Word: mekong
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...river runs through it" could well be the unofficial motto of Luang Prabang, the former capital of Laos that grants full meaning to the adjective sleepy. And cruising along the swirling depths of the Mekong grants an entrancing panorama of both natural and traditional life in the region...
...Songhua river in northeastern China doesn't have the history of the Mekong, the spirituality of the Ganges or the sheer power of the Yangtze. But in November 2005, this 1,200-mile (2,000 km) waterway made headlines when a chemical plant in the Chinese city of Jilin spilled massive amounts of the toxic chemical benzene, creating a 50-mile (80 km) noxious slick. The chemicals oozed toward the sea, and Chinese cities that drank from the Songhua were forced to cut off supplies, leaving millions to fend for themselves. As the slick passed over the border...
...That doesn't mean we should expect Asian nations to immediately start shooting wars over access to the Mekong or the Yalu - though all bets are off if climate change leads to the loss of the Himalayan glaciers whose seasonal melt provides water for billions in Asia. In fact, the history of cross-border water disputes has been surprisingly conciliatory so far. India and Pakistan have fought three wars and currently point nuclear weapons at each other, yet the Indus Waters Treaty - which divvies up the two countries' trans-boundary waterways, overseen by a joint commission - has survived for decades...
...ingenious ways to work while under fire. Hyunh Phuong Dong perfected the technique of squeezing clumps of paint straight onto paper and adding black outlines later, once he was out of harm's way. "Their bombs cannot bury me," he wrote in a letter to his wife from the Mekong Delta. "I can still work, paint, sing and write to you." Another artist, Pham Thanh Tam, filled empty penicillin vials with paint, which he stored inside Russian-made 12-mm shell casings so that they wouldn't break...
...Today, the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum holds the largest collection of what is known in Vietnam as Liberation Art. The biggest buyers - perhaps unsurprisingly - are American Vietnam War veterans seeking the catharsis of art. Mekong Diaries provides just that, and testifies to the ultimate futility of armed conflict. "If we were all artists," writes another featured painter, Nguyen Thu, "there would...