ABSTRACT
A whole series of smaller deltas, often built around rivers less than 100 miles long, dot the shore line of Central Viet-Nam: Thanh-Hoa, Ha-Tinh, Quang-Ngai, Binh-Dinh and Khanh-Hoa. It is rice-bearing deltas—that of the Mekong in the south and of the Red River in the north—which indeed are the "rice baskets" of the country. The "carrying pole" of those rice baskets is a series of mountain chains whose watershed roughly constitutes Viet-Nam's western border with Laos and Cambodia and is known as the Annamite Cordillera. Two other important ethnic minorities exist in Viet-Nam, and both live south of the 17th parallel: the Khmer and the Chinese. In South Viet-Nam, considerable state capital and French economic aid has gone into the opening of a coal mine at Nong-Son, which has a total yield of perhaps 3 million tons, while North Viet-Nam's coal fields could easily produce 3 million tons a year and have been producing 2.5 million tons all along.
