New Mandala

As China continues to have problems with its own internal ethnic tensions, some of those it faces in Burma are richly ironic, but the entire situation is becoming more complex and fraught by the day.
- Michael Sainsbury, “For China, Burma is thorny territory”, The Australian, 8 September 2009.  This old New Mandala picture provides some [...]

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Two are dead and twelve missing (presumed dead) due to a landslide caused by monsoonal weather at the Xiaowan dam on the Mekong in Yunnan. Thanks to a reader for passing this on.

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In November 2007, Roger Casas sent in a report on the dedication of a new central temple outside of Jing Hong in Sipsongpanna.  Roger introduced this temple and its dedication as something of a compromise between the desires of the local government to develop its “tourist industrial complex” and the desires of the local Sangha to [...]

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I am delighted to announce the publication of Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Southeast Asia. It has been published by National University of Singapore Press,  NIAS Press, and University of Hawaii Press. The book is the result of research collaboration that has been going here at the Australian National University over the past six or so years. It features [...]

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Regular readers will recall that in recent weeks I have pointed out some of the interesting parts of Burma and Thailand that are visible on satellite images.  Today I have been scouting around for other places of interest and decided that a short tour of the towns of Ruili and Muse would be appropriate.
From high [...]

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Thanks to Leedom Lefferts for this image from a traffic circle just to the south of Jinghong.

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Sometimes I’m afraid that we might focus too much on doom and gloom, and cut and thrust, here on New Mandala.  But no matter how much we devote ourselves to issues in mainland Southeast Asia we all still need to eat.  And on a day when Gordon Brown is telling those of us in Britain to stop wasting food it seems [...]

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[One fascinating aspect of the latest wave of commercialization in the borderlands of China and southeast Asia is the dramatic revival in popularity of Yunnan's Puer tea. Jinghong Zhang is a PhD student at the Australian National University who is studying the production, marketing and consumption of Puer tea. She has provided this brief report [...]

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A chinese boat unloading apples in Chiang Saen in 1994

Timothy Hamlin of the Stimson Center has written this update on commercial navigation on the upper-Mekong.  It seems that the environmentally dubious project of blasting the Mekong rapids between southern China and northern Thailand is now all but complete, making the way for a greater influx [...]

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A scientific team, consisting of members of the Gibbon Conservation Alliance based at Zurich University and the Kunming Institute of Zoology, as well as staff members of the Nangunhe National Nature Reserve, carried out a survey in all Chinese forests reported to support white-handed gibbons (Hylobates lar) during the last 20 years.
The species was last [...]

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