THE MEKONG: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future By MILTON OSBORNE
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press Books, 2000. 295 pages, 30

Sarah Stephens

"The Mekong is not only a great river with a turbulent, largely unknown past. Increasingly, there seems every reason to fear that it is a river with an endangered future." Milton Osborne, in his preface to The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, captures much of the essence of this fascinating Southeast Asian river, which runs an immense three-thousand-mile course, from the wild uplands of Tibet to a sprawling delta in the South China Sea.
Passing through six countries, and with extraordinary fluctuations in its fortunes as well as its water level, the Mekong has played a key role in defining the history of the civilizations that have lined its banks. Osborne's considerable quest is to lead us through two millennia of exploration, discovery, livelihoods, war, and development that have marked the river's course.
In fact, this is not quite as daunting as it may sound, for one of the more unusual aspects of the river's history is just how little we know: as an indicator, the source of the Mekong was only determined with pinpoint accuracy in 1994. Osborne returns to this central theme again and again as he plows through centuries of history-why should it be that while great rivers like the Nile and the Amazon have a permanent and lasting place in Western mythology, the Mekong has always remained elusive, and if not exactly unloved, at least un-eulogized?

Certainly, the river's geography is part of the reason. The impressive Khone Falls, at the border of Laos and Cambodia, vanquished any ideas of using the Mekong for river trade to China, as the French Mekong Expedition discovered in 1866. The expedition, which Osborne covers in colorful detail, was led by Ernest Doudart de Lagr¨¦e and his feisty second-in-command, Francis Garnier, and although doomed from the start-plagued by inadequate preparation, serious illness, and its members' seemingly endless penchant for squabbling-it began a series of attempts by various parties to find a way around the falls. France later attempted an ingenious but ill-fated steam-engine-based solution, while eager locals continued to assure generations of would-be navigators that at peak wet season, when everything was in just the right position, a passage could be obtained.
But despite many optimistic approaches, the falls were never navigated successfully, and commercial interests were never able to utilize the river for their own means. This, and the grim fact of the almost continual upheaval in the lower Mekong from the 1950s onward, has led to the Mekong maintaining its mystique well into the modern age, when many other great rivers across the world have been "explored to death." In a fascinating aside that emphasizes how history remembers some and not others, Osborne notes that in the 1870s Garnier shared an honored geographical award in Antwerp with another new explorer of the day-one David Livingstone.
But the flipside to the Mekong's more subdued position in the annals of Western history is that in many places the river maintains much of the original charm and grandeur that so impressed and exasperated the early explorers. Particularly in Laos and in northern Cambodia, large sections of the river are still recognizable from Garnier's nineteenth-century descriptions, and the effects of industrialization and mass development have yet to be seen.
Enjoy it while you may, says Osborne, as he turns to the stark realities of the river's future. Since the early 1990s, the Mekong River Commission, various international-aid bodies, and the governments of the affected countries have been embroiled in one of the great late-twentieth-century environmental conundrums-to dam or not to dam? China, which has been characteristically unilateral in its attitude toward the development of the Mekong basin, has already constructed the Manwan dam, and there are several more in the pipeline.
The effects that these dams may have on the countries further down the Mekong is easy to imagine. In Cambodia, for example, every wet season, the silty deposits put down by the fast-flowing Mekong cause the river to slow, back up, and reverse its flow into the Tonle Sap river and from there into the great Cambodian lake, a unique natural phenomenon that brings a huge fish harvest with it. With Cambodia reliant on fish as its staple diet, a change in the river's flow and character could be catastrophic. Add to the ecological melting pot a mix of illegal logging, less-than-reputable governments, pollution, and overfishing, and the recipe for environmental disaster looks dangerously imminent, as the author sadly notes.
Having lived and traveled in the region for more than forty years, Osborne describes his various encounters and memories with a touching and sincere tone. Much of the mid- to late- twentieth-century history will be well-known to Southeast Asia enthusiasts, and the book is at its best when charting the early attempts of the Western world to come to grips with the turbulent river. The Mekong expedition may have been doomed, but how many people knew about the swashbuckling and occasionally rather louche antics of Diego Veloso and Blas Ruiz, two sixteenth-century Iberian explorers and freebooters who escaped war and piracy and made their way into the Cambodian court, charmed the king, wooed the ladies, and for a while held the fate of the beleaguered country in their hands? Osborne treats their stories with flair and wry humor.

If the notion of a "river history" is rather lost in the Khmer Rouge and Vietnam War section of the book, it is largely because the dramatic events of those years necessarily overshadow any idea of a separate, definable story of the Mekong. Yet, as in all eras, the river remains the lifeblood of the region, and with careful management and a large helping of luck, will be allowed to remain so for generations to come. Milton Osborne's book is a welcome addition on a subject that has been surprisingly neglected.

Sarah Stephens is a writer who lived beside the Mekong for several years.