Lan Xang (Luang Prabang and Vientiane)

Brothers since Borom

formationDrafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)

Fa Ngum was born in 1316 the son of a Lao prince exiled for a fault the chronicles remember only as a fit of temper - Phi Fa, "Spirit of Heaven," a name his own father gave him in bitter irony after Phi Fa's taste for women reached into the royal harem itself and got him driven out before he ever ruled. Father and infant son found refuge at the Khmer court of Angkor, where a Cambodian king raised the boy, married him to his own daughter at sixteen, and, at some point between 1340 and 1350, gave him an army to go reclaim the kingdom of his grandfathers.

A conquest paid for in kinship

The Lao chronicle Nithan Khun Borom describes Fa Ngum's advance up the Mekong through Bassac, Khammuan and Tran-ninh, negotiating a border with Dai Viet along the way, before descending on Muang Chawa - the future Luang Prabang - where he was proclaimed king. What made the conquest possible, the same chronicle insists, was less force than a shared claim of descent every Tai-speaking ruler in his path recognized: the Tran-ninh envoys called him brother through their common ancestor Khun Borom, a Tai chief of the Sip Song Phan Na made the same appeal rather than fight him, and even the king of Ayutthaya, moving to check Fa Ngum's advance onto the Khorat plateau, chose to offer territory and a royal marriage instead of battle, reminding him they were "brothers since Borom." Only at Wiangchan did Fa Ngum resort to force outright - and even there by trick rather than storm, luring the defenders out to gather a feigned retreat's abandoned gold and silver arrows before turning on them in the open.

Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968) · Nicolas Eynaud · CC BY-SA 4.0

A coronation, and a Buddha that gave the capital its name

Fa Ngum's own solemn coronation, which the sources place in 1353, marks the founding of the kingdom that would come to be called Lan Chang (Lan Xang). It joined Luang Prabang and Wiangchan under one crown for the first time, at the expense of a Khmer garrison presence on the upper Mekong that had held the territory since Jayavarman VII's own reign a century and a half before. Fa Ngum did not forget the court that had raised him: shortly after his accession he sent his old religious tutor, Maha Pasaman, back to Angkor with a mission of monks and artisans, who returned with sacred texts and a revered image, the Phra Bang - the statue that would eventually give Luang Prabang its own name, and the clearest sign that the kingdom Fa Ngum built on the upper Mekong owed its script, its Buddhism and its court culture to the same Khmer world his own family had once fled to as exiles.

Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968) · CEphoto, Uwe Aranas · CC BY-SA 3.0

The images that never went back

peakDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam (1926)

Jai Jett'a came to power by leaving a throne rather than seizing one. Crowned Maharaja of Chiengmai shortly after the death of that kingdom's own king in 1547, he chose within two years to abandon it and return to Luang Prabang to fight his younger brother, who had claimed their father's Lao throne on his sudden death. He took with him some of Chiengmai's most sacred possessions: the Emerald Buddha, the crystal Buddha of Lamp'un, and other images that had been kept in that city for generations. Only one of them - a lesser image called the P'rasingh - was ever returned. Chiengmai's own nobles, finding their throne effectively vacated, simply summoned a rival prince to fill it.

A new capital on the river

Some time in the years that followed, Jai Jett'a moved his own capital from Luang Prabang downriver to Wiengchan, a site he named Sri Satanakonahut - what later ages would know as Vientiane. The Emerald Buddha moved with him, and would stay in his new capital for more than two centuries.

Wood, A History of Siam (1926) · Philip Nalangan · CC BY 4.0

A princess sent, and a princess sent back

The new king's ambitions extended into marriage diplomacy with Siam itself. He asked King Chakrap'at of Ayut'ia for the hand of Princess T'ep Krasatri, daughter of the warrior queen Suriyot'ai; when the princess fell ill before her journey, the Siamese king sent a different daughter in her place. Jai Jett'a was, in the words of the chronicler who later recorded it, a man whose "taste in collecting Princesses seems to have been equal to his discrimination in amassing other people's images of Buddha" - he sent the substitute back at once, with a blunt message that he would accept T'ep Krasatri and no one else. In 1564 the princess finally set out for Wiengchan, only to be intercepted en route by a Burmese force acting on intelligence from a rival Siamese governor and carried off to Burma instead - a diversion that left the marriage forever unconsummated, and left Jai Jett'a and that governor enemies from that day forward.

Wood, A History of Siam (1926) · Papa November · CC BY-SA 3.0

The siege of P'itsanulok

peakDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam (1926)

Jai Jett'a spent most of his reign fighting off Burma rather than fighting for advantage elsewhere, but one episode shows how far his own ambitions reached when the opportunity arose. A Siamese governor, out of favor with the pro-Burmese faction controlling the regency at Ayut'ia, invited Jai Jett'a to intervene against the border town of P'itsanulok, then held by the very official who had helped intercept Princess T'ep Krasatri two years before. Jai Jett'a needed no second invitation. At the end of 1566 he marched a large army to the town and laid siege to it, while a Siamese prince who marched north ostensibly to relieve the town in fact intended to hand it over to the Lao king instead. The plot failed - the townspeople refused the prince admittance - and a Burmese relief force arrived before Wiengchan's army could take the walls, forcing Jai Jett'a to withdraw.

Wood, A History of Siam (1926) · Supanut Arunoprayote · CC BY 4.0

A kingdom that kept surviving invasion by disappearing into the jungle

The pattern held throughout his reign: when Burmese armies invaded Wiengchan itself, in 1563-64 and again in 1569-70, Jai Jett'a did not try to hold his capital against them. He abandoned it and withdrew into the jungle with most of his own population, waiting out Burmese armies that suffered, each time, from famine and disease before they retired. It was not a glamorous strategy, but it worked twice running - a kingdom too thinly held to be occupied for long, and too elusive to be permanently broken by any single campaign.

Lost in the jungle

contractionDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam (1926)

The strategy that had twice saved Wiengchan from Burmese occupation could not save the king who relied on it. In 1571, campaigning in Cambodia, Jai Jett'a became separated from his own army in the jungle and was never found again - no body, no captor, no clear account of what became of him, only a king who simply stopped appearing in the record. One later chronicler, unable to resist the irony, called it a fitting judgment on a man who had once carried off Chiengmai's most sacred images and never returned them.

Wood, A History of Siam (1926) · xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0

An infant king, and a regency too weak to hold

With no adult heir in the capital, an infant son of Jai Jett'a was proclaimed king, governed in practice by a regent. It was exactly the kind of succession a hostile neighbor could exploit, and Burma did not wait long to try.

A brother's borrowed crown

contractionDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam (1926)

Burma's king demanded that the infant's regent abdicate in favor of one of Jai Jett'a's own brothers - a man who had spent years as a prisoner in Burma since an earlier invasion of Wiengchan, and who could therefore be relied on to rule as a compliant vassal. The regent refused. In 1574 a Burmese army invaded, captured the guardian who had been protecting the young king, and placed Jai Jett'a's brother on the Wiengchan throne under Burmese supervision - the furthest reach Burmese power would ever achieve over the Lao kingdom, and a striking reversal for a dynasty that only a few years before had been strong enough to besiege a Siamese border town on its own initiative.

Two decades, then a throw of the yoke

Vassalage did not last forever. In 1595, after twenty-one years as a Burmese tributary, Wiengchan renounced the arrangement and reasserted its own independence - one of the last of the mainland kingdoms Burma had subdued in its sixteenth-century expansion to shake the yoke off entirely. The kingdom that had once survived by vanishing into its own jungle proved just as capable of waiting out an occupying overlordship as it had been at waiting out an invading army.

One crown divided

endDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam (1926)

Independence recovered in 1595 did not bring stability. For more than a century afterward, rival princes contested the Wiangchan throne with little the neighboring kingdoms troubled to record in detail - until, by 1699, the dispute had split the kingdom outright. Prince Chao Ong Wiet had set himself up as king at Wiangchan; his cousin, Prince Kingkisarat, had meanwhile seized Luang Prabang and now prepared to reunite the two by force, marching against his rival's capital.

A princess offered, an army that never fought

Ong Wiet, facing a cousin's army he could not match alone, appealed to Siam for help and offered his own daughter's hand as the price of alliance. Ayutthaya's king sent a relief force at once - but the campaign never came to battle. Kingkisarat, weighing his own chances against the combined strength of Wiangchan and its new Siamese ally, chose negotiation instead: a treaty dividing the old kingdom of Lan Xang between the two cousins outright, one to hold Luang Prabang and the other Wiangchan, each an independent throne rather than a single crown contested between two claimants. The promised princess went on to Ayutthaya regardless, where she was given in marriage to the Siamese king's own heir.

A third throne, already standing apart

By the time Siam next intervened in Lao affairs, in the 1770s, a third kingdom existed on the middle Mekong as well: Champasak, ruled by a Prince Chao O as an independent principality in its own right, far enough downriver that Wood's own account treats its separation from the old body of Lan Xang as an accomplished fact rather than a recent event needing explanation, and how or when it broke away is left unstated. What is certain is that the single kingdom Fa Ngum had joined by conquest in 1353, and that Jai Jett'a had governed as one throne two centuries later, had by the early eighteenth century become three separate courts - Luang Prabang, Wiangchan and Champasak - each answering for itself, and each, within a century, a tributary of one or another of its stronger neighbors rather than of any single Lao crown.

Wood, A History of Siam (1926) · Basile Morin · CC BY-SA 4.0

Heads for sale outside P'ak'o

endDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam (1926)

Two centuries after Jai Jett'a's reign, a chain of events set off by a Siamese campaign against Champasak brought a reckoning to Wiengchan itself. A Wiengchan noble named P'ra Woh, who had rebelled against Prince Bun San, ruler of Wiengchan, fled south to Champasak territory and submitted formally to the victorious Siamese army when it arrived there. As soon as the Siamese withdrew, Bun San's forces caught P'ra Woh and cut off his head. King Taksin of Siam took the killing as an act of war against himself, and raised an army of twenty thousand men to invade Wiengchan in response, joined by the rival Prince of Luang Prabang, who saw in Siam's campaign a chance to settle old scores of his own.

A siege months in the taking

Wiengchan held out for several months. During the siege of the nearby town of P'ak'o, the besieging Siamese sent women out to sell boatloads of severed heads outside the walls - a calculated act of terror the source that records it compares, without much exaggeration, to Burmese methods in their own invasions of the kingdom two centuries before. When Wiengchan finally fell, the Siamese stripped it of everything of value they could carry.

The Buddha that finally left for good

Among the plunder taken from the captured capital was the Emerald Buddha itself - the same image Jai Jett'a had carried off from Chiengmai more than two hundred years earlier, and which had stood in Wiengchan ever since. It went to Bangkok, where it remains. From 1779 until the French protectorate arrived in 1893, both Luang Prabang and Wiengchan stood as dependencies of Siam - a kingdom that had spent two centuries acquiring sacred images and vassal thrones by turns finally reduced, in a single campaign, to keeping neither.

Wood, A History of Siam (1926) · Shivashanky · CC BY-SA 4.0