GEOGRAPHY OF THE UPPER MEKONG. 
53 5 
As to whether, then, such schemes will pay becomes a question of 
some intricacy, and will depend chiefly on the population, which, 
whatever it may become in the future, is at present infinitesimal. 
f* Upper Mekong . — The phrase “ The Upper Mekong” is rather an 
elastic and uncertain one. If one looks at the whole length of the 
river, one may with propriety call anything north of 20° N. lat., or of 
the great Luang Prabang bend, the Upper Mekong. 
In Siam and Cambodia one may safely say that the Upper 
Mekong means the river above Nongkhai or Chi eng Kan, until, in 
fact, it leaves the hill country of the Lao States of Luang Prabang 
and Nan in 18° N. lat. ; the stretch below that point to lat. 14° or 
about the Khong cataracts being generally characterised as the 
Middle Mekong, and this, being the more usual, we will follow. 
Upper Course . — Of the course and character of the river from its 
apparent source in Tibet down to Chiamdo, where it is also known as 
Nam Chu, and is some 10,000 feet above the sea, and on again to the 
26th parallel, none of us can give as yet a very accurate account. 
It has been crossed by occasional travellers at Chiamdo and in 
Makham where the two great roads from Ta Chien Lu (18 stages away) 
and China cross it going westward into Tibet and to Lhasa (46 stages 
off). 
Kinshu . — In 29° N. lat. it will be seen by the map to be confined 
in a narrow gorge, with on the east the Kinshu, known in Tibet as the 
Di Chu, within 25 miles of it. This river becomes the Yangtze Kiang, 
and goes away east through the heart of China. 
Meh Ka . — On the west, again, hardly 30 miles away, the Giama 
Nu Chu drains in the same southerly direction; the latter, in the map 
lately published by the Koval Geographical Society, is identified with 
the Meh Kha (a very Siamese-looking name, by the way, like many in 
the Wa country), an important tributary of the Irrawady. 
Salween , — The Salween, which soon becomes the Mekong’s 
western neighbour, is cut off by recent authorities in a rather dis- 
appointing manner, for tradition and appearances used to give it a far 
more northerly source than lat. 27° 80', the highest point now allowed it. 
Mr. Colborne Eaber says that of the three rivers, Mekong, Salween, 
and Shwali, crossed by the Grosvenor Mission on the road from Tali 
through Yung Chang to Mornein, in Burmah, the Salween was in that 
parallel “ beyond question the largest.” 
The Salween, or Lu Kiang, as it is known up there, is in its way 
the most interesting, as it is by far the most mysterious, of the great 
rivers draining out of the south-eastern corner of the great Tibetan 
plateau. 
In a deep gorge among the mountains, with tributary streams few 
and far between, 2,000 feet below the level of the great neighbouring 
valleys, with above it peaks rising to 8,000 feet even in its lower 
courses, it is a scene of wild luxuriant desolation; its course full of 
rapids, and flanked by wooded heights, and its narrow bed the home of 
malarial poisons, which at- no time of the year seem to get quite dis- 
pelled either by sun, wind, or rain of Heaven, or even in the cold 
months, It is a very curious thing if that large volume of water, 
drained as we know it is from the narrowest and most confined of 
watersheds, has its source no further north than 27° 80'. 
