(Philip Taylor) (PDF 3.1MB) - ANU

100
PHILIP TAYLOR
Figure 1
Docks in District Five, principal
terminus jor the riverine trade
between H6 Chi Minh City and the
Mekong delta (all photographs by the
author)
IS Nguyn KMc Vien, "From one delta to
another," in idem, Southern Vietnam 197
1985 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing
House, 1977), pp.279-325.
16 Ibid., p.284.
17 Ibid., pp.288-307.
18 Ibid., p.303.
geology, hydrography and human ecology he had noticed between the
northern and southern deltas. IS Yet the author was quickly reminded of the
unity of these deltas' human history. He reported having found people
wanting to talk about the Tay Sdn rebels' eighteenth-century victory against
the Siamese invaders, the anti-colonial struggle, the anti-US war of resistance. 16
He had visited various "bases of our resistance": Ap B:k, Be'n Tre and the U
Minh forest]] In Be'n Tre he had met an indomitable heroine who reminded
him of another female revolutionary he was acquainted with in the North. He
described the various patriots and heroes of "resistance struggles against
foreign aggression" produced by the Mekong delta. He discussed the region's
history of economic exploitation by French colonialists and the Americans
and found that only since liberation had the region begun to achieve real
development by returning to the nation's "millenary tradition" of collective
work practices. He described people's joy at receiving a visitor from Hanoi.
"They peppered us with questions about the North, about Uncle HO. ,, 18
In a 1982 article, Trin Van Giau, influential historian and head of the Nam
B9 chapter of the Indochinese Communist Party during the colonial era,
evoked another post-war journey, perhaps an allusion to his own return
south after having spent the war years in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Giau observed that for one who had been away from the region for a period