Abstract: The Lancang (upper-Mekong) River originates in the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau of China and flows through China’s Tibet Autonomous Region and Yunnan Province for over 2100 kilometers before reaching the Chinese border. After leaving China, it passes through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam countries. The whole length of the Lancang-Mekong River is over 4800 km and the drainage area of it is about 811, 000 km2. As a transboundary river as well as the 7th biggest river in Asia, the Lancang-Mekong River becomes the most important international river in Southeast Asia. In addition, with a variety of geomorghological and climate features, the Lancang-Mekong River Basin has all kinds of ecosystems in northern hemisphere except desert and marine, and a world-class gene pool, making it irreplaceable in the world. Since the international economic cooperation launched in Great Mekong Subregion in 1990s, Lancang River basin (upstream of Mekong River) has received wide attention from the international community. Human settlement issues in the Lancang River are crucial to China as more than 10 million people live in Lancang River Basin of China. With human settlement as the research contents, this paper has systematically built an evaluation index system on the basis of clarifying the concept of human settlement and establishing an analytical framework. Besides, this paper has estimated the Spatio-temporal evolution trends of human settlement of 56 counties (autonomous regions or municipalities) in Lancang River Basin from 2000 to 2009 using factor analysis and Arcgis spatial analysis. Conclusions are as follows: 1) From the point of view of spatial patterns, suitability ranking of human settlement in Lancang River Basin decreases pregressively from south to north; from the perspective of temporal evolution, the suitability of human settlement in Lancang River Basin from 2000 to 2009 was getting worse on the whole; 2) Over the past decade, the importance of infrastructure in human settlemnet has been surpassed by economic development factors such as GDP Per Capita (GDPPC) and the Proportion of the Tertiary Industry(PTI); At last, several policy recommendations, for example, vigorously developing the economy, enhancing the proportion of tertiary industry and further improving the infrastructure in Lancang River Basin have been given in the paper.

Key words: Man-Land relationship, Human settlement, Lancang River Basin, Spatio-Temporal evolution