SE Asia Part 1 of 3

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]hello geographers and welcome to southeast asia we'll be dealing with the region pretty much everything south of china east of india and then just half of the island of new guinea it's a pretty diverse area we're going to be looking at areas that are mountainous as we get in through the continent but also some mountainous areas in indonesia the islands lend themselves to separating cultural groups and kind of developing unique cultural patterns though we will see some cultural groups that cover a large area even within those we'll see lots of diversity so this this fragmentation creates isolation so we end up with different groups developing and sometimes we're developing animosities to each other so unfortunately one of the themes throughout southeast asia will be separatist movements and at one time in myanmar although on this map it says burma there was over a dozen different groups fighting with each other to some extent over control of regions within the country now if we look at this it seems to you can see the ethnic diversity in the continental aspect of southeast asia but if we look at countries like myanmar which extends down the peninsula and thailand which extends down the peninsula you've got different groups within each one of these countries and even at that there's subgroups of these even more so are subgroups within this indonesian ethnic group where there's quite a diversity between the filipinos and the indonesians but even within the indonesian groups you've got some that are traditional practices of islam some that are more modern practices of islam and then with even other religious religious groups kind of thrown in here as well the tropical issues some of these i've already mentioned especially the poor soils the tropical rainforest soils are notorious for the nutrients being leached out and so their the slash and burn agriculture the shifting agriculture i mentioned before is very common here so we see lots of deforestation when it comes to agricultural uses there's some volcanic soils which helps soils in some of the areas but still the we're losing more forest than we're replacing it with because of the agricultural demands and also lumber as an agricultural product because the woods here in the tropics are referred to as hardwoods and so they're very durable very expensive and they they bring a lot of money relatively into the area so there's lots of old growth forests that are being cleared just simply for the lumber demands themselves also common in southeast asian is southeast asia's plantation agriculture coffee is one of the main products that comes out of this area the java c for pete's sake the island of java java is a nickname for coffee sulawesi for those of you who are coffee snobs or sorry who people who appreciate the different varieties of coffee you'll recognize that sulawesi sumatra those are islands in southeast asia that are big coffee producers now personally my favorite type of coffee is the sumatra i love that really earthy flavor to it it's not bitter it's got a good mouth feel to it and so this is when i'm buying my coffee if if i have a choice it's the sumatra just like i know too much about alcohol production in california i know too much about coffee as well there's one that's slightly better than the sumatran and that's the new guinea peaberry and the peaberry is a coffee bean where you have a single bean in the coffee seed as opposed to multiple beans it gives more flavor concentration there there's your coffee update here we can see how much forest has been lost and i've been trying to find an updated one because it's been much more extensive in borneo than it has been in the past and here areas that have been deforested for commercial agricultural uses what this white stuff you're seeing these are sediments so the the fields drain to this corner and so this is as the rains carry the top soil down here some of those sediments are building up down in through here so just even in commercial agriculture there's an extensive loss of soil as well from the rains don't forget with coffee i mean sorry with plantation agriculture these are cash crops these are not really making profits for the local farmers in the most cases this is these are run by corporations or by large land owners and they're the ones that are making substantial profits there are efforts underway you may have heard of fair trade coffee there's other groups starbucks i know they get a lot of backlash but they try and work with producers where the money does go to the locals and for coffee it's really labor intensive you the beans ripen at a different rate i know i said seeds earlier i apologize they ripen at different rates on the branches and so you can't just take everything off all at once like you can for grapes and so you can only pick the dark ones and that's the only way to do that is by hand tourism is another big industry it's a relatively cheap destination once you're there for expenses wages are low also for europeans it's a big destination because it's it's a cheap flights you can get to with there are cheap flights that you can go from europe to indonesia we'll see this later when we talk about the tsunami that a lot of europeans were killed because they were on holiday in southeast asia when it occurred in 2004. and in the upright you see people writing elephant don't ever do that that's really cruel to the elephant i've had opportunities to write elephants multiple times and i always refuse to do it because it's not a good life for the elephant that's not what they were trained or brought up to be oil is their other major resource and the oil fields in the south china sea but also kind of as you get into around the malay peninsula and these are big oil producers indonesia is the biggest simply because they have the most territory but brunei which didn't even get labeled on this map this little spec right here that's 99 of the revenue is from oil this is a phenomenal resource in this area there's two conflicts going on though one i'll talk about when i talk about china that china is making claims down to this portion of the south china sea and you'll notice that the only portion of china that shows up on the map is this little spec up here and yet china is claiming territories down into here and so the rest of the world is is seeing as as it as a absurd as it sounds but there's conflicts related to the western oil companies some of these oil companies are coming in and they're using the local military and government to remove villages other obstructions so they can build their pipelines and develop their infrastructure the governments are just seeing the oil as a source of revenue and what they would consider the least powerful in society those living in the rural villages as almost expendable in order to bring in some of the oil money there's oops we'll get back to that in a second well i might as well get to an action going what the hell am i doing the sex trade is also unfortunately a tourist access aspect of this area but please note that the us government does track individuals who travel to this area and if they are suspected of engaging in ill acts that would be considered illegal in the united states they could be arrested upon return to the united states for violating those laws back to the oil um in myanmar the unicow had used the government to clear some to clear some territory for the pipeline to go through and they were accused of human rights abuses they were sued by some of the locals in myanmar but they were sued in u.s court now there's a weird law that if an american company does abuses abroad and this goes back to the 1800s that you can sue in american courts for um to you can sue against the companies in american courts well unicow was saying no no that wasn't us that wasn't unit count that was unical myanmar which is a totally different company we don't do anything with that and the courts recognize that that was absurd unical set up a new company called unical myanmar the profits from unical myanmar went to unical the oil went from unicow myanmar to unicow and so this was kind of put some of the companies on notice when they were doing businesses business abroad that they could be sued and lose also chevron while this was going on did the opposite when they were in new guinea they said they were going to come and build roads and help the locals but they did that first and then they developed the oil industry so chevron has a much better reputation in the area than unical does now myanmar mentioned a couple times you'll see it on like the earlier map it said burma on this one it has burma in parentheses sometimes you'll see burma with myanmar in parentheses well there was a coup in me in burma in 1989 it wasn't recognized by the british and in many western powers such as the united states as being a legitimate overthrow of the government and so those countries refused to recognize what burma renamed itself to myanmar and it's just silly because for pete's sake it's it's been a few decades of calling it myanmar you think finally somebody would go yeah you're right it's no longer burma but the bbc which is the british broadcasting company anytime they talk about this country they call it burma and bbc is a state-controlled media outlet and so they get to tell the media what to call these countries the when i mentioned this before about the civil wars unrest the different groups fighting against each other in myanmar there wasn't 20 groups fighting against 19 other groups all at once this had waxed and waned with where the conflict was going you got to imagine that that level of unrest is going to cause issues with economic development so other than oil and tourism there's not a lot of other things going on in the myanmar government so we kind of see this consistent unrest within myanmar and it from any given year we may have yangoon being a very popular tourism destination to stay the hell away from there because there's a police crackdown going on and it literally will fluctuate from from one year to the next as to whether it's safe to go or not to go now thailand used to be known as siam was a relatively cohesive government for a long period of time so the king of siam ruled over this large area and it was a buffer state between the french colonial holdings in french indochina and the british colonial holdings to the west and so the british and the french just kind of left it alone because it was a way for them not to fight with each other over colonial holdings well i put one stable because since they got their they're in their their full constitution in the 1930s they've had i believe it's literally 30 different constitutions the most written by military and civilian leaderships that come to power they've maintained the king this whole time but we have different provisional governments and new governments that come in and rewrite the constitution so it's it's almost been in an ongoing state of flux the latest one was in 2014 where the military took over there's a military leader as the prime minister they rewrote the constitution then but they've still maintained the king in power i'll come back to a little bit about that in a second what the results of that are there's separatist movements throughout both in the mountainous areas and down the melee peninsula which is slowed economic development none have been really brutal and to the level of a full-scale war yet but it's just kind of simmering there in the background tourism is big phuket which is one of the main beach areas on the melee peninsula was one of the areas that was hit by the tsunami and of course oil i mentioned that which is bringing in profits don't ride elephants now phuket always be careful when you pronounce this city name this is a big european destination look at all the tourists these are europeans on the beach some of these beaches are not for local usage which is always amazing to me that you travel to another part of the world and want to go to the local beach and there won't be any locals there and again catering to western desires for kfc and mcdonald's now what's happened recently in thailand and as of i say this in october of 2020 the protests have been getting larger and larger against the government and you'll see sometimes a symbol of somebody holding up three fingers and they want three things they want dan to find his notes that he set down somewhere hold on got him it's they want three things they want resign they want the prime minister to resign the one who came to power in the military coup they want the rewrite of the constitution that was written by the military in 2014 and they want reform in government they want the monarchy under the constitution they want more accountability within the government and so this is on top of the covet 19 pandemic so there's the austerity programs that are associated with that so at this point it hasn't gotten incredibly violent but i'm always hedging my bets because you never know what's going to happen all right in the next segment we'll go on to what is now vietnam thank you