Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2019, this scholarly study examines the Mekong Delta plains during the eighteenth century — territory long known in Khmer history as the Lower Mekong / Khmer Krom region before it came under Nguyen Vietnamese control. Per the publisher's own description, the book draws on Vietnamese and Chinese sources to show "the ways in which two leading statesmen mobilized literature to effect the transformation of the frontier region," at a time when multiple migratory groups with competing political ambitions — including Khmer, Vietnamese, and Chinese settler communities — converged on the delta. Author Claudine Ang is a historian specializing in early modern Southeast Asia. Because the book treats the Mekong Delta as a genuinely cross-border frontier rather than a purely Vietnamese story, it is directly relevant to Cambodian history: this delta region is the same territory Khmer sources call Kampuchea Krom, and the book's account of how literature and statecraft were used to remake the frontier speaks to the deeper, contested history of Cambodia's southern borderlands.