Image via thailand.net.auBy Milton Osborne
The Asian Pacific Journal
Until the 1980s the Mekong River flowed freely for 4,900 kilometers from its 5,100-meter high source in Tibet to the coast of Vietnam, where it finally poured into the South China Sea. The Mekong is the world’s twelfth longest river, and the eighth or tenth largest, in terms of the 475 billion cubic meters of water it discharges annually. Then and now it passes through or by China, Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It is Southeast Asia’s longest river, but 44 percent of its course is in China, a fact of capital importance for its ecology and the problems associated with its governance.
In 1980 not only were there no dams on its course, but much of the river could not be used for sizeable, long-distance navigation because of the great barrier of the Khone Falls, located just above the border between Cambodia and Laos, and the repeated rapids and obstacles that marked its course in Laos and China. Indeed, no exaggeration is involved in noting that the Mekong’s overall physical configuration in 1980 was remarkably little changed from that existing when it was explored by the French Mekong Expedition that traveled painfully up the river from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta to Jinghong in southern Yunnan in 1866 and 1867. This was the firstEuropean expedition to explore the Mekong from southern Vietnam into China and to produce an accurate map of its course to that point.
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