Alexander|Khong Chiam, Ubon Ratchathani — the Mekong cast as the Hydaspes

The elephants were real. Stone took the production to Ubon Ratchathani, in Thailand's far northeast, to stage the Battle of the Hydaspes — the Indian campaign, the war elephants, the horse going down under Alexander in the last engagement he ever fought as a conqueror. The river he needed was the Jhelum in Pakistan. The river he used was the Mekong, shot in country that faces Laos across the water.

Khong Chiam is where that geography is easiest to stand in. The Mun River finishes its run across Isaan here and empties into the Mekong, and because the two carry different sediment they meet in two visible colours — brown against blue-green, a seam you can trace from the bank at Wat Khong Chiam. The far shore is Laos. In the dry season sandbars surface mid-channel wide enough to walk on, which is precisely the kind of ground an army crossing a monsoon river would have prayed for and rarely got.

Ubon is a long way from Bangkok and that is part of the point: a river valley with no Western skyline in it, jungle running to the water, and an elephant population with generations of working handlers behind it. When the shoot ended, props from the production stayed in the province and were later gathered into a small museum park devoted to the film, one of the odder legacies any Hollywood epic has left in Southeast Asia.

Get to the confluence early, before the tour boats start. The water goes past in two colours, silently, and it is not difficult to imagine what forty thousand exhausted men thought when they were told to cross it.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.