Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'laos'
Viewing articles tagged 'laos'
3 articles
The slave raids
From at least the eighteenth century until the French arrived, the highlands were a hunting ground for people. Highlanders were seized in raids, carried down to the markets of the Mekong and sold in Cambodia, Siam, Laos and the Vietnamese south. The trade shaped where villages stood and how they were built, it gave the lowland peoples their word...
The Trail and the poison
Two things came through the highlands during the American war that had nothing to do with us and fell on us anyway. One was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the network of roads and paths that carried North Vietnam’s war into the South along our western edge. The other was the herbicide the United States sprayed to strip the forest from the Trail and the...
Rubber
Coffee is the crop most people associate with the highlands, and we write about it in Land taken for coffee. Rubber is the older story. It came with the French, it was worked by people who died in large numbers doing it, and in our own time it has taken highland land in Vietnam and in Cambodia and Laos, where our kin live.
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