"The boat moves off, the river banks remain." -- Old Khmer proverb

This is how great rivers are meant to be: timeless, immutable and self-governing, disdainful of the blueprints that would bring them under the control of governments and the populations that depend for their livelihood on their generosity or parsimony. The Mekong, the world's 12th-largest river, has just such an aura of grandeur. The focus of ambitious but largely unfulfilled development schemes for over a century, it remains essentially unchanged, a massive but untapped resource whose potential has both beguiled and infuriated the leaders of the six nations that cluster around its banks.

Veteran Indochina reporter Jon Swain recently wrote in his tribute to the Mekong, "River of Time," that great waterways "have a special magic. There is something about the Mekong which, even years later, makes me want to sit down beside it and watch my whole life go by." Now, however, plans to utilize the Mekong's waters on a large scale are being revived, and the days when it was possible to indulge in such romantic musings on long, serenely quiet and unpolluted stretches of the river may soon be over.