The Johor–Singapore Causeway was inaugurated on 28 June 1924. With this, Singapore became physically connected to the Malay Peninsula via a 1,056-metre-long raised track across the Johor Strait. Since then, this understated piece of infrastructure has come to underpin many aspects of life in Singapore and Malaysia. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, an estimated 300,000 people crossed between Malaysia and Singapore via the Causeway every day, making it one of the busiest border crossings in the world, and perhaps the busiest of all in Southeast Asia. The reasons for this transborder travel included daily commutes for work, access to education and health services, as well as shopping and leisure. In addition, people crossed the Causeway to then use either Singapore or Johor as a gateway to destinations further afield. While the pandemic curtailed almost all cross-border movement of people, as of early 2023 trips across the Causeway were approaching their pre-COVID-19 levels.

This article analyses how families and communities in Shan State, Myanmar, have responded to rising youth drug use, and the impacts that these responses have on young people. It first examines the factors that have caused drug production and drug use amongst youth in Shan State to increase over the past three decades and places these phenomena in the context of wider political and economic transformations that have shaped Myanmar's borderlands since the late 1980s. Drug-related harms among Shan youth have overwhelmed family and community coping mechanisms in a context where state responses have been ineffective and inadequate. Consequently, families have resorted to increasingly desperate ways to try to protect young family members from drug use. This article focuses on two responses. First, the decision by rural families to send sons and daughters away to big cities or to neighbouring countries to avoid the local drug environment. Second, the decision to send children experiencing drug harms to treatment centres operated by ethnic armed organisations. Both responses, this article argues, expose young people to new forms of vulnerability. Finally, the article reflects on some of the challenges the drug problem poses for government and communities, and offers suggestions for alternative responses.

Utsana Phloengtham's The Story of Jan Dara is one of the most widely known stories in Thailand. It is remembered as ‘erotic fiction’ as well as an ‘immortal classic’. It has also been praised as a Buddhist treatise. Yet, despite being replete with Buddhist terminology and references, it has never been analysed in English as a work of Buddhist fiction. This article argues that Jan Dara is one of the very few examples of Thai Buddhist modernist literature, and a highly original and highly layered one at that. The novel employs a diverse number of techniques and concerns derived from modernist authors such as D.H. Lawrence to explore sexual life in an aristocratic mansion of the 1930s. Understood with reference to the literary modernist tropes it employs and the debates in Buddhist cosmology and morality at the time of writing, it can be shown to be a scathing indictment of old-fashioned moralistic ‘hypocrites’ who practice decadent lives ‘while mouthing the Buddhist precepts’.

This article examines the highly ornamented Burmese manuscript known as the Kammavāca to understand what its luxurious materials and distinctive illustrations reveal about Buddhist practice and politics in Burma's last kingdom, the Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885). This article shows that the illustrations on Kammavāca manuscripts transformed during the Konbaung dynasty to feature new sword-wielding guardians. This article argues that this militarisation was part of the Burmese kingdom's increasing reliance on ritual practices and religious materials to fortify a kingdom at war with the British and threatened by ethnic divisions.

Like coeval classical kingdoms of Southeast Asia, the Dali Kingdom (937–1253 CE) of Yunnan adopted politico-religious ideologies for Buddhist kingship. Understanding Buddhist kingship as a medium for bolstering both spiritual and temporal authority, this article investigates if relations between twelfth-century Duan monarchs and their Gao ministers of state were the same as those depicted in post-thirteenth-century sources and scrutinises the argument for the eighteenth monarch Duan Zhixing (r.1173–1200) promoting himself as a dharmarāja to assert superiority over his Gao ministers. I reframe Duan-Gao relations from one of tension and conflict to one of collaboration, and postulate twelfth-century Duan-Gao relations then changing before the 1250s, when thirteenth century sources mention Gao domination. I argue for a working hypothesis of the dissemination of Duan Zhixing's politico-religious ideology dovetailing with administration at the kingdom's core areas. Dissemination was implemented by Gao ministers of state and monks from the royal Chongsheng Temple, and the process reveals a collaborative rather than confrontational relationship between Duan monarchs and the Gao clan.

In the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, the fall of Singapura is widely appraised as an act of divine retribution unleashed upon rulers who have committed injustice. Implicit in this theodicy is the promise of moral justice enshrined in the Bukit Siguntang covenant, which ensures mutual reciprocity between the rulers and the ruled. But a cautious approach to the narrative of Singapura's demise reveals how justice is suspended, rather than upheld, in service of power. Enabling this suspension of morality is the transformative capacity of violence. This article performs a close reading on three consecutive episodes of unjust violence inflicted on a foreigner, a child, and a concubine, respectively, prior to the sacking of Singapura by Majapahit. In scrutinising the symbolic significance of these victims as persecuted by injudicious rulers, this article posits that violence functions as a rhetorical trope in the retelling of a Malay history. As victims are made scapegoats, unjust violence brings about the fall of Singapura and, by the same token, necessitates the birth of Melaka. Violence impels the forward movement of a royal genealogy by permitting an uninterrupted sequence of reigns through a sequence of crises.

Oliver Gordon Young was a third-generation American Baptist missionary who served with the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s and the United States Agency for International Development during the 1960s. He left Southeast Asia in 1974 disenchanted with his missions in the border areas of Thailand, Burma, and Laos. His ‘disenchantments’ with these two preeminent American Cold War agencies illustrated what the United States had increasingly failed to grasp, which was the ‘indigenising’ nature of the Cold War in Thailand. This essay examines Young's career in Thailand and bordering regions to better understand the limitations of American foreign policymaking establishments and their Cold War policies.

Beginning in 2020, young people in Thailand have led rallies to protest the interference of the military and the monarchy in politics. They have also condemned the role played by Buddhist discourse and court ritual in celebrating kings as divine. ‘No God, No King, Only Human’ reads a protest sign. Simultaneously, however, some groups of protesters have used the same ‘religious’ repertoire, such as the astrological tradition of the court, in their activism, turning it into an instrument of resistance. This article explores this apparent ambivalence via an ethnographic focus on divination, a long-standing central feature of Thai politics. Drawing from a decade of fieldwork conducted with diviners (mo du) and their clients from both pro-regime and pro-democracy camps, including prominent young activists, I argue that progressive individuals do not necessarily need to reject cosmological ideas and rituals deemed conservative in order to resist. Rather, many proactively co-opt them to enhance their own position in the polity, further demonstrating the inability of those in power to live up to accepted moral standards. This strategy, which builds on a Southeast Asian tradition of millenarianism, mobilises dogmatic notions including karma in support of narratives and practices of resistance.

This essay proposes a revisionist interpretation of the debates between Buddhists and Protestants in nineteenth-century Siam. It argues that the Buddhist–Protestant debates were different in nature from the earlier Buddhist–Catholic clashes, which were interwoven with colonial ambitions and occasionally erupted in acts of persecution against the Catholics. The debates among Protestant missionaries and the Siamese royalist elite, monks and lay literati comprised an intellectual exchange mediated by the printing press. Centred around the encapsulation and bifurcation of religiosity and modernity, the debates helped the literati readjust their epistemological position during Siam's early modern era, creating a discursive space for the emergence of a form of scientific Buddhism. The latter affirms that Buddhism not only accords with aspects of modern science but was precocious in its understanding of features such as the analysis of mental states prior to modern scientific methods. The ‘scientificity’ of Buddhism as articulated by Siamese literati had long-lasting effects on Thai intellectual life well into the twentieth century.

The cultural, technological, and socioeconomic dimensions of exotic animal introductions into the Malayan Peninsula have largely escaped the notice of scholars of British Malaya. At the same time, the scientific literature on exotic ichthyological introductions into Malaya has framed such introductions in largely biological terms. Biological factors alone, however, cannot explain the introduction and cultivation of exotic (sometimes temperate) fishes in tropical Malayan waters. Between 1923 and 1942, the Fisheries Department of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States experimented with introducing three categories of exotic fishes into the Malayan Peninsula. These fishes—the sepat siam, Chinese carp and English trout—were reared and released into demographic and geographical landscapes profoundly shaped by imperial power. These animals were thus ‘fishes of Empire’, their introduction and cultivation in the Malayan Peninsula significantly influenced by the scientific, socioeconomic, technological, and cultural contexts of the British Empire. Studying the places, peoples, and technologies that shaped (and were in turn shaped by) these fishes of Empire offers insights into the intersections of imperial power, colonial science, and environmental history.

Despite the fact that Burmese courts had sizeable harems and that eunuchs are typically associated with harems, little attention has been paid to the presence of eunuchs in Burmese courts. This essay provides an overview of the existing English-language literature on eunuchs in Burmese courts, focusing on the three Burmese courts for which mention of eunuchs has survived in the historical record, namely the court at Pegu of the Taungoo dynasty (1486–1599), the court of Mrauk U of the Arakan kingdom (1429–1785), and the so-called ‘Court of Ava’ of the Konbaung dynasty (1765–1885). Noting the descriptions of eunuchs as Muslim, the essay considers the evidence regarding their numbers, their functions, and their possible origins.

While studies of commerce and trade in Manila's ‘Golden Age’ are common, the impact of the city's multiethnic society on the daily lives of its inhabitants has often been harder to gauge. Based on 98 Inquisition cases, this article examines the widespread use of folk magic in colonial Manila, offering new insights into cultural interactions and inviting new reflections on the nature and extent of colonial domination. Folk magic—also known as hechicería—was an important part of cultural life within Spanish communities across the empire in the early modern period. Encompassing a variety of different practices, including the use of love charms, luck charms, spell-casting, and divination, it offered individuals opportunities to mediate their relationships, particularly with members of the opposite sex. These practices connected European folk traditions with Asian knowledge of botany, medicine, and spirituality to fulfil the needs of the Spanish community for magic. At the same time, this blending of Spanish and Asian cultures was subversive of colonial authority. Folk magic practices challenged the progression of ‘pious imperialism’ that pitted Christianity against indigenous traditions, creating spaces of cultural exchange where the balance of power between cultures was more evenly felt than often assumed.

This article investigates the understudied mission of Bishop Carlo van Melckebeke CICM as Apostolic Visitor for the Chinese overseas from 1953 to his retirement in 1970. Although Chinese had settled overseas from as far back as the twelfth century, the Catholic Church never had a significant presence among these communities, except in British colonial era Singapore-Malaya. Following the mid-twentieth century forced exodus of Chinese seminarians and Western missionaries from the mainland after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Holy See responded by redirecting missionary efforts through the initiatives of Bishop van Melckebeke and his colleagues to this major ethnic group scattered across the world. This article deals with this unprecedented apostolate to these diasporic communities, in a substantially different manner from previous scholarship on Catholicism in China in terms of notions of institution, and the framing of missionary activities, networks, and resources. Based on archival resources, media reports and interviews, it recounts how the Office of Apostolic Visitor and the Singapore Catholic Central Bureau extended their mission beyond the politics of the Cold War, and organised a variety of ministries to serve the overseas Chinese population residing on five continents.

Theories about state-led Islamisation tend to attribute the phenomenon to domestic dynamics, such as political competition, institutional co-optation, and changing social norms. When exogenous factors are considered, they usually refer to imported ideologies. Moreover, Islamisation is often depicted as a firm rejection of the West. This article seeks to complicate those explanations. Using insights from the ontological security literature in International Relations, I argue that Malaysia's state-led Islamisation cannot be understood comprehensively without looking at macro-historical factors, particularly Malaysia's postcoloniality and its elites’ perception of the global order. Instead of being a manifestation of anti-West sentiments, I argue that the initial receptivity towards Islamisation by Malaysia's largely secular ethnonationalist elites constitutes a quest for recognition within an international order within which the Muslim identity is racialised and stigmatised. This is most obvious in Mahathir Mohamad's ideas on Islam, in that his calling for a developmentalist Islam has as its (imagined) respondent the stigmatising ‘West’. I argue that the forms of Islamisation undertaken during the Mahathir administration reflected this drive to catch up with the West while simultaneously securing recognition for Islam; and that such a leitmotif persisted even into the post-September 11, post-Barisan Nasional world.

During the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, military and civilian officials governing Singapore used a combination of State Shinto and sport to assist in culturally assimilating Singapore into Japan's Empire. A planned massive sports complex was to be located at Singapore's own State Shinto shrine, the Syonan Jinja, which was partly modelled on Japan's Meiji Shrine which regularly held on its own grounds sports events and games that mixed the rituals of State Shinto with athleticism. Participation in sport was used to assimilate local populations into an imperial identity, united under the helm of the Japanese Emperor.

Indigenous Mentawai on Siberut Island (Indonesia) consume sago and tubers as their staple foods. Since the early twentieth century, Dutch colonial officers, missionaries, migrants, and Indonesian state agencies have strongly encouraged the cultivation and consumption of rice in lieu of these native staples. While Mentawai find rice tastier, easier to serve, and more prestigious, they also discover that rice fails to satisfy their appetites or fortify their bodies. They show little interest in cultivating rice. Mentawai view rice as a symbol of modernity and associate it with powerful mainland people who have long diminished their autonomy. In this article, I argue that the desire to consume rice and the reluctance to produce it reflect a desire to be modern without losing autonomy. Further, this ‘rice ambiguity’ reveals that food is more than just a symbol of social processes and basic sustenance. Rather, food is a transformative agent that can be used to create, enact, and alter identities, values, and ideas.