Features on Asian Art, Culture, History & Travel
Features
Graham Greene’s Saigon
Old Saigon
I deliberately used a quotation from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American in the introduction to this book. It’s probably the best novel, at least in English, on Vietnam, its politics and its mores in the middle of the 20th century. No Vietnamese city is more closely associated with Greene than Saigon. Yet his chief protagonists – Fowler, and Pyle – travel much further afield, to Hanoi and Haiphong in the north, to Ninh Binh and the cathedral town of Phat Diem in south-central Tonkin, as well as to the Cao Dai Holy See at Tay Ninh, northwest of Saigon. Fowler even takes part in a French dive-bombing operation in the northwest near Lai Chau, while the sound of heavy artillery from a major battle at Hoa Binh can clearly be heard at night from downtown Hanoi. Even legendary Halong Bay gets a mention.
Golden Lanterns Of Chiang Mai
Celebrating The Age-Old Yee Peng Festival of Northern Thailand
Yee Peng is a northern Thai term signifying the full moon of the twelfth month of the lunar calendar. In Chiang Mai, Yee Peng is celebrated as a religious holiday. Throughout the region temples are full as people make merit, whilst monks give special sermons and recite religious texts. Traditionally, scrolls illustrating these texts were hung outside the temples to help explain the monks’ readings, and in some small villages of the north this custom is still followed.
STALKING MONKS
Story by Joe Cummings / CPA Media (11 January 2025)
Famous French filmmaker and writer Jean-Claude Lubtchansky makes it clear to our correspondent and facilitator, “We want monks who are practicing the tradition and who can show us their practice by example, and it has to be real.”
Pondicherry
Where India Meets France
For most people, images of European imperialism in South Asia are inextricably bound up with the poetry of Kipling and the pomp of the British Raj. Yet few people, by contrast, are familiar with the former French Indian Territories, administered from the sleepy colonial enclave of Pondicherry until their return to India in 1954.
The Chanthaburi Tales
Story by Ron Emmons / CPA Media (23 July, 2023)
Scenes to rival Chaucer’s classic await visitors to Chanthaburi in Thailand’s east.
THE HANDICRAFT HIGHWAY
Story by Ron Emmons / CPA Media (14 August 2023)
The inhabitants of the former kingdom of Lanna have developed a reputation for producing some of the most beautiful and diverse handicrafts in Asia.
THAI TRANSPORT
Story by Ron Emmons / CPA Media (11 December 2023)
Once you’ve booked your dream holiday to Thailand how are you going to get around? Our reporter Ron Emmons has the answers.
Electric Ghosts and Surf Psych: Dengue Fever Returns to Phnom Penh
Review by Joe Cummings / CPA Media (28 March 2025)
“Cambodia isn’t just where the music comes from,” says guitarist Zac Holtzman. “It’s where the spirit of what we do was born."