Frontier. The word immediately conjures up rustic scenes from America’s wild west, the heady gold rush days (1849) in California, the driving of the golden spike that marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States.

The word also conjures up images of an untamed landscape ready to be conquered, usually a woodsy panorama that’s no more than sparsely populated. Quick to recognise the universal popularity of the recounting of such human drama - namely the clash of civilisation with the uncivilised world - Hollywood’s movie moguls, beginning with silent movies, have reproduced each event.

The real thing, if you have a taste for it, is now transpiring in the vast quadrangle area surrounding the junction of the Lao-Burmese border (which follows the Mekong River for 236 kilometres), and is made all the more interesting because Laos and Burma share adjacent borders with southern China and Thailand.

This is the region where "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell built the Burma Road to supply Chiang Kai-shek’s forces as they fought the Japanese in the 1940s, where a decade later HoChi Minh’s troops defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu (1954), and a decade after that the Chinese began building a road into the Land of a Million Elephants (Laos) but were ultimately asked to withdraw, the lowland Lao revolutionaries inhibiting Vientiane, the capital, being fearful of insurgency - the northern Lao and certain Yunnan tribes share ethnicity.

The Japanese lost in Burma largely due to unyielding terrain coupled with torrential monsoons. Similar inhospitable topography provided natural camouflage for the intransigent Vietnamese. The mainland Chinese, always looking for an overland route (even in circuitous one) to the Indian Ocean, temporarily gave up when push came to shove between socialist brothers. (There were 16,000 Chinese road workers in Laos through out the so-called "secret" war.)

Into this near-historical abyss comes William A White, the 64-year-old retired chairman of McCann-Erickson Thailand who has just paid his first call on Laos since 1968. A veteran of the Korean War, White pioneered the McCann-Erickson office in Bangkok thirty years ago with US$10,000 and a power-of-attorney. He has been brought back to the battlefield of advertising - McCann-Erickson Worldwide is the largest advertising agency in the world to open offices in Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma and Laos.

A seasoned practitioner with 37 years experience in Asia, White is not intimidated by the obstacles. Said White: "McCann-Erikson has scheduled expanding into Laos. Our competition thinks we are insane. But every few million people add up and the total for Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia (where we opened in January this year) and Vietnam comes to around 180 million. Our clients, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Gillette, etc., tend to agree with us" that expanding throughout the region is worthwhile.

With his acclaimed academic eyes trained on Laos, the surrounding region, and the roads being built inside Laos, the length of the country from Cambodia to China and the width of the country from Cambodia to Burma, Dr Grant Evans, an Australian professor with considerable Lao fluency at the University of Hong Kong, said: "From the point of view of the Laotian government the more roads you build, the more you can integrate the country. In Laos, roading building is state building."

Yet he is quick to add that the Lao have an inborn distrust for their powerful neighbours, a legitimate historical apprehension which tends to brake development. Despite this studious interpretation, M R Pridiyathorn Devakula, the president of the Export-Import Bank of Thailand, said during an interview: "Laos is abundant in natural resources for energy generation so they should be put to good use. Laos energy-generating potential outshines that of other Indochina countries". In fact, claimed an attention-grabbing headline, "Electric generating potential makes Laos (the) region’s Kuwait".

Kuwait? Really? Perhaps! Undoubtedly the most meaningful view of Laos, the one with the fullest potential, is the long view. This is particularly meaningful when Laos is viewed from the Chinese side of its northern border, the steep-walled upper Mekong valley being one of several thresholds under the "open-door" policy expounded by Deng Xiaoping in the early eighties to encourage trade with foreign countries. It is precisely in this region that some US$1 billion is estimated to be in circulation today.

With modest but strategic portions of both countries (Laos and Burma) sharing a common border -small cargo boats now ply the Mekong between Yunnan’s Jinghong and northern Thailand’s Chiang Khong, and a new ring road is transforming a series of dirt tracks connecting Burma, China, Laos and Thailand, making it possible to drive the 1,300 kilometres between Kunming and Bangkok by 1996 - it is precisely this area that is a part of the emerging four-nation Golden growth Quadrangle, so-named because the boundaries of these four nations (Burma, China, Laos and Thailand) collide in roughly the same mountainous area.

The myth of the aura of the wild west on this four-country frontier is not a myth at all: it is fact. However, with the exception of western multinationals that are desperately needed for infrastructure and natural resources development, the lone commercial traders who actually stand a chance of succeeding are indigenous (local) ones: not those from far-away Hong Kong or Singapore, cities that were originally energised by western business customs and trade.

Making difficult matters worse, the Quadrangle’s cultural component it delicately balanced between seven lineages: Vietnamese, Chinese, Tai, Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burman, Karen and Hmong-Yao. A 1932 remark by Hemingway might provide insight here: "Remember the race is older than the economic system".

Last, it is worth remembering that the idea of the Golden Quadrangle was invented by American consultant Stan Matthew. He has recently proposed a China-India rail link that would cross Burma (at Myitkyina) as it runs from Yunnan’s Kunming to Dibrugarh in India’s Assam state. China and India have just signed a trade protocol worth US$3 billion.