Moreover, Vietnam was of major interest to me as a geographer because its great rice growing area in the Red River lowland is a classic example of the intensive agriculture of East Asia and because the country illustrates on a smaller scale the problems and difficulties China faced five or six years ago.

I boarded the train at Nanning at the uncomfortable hour of half past three in the morning and woke to find the train winding south through a sunlit landscape of tawny grass and low scrub, stippled with small villages and patches of cropland and broken by massive grey crags of limestone. At 10 a.m. I was on the southern frontier of China, changed trains, for there is a break of gauge at the frontier, and shortly after reached Langson, the first station in Vietnam.

A background of shrilling cicadas, of banana fronds, and tiny rice fields; on the platform slender dark-eyed children selling fruit and sugar cane; smart Polish and Indian officers and Canadian observers of the United Nation Control Commission; a small group of Russian technicians and their families; Vietnamese students returning from Peking and Moscow; in the distance a burnt out building and the ruins of a French pillbox . . .

All these things suggested the character and problems of life in Vietnam—its tropical climate and gentle peoples; its recent emergence from a bitter colonial war; its partition at the end of this war; the international supervision of the armistice by United Nations observers; the reconstruction of the country carried through with the help of technicians and funds from the Sino-Soviet block.