Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Lao life in the Upper Mekong region, a principality significant enough to be a vassal state of
the great Siamese kingdom of Sukhothai.
Chao Fa Ngum and the advent of Buddhism
It wasn't until the legendary Lao warrior
Fa Ngum
swept down the Nam Ou with a Khmer
army in 1353 and captured Xieng Dong Xieng Thong that the town emerged as the heart of
a thriving, independent kingdom in its own right. Claiming the throne of his grandfather, Fa
Ngum founded the kingdom of
Lane Xang Hom Khao
- the Land of a Million Elephants
and the White Parasol - and established the line of kings that was to rule Laos for six centur-
ies.
With Fa Ngum came monks, artisans and learned men from the Khmer court and, according
to histories written a century and a half later, a legal code and Theravada Buddhism. Yet Fa
Ngum was still very much the fourteenth-century warrior. After his ministers grew weary
of his military campaigns and his rather uncivilized habit of taking his subject's wives and
daughters as concubines, he was exiled and replaced on the throne by his son, Oun Heuan,
during whose peaceful reign the city flourished.
The golden age and Burmese invasion
The sacking of the city in 1478 by the Vietnamese proved a catalyst for the ushering in of
the city's
golden age
: striking temples, including the
sim
of Wat Xieng Thong, were built,
epic poems composed and sacred texts copied. In 1512, King Visoun brought the
PhaBang
,
a sacred Buddha image, to Xieng Dong Xieng Thong, significant for the identity of the Lao
people and the city itself, and a sign that Theravada Buddhism was flourishing.
Wary of encroaching Burmese, King Setthathilat, Visoun's grandson, moved the capital to
Vientiane in 1563, leaving the Pha Bang behind and renaming the city after the revered
image. The Pha Bang may have been known for its protective properties, but they were
no match for the might of the Burmese, and Luang Prabang was engulfed by successive
Burmese invasions
, ushering in a period of chaos.
The Kingdom of Luang Prabang, Chinese raids and the French period
With the disintegration of Lane Xang at the turn of the eighteenth century,
Kingkitsalat
became the first king of an independent Luang Prabang. When
French explorers
Doudart
de Lagrée and Francis Garnier arrived in 1867, they found a busy market and port town of
wooden homes, a town that Garnier called “the most eminent Laotian centre in Indochina”.
With Luang Prabang firmly in Siam's orbit, the explorers' suggestion that the kingdom would
be better off French was scoffed at by King Oun Kham, but they were proved right two dec-
ades later when the Siamese left the town virtually undefended and the city was set ablaze
by a group of marauding
Haw
. During the siege, French vice-consul Auguste Pavie plucked
the ageing Lao king from his burning palace and brought him downriver to safety. From that
moment, the king offered tribute to France.
