Lan Xang

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An old royal town the chronicles call Xieng Dong Xieng Thong — the city of flame trees by the river — stood on a tongue of land where the Mekong bends past the limestone hills to meet the Nam Khan. The Mon settlements of Dvaravati had once reached these northern valleys, and after them the laterite reach of Angkor pressed up the river as a frontier of god-kings and tribute. In the middle of the fourteenth century that frontier slackened, as it had slackened for the Tai principalities of the Sukhothai basin a century earlier. In 1353 a prince raised at the Khmer court came north out of Angkor with an army at his back and welded the scattered upper-Mekong muang into a single realm. He gave it a name that is half a boast and half a cosmology: Lan Xang Hom Khao — the Million Elephants and the White Parasol. The elephants were war and abundance; the parasol was kingship itself, the tiered umbrella of a consecrated lord. For three and a half centuries that name covered the largest inland kingdom of mainland Southeast Asia.

Fa Ngum and the founding

The founder, Fa Ngum, was a grandson of the ruling line of Muang Sua who had been sent away into exile as a child, after a quarrel within his own house. He grew up at the court of Angkor in the years of its long autumn, was schooled there, and married a Khmer princess, Keo Kang Ya. From that marriage came the army that made him. Around 1349 the Khmer king sent his son-in-law north with a force that the chronicles number at ten thousand, to recover and unify the Lao muang of the upper Mekong. The campaign served Angkor as much as it served Fa Ngum: a friendly inland kingdom on the middle river was a counterweight to the rising Tai power of Sukhothai and a channel for Khmer prestige carried in the idiom of the Theravada. Fa Ngum fought his way up the valley, took town after town, and in 1353 was consecrated at Xieng Dong Xieng Thong as the first king of Lan Xang.

What he brought with him from Angkor was not only soldiers. He carried, or soon received, the regalia and the personnel of a Buddhist court — monks, the Pali scriptures of the Tipitaka, the apparatus by which a king is made a king in the Theravada world. The single most charged object in that inheritance was an image. The Phra Bang is a standing Buddha a little under three feet high, bronze beneath its skin of gold, both hands raised palm-outward in the doubled gesture that stills fear and forbids the waters to rise. Tradition gives it a Sinhalese casting and a passage through Angkor; its features speak of Khmer workmanship. It came to Lan Xang as a gift from Fa Ngum’s Khmer father-in-law, and it came as an instrument of legitimacy — the visible warrant that the new king ruled as a Buddhist sovereign and that his kingdom belonged to the larger community of Theravada realms. The image was so central that the capital itself would in time be renamed for it: Luang Prabang, the great Phra Bang, the town that holds the royal image.

Fa Ngum’s reign closed in the way that strong founders’ reigns often do. He had built a kingdom faster than he could reconcile it, and in 1373 his own ministers deposed him and sent him into exile in the principality of Nan, on the far side of the western hills, where he died and where his ashes were laid. The throne passed to his son.

The making of a Buddhist kingdom

Fa Ngum’s heir reigned under a name that is also a census. He was Oun Heuan, and he is remembered as Samsenthai — three hundred thousand Tai — for the count taken in his time of the men his realm could levy. His long reign, running to 1416, settled what his father had seized: a kingdom of muang bound to the capital by oath and tribute, its agriculture on the river terraces, its wealth in forest goods and the elephants that gave the realm its name, its court ordered on the Indic model the Tai had taken in part from Angkor and in part from the Mon. After Samsenthai the line frayed for several reigns into the quarrels of an aristocracy that elected and unseated its own kings, and the kingdom passed through a long unsettled stretch before it found, in the sixteenth century, the rulers who would give it its classical shape.

The first of these was Photisarath, who came to the throne in 1520. He was a Buddhist of a deliberate and reforming kind. In 1527 he issued an edict against the old spirit religion — the cult of the phi, the tutelary and ancestral powers whose shrines stood in every village and at the gates of every town — proscribing its worship as groundless, ordering its altars cast into the river and temples raised on the ground its shrines had held. The edict did not abolish the phi; the spirit powers and the Buddhist Dhamma would go on sharing the Lao religious world for centuries, the one governing the near affairs of soil and sickness and the other the long economy of merit and rebirth. But it marked the point at which the monarchy threw its full weight behind the sangha, the order of monks, as the kingdom’s official frame of meaning. The relation it sealed is the one that organizes the whole history that follows. The king was the sangha’s patron and protector, the builder of its monasteries and the donor of its lands; the sangha, in return, was the field in which the king and his people sowed the merit that legitimized a reign and ordered a cosmos. A Lao king did not stand outside the religion he sponsored. He ruled as its first lay servant, his throne underwritten by the Buddha image in his capital and by the robed community that received his gifts.

Photisarath’s marriages reached across the Tai world. His principal queen came from Lan Na, the kingdom of Chiang Mai in the northern valleys, a realm with deep roots in the Mon Buddhism of Hariphunchai; when the Chiang Mai line failed of a male heir in 1546, Photisarath was able to place his own son on that throne. So when Photisarath died in 1550, after a fall while hunting wild elephants, his son returned south carrying a double inheritance — and an image even more potent than the Phra Bang.

Setthathirath and the move to Vientiane

The son was Setthathirath, and he is the great builder of Lan Xang. He had reigned in Chiang Mai before he was called home, and when he came south to take his father’s throne he brought with him the Emerald Buddha, the small green image of jasper that was the palladium of Lan Na and remains the most venerated Buddha image in the Tai world. For a generation it would rest in his Lao capital.

That capital he moved. In 1560 Setthathirath shifted the seat of the kingdom downriver from Luang Prabang to Vientiane, the broad bend of the Mekong on the central plain, and there it would stay for two and a half centuries. The reasons were strategic as much as devotional: the wide alluvial country was richer and more defensible against the danger gathering to the west, and the move opened a great program of construction. Setthathirath walled and fortified his new capital, raised a royal palace, and built the Haw Phra Kaew to house the Emerald Buddha. He rebuilt the That Luang, the gilded reliquary stupa whose tiered spire would become the emblem of the Lao nation, on a scale that made it the kingdom’s chief monument. At the old capital he left Wat Xieng Thong, the river-temple whose low sweeping roofs are the signature of Lao sacred architecture. These were not ornaments. A Theravada kingdom proved itself in stupas and ordination halls and images; to build was to govern, and to enshrine a relic or a venerated image was to anchor the realm to the Dhamma and the Buddha both.

The danger that shaped Setthathirath’s reign came from the Toungoo dynasty of Burma, then the most formidable military power of the mainland. Its king Bayinnaung had taken Chiang Mai in 1558 and would sack Ayutthaya, the great Siamese power of the Chao Phraya, in 1564. Lan Xang stood next in line. Through the 1560s Setthathirath held his kingdom against repeated Burmese invasion, trading the open field for the forest and the long retreat, refusing the decisive battle the larger army needed. He kept Lan Xang independent where its neighbors fell. He vanished in 1571 on a campaign in the south, leaving no settled heir, and the kingdom passed into a generation of contested succession and Burmese overlordship from which it was recovered only at the century’s end.

The golden age and its end

The last great reign began in 1637, when the nobles of Lan Xang passed over two elder brothers and raised Sourigna Vongsa to the throne. He held it for fifty-seven years, and Lao memory keeps his reign as the golden age: a long peace, settled borders, a court of consequence, and a sangha at the height of its learning. For the first time the kingdom was seen and described from outside by European eyes. In 1641 the Dutch merchant Gerrit van Wuysthoff came up the river from the Cambodian trade station of the East India Company, the first European to reach the Lao capital, and carried back to the wider world the report of a powerful and prosperous kingdom on the upper Mekong. A year later the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Maria Leria reached Vientiane and stayed some five years, leaving a long description of the realm — and the record of a sangha confident enough in its own authority to keep the missionary firmly at the margin of a thoroughly Buddhist society.

The golden age held only as long as the man who made it. Sourigna Vongsa outlived his sons, and when he died in 1694 he left a disputed inheritance — young grandsons, daughters, and an ambitious nephew who seized the capital with the help of a Vietnamese army from Dai Viet. The unity that had taken Fa Ngum a campaign to win and three centuries of kings to keep came apart along its own seams. By 1707 the realm had divided: a northern kingdom around Luang Prabang and the old royal image of the Phra Bang, a central kingdom at Vientiane, and before long a third in the south at Champasak. The Million Elephants had become three smaller herds, each with its own parasol, each in time drawn into the orbit of a resurgent Siam.

The partition redrew the map but did not undo the religious order the kingdom had built into it. Each of the three new realms ruled as a Theravada kingdom on the pattern Fa Ngum had carried up from Angkor: a king who built monasteries and fed the robed order, a court anchored to a venerated Buddha image, a capital measured by its stupas. The Phra Bang stayed at Luang Prabang and gave the northern kingdom both its name and its warrant; the great gilded spire of the That Luang still rose over Vientiane. The image that the first king of Lan Xang had received as the gift that made him a Buddhist sovereign had become the kind of thing kingdoms are organized around — and three kingdoms now organized themselves around it, each a fragment of the realm whose name had meant a single unbroken parasol over a million elephants.

Sources and scholarship

The standard modern narrative of the kingdom is Martin Stuart-Fox’s A History of Laos (Cambridge University Press, 1997), which sets Lan Xang within the long arc from the founding of the realm to the modern Lao state and supplies the dynastic framework for the account above; his companion study Buddhist Kingdom Marxist State: The Making of Modern Laos (White Lotus, 1996) traces the monarchy-and-sangha relation forward into the twentieth century. The classical kingship of the sixteenth century has a focused recent treatment in the study of Vientiane’s establishment as capital under Xaysetthathirath in the Journal of Mekong Societies, which sets the 1560 move in the context of the Burmese threat and Setthathirath’s building program.

The earliest external descriptions of the kingdom belong to the golden age. Gerrit van Wuysthoff’s 1641 travel report — the first European account of Lan Xang, valuable as much for its picture of the river trade as for its glimpse of the court — survives in the Dutch East India Company records and has been edited and studied in its own right. The Jesuit Giovanni Maria Leria’s mid-century Descripsão do Reyno dos Laos is the fullest seventeenth-century portrait of the realm and its Buddhist establishment; the text and its missionary context are examined in a study published in Episteme. For the religious frame within which the kingdom understood itself, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion surveys the Asian foundations of Theravada Buddhism and the sangha-and-kingship pattern that Lan Xang shared with Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, and the older Mon Buddhism of the central plain. The Pali scriptures that the kingdom professed are represented in the public-domain translation literature — the canonical verse of the Dhammapada and the early discourses gathered as the Buddhist Suttas — the textual bedrock of the religion Fa Ngum carried up the Mekong in 1353.

→ In the library: The Dhammapada (Müller, 1881) — a canonical Pali verse-text of the Theravada profession Lan Xang carried · Buddhist Suttas (Rhys Davids, 1881) — early discourses of the Pali Canon

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