This article shows that the descriptions of Southeast Asian geography contained in Ming and Qing Chinese sources that used observations collected from contemporary mariners reflect the structure of the maritime trading networks in the region. It examines several Chinese textual studies of Southeast Asia, navigational rutters, and maps, and uses geographic information system mapping to visualise and compare the extent of the authors’ and cartographers’ knowledge of the region. The article then takes the findings and situates them in the context of early modern Southeast Asian economic history to explain how the Chinese networks were transformed.

This article examines the first decade of Pasar Gambir as an annual week-long festival held in the Dutch East Indies in conjunction with Queen Wilhelmina's birthday. As a study of colonial spectacles, it seeks to address the dearth of scholarly literature that analyses how the Western exhibitionary complex functioned in a colonised environment. In producing Pasar Gambir, the Dutch colonisers did not adopt this exhibitionary complex in its entirety. As such, Pasar Gambir assumed the hybridised form of a jaarmarkt-tentoonstelling (fair-cum-exhibition) imbued with market-like characteristics. This reality distinguished Pasar Gambir from its metropolitan equivalents by involving the colonised not only as objectified exhibits on display, but also as active consumers and participants of the spectacle. Ultimately, this article argues that the hybridity of Pasar Gambir undercut Dutch efforts to use it as a vehicle that illustrated and vindicated their claims of benevolence and racial supremacy. Through the Malay language press’ appropriation of the spectacle to underscore the moral superiority of the colonised and the Indies Chinese’ successful boycott of Pasar Gambir in 1925, colonised communities contested the empire-building messages that the Dutch sought to convey through Pasar Gambir and inscribed their own nationalist readings and interpretations of the annual jaarmarkt-tentoonstelling instead.

Between 1967 and 1969, thousands of Hmong in northern Thailand became aligned with the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) and resided in mountainous strongholds near the border with Laos in Chiang Rai, Phayao, Nan, Phetchabun, and Phitsanulok provinces, and in Tak province near the border with Burma. They stayed in these strongholds until the early 1980s, when the CPT fell apart. During the CPT period, some important transformations in Hmong gender relations occurred, especially relative to the traditional strongly male-dominated society. We describe the most important changes, as reported by Hmong women. The legacy of the CPT period remains today. However, there has been some reversion to pre-CPT patriarchal practices. Some Hmong women feel nostalgic about the rights they enjoyed during the CPT period, although the leadership of the CPT was male dominated, and despite the fact that some progress has been made, for example, in convincing clan leaders to allow divorced women to return to their birth clans. This study applies a feminist geography and social memory theoretical framework to examine Hmong women's life stories about their time with the CPT.

This article examines the role played by commercial advertising in promoting images of city reconstruction and architectural modernity within Manila in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. It concentrates on the leading English-language daily, the Manila Times, which, from early 1946, began publishing advertisements that featured dramatic images of a future city of skyscrapers and other buildings rising out of the ruins of war. Advertisers called out to readers to contribute to the process of economic recovery by purchasing newly arrived shipments of goods and equipment and to support their efforts to drive property investment and the reconstruction of the city. By 1947 publicity was extending into home construction and advertisements incorporated illustrations of modernist houses as a means of promoting imported building products from the United States as well as locally manufactured materials. The article examines these advertisements for what they reveal about the stimulation of public interest in urban and architectural modernity within the Philippines in the early postwar years.