Indochina is not a country you can visit under that name today. It is an old European name for part of Southeast Asia. In the 1800s people used it loosely: it could cover Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, parts of Malaysia, and Laos. In the 1900s the meaning usually shrank to a political one — the lands France ruled there: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Those three were also called French Indochina. After they became independent, the name stayed in history books more than on new maps. The word was built to sound like India plus China, copying French Indochine. A Scottish poet and scholar, John Leyden, suggested the name in the early 1800s; the geographer Conrad Malte-Brun was among the first to print it.