Notes from a Lecture

This Monday, I attended a lecture by Professor Leonard Blussé, who wrote many of the materials I have been reading through in my studies of Christianity in Taiwan. Perhaps his most monumental work is the four-volume Formosan Encounter, a selection of Dutch East India Company Documents and other resources, along with translations thereof. Nevertheless, this lecture focussed on the historical study of rivers in Southeast Asia, which Blussé punctuated with a number of anecdotes and insights into his life, research methods, and philosophy.

Being very unfamiliar with the topic at hand (I attended on account of Blussé’s work on Taiwan), I mostly took away more general ideas. For example, I previously haven’t thought much about how the subdivision of Southeast Asia along non-political geographical lines affected the study of history. However, Blussé’s lecture underscored the importance of thinking about Southeast Asia in terms of two economically and politically distinct regions: the inlands, centred around rivers, and coastal areas – two regions whose trade, diplomacy, and life in general functioned in very different ways. 

Other facts in the ragbag of things I learned at the lecture are: many of the major rivers in Southeast Asia run parallel to each other, but are separated by mountains, and thus sections along the rivers used to form distinct socio-economic units; the current population of Southeast Asia is by and large not the original population of the region; Taiwan has only been accepted as the historic homeland of the Austronesian peoples in the past twenty years; the rulers of Southeast Asia’s ports would monopolise trade along river estuaries, buying produce from lands upstream in exchange for much-needed salt.