Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In order to cover the cost of administration, France imposed heavy
taxes
on opium, alcohol
and salt, levied a head tax on males between 18 and 60, and required all adult males to per-
form unpaid
corvée
labour. Often required to walk days to work sites far from their villages,
while supplying their own food, villagers sometimes responded by simply clearing out of
an area altogether, returning once the project was completed. Such measures provoked
re-
volts
, some led by messianic religious figures, with the first large uprising beginning on the
Bolaven Plateau
in 1901. It seems these disturbances were more in response to central gov-
ernment intrusion into rural life and the disruption of old orders than they were specific-
ally anti-French. It's telling, however, that most of these uprisings occurred among upland
peoples, upon whom the French made harsher demands and for whose customs they showed
less respect. Later, these revolts were construed as forerunners of the nationalist Lao Issara
and Pathet Lao movements.
While explorers' reports that Laos was teeming with
natural resources
proved overly op-
timistic, the French did manage to exploit, among other things, tin deposits near Thakhek and
teak trees, which were cut and floated down the Mekong, and introduced coffee. France's
chief agricultural exports were cardamom from the Bolaven Plateau area and, from the high-
lands of Xieng Khuang,
opium
, a product that was later allegedly used by the CIA and the
Pathet Lao to finance their respective war efforts.
Trade
was in the hands of Chinese merchants, as it had been for centuries. Goods followed
traditional routes from Laos and the west bank of the Mekong across the Khorat Plateau to-
wards Bangkok and away from French Vietnam. The same Chinese merchants who exported
cardamom, sticklac and benzoin, skins and ivory to the trading houses of the Siamese capit-
al were already importing cheap British and German products by the time the French estab-
lished themselves in Laos.
With trade flowing towards Bangkok, minimal exports and a depleted population providing
an insufficient tax base, the colony remained dependent on
federal subsidies
. The French
hoped to remedy these problems by building roads and, eventually, a railway from the Viet-
namese coast - a project derailed first by the Great Depression and then by World War II -
and by encouraging mass Vietnamese migration, in order to tackle the age-old problem of too
much land and too few people. Had it not been for World War II, the French may well have
succeeded in making the Lao a minority in their own land, in which case Laos might not exist
today.
For all its talk of the “civilizing mission” of their particular brand of imperialism, France
appeared to have no mission in Laos, other than to deny territory to the British. Elsewhere in
Indochina, the French built schools, universities, a railway network and an extensive highway
system, and though they did construct a skeletal highway system linking Laos with Vietnam
