Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia

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John Keay. Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia

JOHN KEAY. MAD ABOUT. THE MEKONG. Exploration and Empirein South-East Asia

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

Maps

FOREWORD

AN INDO-CHINA CHRONOLOGY. THE ADVENT OF THE FRENCH

THE FRENCH ADVANCE

FRENCH WITHDRAWAL AND US INTERVENTION

ONE. Apocalypse Then

TWO. Shuttle to Angkor

THREE. To the Falls

FOUR. Unbuttoned in Bassac

FIVE. Separate Ways

SIX. River Rivals

SEVEN. Hell-Bent for China

EIGHT. Heart of Darkness

NINE. Into the Light

TEN. Death in Yunnan

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

PRAISE

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Отрывок из книги

FOR ALEXANDER

Title Page

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By way of the Arroyo de Poste the expedition reached the Tien Giang branch of the Mekong at the town of My-tho, then headed upstream. The river is said to have nine mouths, nine being a fair approximation to the geographical reality as well as an exceptionally auspicious number throughout Buddhist south-east Asia. In mythology and art the river is usually represented as a nine-headed serpent or dragon (Cuu Long). But the nine open-mouthed heads on their nine sinuous necks grow from just two scaly torsos, the Tien Giang or Upper River and the Hau Giang, Bassac, or Lower River. Each about a kilometre wide, the Tien Giang and the Hau Giang comprise the main navigational channels up through the Delta, braiding together the seven other effluents until they themselves converge to form the parent stream at Phnom Penh.

On either side of these twin conduits the Delta fans out to both the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam (or Thailand). The map shows the Delta as eighty thousand square kilometres of very green land criss-crossed by a capillary of waterways. In reality, for at least half the year it is eighty thousand square kilometres of very glassy water criss-crossed by a web of causeways. The Mekong falls only six metres in its last eight hundred kilometres, but so low-lying is the Delta that the river in flood appears, and often is, the highest thing around. The land is so flat that from an upper deck you must allow for the curvature of the earth’s surface in counting the tiers of a distant pagoda; the lower ones may have ducked below the horizon. In fact the river feels as if it were itself cambered, with the boat driving along its crown, and lateral channels plunging to left and right or spilling under bridges to explore the orchards and inundate the cabbages.

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