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Milton Osborne - The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future

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A remarkable history of the great river of Southeast Asia (Jill Ker Conway, author of The Road from Coorain).
The Mekong River runs over nearly three thousand miles, beginning in the mountains of Tibet and flowing through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam before emptying into the China Sea. Its waters are the lifeblood of Southeast Asia, and first begot civilization on the fertile banks of its delta region at Oc Eo nearly two millennia ago.
This is the story of the peoples and cultures of the great river, from these obscure beginnings to the emergence of todays independent nations. Drawing on research gathered over forty years, Milton Osborne traces the Mekongs dramatic history through the rise and fall of civilizations and the era of colonization and exploration. He details the struggle for liberation during a twentieth century in which Southeast Asia has seen almost constant conflict, including two world wars, the Indochina War, the Vietnam War, and its bloody aftermathand explores the prospects for peace and prosperity as the region enters a new millennium.
Along the way, he brings to life those who witnessed and shaped events along the river, including Chou Ta-kuan, the thirteenth-century Chinese envoy who recorded the glory of Angkor Wat, the capital of the Khmer Empire; the Iberian mercenaries Blas Ruiz and Diego Veloso, whose involvement in the intrigues of Cambodias royal family shook Southeast Asias politics in the sixteenth century; and the revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh, whose campaigns to liberate Vietnam from the French and unify the nation under communism changed the course of history.
[A] pathbreaking, ecologically informed chronicle . . . A pulsating journey through the heart of Southeast Asia. Publishers Weekly

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The Mekong
Also by Milton Osborne
BOOKS
The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia: Rule and Response (1859-1905), 1969; reprinted 1997
Region of Revolt: Focus on Southeast Asia, 1970; revised and expanded edition 1971
Politics and Power in Cambodia: The Sihanouk Years, 1973
River Road to China: The Mekong River Expedition, 1866-1973, 1975; new edition 1996; US edition 1999
Before Kampuchea: Preludes to Tragedy, 1979
Sihanouk: Prince of light, prince of darkness, 1994; Japanese edition 1996
Southeast Asia: An introductory history, 1979; 2nd edition 1983; 3rd edition 1985; Japanese edition 1987; 4th edition 1988; 5th edition 1990; 6th edition 1995; 7th edition 1997
RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS
Singapore and Malaysia, 1964
Strategic Hamlets in South Viet-Nam: A Survey and a Comparison, 1965
The Mekong
Turbulent past, uncertain future
Milton Osborne
Copyright 2000 by Milton Osborne All rights reserved No part of this book may - photo 1
Copyright 2000 by Milton Osborne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Maps on pages x, 145, 230 by MAPgraphics, Brisbane, Australia
Originally published in 2000 by Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, Australia
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osborne, Milton E.
The Mekong, turbulent past, uncertain future / Milton Osborne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ebook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9609-5
1. IndochinaCivilization. 2. Mekong River ValleyCivilization. I. Title.
DS537.083
2000 959.7dc21
99-086337
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Contents
Maps and Illustrations
Maps
Illustrations
Colour illlustrations
For Dinah
The course of the Mekong Preface The book that follows deals with one of the - photo 2
The course of the Mekong
Preface
The book that follows deals with one of the worlds great rivers, the Mekong. The twelfth largest in size it is, for reasons that I examine in the text, still surprisingly little known by comparison with other great rivers such as the Nile or the Amazon. Yet the Mekong and the lands that lie beside it possess a rich if turbulent history, face major contemporary political and economic problems and, as I spell out in the following pages, an uncertain future. While I never planned to do so, I have spent forty fascinated years in close association with the Mekongliving beside it, travelling on it, and studying its history. The present book is very much a reflection of this personal experience. Those forty years of personal association have yielded friendships and intellectual debts that I have tried to acknowledge in full in the Sources, Notes and Acknowledgements provided at the end of the text. Writing about two thousand years of history is a task that can only be undertaken with the help of others, but as must always be the case, the judgments made in this book and the choice of issues discussed are mine alone.
In writing about a large geographical region I have tried to follow a simple rule in the choice of spellings I have adopted for the many place names that are cited. In short, I have used the most common contemporary spelling, even though this means that current usage can differ considerably from that of, say, the nineteenth century. So what was commonly known as Keng Hung in the nineteenth century is now identified as Jinghong. In other cases the difference between earlier and current usage is not great. The change from Tali to Dali in western Yunnan is a case in point. I should note that I have found no need to change the identification of the Chinese capital from Peking to Beijing. In this I find myself in the admirable company of Simon Leys and Jonathan Spence. Widely known Vietnamese toponyms such as Saigon and Danang are recorded as one word, but less well-known names are cited in their common Vietnamese form as, for instance, My Tho. Where there are references to the Mekong in quotations from earlier periods which use different spellings, I have preserved the contemporary usage.
In the case of Chinese personal names, and while I have adopted the modern spelling of Mao Zedong (formerly Mao Tse-tung), I have continued to use the older, and much better known spelling of Chou Ta-kuan when writing about the Chinese imperial envoy who visited Cambodia in the thirteenth century and has left us with the only eye-witness account of the great city of Angkor in its prime. Anyone wishing to read this account in translation would be hard pressed to find it by looking for Zhou Daguan as the author in a catalogue or book index.
Illustrations and maps not otherwise acknowledged are my own material.
Milton Osborne
Sydney, 1999
The Mekong River and Region: An Outline Chronology
1st century AD
Archeology covering this period has revealed the existence of a seaport at Oc Eo on the edge of the Mekong Delta that had links with China and the Mediterranean world.
2nd-6th centuries
Chinese records speak of Funan, a state established in the Mekong Delta region. Modern scholarship judges Funan to have been a collection of petty states rather than a single polity
c. 3rd century
The Chinese build a bridge across the Mekong in western Yunnan.
6th-9th centuries
Chinese records no longer speak of Funan but of Chenla, a state in two parts, one around the territory of modern Cambodia, the other possibly centred on Wat Phu in southern Laos.
9th-15th centuries
Period of the great Cambodian empire based at Angkor.
c. 1278
Marco Polo presumed to have crossed the Mekong in western Yunnan when travelling out of China on his way to Bengal.
1296-97
Chinese envoy Chou Ta-kuan visits Angkor and writes a detailed description of the city and its inhabitants.
post-1431
The Cambodian king leaves Angkor; henceforth the Cambodian capital is located at or near the site of modern Phnom Penh.
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