Land of nine dragons

Most accounts of contemporary Vietnam take the retrospective approach: veterans or correspondents return for the first time since the war and compare what they see today with memories of combat tours. They dwell on their own past history, telling us little of this ancient country and its people today. The objective of this book, however, is to take a much different look at Vietnam, to examine the nation more as a modern entity than as a chapter of American military history, to provide a vehicle for mutual understanding. What, indeed, is Vietnam today, this nation of roughly seventy million people, most of them ethnic Viets, but with a significant number of hilltribe minorities, among them the Black Thai, White Thai, Meo, Muong, and Hmong of the Northern Highlands? As the many photographs in this book so beautifully show, this small country covers an incredibly diverse landscape, ranging from tropical beaches and mangrove swamps to picture-postcard rice paddies and impenetrable rainforest. With one of Asia's least developed economies - yet with a historic architecture that rivals any in the East - Vietnam today is once again under intense foreign scrutiny, by entrepreneurs from Japan, Europe, and, lately, America. A nation of contradictions, Vietnam is a Communist state with a government under rising pressure to reform both its economic and basic human rights policy. In chapters organized geographically, beginning in Hanoi, working south toward Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), and ending in the Mekong Delta, the author and the photographer explore the country through firsthand encounters with Vietnamese of every sort, showing Vietnam in a 1990s context - the culture, the geography, the resources, the landscapes, and the people. They provide a perfect introduction for the traveler to a country now experiencing a resurgence of tourist and business interest.