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beaten track, some of these war relics are easily accessible. Another place worth stopping
at to explore the surrounding area is the rebuilt market town of Xepon , which, along with
neighbouring towns, is populated predominantly by Phu Tai people, a lowland Lao group.
Muang Phin
You'll know you've reached MUANGPHIN , roughly 160km east of Savannakhet, when you
spot the massive Vietnamese-Lao friendship monument. The golden rendering of a Pathet
Lao and North Vietnamese soldier dwarfs the town, whose run-down appearance attests to
Muang Phin's unfortunate position on one of the fronts during the war.
VIETNAMESE INFLUENCE
Ties between Muang Phin and Vietnam go back a long way. During much of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, the area's Phu Tai inhabitants paid tribute to the court in Hué.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Vietnamese rulers, having just wrapped up a
war with Siam, were content to exact a light tribute of wax and elephant tusks from the
Phu Tai, preferring to leave the Tai minority's territory as a loose buffer zone between re-
gional powers. By this point, Vietnamese merchants, following the traditional trading route
across the Lao Bao pass, were already arriving in Muang Phin with cooking pans, iron,
salt and fish sauce, and returning east with cows and water buffaloes in tow. A story told
by an early French visitor to the town attests to the business acumen of one of these mer-
chants. Upon arriving in town, the merchant found prices too high, but was reluctant to
return home without making a good profit. With a quick conversion to Buddhism the mer-
chant's problem was solved: he shaved his head and shacked up in the local temple where
he could defray his expenses until prices dropped, at which point the merchant donned a
wig, bought up a few buffalo and hightailed it back to Hué.
Xepon
A ramshackle village in the foothills of the Annamite Mountains, 40km from the Vietnamese
border, XEPON is a handy stopover en route to Vietnam or Savannakhet. It's such a small
town that even the market fails to generate much of a buzz. The original town of Xepon was
destroyed during the war - along with every house of the district's two hundred villages -
and was later rebuilt here 6km west of its original location, on the opposite bank of the Xe
Banghiang river. The old city (written as “Tchepone” on some old maps) had been captured
by communist forces in 1960 and became an important outpost on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As
such, it was the target of a joint South Vietnamese and American invasion in 1971 (see Oper-
ation Lam Son 719 ) , aimed at disrupting the flow of troops and supplies headed for commun-
ist forces in South Vietnam.
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