Scientists have spent years working on the conundrum and think they have found the landmass, which split from Australia, hidden under Southeast Asia’s eastern islands.

Spoken Teochew is both ancient and at the same time evolving, just like any other "live" languages. The Teochews settled in the Malay-speaking world covering Singapore, Malaysia and Indon...

In the latest episode of our popular 10 Things You Should Know series, we share facts about the keris, a warfare weapon used in maritime Southeast Asia.

Katak di bawah tempurung / Seperti katak dalam tempurung – Frog under the coconut shell. Let’s try to get out from under our shell.This page is a list of open access resources and prima…

The concept of queer and non-binary identities has long been a part of Indonesian culture, including the Bugis culture in Sulawesi, where the Bissu, who embody all genders, play a significant role in society, despite facing discrimination from various conservative groups. Yuyun and Eka are very few Bissu who are still fighting for this tradition.

Đạo Mẫu, the worship of mother goddesses, has helped destabilise gender norms and stigma towards the queer community in Vietnam. The tradition is often regarded as a safe space for Vietnamese queer people people to express their authentic self, as the belief transcends social stigma against queer people.

The ethnic minority can now openly express their cultural identity but remain vulnerable to prejudice.

LINDA LIM explains the complexities behind Singapore’s seemingly alarming number four rank in The Economist’s Crony Capitalism index. Regardless of the scale and impact of political connections in the Singapore economy, though, the republic’s status as an enabler of crony capitalism in other countries should be of concern.

Indonesia, a multicultural country, exhibits high diversity of cultural heritage. Sambal, for example, a traditional chili paste or sauce usually consumed as condiment, has been an integral part of Indonesian food culture for centuries. Initially, sambal was prepared using native ingredients such as pepper and ginger. Cayenne pepper (Capsicum annuum), a native American plant, was incorporated in sambal recipes in the sixteenth century and since then, it has been the major ingredient of Indonesian sambal. Each region of Indonesia has its own traditional versions of sambal, distinguishable by its ingredients or production methods. The aim of this review is to identify and establish a profile regarding the diversity and geographical distribution of 110 different varieties of sambal in Indonesia reviewed from various cookbooks. The island of Java exhibits the highest amount of sambal variants (64.5% of sambal variants found in Indonesia) among other islands. More than 80% of the identified Indonesian sambals are prepared by crushing and cooking the ingredients. Some also are served as raw sambals in all islands in Indonesia, except Java and Sumatra. Besides chili pepper, sambal production often involves the use of diverse secondary ingredients that gives a unique identity for every sambal recipe (e.g., fruit, local food, aromatic herbs, etc.). Nowadays, sambal is produced both traditionally for direct consumption and modernly in food industries, thus resulting in commercially packaged sambals with long shelf life. Sambal also has potential to contribute to the nation’s economic conditions, mainly by supporting the development of small and medium enterprises. With regard to novelty, this is the first international review discussing the diversity of sambals in Indonesia in a thorough and comprehensive manner.

Burning fields are blamed for hazardous levels of air pollution in northern Thailand but the government is doing little.

How Orientalism and ethnocentric prejudice hijacked a "scientific quest for the truth" behind yellow rain, with unsettling consequences.

We have to exercise our imagination even as we "snap back to grid."

A crowd-sourced map of community cats in Singapore

In the 1970s and 80s, when the guards stepped away, the pots and flames came out.

Below is a list of English language open access journals that publish scholarship related to East and Southeast Asia. The peer-reviewed journals listed here make their articles available at no cost…

Katak di bawah tempurung / Seperti katak dalam tempurung – Frog under the coconut shell. Let’s try to get out from under our shell.This page is a list of open access resources and prima…

While it started labour export as a stop-gap measure, the Philippine government now aggressively exports Filipinos. Labour migration has helped address the short-term needs of migrant families and the economy, and has benefitted migrant-receiving countries, local elites and the government, but also poses serious long-term problems to migrants, Filipinos, and the country.

Fears that the fall of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria and the return of the Afghan Taliban would give rise to a new wave of terrorism in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have proven largely unfounded.