Essay on Touching the Mekong,
by Andrea Baldeck

To travel in Southeast Asia is to be humbled by its layers of history and humanity, and by the realization that in a lifetime one could barely scratch the surface of understanding. But what a rich and tantalizing surface! Its sheer visual bounty prompted the photographs which follow. In no way do they constitute a compendium or travelogue; many such volumes already serve this purpose well. The images captured here are very much a personal account of textured, nuanced, enigmatic moments in a fascinating world. Using light and shadow, contrast and composition, I have sought to fix fragments of the surface for the viewer, with hopes of revealing a bit of what lies beneath.

Snowmelt in Tibet gives rise to the Mekong (pictured above), the major riverine artery of Southeast Asia. Coursing from high plateaus, through mountain gorges and floodplains to the South China Sea, it touches and traverses many countries, including Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. With its smaller sister rivers, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Chao Phraya, and the Red, it drains the vast wedge of land between India and China which has come to be called Indochina.

Into this region, overland from the North and West and by sea from the South and East, have flowed waves of migration, creating a rich carpet of cultures, languages, and lifestyles. With them came belief systems ranging from indigenous animism, Chinese Confucianism, Indian Hinduism and Buddhism (now the predominant faith), and later Islam.

Along the coasts and river basins grew up trading ports, city-states, and wealthy kingdoms, best known of them being the Khmer civilization and its capital at Angkor, near the Mekong in what is now Cambodia. Warfare, invasion, and changing political fortunes saw empires rise and fall, their ruins reclaimed by jungle.

Western awareness of these distant and fabled lands stretches back to the Roman Empire, but it was not until the Age of Exploration in the 16th century that European traders -- Portuguese, Dutch, and later, British -- established trading posts in these lands. Navigation of the rivers soon followed, as fortune-seekers and missionaries probed inland into territory unknown to Europeans.

Commerce and converts were not enough, however, as powerful nation-states such as England and France appropriated territories in the global land rush of colonization. They were players in the "great game," superpowers competing for strategic geography, riches, and world supremacy. The French, seeking a river road to China, sent expeditions up the Mekong and claimed governance over Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). While treacherous rapids in the river were to thwart their plans for a trade link with China, the adventure uncovered the ruins of Angkor to the amazement of the Western world. England, firmly established in India, warily eyed French expansionism and moved to protect its eastern flank by annexing Burma. Thailand was the one country of the region never to have been colonized by the West.

European colonizers and Southeast Asian people maintained their uneasy, unequal coexistence well into the 20th century, amid the rising currents of nationalism and self-determination. The upheaval of World War II added impetus to these movements, and the postwar world saw the empires dissolve and independence arrive in Burma, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Transition to statehood in the Cold War era led the new superpowers (China, the Soviet Union, the United States) to compete for influence in this strategic region, unleashing again the forces of political repression, war, migration, and genocide. Wholesale conflict ceased in 1975, but another two decades would pass before a measure of peace, reconstruction, and development would come to the area. Its reintegration into the global community has revived tourism to destinations long inaccessible. Place names on the map that evoke scenes of past exploration and conflict can now be visited by those armed only with guidebooks and cameras.

Thus equipped, and with a headful of visions ranging from the Ramayana to the National Geographic to the newscast war footage of my college years, I spent two long sojourns in lands touched by the Mekong. Mandalay, Hanoi, Luang Prabang, Danang, Angkor, sites which by name alone stir the imagination, presented a complex swirl of populations and cultures. Terrains of seductive beauty and variety provoked awe and delight: the jungled mountains of the upper Mekong, the meanders of the Irrawaddy, the placid expanse of the Tonle Sap, the shoreline of the Bay of Bengal. In this highly varied landscape live equally diverse peoples, a cultural patchwork vividly evident at open-air markets and religious festivals, yet also subject to shifting political and economic pressures in a region changing more quickly than can be captured by the camera.