Features on Asian Art, Culture, History & Travel
eBooks
ANCIENT CHIANG MAI Volume 1
The first of a series exploring the Peoples, Cultures and History of Northern Thailand. 12 articles, 18,000 words, 60 images
The beautiful old walled city of Chiang Mai, set amid the forested mountains and fertile valleys of northern Thailand, is the historic capital of the former Lanna Kingdom. Founded in 1296 by King Mangrai the Great, it did not become fully part of Thailand until 1939, and even today the region retains a distinctly different character, with its own language, culture, cuisine and even temperament.
ANCIENT CHIANG MAI Volume 2
The second of a series exploring the Peoples, Cultures and History of Northern Thailand. 12 articles, 18,000 words, 60 images
The beautiful old walled city of Chiang Mai, set amid the forested mountains and fertile valleys of northern Thailand, is the historic capital of the former Lanna Kingdom. Founded in 1296 by King Mangrai the Great, it did not become fully part of Thailand until 1939, and even today the region retains a distinctly different character, with its own language, culture, cuisine and even temperament.
ANCIENT CHIANG MAI Volume 3
The third of a series exploring the Peoples, Cultures and History of Northern Thailand. 12 articles, 18,000 words, 60 images
The beautiful old walled city of Chiang Mai, set amid the forested mountains and fertile valleys of northern Thailand, is the historic capital of the former Lanna Kingdom. Founded in 1296 by King Mangrai the Great, it did not become fully part of Thailand until 1939, and even today the region retains a distinctly different character, with its own language, culture, cuisine and even temperament.
ANCIENT CHIANG MAI Volume 4
The fourth of a series exploring the Peoples, Cultures and History of Northern Thailand. 12 articles, 18,000 words, 60 images
The beautiful old walled city of Chiang Mai, set amid the forested mountains and fertile valleys of northern Thailand, is the historic capital of the former Lanna Kingdom. Founded in 1296 by King Mangrai the Great, it did not become fully part of Thailand until 1939, and even today the region retains a distinctly different character, with its own language, culture, cuisine and even temperament
ANCIENT CHIANG MAI Volume 5
The fifth of a series exploring the Peoples, Cultures and History of Northern Thailand. 12 articles, 18,000 words, 60 images
The beautiful old walled city of Chiang Mai, set amid the forested mountains and fertile valleys of northern Thailand, is the historic capital of the former Lanna Kingdom. Founded in 1296 by King Mangrai the Great, it did not become fully part of Thailand until 1939, and even today the region retains a distinctly different character, with its own language, culture, cuisine and even temperament.
ANCIENT CHIANG MAI Volume 6
The sixth of a series exploring the Peoples, Cultures and History of Northern Thailand. 12 articles, 18,000 words, 60 images
The beautiful old walled city of Chiang Mai, set amid the forested mountains and fertile valleys of northern Thailand, is the historic capital of the former Lanna Kingdom. Founded in 1296 by King Mangrai the Great, it did not become fully part of Thailand until 1939, and even today the region retains a distinctly different character, with its own language, culture, cuisine and even temperament.
GRAHAM GREENE’S VIETNAM
Graham Greene spent much of the period 1951-1954 in Vietnam while he was writing ’The Quiet American’. 100 images, maps
‘Nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes’
Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)
When the novelist and traveller Graham Greene penned his darkly prophetic masterpiece of Vietnam, The Quiet American, in the mid-1950s, he was intimately acquainted with a country very different to the one so rapidly emerging today. The phoenix Greene refers to is Phuong, youthful mistress of the cynical and worldly-wise Saigon based British correspondent Thomas Fowler. Yet Phuong, whose name means phoenix, is clearly intended as a metaphor for Vietnam itself. Greene was, quintessentially, a man of his time. Nobody else has written so eloquently or so prophetically of Vietnam in the last savage throes of French colonialism and the coming nightmare of American involvement.
UNDERSTANDING THE INDOCHINA WARS
A comprehensive and eminently comprehensible guide to Vietnam’s three 20th century Indochina Wars, against the French, the United States, and China. Profusely illustrated
The story of the Vietnam War, together with its less familiar adjuncts, the ‘Secret Wars’ in Laos and Cambodia, is complex, painful and difficult to understand.
Before open US involvement in Indochina began with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, few Americans knew much at all about Vietnam. Following the Fall of Saigon to communist forces in 1975 and the final US withdrawal, few Americans wanted to know much about Vietnam – except that at last, and at a cost of 58,220 dead, 1,687 missing and 303,635 US wounded, the terrible war was finally over.