There's something magical about this place:
Mountains, rivers, climate, space;
The smile on a passing face.

A time preserved by cowries buried;
From ancient Maldives to Kunming ferried;
More numerous now than later pennies.

Three nights before and after full moon;
Harvested en-masse in 'Western Ocean' blue;
In sands, by feet of women, sought true.

Then voyaged as cheap ballast to Bengal,
Carried off by the crore,
Brokers charging but a little more.

And up through Burma,
Our mysterious neighbour:
Drug armies, weapons markets, favour!

Part of the southern Silk Road,
Now nought but a distant ode,
Links cut, and trade pushed further below.

Centuries' traders: came and gone,
Such as late families of Tengchong,
Chinese of jade, ivory and opium fond.

But ancient caravans arrived;
After poisonous-vapour jungle time,
Sought shelter, feed and solace from grime.

They must have met with greatest danger,
Moving through wilds with tigers untamed:
Then nought to act as lingua franca?

But some made good: the shells are proof.
And in revelry, profligacy did tune its lute.
Bronze drum figures dance not for repute.

And that carousal continues here today,
The same lakes, stars and carefree play,
We join in simple pleasures, night and day.

There's something magical about this place:
Mountains, rivers, climate, space;
The smile on a passing face.

But what of southeast,
Pragmatic watercraft aesthetes,
Red River delta Austronesian treat.

For some say it was here,
Where karst isles drop as tears,
That multihull vessels first steered.

Perhaps humanity's greatest journey,
Reversing hulls, identical prow-sterns adjourning,
Generations of hearts, exploration yearning.

Austronesian Lapita culture genes,
On pottery, taro, dog and chicken leaned;
Wood and textile arts with Yunnan correlating.

But Vietnam was invaded,
A Sino-centric endemic cultural erasure,
Leaving Red River with but square-rigged China-junks for navigation.

There's something magical about this place:
Mountains, rivers, climate, space;
The smile on a passing face.

And all about periphery,
A distinctly pervasive subcontinental legacy,
Through writ, thought and ceremony.

Vietnam's pre-Sinification Chams,
Whose great Hindu monuments cross the land,
And whose harbours saw even Roman merchants gander.

Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma;
These competing for an Indian heritage further,
Yet each with un-Buddhist histories of mass murder.

There's something magical about this place:
Mountains, rivers, climate, space;
The smile on a passing face.

And before so much as new world crops,
Chilli, corn, tomato, potato still not;
What did the people here commit to pot?

One old cookbook of Mongol era,
Records saucey recipes of contemporary fervour,
And baklava: a honeyed sweet of Turkic veneer.

The humble fern of bracken green,
Wrought first from snow in Spring up here,
Ancient and culinarily pervasive even for lower peoples.

There were of course back then more beasts,
Monkey, elephant, tiger and turtle meats,
Populations now all but totally extinct.

There's something magical about this place:
Mountains, rivers, climate, space;
The smile on a passing face.

Our neighbour Tibet's story part unwrit,
Pre-Buddhist Bon stone megaliths,
Confluence of great river-valley trips.

For pathways of old were rivers true,
Without manual labour the jungle grew,
Mountains paths exhausting caravan crew.

Thus in strange geographic nexus many met,
Within which a feudal balance did beget,
And the lightest burden, ideas, could collect.

True once I saw them at the beach,
Which this Tibetan family by train had reached,
Selling trinkets and meditating the ocean's vast degree.

There's something magical about this place:
Mountains, rivers, climate, space;
The smile on a passing face.

Ancient Shu kingdom of Sichuan rich,
Metallurgist idols and cryptic worship,
Destroyed by the Han but for burial pits.

Their tree-worship and lacquerware carried south,
As survivors fled through mountain paths,
Fording gold-sanded rivers toward plateaux of karst.

Northeast the mountain alliances of Guizhou,
From which also many rivers flow,
Tearing out to plains below.

Long did they resist China's taxing yoke:
Whose own name today, some academics have spoke,
May derive in fact from Indian visitors to Yelang's folk.

There's something magical about this place:
Mountains, rivers, climate, space;
The smile on a passing face.

... as a fellow Aussie (OP is Melbourne Uni), in the nominally surveilled China, making robots. I still appreciate nature and time. Modernity is pretty passe. As Alan Kay said: Whatever's going on right now is just crap, by definition [...] it's gotten mundane, and part of it is just the bell curve of normality in humans. Whatever it is, it gets converted to something like normal. Study history.