38 Fun Facts About Mekong River

Into which sea does the Mekong empty through its delta, after crossing six countries?

The South China Sea receives it; illegal sand mining in the delta has deepened the riverbed and let seawater push farther inland.

What is the Mekong officially called in China?

Lancang is its official name in China, where a cascade of large dams now holds back the upper river.

On which high plateau does the Mekong rise?

The Tibetan Plateau is where it rises, and snowmelt from those heights supplies a big share of the lower river's flow in the dry season.

Which Mekong catfish, farmed in Vietnam and exported worldwide, is sold in US stores as swai?

Pangasius is sold cheaply as swai in the US and as panga in Europe, where its low price and mild taste made it a supermarket staple.

Which glowing lights are said to rise from the Mekong each October, at the end of the Buddhist rains retreat?

Naga fireballs are credited to the river serpent Naga; scientists have suggested flammable phosphine gas from the marshes, but no explanation has held up.

What does 'Mae Nam', the Thai and Lao prefix in the river's original name, mean?

Mother of Waters is the meaning, and because Khong itself meant 'river', the name Mekong says 'river' twice over.

What does the Vietnamese name Sông Cửu Long, used for the Mekong in its delta, mean?

Nine Dragons River refers to the nine mouths through which the delta's branches reach the sea.

Which two other great rivers run parallel to the Mekong through the gorges of Yunnan?

Yangtze and Salween run beside it for over 300 km, then part so widely that the Salween meets the Indian Ocean and the Yangtze reaches the sea at Shanghai.

Which three countries meet at the Golden Triangle tripoint where the Ruak joins the Mekong?

Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet here, though the Golden Triangle name first covered their whole mountainous border region before tourism pinned it to this confluence.

Which former royal capital, a UNESCO World Heritage town, stands where the Nam Khan river meets the Mekong?

Luang Prabang lost its crown when King Setthathirath moved the royal capital downriver to Vientiane, fearing Burmese attacks.

Which animal, first seen by scientists for sale as meat in a Mekong town market, turned out to be a living fossil?

Rock rat was the find: its family, the Diatomyidae, had been thought extinct for about 11 million years.

Which capital city stands on the Mekong at its junction with the Tonlé Sap?

Phnom Penh means 'Penh's hill', after a rich widow who, legend says, built a hilltop temple there to house Buddha statues.

What unusual thing happens to the Tonlé Sap river when the Mekong floods?

Its flow reverses each year, filling the great lake, and Cambodia's Water Festival boat races are held when the river turns back.

The ruins of which ancient Khmer capital lie just north of the Tonlé Sap, Southeast Asia's largest lake?

Angkor was sacked by the kingdom of Ayutthaya around 1431, and its most treasured artworks were carried off to the victors' capital.

Fa Ngum's Lao kingdom on the Mekong was named for a million of which animal?

Elephants: the name alluded to the king's military might, above all his army's countless war elephants.

Which river is the first and main distributary to branch off the Mekong, beginning its delta?

Bassac River: from Châu Đốc on its bank, Emperor Gia Long ordered the Vĩnh Tế Canal dug along the Cambodian border to guard the frontier.

In which Marguerite Duras novel does a French schoolgirl meet a wealthy Chinese man on a Mekong ferry?

The Lover drew on Duras's own teenage affair; after clashing with the director adapting it for film, she rewrote the story as a new book.

Which city, the Mekong Delta region's seat and economic centre, is famed for its floating markets?

Cần Thơ got a cable-stayed bridge in 2010 that replaced the ferries carrying National Route 1 across the river.

Where do the Khone Falls, the widest waterfall in the world, lie?

Southern Laos is where they block boat traffic between Cambodia and China, defeating repeated French attempts to take steamers upriver.

The Khone Falls area is known as Si Phan Don, meaning what?

The four thousand islands lie so low that many of them disappear underwater when the Mekong is in flood.

What did French colonists build after failing to get boats past the Khone Falls?

A railway across two islands let the French take specially built boats apart, haul the pieces on wagons and relaunch them upstream.

The first European known to have encountered the Mekong, in 1540, came from which country?

Portugal's António de Faria saw it first, yet even a European map of 1563 showed little of the river beyond its delta.

Which European nation's traders took a boat expedition up the Mekong as far as Vientiane in 1641?

Dutch trader Gerrit van Wuysthoff was received with honours, but his boats had to be unloaded and carried past waterfalls, so no trading post followed.

Vat Phou, the ruined Khmer temple on a mountainside near the Mekong in Champasak, was built for which Hindu god?

Shiva was believed to dwell on the mountain because its peak has a natural linga shape, and the ruins later became a Buddhist pilgrimage site.

Which future US Secretary of State commanded a Swift boat in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War?

John Kerry commanded Swift boats there, and when veterans disputed his war record in 2004, 'swiftboating' became a byword for an unfair political attack.

What was found in excavations at Oc Eo, in the ancient Funan culture of the delta?

Roman coins, or local copies, turned up there, including one of Antoninus Pius worn as a pendant; the port may be the Cattigara known to Roman merchants.

Which four countries founded the Mekong River Commission in 1995?

Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam signed it, bringing back Cambodia, which had left the older Mekong Committee while the Khmer Rouge ruled.

Which river basin is the only one with greater biodiversity than the Mekong's?

The Amazon is the only richer basin, yet as dams have gone up on the river, fishers have been landing smaller and fewer fish.

On average, how often were new species discovered in the Mekong region between 1997 and 2015?

Two a week on average, even as poachers killed Vietnam's last Javan rhino in 2010.

Which fish, caught in the Mekong in 2022, is the largest strictly freshwater fish ever documented?

A 300 kg giant stingray, nearly 4 m long, was documented, tagged and released; sturgeon grow bigger but spend part of their lives at sea.

How does the adult Mekong giant catfish differ from other big catfish in the river?

Almost no barbels or teeth: young fish have both, but lose them once they reach 30 to 50 cm.

Which freshwater cetacean, once common across the lower Mekong, now survives there mainly in a protected stretch of Cambodia's river?

Irrawaddy dolphin numbers there have begun to recover, rising past 100 by the mid-2020s.

Roughly how many tonnes of wild fish are landed from the Mekong basin each year?

2 million tonnes of wild fish are landed a year, but dams that stop fish migrating upstream to their spawning grounds put that catch at risk.

The Xayaburi Dam in Laos sells 95% of its power to which neighbour's electricity authority?

Thailand's EGAT buys about 95% of its output, and the dam went ahead even though the Mekong River Commission had spoken against it.

What happened to the Mekong near Chiang Saen in July 2019, during the wet season?

It fell to a century low; locals blamed the new Xayaburi Dam, whose operator replied that the run-of-river dam lets out whatever flows in.

The First Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge, opened in 1994, links Vientiane with which Thai city?

Nong Khai is joined to the Lao side by a bridge that Australia paid for as development aid.

Which mountain range, home to Cambodia's highest peak, borders the Tonlé Sap basin to the southwest?

Cardamom Mountains are so remote and forested that one of Southeast Asia's largest wild elephant populations still lives there.

A cable-stayed bridge over the Mekong's largest distributary opened in 2010, three years after what?

A deadly collapse during construction killed dozens of workers in 2007 and pushed the opening back from late 2008 to 2010.