The Mekong

The Mekong is one of the world's great rivers, and by far the largest in Southeast Asia. Empires have risen and fallen in the lands through which the Mekong flows and it has been linked to remarkable adventure and exploration as well as war and massacre. Now that Indochina is at peace, new dangers threaten the river's future. The author has lived beside, travelled on and written about the Mekong, and here recounts the history of it from the earliest times to the 21st century. It is a history full of the stories of Spanish and Portuguese freebooters and missionaries who briefly held the fate of Cambodia in their hands; French explorers who were recognized in the 19th century as the equal of Burton and Livingstone, but are now largely forgotten, even in France; a martyred Cambodian monsignor and an Australian-educated Vietnamese reflecting on Communist rule. In the 20th century, the Mekong was at the heart of two wars, while one of the lands along its course, Cambodia, witnessed the terrible tyranny of the Pol Pot regime.
The book is a distillation of the river's history and also looks to the future, including the major dam building on the upper Mekong in China and the construction of dams on the lower Mekong's tributaries, with the risks they pose to the river's ecology.