The waters of the Mekong, the world's 12th-longest and Southeast Asia's foremost river, do not, like the Thames, run sweetly. Nor have they inspired poets to dream on the river's banks, or ever accorded those who live alongside it an uninterrupted sense of well being. To writer Colin Thubron, recalling the brutalities of the Khmer Rouge and the re-education camps of Vietnam and Laos, it was a "river of evil memory."
Despite its strategic importance and monumental dimensions -- 4,350 km long, an annual discharge of 475 billion cubic meters, and a drainage basin that covers 795,000 sq. km -- the Mekong has never occupied the same place in the Western imagination as the Nile, Amazon and Ganges have. This may be because these rivers were linked with the colonial penetrations of Britain and Spain, while France's empire in Indochina came relatively late in the day. The Mekong swelled in the consciousness of Americans during the Vietnam War, but then abruptly dried to a trickle. Only now is it reaching something like normal levels in the awareness of non-Asians and being accorded its rightful place alongside the other great rivers of the world.
Closely associated with the Mekong for over four decades, Milton Osborn has condensed his knowledge of the river into what is probably the definitive book on the subject. It has been a good decade, in fact, for musings on the river. John Hoskin's "The Mekong: A River and its People," journalist Jon Swain's "River of Time," the anthropology of Liesbeth Suiter's "The Mekong Currency" and Edward A. Gargan's "The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong" all indicate a level of interest in the river unparalleled since the 19th century, when a number of works by French explorers (many of which are now being reissued) first appeared in translation.