a good possibility of a stable government. Conversely, the absence of such a hegemon results in an unstable government. Stability, however, being simply a condition, does not naturally predispose a hegemon towards virtuous governance.

Development policies for fishery resources within the Mekong River Basin are increasingly divided between aquaculture and capture fisheries. The modern production orientation of aquaculture has been adopted by government and NGOs and justified by the rhetoric of poverty alleviation and rural development. In contrast, capture fisheries has been subjugated as an activity that reaffirms the dependency of the rural poor on natural resources. This paper critically analyses the division between aquaculture and capture fisheries in Cambodia, Thailand and Lao PDR by tracing the emergence and influence of ‘development narratives’ used to justify contemporary policy and practice.

Thai religion is changing. So is Thai society. To most scholars the connection is obvious: social and especially material changes drive religious ones. So a new middle class causes religious ferment while a crisis in legitimacy explains a militant Buddhist movement as well as the fervour for amulets and forest monks. Such explanations are typical in using extra-religious current events to explain religious change. We need not dispute their specific interpretations to make a larger historical point: today's religious changes are, if only in part, the unintended consequences of a century and a half of Sangha reform that has undermined the local Buddhism of the temple or wat. In effect centralizing reforms took the wat away from locals and, by driving folk practices out of the temple, fostered today's religious “free market”. This long-term institutional shift, changing the wat's place in Thai society, can be the context for understanding today's religious changes.

The article investigates the operation of the jade trading networks from Burma to Thailand during the period of the Burmese socialist regime. The trade, a significant ethnic enterprise undertaken by Yunnanese migrants, has relied on transnational networks that deal with different political and economic systems beyond the jurisdiction of the state. The network approach is used to analyse the intertwining of guanxi formation and regulatory observance.