While the two previous chapters have pointed to Laosmall-scale traders’ highly mobile, strategic, andintentional ways of acting out largerrepresentations and realities of land-linkednessthrough different embodiments of smallness (inconspicuouslyblending in with landscapes of transnational Tai Lueethnicity or self-ironically deriding their nationalunderdevelopment and inferiority), this chapterspatially fixes those mobile practices in the localcontext of marketplaces in northern Laos. Zooming infrom frequent cross-border trade fair trips andtransnational commodity flows to concrete physicallocations, I will examine the marketplaces of LuangNamtha and Muang Sing towns (both in Luang Namthaprovince) as central nodes of an overall localcondition of everyday lived transnationalconnectedness—and consequently as sites of a certainvariety of cosmopolitanism where transnationalcommodity flows and trade intermediaries, vendors,customers, and travellers from multi-ethnic andmulti-national backgrounds intersect andinteract.

Parallel to the seemingly antithetic “peripheralcentrality” (Brown 2018) of Laos in general,nationally rather remote but regionally interlinked,Luang Namtha province is central to theYunnan–Laos–Thailand borderland economy. It is inLuang Namtha where the cross-border mobilities ofChinese trade fair attendees and traders of Thaifruits converge. This is best illustrated by Amnuay,my key informant in Luang Namtha, who in factcentrally facilitated my research by providingessential contacts that linked together these twocross-border trade activities. To put it bluntly,the reader would not have enjoyed the previouschapters if I had not met Amnuay—first in Jinghong,then in Luang Namtha.