Twenty years after I wrote the Epilogue chapter of my book, the changes that have taken place along the course of the Mekong River have been just as momentous, perhaps even more so, than those I charted as having occurred in the century that had passed since the explorers made their way towards China. When the book was completed in 1974, Vietnam was still a divided country in which war raged, as it did also in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. China was still led by Mao Zedong, and although the shockwaves of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution were beginning to subside the rulers of Asia's largest country still rejected Western concepts of a market economy. Burma, now called Myanmar, in many ways the least accessible of all Southeast Asian countries, remained a state with its face turned away from the outside world.
For the countries that had once formed French Indochina, 1975 was a year of high drama. In Cambodia, 1975 saw the triumph of the Khmer Rouge forces and the subsequent descent of that country into a terrifying period of state-sponsored brutality against its own population. In Vietnam, the same year saw the end of the war that had pitched the communist forces linked to the government in Hanoi against its Saigon-based opponents and their American backers. And in Laos, too, though in an idiosyncratic and gentler Laotian fashion, a communist government finally came to power after years of war.
Now, twenty years on, there has been further change to the politics of the countries that border the Mekong. In the broadest sense, the passage of time has had the least effect in Burma, where a central government dominated by ethnic Burmans continues to hold sway and seeks by all means, including through its armed forces, to exercise control over the minority ethnic groups spread around the country's borders. These were the same ethnic groups the explorers confronted and which caused them so many painful delays.
Dramatic change has come to China in the past two decades. The death of the ‘great Helsman' in 1976 signaled the beginning of a shift from communist economic orthodoxy to an embrace of market economics, with accompanying political consequences that still cannot be fully assessed. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, China finds itself in the final decade of the twentieth century the last major power to order its political affairs through the apparatus of an entrenched communist party.
Communist parties still control the politics of Vietnam, and Laos, but these countries, too, are wrestling with the dilemma that faces the Chinese leadership. How, in a post-Cold War world, with an increasing reliance on market economics and openings to the outside world, can the authority of the party be maintained?
Of all the political changes that have taken place over the twenty years since my book was completed, none have been more dramatic, or more terrible, than those affecting Cambodia. For more than three awful years, a leadership espousing a bizarrely primitive version of Marxism pursued policies that caused the death of upwards of one million Cambodians, through executions, exhaustion and starvation. Only after a Vietnamese invasion and then an agonizingly protracted civil war has Cambodia been able to attain a measure of peace in the 1990s.
Yet if political change along the course of the Mekong has been considerable, the landscape through which the great river flows has altered remarkably little. In Vietnam the settlement from which the explorers began their journey is now called Ho Chi Minh city rather than Saigon and in the nearly twenty years that have passed since the communist forces gained control of the city many of the old landmarks have been demolished. But not all, for the Customs House that dominated the waterfront when they set off is still there. No longer linked to the business of the port, it has become the Ho Chi Minh Museum.
The other capitals that sit beside the river – Phnom Penh, Vientiane and Luang Prabang – have changed remarkably little over the past twenty years. Both Phnom Penh and Vientiane have grown in size, with ‘modernity' doing little to enhance their charm. Luang Prabang continues to escape the worst ravages of contemporary development. For the rest, while there has been some change to the river towns that dot the Mekong's banks as it wends its way from Tibet to the South China Sea, these changes have not been of a striking kind.
There is one notable exception to this generalisation. For the first time the Mekong has been bridged. Opened in 1994, a bridge more than one kilometre in length now links Thailand and Laos, from Nong Khay on the Thai side of the river to a location on the Laotian left bank, a little to the south of Vientiane. The construction of this bridge represents change indeed and may be a sign of greater changes still to come. There is talk of a second bridge and discussion continues to take place of future dams, either along the Mekong's tributaries, or even on the river itself.
One thing has not changed in any important fashion over the past two decades. The hopes that were so central to the French explorers' mission of the Mekong becoming a trade route into China remain unrealized. So the Mekong is still what it has always been. It provides opportunities for relatively limited local water-borne traffic. But more importantly it is an essential element in the life of the men and women along its course whose lives are linked to agriculture and to fishing. When the Mekong floods it deposits rich layers of silt along that runs back from its bank. Far to the south from its source, in the Mekong Delta, the river spreads to form a region of rich fecundity that is once again being exploited in an atmosphere of political calm. Through the enormous volume of water that flows down the Mekong, Cambodia's Tonle Sap river is turned around to flow backwards into the Great Lake, where vast numbers of fish breed. When the waters reverse once again, the fish are harvested in huge quantities to form an essential part of Cambodian peasants' diet.
The Mekong is still the ‘Great River’ that so fascinated Lagrée, Garnier and their companions. With its origins only finally discovered in 1995 in the high plateaus of eastern Tibet, it still embodies mystery as well as bringing life to the lands through which it flows. Still known by many names at different points along its length, the passage of another score of years will leave it what it has always been – the great and dominating physical feature of the Indochinese world.
Milton Osborne,
April 1996