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Indochina
The mainland Southeast Asian peninsula, and a name under review
Indochina is the great peninsula hanging south from China between India and the South China Sea, holding Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, with peninsular Malaysia sometimes attached at the bottom. The name is a nineteenth-century European compound meaning the land between India and China, and that is precisely its problem: it describes a place by what lies on either side of it, and for much of the twentieth century French Indochina meant a colonial possession rather than a landform. Geographers and the region's own governments now mostly say Mainland Southeast Asia. The older word survives in travel writing and in histories of the wars, carrying its freight with it.
The peninsula's structure is a set of parallel mountain ranges and river valleys running roughly north to south, unspooled from the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Chao Phraya, the Mekong, and the Red River all begin in or near that highland knot and end in deltas that hold most of the population. The Mekong alone runs some 4,900 kilometers through six countries and feeds the largest inland fishery on earth. Hkakabo Razi, in far northern Myanmar, reaches 5,881 meters. The monsoon splits the year cleanly into wet and dry, tropical forest covers the uplands, and the deltas grow rice on a scale that feeds much of Asia.
Some 253 million people live here, speaking languages from four unrelated families, Tai, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Hmong-Mien, and following, across most of the region, Theravada Buddhism, while Vietnam looks instead to the Confucian and Mahayana tradition of China. That split runs deep: Vietnam spent a thousand years under Chinese rule, whereas Angkor, Pagan, and Ayutthaya built Indic-influenced empires to the west. France colonized Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Britain took Burma, and Siam alone stayed independent. The wars that followed decolonization, in Vietnam, in Laos, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, killed millions. Today Vietnam is a manufacturing power, Thailand an export and tourism economy, and Myanmar is at war with itself.