Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'laos'
Viewing articles tagged 'laos'
3 articles
The slave raids
At Stung Treng in the last century of the trade a person from our highlands sold for three or four bars of silver. The Lao word for us, Kha, means servant or slave. The Frenchman who wrote both of those things down in 1898 added a third sentence about us that we reproduce here because of what it shows about the men who came to abolish the traffi...
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 web 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 crop...
Rubber
Coffee is the crop people associate with the highlands, and we write about it on Land taken for coffee. Rubber is the older story and the wider one. It came with the French, it was worked by people who died in great numbers doing it, and in our own time it has taken highland land on both sides of the border: from our villages in Gia Lai and Dak...
Powered by WBAMS