Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Brief history
The
early history
of the far south remains a hot topic of debate among archeologists. Al-
though the ruins of an ancient city buried near Champasak (and not far from Wat Phou) in-
dicate that the area was the centre of a thriving civilization as early as the fifth century, no
one seems sure if the town was part of
Champa
, a Hinduized kingdom that ruled parts of
central Vietnam for more than fourteen centuries, or the
Chenla
kingdom, which is thought
to have been located near the Mekong river in present-day northern Cambodia, extending
through what is now southern Laos. The
Khmer
were the first people to leave a clear im-
print on the area, and the temple ruins that survive throughout the far south along the Mekong
river suggest the region was an important part of the Khmer empire from the eighth to the
twelfth century, when the Angkor empire was at its height. It is also thought that the better
part of southern Laos was dominated by ethnic Khmer, in particular the
Mon-Khmerethnic
groups
that still inhabit the Bolaven Plateau region and the Annamite Mountains.
The Lao Kingdom of Champasak
The
ethnic Lao
are relative newcomers to the region, having made their way slowly south
along the Mekong as Angkor's power, and its hold over present-day southern Laos, waned.
By the early sixteenth century, King Phothisalat was spending much of his time in Vientiane
and eventually, in 1563, the capital of Lane Xang was shifted from Luang Prabang to Vi-
entiane. While the origins of the first ethnic Lao principality in the Champasak region are
unclear, legends trace the roots of the
Lao kingdom of Champasak
back to Nang Pao, a
queen said to have ruled during the mid-seventeenth century. The story goes that
Nang Pao
was seduced by a prince from a nearby kingdom and gave birth out of wedlock, initiating a
sex scandal for which she has been remembered ever since. The queen supposedly acknow-
ledged her mistake by decreeing that every unwed mother must pay for her sin by sacrificing
a buffalo to appease the spirits, a tradition continued into the late 1980s by unwed mothers,
known as “Nang Pao's daughters”, from some of the ethnic groups in the area. Legend has
it that Nang Pao's actual daughter, Nang Peng, ceded rule over the kingdom to a holy man,
who in turn sought out
Soi Sisamouth
, a descendant of Souligna Vongsa, the last great king
of Lane Xang, and made him king in 1713.
Soi Sisamouth ascended the throne of an independent southern kingdom centred on present-
day Champasak, near Wat Phou, and extended its influence to include part of present-day
Thailand, as well as Salavan and Attapeu. But the king and his successor only managed to
maintain a tenuous independence and, after its capital was captured by Siamese forces in
1778, Champasak was reduced to being a
vassalofSiam
, and so it remained until the French
arrived more than one hundred years later, claiming all territory east of the Mekong river.
Division and reunification
Caught between French ambition and a still-powerful Siam, Champasak was split in half - a
situation which lasted until 1904, when a Franco-Siamese treaty reunited its territories. Fol-
