Which brings us to the curious case of the Indochina railway and its Kiwi benefactor.
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The Vietnam War was starting and the Americans needed proxies to counter the communists in Indochina.
After the war, Joyeuse served with the French army in Indochina as a medic.
Elsewhere in Vietnam, Ha Giang is the final frontier for motorbiking aficionados in Indochina.
So, from 1975 to 1980, America let in almost half a million people from Indochina.
In January 1973, he announced an accord with North Viet Nam to end American involvement in Indochina.
They're just doing it in a different way, and they're in Indochina as much as they were before.
As chequered as his record is, he is the only leader in Indochina to permit multi-party elections of any sort.
It was in French Indochina that Gen Bigeard began to make his name as a commander in a Paratroop regiment.
Asia had been ravaged by war - atomic bombs fell over Hiroshima, succeeding armies marched across the Philippines, guerrillas fought over Indochina.
She noted that in the 1970s and 1980s Hong Kong accepted refugees from Indochina, a humanitarian gesture not widely practiced around Asia.
This is already a worry, for example, on Mount Fansipan, Indochina's highest peak, where uncontrolled tourism is degrading the top of the mountain.
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Until the war in Indochina, the Hmong were a small, isolated community of farmers living in the highlands of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
In July 1941 the U.S. government issued an ultimatum to Japan: withdraw from Indochina or the U.S. would impose an oil embargo on Japan.
In the mid-1950s the Communists ran the French out of what was then called Indochina, setting the stage for our involvement and the Vietnam War.
Apart from the nuclear confrontation with the Soviets, there was an intense covert war, from back alleys in Europe to the Congo, Indochina to Latin America.
Mr Hun Sen is said to be obsessed with Cambodia's ancient Khmer kingdom, which built the awesome Angkor Wat complex and once ruled much of Indochina.
No final decision was then made until September, when Mr Le Drian announced that Gen Bigeard would finally be buried in the Indochina memorial in Frejus.
Set in the early 1950s, when Vietminh fighters were driving colonialist France out of Indochina, the book was framed as a political thriller plus a murder mystery.
China, Hong Kong, Indochina and India are also important targets.
Some are dilapidated but others have been spectacularly restored, including the former Bank of Indochina building, which now houses a fine-dining restaurant with an excellent view across the square.
Maj Malins was a veteran of both Burma and Dunkirk and he also won the Military Cross for leading a mission in French Indochina after the war had ended.
Arms that once fuelled the wars in Indochina, he says, now have nowhere else to go, except in the hands of willing buyers in those societies with unsolved ethnic conflicts.
Ms Le's boss at Indochina Capital, Tung Kim Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American, reckons there is a bigger wave to come as older exiles return to spend their final years back in their homeland.
Places like Laos, whose territory is still littered with munitions from the hot wars in Indochina, will have difficulty meeting the five-year target for clearing up unexploded ordnance, let alone finding money to pay for it.
Presumably this means the alliance might set off to keep the peace in the Caucasus or rescue hostages in North Africa, but it will not be dragged off to fight wars in South America or Indochina.
It was formally in occupation in West Germany and Japan, and it was the de facto power in a variety of places from Dutch Indonesia to the Belgian Congo, from most of Latin America to much of Indochina.
But there was method to my madness because by the next dry season, the fate of the Cardamoms, the last great wilderness left in Indochina, may already be decided, before almost anyone from the outside world gets a look at it.
However, Bao Viet, Vietnam's largest insurance company, which was privatized in May, is expected to list on a main exchange soon and is worth watching, says Indochina Capital's Chief Executive Peter Ryder, who manages the Indochina Capital Vietnam Holdings fund, a London-traded closed-end.
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