History - Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Northern Thailand - page 981

Lan Xang, the Birth of Laos
As the power of Sukhothai grew, the ascendant Thais began to exert more pressure on the
Khmers. The Cambodian court looked around for an ally, and found one in Fa Ngum, an
exiled Lao prince who was being educated at Angkor.
King Jayavarman VIII married Fa Ngum to a Khmer princess and offered him an army
of more than 10,000 troops. He pushed north to wrest the middle Mekong from the control
of Sukhothai and its allied Lanna kingdom. By 1353 he declared himself king of Lan Xang
Hom Khao, meaning 'land of a million elephants and the white parasol'. This was really
the last hurrah of the declining Khmer empire and quite probably served only to weaken
Angkor and antagonise the Thais.
Within 20 years of its birth, Lan Xang had expanded eastward to pick off parts of a disin-
tegrating Champa and along the Annamite Mountains in Vietnam. Fa Ngum earned the
sobriquet 'The Conqueror' because of his constant preoccupation with warfare. Theravada
Buddhism became the state religion in Lan Xang when King Visounarat accepted the Pha
Bang, a gold Buddha image, from his Khmer sponsors.
THE LOST KINGDOM OF CHAMPA
The Hindu kingdom of Champa emerged around Vietnam's present-day Danang in the late 2nd century
AD. Like Funan, it adopted Sanskrit as a sacred language and borrowed heavily from Indian art and
culture. By the 8th century Champa had expanded southward to include what is now Nha Trang and
Phan Rang. The Cham were a bellicose bunch who conducted raids along the entire coast of Indochina,
and thus found themselves in a perpetual state of war with the Vietnamese to the north and the Khmers
to the south. Ultimately this cost them their kingdom, as they found themselves squeezed between two
great powers.