Word: northerners
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...investment will likely grow even greater next year when Chinese construction workers finish building a 1,100-mile (1,800-km) Yunnan-Bangkok highway that parallels a section of the Mekong. "Chinese are natural businessmen," says Liu Jingchun, a Chinese boat captain who transports goods between Yunnan and northern Thailand. "For so many years, we shut ourselves off from doing business. Now that we're allowed to trade again, it's like a giant floodgate has opened...
...places on the Mekong have changed so dramatically as has the northern Thai river port of Chiang Saen. Located near the Golden Triangle, the point on the Mekong where Burma, Laos and Thailand meet, Chiang Saen was for centuries a drowsy temple town. But when Chinese engineers opened up the river by blasting nearby reefs, trade exploded. Laborers from all three Golden Triangle nations converged on the docks looking for work. A few years ago, only boats carrying less than 100 tons of goods could navigate this stretch of the Mekong - hardly worth the trip. Now, ships can handle triple...
...Cambodia, many still remember the People's Republic's patronage of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, which oversaw the deaths of an estimated one-quarter of the population. And even in countries with less complicated historical ties to China, suspicions of an economic overpowering endure. Farmers in northern Thailand complain that they cannot compete with the influx of cheap Chinese-grown garlic, apples and onions. Even Thai customs official Ratchaphol expresses reservations about the future container port he is helping oversee. "We don't get many of the benefits," he says. "Most of our own people are not very educated...
...little water. But in recent decades, farmers have begun switching to more profitable irrigated crops, unwittingly creating an alluring new habitat for the vole. "Since the late 1980s we have seen occasional cycles in which large numbers of voles, drawn by these new food sources, have appeared in the northern part of Castilla-León," says biologist Juan José Luque, a rodent specialist at the University of Valladolid. "What's extraordinary this year is that, instead of declining over the winter, the population exploded...
...monument to imperial grandeur was Barlow's famous spider-like "train shed" - at 243 feet, still the biggest single span of cast ironwork in the world. Beneath it lies the concourse, supported by nearly 1,000 cast-iron pillars in a vast basement. Once used as a warehouse for Northern bitters to quench Victorian London's insatiable thirst for beer - each pillar is said to stand two ale barrels apart - this muscular 19th century vision will be complimented with a 21st century sleekness: shops, bars, restaurants, a farmers' market and the longest champagne bar in Europe...