Word: lotuses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After Tesco entered the Thai market in 1998 with its brand of colorful, well-stocked superstores, angry local competitors tried to impede the powerhouse U.K.-based retailer's progress with a wall of lawsuits?including one that would have forced Tesco Lotus, the company's regional subsidiary, to shut off air conditioning because chilly stores posed a public health hazard to the equatorial Thai people. Frivolous legal actions were a minor nuisance compared with what came next. Over a five-month period last year, two Tesco Lotus outlets were bombed, another peppered with automatic weapons fire and yet another...
...would think a reception that warm would force a company to consider relocating to more hospitable lands. But Tesco Lotus, Thailand's No. 1 retailer with 26 stores, plans to open more?a lot of them. So do other "hypermarkets," giant retailers from Europe and America that are taking over some of Asia's prime selling grounds. Despite threats by governments to ban them, not to mention rocket attacks, chains, including France's Carrefour and U.S.-based Wal-Mart, are ramping up plans to open hundreds of new outlets throughout the region over the next several years. The onslaught threatens...
...have long served the region's consumers are no match for the modern, monolithic superstores. Boonyoong, the Bangkok grocer, can't beat superstore prices and selection and never will. Mom-and-pop operations have no economies of scale. "I was thinking my business might be in trouble when Tesco Lotus first opened," says Boonyoong. "Today I know...
...devotees wait in line at the temple bearing offerings of orchids, cigarettes, bottles of M-150. At the head of the queue, sitting in the lotus position, is Luang Phi Pao, a young monk whose arms and legs are covered with tattooed mantras and serpents. He dips a pointed, 60-cm silver rod into blue black ink infused with Chinese herbs and snake venom. With a steady rhythm, he delicately jabs Niwet Paopunsri, an auto mechanic, inscribing the words The Heart of Lord Buddha in ancient Khmer on the small of his back. (That's Pao's specialty; other monks...
...What is it about Cambodia that renders it so irresistible to writers and photographers? Are we beguiled by the gentleness of the people? Or by the enigma of why a country once famed for its lotus-eaters should be so bedeviled by war and suffering, much of it self-inflicted? Whatever the root of Neveu's obsession, we all benefit from his pictures, which are powerfully displayed in Cambodia: The Years of Turmoil (Asia Horizons; 160 pages...