Indochina

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Indochina 1886

Dark green: always included, Light green: usually included, Red: sometimes included

Indochina, or the Indochinese Peninsula, is a region in Southeast Asia. It lies roughly east of India, south of China. The name has its origins in the French, Indochine, and was adopted when French colonizers in Vietnam began expanding their territory to bordering countries.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Historical context

Historically, the countries of Mainland Southeast Asia received cultural influence from China and India, but to varying degrees. Some Southeast Asian cultures, such as that of Cambodia, Laos, Burma and Thailand are influenced mainly by the culture of India with a smaller influence from the culture of China. Others, such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, received a much larger influence from China, with only minor cultural influences from India, largely via the Champa civilization that Vietnam conquered during its southward expansion.

Today, most of these countries also show pronounced Western cultural influences which began during the period of Western colonialism in Southeast Asia.

A reflection of this varying influence is in the use of chopsticks and Chinese characters, emblematic of the Sinosphere, versus hands and India scripts, versus spoons and forks and Latin script. Chopsticks are used in Vietnam while chopsticks are not traditionally used in Thailand (only being used for noodle dishes today), which instead traditionally uses hands for eating, until Westernization in the 1930s led to the use of spoon and fork. Similarly, Chinese characters used to be used in Vietnam, but have been replaced by Latin characters, while Burma and Thailand use their own writing system, derived from India.

In a strict sense, Indochina comprises the territory of the former French Indochina: