The history of Laos

Laos is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, a land of forested mountains and plateaus drained by the Mekong River. Its uplands were home to Austroasiatic-speaking peoples, such as the Khmu, long before Tai-speaking Lao settled the river valleys in the early second millennium CE, and its south lay within the orbit of Chenla and the Khmer Empire. In 1353 Fa Ngum founded Lan Xang, the "kingdom of a million elephants", which for three and a half centuries was one of the great Buddhist states of the mainland before it divided and fell under Siamese and Vietnamese domination. France united the Lao lands east of the Mekong as part of French Indochina in 1893, and after independence in 1953 Laos was torn by civil war and became the most heavily bombed country per person in history during the Vietnam War. Since 1975 it has been ruled by the Lao People's Revolutionary Party.

A skull found in 2009 in Tam Pa Ling cave, in the Annamite mountains of the north-east, belonged to a modern human who lived at least 46,000 years ago, among the oldest such fossils in the region. Later hunter-gatherers made the pebble tools of the Hoabinhian tradition, and farming, with rice and millet, reached the region in the Neolithic, followed by bronze and then iron working. The ancestors of many of today's upland peoples, speakers of Mon-Khmer languages such as the Khmu, were the earliest of Laos's present populations, and they are still often called the Lao Theung, the people of the mountain slopes.

On the Xieng Khouang plateau, Iron Age communities from around 500 BCE to 500 CE set up thousands of carved stone jars, some more than two metres tall, across dozens of sites. Excavations have found human bones, beads and pottery around them, and most archaeologists believe they were used in funeral rites. The jars probably also reflect a society grown rich on overland trade in salt and metal. The Plain of Jars was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019, after decades of work to clear the area of bombs left from the Indochina wars.

In the south, the earliest known kingdom on Lao soil was Chenla, which grew up in the sixth century around the sacred mountain of Phou Kao near Champasak, where Hindu temples were built at Vat Phou. Chenla later shifted its centre into today's Cambodia, and Chinese records describe a northern "Land Chenla" that sent a mission to the Tang dynasty in 717. Further north, Mon peoples linked to the Dvaravati culture of today's Thailand founded city-states along the middle Mekong, such as Sikhottabong near Thakhek, and brought Theravada Buddhism to the region. From the ninth century the Khmer Empire of Angkor dominated much of the middle Mekong, rebuilt Vat Phou as one of its holiest temples and ran roads and rest houses into the Khorat plateau.

The Lao belong to the Tai-speaking peoples, whose languages arose in what is now southern China and northern Vietnam. Older theories that the Tai came from the kingdom of Nanzhao in Yunnan are no longer accepted. Linguistic evidence suggests that Tai groups moved south-west along the rivers between about the eighth and tenth centuries, perhaps under pressure from Chinese expansion, and gradually founded small principalities called muang in the valleys. The Lao origin legend of Khun Borom tells of a divine king whose seven sons founded the Tai kingdoms of the region, while the Khmu epic of Thao Hung recalls the struggles of the earlier peoples with the newcomers. By the 13th century a Tai principality ruled Muang Sua, later Luang Prabang, and as the Khmer declined the Tai kingdoms of Lanna and Sukhothai, in today's Thailand, extended their influence over the Lao muang.

Fa Ngum, a prince of Muang Sua raised in exile at Angkor, led a Khmer-backed army up the Mekong from 1349, conquering the principalities of the region; he was crowned in 1353 and made Muang Sua the capital of Lan Xang. Tradition credits him with bringing Theravada monks and the Phra Bang, a golden image of the Buddha that became the kingdom's palladium and later gave Luang Prabang its name. His harsh rule led his ministers to depose him in 1373, and his son Samsenthai, named for a census said to have counted 300,000 Tai men, gave the kingdom a long period of stability. In 1479 an army of Đại Việt sacked the capital, but the kingdom recovered.

Under Photisarath (reigned 1520–48) Buddhism was strengthened at the expense of spirit cults, and his son Setthathirath, who for a time also ruled Lanna, moved the capital to Vientiane around 1560 to escape the threat of Burma. He built the great stupa of That Luang and brought the Emerald Buddha from Chiang Mai. After his disappearance on a campaign in 1571, Burmese armies of the Toungoo dynasty repeatedly occupied Vientiane, and Lan Xang was a Burmese vassal for decades. It recovered fully under Sourigna Vongsa (reigned 1637–94), the longest-reigning king, whose capital impressed the first European visitors, a Dutch merchant and an Italian Jesuit, in the 1640s. After his death without an heir, succession disputes split the kingdom: in 1707 Luang Prabang and Vientiane became separate kingdoms, and Champasak broke away in 1713.

The divided Lao kingdoms were drawn into the wars between Burma and Siam. In 1779 a Siamese army under the future King Rama I took Vientiane, carried off the Emerald Buddha, which is still in Bangkok, and made all three Lao kingdoms vassals of Siam. In 1826 King Anouvong of Vientiane, a vassal who had grown resentful of Siamese demands and of the forced labour and tattooing of Lao subjects, rebelled and marched on the Khorat plateau. Siam defeated him, and in 1827–28 its armies sacked and razed Vientiane and deported much of its population to the Khorat plateau, now north-east Thailand, where more ethnic Lao live today than in Laos itself. Anouvong was captured and died in captivity in Bangkok. The eastern Lao principality of Xieng Khouang, already a tributary of Vietnam, was annexed by the Vietnamese court at Hue.

For the rest of the century Siam ruled the Lao lands through vassal princes and governors on the Mekong, and Siamese and other raiders carried off upland peoples as slaves. In the 1870s and 1880s bands of Chinese Haw fighters, remnants of the Taiping-era wars, raided northern Laos, and in 1887 they sacked Luang Prabang.

The French explorer and consul Auguste Pavie helped King Oun Kham escape from Luang Prabang in 1887, and France used the episode to press claims, inherited from Vietnam, to the lands east of the Mekong. After French gunboats forced their way to Bangkok in the Paknam incident of 1893, Siam signed a treaty on 3 October 1893 surrendering the left bank of the river, and further treaties in 1904 and 1907 added territories on the right bank. Laos became part of French Indochina, with a protected kingdom at Luang Prabang and the rest of the country ruled directly, and Vientiane was made the administrative capital.

Laos was a neglected corner of the colony. It produced little for export, and the French relied on Vietnamese clerks and workers, who by the 1940s formed a majority in several towns. Heavy taxes and forced labour provoked uprisings, among them the long revolt of the upland peoples of the Bolaven plateau under Ong Keo and Ong Kommadam from 1901 to the 1930s and the Hmong rebellion of 1918–21. In the 1930s scholars and Prince Phetsarath encouraged a revival of Lao history and culture. During World War II, Thailand seized the right-bank provinces in the Franco-Thai war of 1940–41, and on 9 March 1945 the Empire of Japan overthrew the French administration. Under Japanese pressure King Sisavang Vong declared an end to the protectorate on 8 April.

After Japan surrendered, the nationalist Lao Issara (Free Lao) movement under Phetsarath formed a government in October 1945, but French troops retook the country in 1946 and its leaders fled to Thailand. France made Laos a constitutional monarchy under Sisavang Vong, an associated state of the French Union in 1949, and fully independent on 22 October 1953. Prince Souphanouvong, who had broken with the exiles, had meanwhile founded the communist Pathet Lao with the backing of Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh. The Geneva conference of 1954 left the Pathet Lao in control of two north-eastern provinces.

Attempts at coalition under the neutralist prime minister Souvanna Phouma, Souphanouvong's half-brother, collapsed in 1958, and the country slid into a civil war fought between royalist, neutralist and communist forces and shaped by the Cold War. A second Geneva agreement in 1962 declared Laos neutral, but North Vietnam kept its troops there to protect the Ho Chi Minh Trail, its supply route to the south, and the Vietnam War engulfed the country. The United States ran a covert war through the CIA, arming a Hmong army under General Vang Pao, and from 1964 to 1973 its aircraft flew about 580,000 bombing missions over Laos, dropping more than two million tonnes of bombs. Tens of millions of cluster bomblets failed to explode and still kill and maim people every year.

A ceasefire in 1973 created a final coalition government, but after the communist victories in Cambodia and South Vietnam in April 1975 the Pathet Lao took power without major fighting. On 2 December 1975 King Savang Vatthana abdicated and the Lao People's Democratic Republic was proclaimed, with Kaysone Phomvihane as prime minister and party leader. Tens of thousands of former officials and soldiers were sent to "re-education" camps, where many died; the king and members of his family were arrested in 1977 and died in captivity. Fighting continued against Hmong resistance groups, and around 300,000 people, about a tenth of the population, fled across the Mekong to Thailand, many later settling in the United States and France. A treaty of 1977 bound Laos closely to Vietnam, and the country relied on aid from the Soviet Union.

Collectivisation failed, and in 1986 the party adopted the New Economic Mechanism, which allowed private trade and foreign investment while keeping its monopoly on power. A constitution was adopted in 1991, and after the Soviet collapse Laos turned to its neighbours and to China. The first bridge over the Mekong to Thailand opened in 1994, Luang Prabang became a UNESCO World Heritage city in 1995, and Laos joined ASEAN in 1997. The country built hydroelectric dams on the Mekong and its tributaries to sell power to its neighbours, at a cost to rivers and villages; the collapse of a dam in Attapeu province in 2018 killed dozens of people and displaced thousands. In 2016 Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit and pledged help in clearing unexploded bombs. Thongloun Sisoulith became party general secretary and president in 2021, and a Chinese-built railway now links Vientiane with the border of China.