Mekong (Tibetan Dza-chu; Chinese Lancang Jiang; Thai Mae Nam Khong), river in southeastern Asia, the longest river in the region. From its source in China's Qinghai Province near the border with Tibet, the Mekong flows generally southeast to the South China Sea, a distance of 4,200 km (2,610 mi). The Mekong crosses Yunnan Province, China, forms the border between Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) and Laos and most of the border between Laos and Thailand, and flows across Cambodia and southern Vietnam, emptying into the South China Sea. In the upper course are steep descents and swift rapids, but the river is navigable south of Louangphrabang, Laos. French explorer Michel Peissel discovered the source of the Mekong in 1994 at a high mountain pass. The basin of the Mekong is an important agricultural area, with rice as the main crop. Without irrigation, rice cultivation is impossible during the long dry season. The United Nations (UN) started the Mekong River Development Project in 1957 to improve flood control, navigation and irrigation, and to develop hydroelectric power plants along the river. However, the project's progress was impeded by the Vietnam War (1959-1975) and political instability in Cambodia and other countries in the region. In the 1990s interest was renewed in developing the hydroelectric power potential of the Mekong River. Officials from four of the six nations that share the Mekong—Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam—met to make plans regarding this development; China and Myanmar did not attend the talks. By 1996, 54 dams were scheduled to be built on the Mekong. Manwan Dam in China's Yunnan Province was the first to be completed; it began producing power in 1993. Thailand completed Pak Mun Dam in 1994. Some of the nations involved have voiced concerns about the dam construction. The nations downriver worry that China's dam plans will interfere with the flow of the river, either flooding land downriver or changing the nature of the river so that hydroelectric projects downstream will lose some of their power potential. Additionally the two existing dams have had a negative effect on the environment, flooding certain areas and destroying fish habitats, which affects the fishing industry of native villagers.

Map Mekong River

The herders had watched us arrive, and that afternoon invited us into a tent. It was a dim, smoky place with sleeping blankets piled on the sides. There were Meiga; his wife, Daji, whose long headdress was hung with coral, turquoise, shells, and silver coins that jangled as she moved; six children; and Daji's brother-in-law, Bucairen, old and toothless. Daji served us a doughy, pancake-like bread made from barley flour. Bucalren poured cups of scalding salted tea. We asked him about the Mekong's source. 'There are two sources,' he said, stoking a fire of yak dung, the eye-watering smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. 'There is the mountain source, high on a glacier. No one goes there. And there is the spiritual source, behind a holy mountain.'

Meiga added: 'We herders believe that a spirit named Zajiadujiawangzha—we call it a dragon—inhabits the holy mountain and keeps safe the source of the waters. We believe that if you drink the source water, you will live a long life. Animals drink it too. This river is the blood that runs into our bodies.' He agreed to take us to the holy source, 25 miles to the north, the next morning. At dawn we saddled up, fingers numb from cold. We rode short, stocky Mongolian horses, their long manes scattering in the wind. Meiga galloped ahead of us. He made a dashing figure on his ginger horse, a silver brooch pinned to his black headband and a pearl-handled dagger stuck in the belt of his sheepskin coat. We rode in silence except for the crunch of hoofs on frozen grass and the chiming of bells on the reins. The plain was ringed to the southwest by the sharp, snow-doused peaks of the Tanggula, a range running along the Tibet-Qinghai border. Beyond that mountain wall lay the glacial source of Asia's longest river, the Yangtze, which flows the breadth of China for 4,000 miles. And then the snowstorm struck with the suddenness of an ambush.

Now, as we sheltered behind our horses, I wondered if we would have to turn back. Then the storm lifted, as suddenly as it had come, leaving a bruised gray sky. We rode another hour, coming to a solitary, cone-shaped hill. 'The holy mountain,' Meiga said. He reached into a saddlebag and pulled out a stack of colored papers printed with Buddhist scripture. He shouted and flung the prayers high into the air and watched happily as the wind carried them off. It would soon be my turn to holler. We rode behind the mountain and found in a shallow draw a sheet of ice some 300 yards long—shaped like an hourglass. Crouching down on the frozen surface, I could hear below a trickle of water. It was the beginning notes of the Mekong. Mike and I were, as far as I can discover, the first Western journalists to hear them. I followed the ice until the water broke free and curled off across the desolate landscape. All of us, horses and humans, bent down to drink to our long lives. My shout was of the finest, rarefied breath. From its source, the Mekong travels about half its length in China; then it borders or moves through Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I would find it called by many names. River of Stone, Dragon Running River, Turbulent River, Mother River Khong, Big Water, the Nine Dragons. Along it empires, kingdoms, and colonial realms have risen and fallen; successor states have been plunged into war and bloodshed. Death and hardship are its legacy.

Mekong River

A town official apologized for the lack of amenities and recreational activities. However, he added, 75 percent of the houses had TV sets. Each evening the satellite dish picked up two channels from Beijing. I slept in a government rest house. The room had five beds, a coal stove, and a cement floor. Because of a power failure I read with a small flashlight.The next day I headed for the 500-year-old Zao Qin monastery located a few miles downstream, nestled on a mountainside. I was met by a monk in a heavy purple robe. The compound, he told me, held 50 monks who study the precepts of Lamaism, a form of Mahayana Buddhism practiced by Tibetans. The monastery, like others, had been boarded up for ten years during China's Cultural Revolution and was reopened in 1979. As we approached the study hall, a man with a wispy white beard hobbled toward us with a cane. He was the master lama, Tudinangjia. He had entered the monastery at age 8, had become master at 29, and was now 70. Many of the young monks followed us into the study hall. With their shaved heads, dirty faces, and curious expressions, they suggested the innocence and shyness of Boy Scouts.

Tudinangjia settled himself cross-legged on a low platform. His eyes looked young and luminous. He told us that the monks' day begins at dawn; they read scripture, study various disciplines, pray. The master's task was 'to love people, to master the scriptures, to memorize them so you can teach.' As I was escorted down the hill, I asked a monk what would happen to old Tudinangjia when he dies. 'The master will be cremated. The other monks will have sky burial,' he said. In sky burial, he explained, the body is broken into small pieces and left on the ground for vultures to consume. 'It is our belief that a monk should make his body a gift to another living creature.' He pointed across the monastery grounds. Five or six mangy gray vultures were greedily picking over bones. 'Yak bones,' he said. 'We feed the vultures so they stay here. Then they are ready when we are ready.' I lost track of the mekong for the next 500 miles. Chinese officials withdrew permission for me to travel through Tibet and the northern third of Yunnan Province. This area holds the river's most spectacular stretch; it tumbles through canyons two miles deep. The authorities, I learned later, ordered the detour because they did not want foreigners to witness the concentration of troops ordered into the region or any antigovernment demonstrations that might break out. The occasion for possible unrest: the 40th anniversary of communist China's takeover of Tibet.

Mekong River

Some 125 miles downstream from the bridge rises the lone dam on the Mekong. I had been traveling along a narrow, bamboo-fringed road, my driver slowing occasionally to pass a barefoot hunter with a flintlock rifle, when suddenly a concrete wall 35 stories high rose from the riverbed between two mountains. Its front and back were cobwebbed with scaffolding on which hung the tiny figures of workers. Forty-foot-high tunnels—the floodwater channels—bore through the mountainside. The river itself had been led like a leashed dog into a sluiceway where it leaped and foamed against its confines. This was the Manwan dam. In 1995, when completed, it is expected to provide 1,500 megawatts of power for new mines and industries near Yunnan's capital, Kunming. 'This river is like a rich mine,' said site boss You Wan Long. 'The volume of water is enormous.' Over the next three decades China hopes to build eight more dams on the Mekong to spur development in one of its most backward regions. The reservoirs would extend like stepping-stones for 300 miles, from the China-Laos border to the north. At Jinghong, some 30 miles from China's southern border, I realized I had reached the tropics. The market was flush with papayas, coconuts, and pineapples. Women of the Dai ethnic group wore the colors of butterflies and birds—bright orange, blue, pink.

Villagers, instead of fearing or ignoring the river, now welcomed it. Boys cannonballed into the river from a high bank. Women rinsed clothes and soaped their hair in it. Some filled their sarongs with air and floated in the sun-warmed shallows with the ease of lily pads. At Jinghong one evening I joined the tide of bicyclists who headed to the Mekong bridge to cool off in the river breezes. Beneath us men and boys plied the river on inner tubes, gathering driftwood they would sell in town.'In this part of the world,' said my government guide, Mr. Ai Zhen, 'nothing is wasted.' Exactly so, I thought. In China the Mekong too must work; its days as a wild and turbulent river are coming to an end.

Leaving China, the Mekong slides between Myanmar and Laos, serving as the border, then touches Thailand. Here—where these three countries meet—lies the heart of the fabled Golden Triangle, where most of the world's opium is harvested and processed. It has long been an area of warlords and armed mule caravans carrying bales of opium paste. When I reached Sob Ruak, a Thai hamlet on the Mekong at the very center of the triangle, I found not mule caravans but big, shiny buses and European tourists. On the hillside stood two resort hotels; a third was under way on the Myanmar shore. The Thai military had pushed the drug refineries and mule trains out of the area. To replace the opium economy, tourism. Visitors fly from Bangkok to Chiang Rai, 40 miles south of Sob Ruak. They then bus here. Between November and May—the dry season—the two resort hotels are fully booked. 'It's the infamy of the place that draws them,' said Mare Cremoux, the dapper French manager of the Baan Boran, one of the hotels. 'I hear my visitors say, 'This is where the drugs come from.' That gives this destination a buzz. People think they're having an adventure, even if they are staying in a five-star hotel and riding in air-conditioned buses.' Crime, or at least the aura of it, still pays.

From the golden triangle, the Mekong plunges east into the jungle highlands of Laos, becoming once again a wilderness river. Laos is the size of Great Britain but holds only four and a half million people. It is mountainous, forested, historically poor, and isolated. The Mekong is its door to the world. Laos has been governed since 1975 by the Pathet Lao communist party, which recently began to soften its hard line. The river border with Thailand has been opened once again; free enterprise and foreign investment have been allowed. But Laos is still nervous about Western journalists. One of the few places the Lao government permitted me to visit on the Mekong was a riverside shrine in the north where statues of Buddha outnumber the humans who pass by in a month. The 7,000 statues inhabit the Pak-Ou caves, two ragged openings on the lower face of a limestone scarp, 20 miles upriver from the old royal capital of Louangphrabang. Our boat pulled ashore, and I followed my young government guide, Thong Chanh, up the steep stairs. We entered a cool, musty dimness. Hundreds of Buddhas, most no taller than two feet, stood on ledges facing the Mekong; erect and still, they seemed like a huge choral group ready to launch into song.

Chanh took off his baseball cap in their presence. 'The people of Louangphrabang started bringing these statues here in the 16th century when the capital was under attack,' he said. 'Ever since then, during Pi Mai, our New Year's festival in April, villagers have come back with flowers and perfumed water to clean the statues.' Most of the statues were chipped or cracked and covered with cobwebs and dust. Still, the combined force of all those benign Buddha smiles seemed to shower the brown river below with a sense of peace, something I rarely felt anywhere else along its restless path.…

Mekong River

The ferries quit at noon for two hours so the Lao, to the bemusement of the hustling Thais, can take a siesta. At two o'clock the streets come alive again with motorbikes and pedestrians. The English words 'Import-Export' are emblazoned on signs hung everywhere in the city's commercial district. Since the ban on foreign investment was lifted in 1987, some 225 joint ventures—mostly clothing factories and trading companies—have been established, mainly with Thai capital. Chanthao Pathammavong, president of Lao Intertrade Company, Ltd, does business with a Lao flavor. She asks guests to remove their shoes, and she wears the sin, the traditional wraparound skirt. 'We have so much to learn,' says the 45-year-old woman, who once worked at the state-run central bank. 'We must deal with quality control, property laws, long-term loans, market research. We're allowed now to make profits, but the government still takes 45 percent—that's quite high.' A street-level showroom displays her wares—air conditioners, photocopiers, water pumps—all imported from Thailand. Her exports are salted water buffalo meat and cow hides for a tannery in Thailand. Like many Lao, she worries that Thailand—with its population of 56 million and its dynamic economy—will overwhelm her country. 'We don't want to import all our lives,' she told me. 'We prefer to build an independent economy, but it will take a long time.' All Laos has to sell abroad, experts believe, is hydroelectric power. Most of the Mekong's energy potential lies within that country.

Recently a United Nations-sponsored development agency in Bangkok, the Mekong Committee, resurrected plans for the construction of four giant hydroelectric dams on the lower river. The first under consideration would be the Pa Mong Dam, 12 miles upstream from Vientiane. The dam would cost 2.8 billion dollars. Its reservoir would submerge the land and homes of 60,000 people. Thai critics say the dams would disrupt flood cycles and fish migrations—and that the number of villagers uprooted is unacceptably high. The decisions will be made by the members of the Mekong Committee—Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and perhaps China, which has shown some interest in joining. 'We haven't decided on Pa Mong yet,' an official of the Lao National Mekong Committee told me in Vientiane. 'There are many problems. But it's difficult for us to export agricultural or timber products, and very easy to export electricity. We have a big market at hand—Thailand. I don't see any other way to get currency.'

The mekong exits Laos spectacularly, foaming and plunging through a six-mile-long run of cataracts known as Khone Falls. As the river descends into Cambodia it changes. No longer as taut and muscular, it becomes a hefty, broad-backed river, two to three miles wide. The landscape too has flattened out, and tributaries—the Kong, the San, the Srepok, the Krieng—swell the river's volume. When I first talked with government officials in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, they were reluctant to allow me to travel on the Mekong, especially in the north. Forces of the Khmer Rouge, the dreaded political party that ruled the country for four blood-drenched years, were raiding villages. These forces had signed a peace accord, but they were still armed. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge a million Cambodians, or one-eighth of the population, perished through killings or enforced hardship. But I persisted, and the officials relented, and so I traveled a northern stretch of the Mekong in a speedboat—'the better to dodge bullets.' The officials with me all carried pistols in pockets or briefcases. The boat driver had an AK-47 at his feet. It was a lonely stretch, with villages 20 or 30 miles apart. There was no traffic, except for a few ferries, the passengers swinging listlessly in hammocks. Downpours came and went, washing off our sweat.

Then, on a hot afternoon, we felt a fresh breeze hitting our faces, and wavelets began to bump the boat. The wind had changed. The monsoon that blows constantly from the Indian Ocean from May to September now yielded to the drier, cooler monsoon from Mongolia. The rainy season was over, a new planting season heralded. Fish had begun their annual migration northward. From a village, men and women came down to wade in the river and to harvest these migrants with scoop nets. The small, silvery fish flashed as they appeared in the nets. The villagers chattered with excitement. 'Now the crabs and frogs will taste better,' said one. 'Even the thunder sounds different,' said another. For the moment, caught up in nature's drama, pistols, AK-47, even the Khmer Rouge were forgotten. But Cambodia works hard not to forget the dark days of the Khmer Rouge. In the city of Kompong Cham, 50 miles northeast of Phnom Penh, a local official took me to see its 'killing field.' All large- and medium-size towns in Cambodia have a killing field; they are the places where the Khmer Rouge rounded up enemies and murdered them.

Mekong River

In 1991 the government also stopped describing itself as communist and began to privatize the economy. There were signs of change. The country's beloved Prince Norodom Sihanouk returned to the royal palace. A Singaporean freighter rode at anchor, stacked with new Japanese cars. At the new Hotel Cambodiana businessmen from Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and other Asian nations arrived to seek deals. I was interested in the resurgent life of the city. Phnom Penh, I discovered, is movie mad. The lines outside the theaters on Achar Mean Boulevard, the main thoroughfare, spill out to block traffic.… Phnom Penh's streets are often crowded, but the largest crowds appear on Prachem Ben, the Buddhist Day of the Dead. In torrid heat, cars, scooters, and bikes headed toward the city's wats. Outside the main temple of Wat Ounalom, near the riverfront, my guide Men Saman explained the observance: 'All the dead come to the pagodas on this day to find their families. If the relatives can't be found, they will be scolded by the spirits and won't be successful in business.'

We passed the outstretched hands of beggars, many of them former soldiers crippled by land mines in the countryside; there were also children, driven from their villages by summer floods that had turned the southern part of the country into a great pond. We followed people, mostly women in dark sarongs and white blouses, into the temple. They carried canisters of rice and bowls of bananas, chicken, fish, bread, and eggs. In the cool, high-ceilinged sanctuary they laid the food at the feet of monks who intoned the names of the dead and said a prayer for each. With all the dead that needed to be recognized, I had expected a sorrowful atmosphere. Yet many families, after making their offerings, spread themselves out on the temple floor and, under the sweet gaze of the gigantic Buddha, ate and talked as if at a picnic in the park. On the temple steps, laughing families posed for photographs. An elderly woman, catching my eye, cried out, 'Eat, eat,' and offered me a bowl of fish curry. I shared her food, after which she said in farewell, 'May you live a long life.' It was, of course, an old and traditional Cambodian blessing, but after all I had seen and heard about the Khmer Rouge years, it pierced my heart. For more than 2,000 miles the Mekong had seemed an aloof, single-minded river, rushing with a minimum of twists and turns toward the sea, only lightly touched by the communities scattered along it.

In Vietnam, the river luxuriates and sprawls. It enters the country in two channels, which the Vietnamese call the Tien Giang (Upper River) and the Hau Giang (Lower River). As it traverses the vast and soggy delta—15,500 square miles—it divides again. By the time it empties into the China Sea, it has seven branches. Two others silted up over the years, but the Vietnamese, mindful that the number nine is auspicious, still call the river here the Cuu Long, or Nine Dragons. Countless small streams and canals feed into and out of the dragons; the length of the delta waterways is estimated at 2,000 miles, nearly the length of the river itself. These are the main streets, back roads, and irrigation canals of the delta. Rarely are they empty. Vietnam is the most densely populated country in Southeast Asia, and more than a fifth of its 69 million people crowd into the delta. They supply Vietnam, the world's third leading rice exporter, with almost half its crop. I reached the town of Phung Hiep, in the delta's midsection, on market day. Seven channels meet here, and from all seven came pirogues bearing bananas, coconuts, papayas, pumpkins, bitter melons.

The small boats, each steered by a person standing in the stern and working a set of oars, nimbly glided up to larger boats where merchants, scales at the ready, bargained for the produce. Like a litter of puppies mobbing their mother, the little boats jockeyed for position. Most of the pirogues were handled by women, their faces shaded by conical straw hats. Clustered together they looked like a field of mushrooms on the water. 'Why so many women?' I asked my interpreter. Niem, as my own boat darted to and fro to keep out of harm's way. 'They have the patience to bargain,' he said. 'Look how they move around, seeking the best price.' A mile down one canal I stopped to visit a farm. The boatman pulled into a bank tufted with palms. Before jumping from the boat, I rolled up my pant legs. I had learned that the ground is always wet in the delta. Niem and I slopped through mud and tightroped across a slippery plank before we reached the modest wood-and-stone homestead of Lu Van Hanh. Hanh had just come in from his rice fields and had been hoisted onto a bed by one of his sons. Both of Hanh's legs were missing from the thigh down. When he saw me glance at his stumps, he said, 'I can work as well as any man. I can climb my fruit trees. I don't have to walk; I have dug canals around my fields so I can row a small boat to reach them. 'Then I push myself around on a board.' Hanh lost his legs fighting as a soldier in the South Vietnamese Army in the delta. 'My past wasn't held against me by the government,' he said, referring to the victorious communist regime. 'They even gave me loans, because they saw how hard I work.' That government was interested in restoring agricultural production to the delta after the war. It encouraged resettlement. Then in the 1980s it abandoned collective farms to allow peasants to lease property for private use. Production boomed.

Hanh's four acres yield three crops of rice a year. The Mekong not only irrigates his land, it also refreshes the soil with silt in floodtime and fills the ditches that hold his shrimp. Last year Hanh harvested 650 pounds of shrimp. 'I came with only empty hands,' said Hanh. 'After the war this was a wasteland. I had to prepare the fields and dig canals. At that time I was the poorest man in the area. Now I have caught up with most people, and even excel some of them.' Nearly two centuries ago, in the time of Emperor Gia Long, a scholar from the royal court in Hue journeyed to the region of the Plain of Reeds, a forest of wild grasses and mangrove trees in the northern part of the delta. Returning, the scholar reported: 'You must beware of the crocodiles … leeches … ghosts and spirits.' Ghosts remain in the Plain of Reeds, some from what the Vietnamese call 'the American war,' in which four million people, or a tenth of Vietnam's population, were killed or wounded.

Mekong river

The herbicide Agent Orange was used by the U. S. forces from 1962 to 1970 to destroy hiding places used by communist troops. It contained dioxin, a chemical now known to be injurious to humans. The contaminant remains in riverbed silt and in the bodies of delta inhabitants. Vietnamese scientists believe that the increased occurrences of birth defects, miscarriages, various cancers, and nervous-system disorders stem in large part from exposure to Agent Orange. American experts caution that the Vietnamese studies are preliminary and not conclusive. But they have found elevated levels of dioxin in test groups.… At ca mau i was only 35 miles from open water. I had wanted to ride to the sea on an oceangoing vessel from the port of Can Tho, but government officials denied my request. Now I decided to try it from Ca Mau, in the southern reaches of the delta. Niem, my interpreter and also my overseer, managed to rustle up a vessel, a 70-foot wooden cargo boat powered by a truck engine. The prow bore eyes painted on each side, the better to see one's way. Our voyage led us through the U Minh—the 'forest of darkness.' I was told that the war had denuded the forest, it had been replanted, and that now it is threatened again. A steady stream of boats, large and small, passed us, each laden with wood cut from the forest. Farther south patches of the forest had been clear-cut, and the raw ground sliced into ditches for shrimp farming. The Japanese, it seems, cannot get enough of tom xu, the three-inch tiger shrimp from Vietnamese waters. The surge of shrimp money has created a boomtown in what was a fishing village, Nam Can. We put into shore and found that life centered around Shrimp Factory Number 29, a state-run processing plant. We arrived at quitting time. Some of the 830 employees were streaming out of the gates. Wages average, I was told, 300,000 dong, or about $25 a month, nearly twice the national per capita income.

Nguyen Truong Giang, 29, vice director of the plant, described its impact on the area. 'We've got motels, restaurants, a junior and senior high, and the national power line just reached us! The population of the district has almost doubled, to 82,000.' Nam Can has the look of a boomtown. At night prostitutes in tight dresses hang around the hotel beer garden. Shrill pop music jumps from radios. Young men drift along the waterfront looking for excitement. There is danger. One morning at the shrimp factory I watched as 700 women in identical white smocks cleaned the shrimp at metal tables. Suddenly their work was interrupted—all had to stand and watch a video on AIDS prevention. Some cases had appeared in town, a manager told me. That night the scenes were the same—in a boomtown, AIDS is just another risk of frontier living. South of nam can, I smelled salt in the air and tasted it in the spray from our prow. But before reaching the sea, Niem decided that our boat must stop at a police checkpoint. Four policemen came aboard. They said we could approach the mouth but not enter it. They gave no explanation. I was disappointed but not surprised. Traveling on the Mekong had been chancy from the beginning. In every country but Thailand access to the river by Westerners is restricted. Maybe the Mekong makes governments nervous. The powerful river is something they cannot control. We got within a quarter mile of the river's mouth, close enough to see the congestion of fishnets, to run aground on sandbars, and to glimpse the Gulf of Thailand beyond. Then the police ordered the captain to turn back. Twilight came as we headed back to Ca Mau. Giant fruit bats swept across the darkening sky. Night herons flew toward the mud flats. Soon we fell into a slow current of boats, joining fishermen, timber cutters, schoolchildren, marketgoers, all sharing in the age-old rhythm of travel on the Mekong. With darkness it was almost possible to forget the shadows of war and turmoil that have fallen so often across these ancient lands, and to imagine instead the waters of the Mekong flowing like a bright dragon—a benign, powerful, life-giving spirit—through the heart of Southeast Asia.

Source: O‘Neill, Thomas. 'The Mekong: A Haunted River’s Season of Peace.' National Geographic, February 1993.

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