Seabourn Cruise: Thailand and Vietnam

Andy will be a Destination Conversationalist on Seabourn Sojourn‘s 14 day Singapore to Hong Kong trip to Thailand and Vietnam.

Proposed conversations include:

Singapore in Peace and War

The stunning failure of the defenses of “Fortress Singapore” during the first months of World War II in the Pacific signaled the collapse of the allied position in Indochina and the Malay Peninsula.  It also seemingly locked into place Tokyo’s “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,” a resource-rich empire spanning East Asia and the vast spaces of the Western Pacific that seemingly resembled an eastern, maritime counterpart to Berlin’s ambitions in Europe.  The mid-20^thcentury history of Singapore’s, fall, occupation, and relief is a fascinating part of the story behind this city-state’s remarkable role in Asia today.

Embassy to the Eastern Courts

President Andrew Jackson sent the U.S. Navy’s newest squadron around the world via Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, carrying diplomats on a years’ long, 98,000 mile mission to the courts of Southeast Asia and Arabia.  Their purpose was to negotiate agreements to open exotic markets to New England’s manufacturers and merchants.   Contemporary documents reveal colorful details of these first contacts between Eastern potentates and Yankee traders and diplomats.

Mapping Southeast Asia

With traditional overland routes between Asia and European commanded by the Ottoman Turks, the appetite for trade, wealth, and power drove Spaniards and Portuguese, and later Britons and the Dutch, over water toward the fabulous markets and precious goods of the Orient.  Europeans’ progress was paced by and reflected in their development of maps and charts, some of great beauty, during the Age of Exploration that illustrated growing knowledge of how to sail there and back home.

French Indochina and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu

France emerged from defeat and occupation in World War II determined to reestablish not only its central role in Europe, but also its empire in Africa and Southeast Asia.  In Indochina that ambition foundered and failed at Dien Bien Phu, a small, remote valley near the border between Laos and Vietnam.  The desperate battle between Ho Chi Minh’s troops and French regulars, foreign legionaries, and native levees was one of history’s most decisive military engagements, triggering the beginning of the end of an era of colonization.

The United States and Vietnam

The Cold War shaped America’s understanding of events in Asia and Africa during the last half of the 20^th century, just as it did of events in Eastern Europe along the Iron Curtain.  Believing that dominoes would fall across Southeast Asia if the US failed to stop North Vietnam’s thrust south, Americans and their allies fought Hanoi’s regulars and the Viet Cong in a distant war that found its domestic reflection in unprecedented controversy and unrest, only now very slowly receding into history and memory.