Lan Xang

Politics and institutions

Lan Xang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants, was founded in 1353 by Fa Ngum, a Lao prince exiled to the Khmer court at Angkor, who returned with Khmer arms and monks to take Luang Prabang. The kingdom was a mandala rather than a centralized state: the king ruled from the capital through vassal princes, while each muang kept its own lords and customs. Setthathirath moved the capital downriver to Vientiane in 1560, in the shadow of Burmese power, and Sourigna Vongsa's long reign from 1637 brought the strongest monarchy of the seventeenth century. Succession was never settled; when Sourigna Vongsa died without a competent heir in 1694, the nobility tore the realm apart, and by 1707 Lan Xang had split into the kingdoms of Vientiane and Luang Prabang, with Champasak following in 1713.

Economy and finance

The Lan Xang economy rested on the wet-rice valleys of the Mekong and its tributaries, on elephants, and on the forest products of a lightly populated upland frontier. Benzoin, sticklac, lacquer, beeswax and cardamom moved downriver and overland to the markets of Siam, Vietnam and Yunnan, exchanged for cloth, salt, copper, muskets and luxury goods. The Mekong itself was the kingdom's highway, linking Luang Prabang and Vientiane, while caravan routes tied the interior to China and the coast. Elephants were at once a military asset, a royal monopoly and an export, and tribute in gold, silver and forest goods flowed from vassal muang to the capital. Court and monasteries consumed the surplus, and Dutch visitors in the seventeenth century described orderly markets and prosperous temples rather than great cities.

Society and culture

Theravada Buddhism, brought north with Fa Ngum from Khmer lands, became the state religion and the frame of Lao culture, layered over older spirit cults that survive in village practice. The sangha ran schools and hospitals, and kings expressed legitimacy through merit-making: Setthathirath raised the gilded That Luang stupa at Vientiane, which became the emblem of the kingdom, while the Phra Bang palladium gave Luang Prabang its name and the Emerald Buddha was enshrined in the capital for over two centuries. Chronicles traced the dynasty to Khun Borom, and court literature adapted the Ramayana as Phra Lak Phra Lam. Society was ordered between aristocrats, commoners and slaves, with the temple at the centre of each muang's life.

Military and frontiers

The army of Lan Xang was built around the war elephants that gave the kingdom its name, supported by infantry levies raised muang by muang. Fa Ngum's campaigns of conquest in the 1350s and 1360s subdued the Lao principalities of the middle Mekong and pushed to the edges of Lan Na and Vietnam. The sixteenth century brought the hardest tests: Burmese armies under the Toungoo dynasty overran the kingdom repeatedly, held Vientiane after 1574, and enforced vassalage until the early seventeenth century. Setthathirath's resistance became legend before his death in 1571, and later kings rebuilt the war canoes and elephant corps of the river. Yet the command structure remained fragmented, so that when succession war came in the 1690s, no army could hold the realm together.

Foreign relations

Lan Xang lived in a crowded mandala between Siam, Lan Na, Vietnam and Burma, and its diplomacy was a matter of marriage, tribute and timely submission. Fa Ngum's Khmer patronage and his Ayutthaya marriage set the pattern; Setthathirath inherited the Lan Na throne through his mother and briefly ruled both realms. Envoys carried tribute to Ming and then Qing China, and the court balanced Siamese, Vietnamese and Burmese demands, sometimes at once. The Burmese domination of the late sixteenth century was broken only when Burma's own wars turned south. After the split of 1707, the successor kingdoms slid into the Siamese orbit, and in 1778–79 both Vientiane and Luang Prabang became vassals of Siam.

Legacy and influence

Lan Xang is remembered as the first and only state to unite the Lao, and its break-up in 1707 defined the political map of the Mekong until the nineteenth century. The French assembled the modern state of Laos in 1893 largely out of the old Lan Xang territories, and That Luang now stands on the national emblem and the country's banknotes. The three successor kingdoms — Luang Prabang, Vientiane and Champasak — became provinces and royal houses of the colonial and post-colonial state. Lao language, Buddhist practice and the epic geography of the river carry the kingdom's memory, and the elephant that named it remains its symbol on the map.