Laos

• 1. The Most Bombed Place On Earth

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  Between 1964 and 1973, American aircraft dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos. That is more than all the bombs dropped by American planes during the whole of World War II, when 2.1 million tons fell across Europe and Asia. The New York Times described the load on Laos as nearly a ton for every person in the country. Some 80 million of those bombs never exploded. They still lie in the soil, and each year unexploded ordnance kills or maims roughly 50 people. This is a landlocked country in Mainland Southeast Asia, the only one without a coast, bordered by Myanmar, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Officially it is the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and its capital is Vientiane. How did a kingdom once known as the land of a million elephants become the most heavily bombed nation in history relative to its population? Who governs it now, and what do its forests, its rivers, and its three World Heritage Sites still hold?

• 2. Land Of A Million Elephants

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  Fa Ngum, a prince whose father had been exiled from the Khmer Empire, founded the kingdom of Lan Xang in the 13th century. The name means million elephants. With 10,000 Khmer troops he conquered principalities in the Mekong river basin and captured Vientiane. He traced his line back to Khoun Boulom, and he made Theravada Buddhism the state religion. His own ministers could not tolerate his ruthlessness, and in 1373 they forced him into exile to what is later the Thai province of Nan, where he died. Oun Heuan, Fa Ngum's eldest son, took the throne as Samsenethai and reigned for 43 years. Lan Xang grew into a trade centre during his rule. After his death in 1421, the kingdom collapsed into warring factions for nearly a century. In 1520 Photisarath came to the throne and moved the capital from Luang Prabang to Vientiane to avoid a Burmese invasion. Setthathirath, who became king in 1548, ordered the construction of That Luang. He later disappeared in the mountains returning from a campaign into Cambodia, and the kingdom fell into more than 70 years of instability. Sourigna Vongsa ascended the throne in 1637 and pushed the frontiers outward, but he died without an heir. The kingdom split into three principalities. Between 1763 and 1769 Burmese armies overran northern Laos and annexed Luang Prabang, while Champasak came under Siamese suzerainty. The Siamese installed Anouvong as a vassal king of Vientiane. He encouraged a renaissance of Lao fine arts and literature and improved relations with Luang Prabang. Under Vietnamese pressure he rebelled against the Siamese in 1826. The rebellion failed, Vientiane was ransacked, and Anouvong was taken to Bangkok as a prisoner, where he died. In this era the seizing of people mattered more than the ownership of land. A British observer described a Siamese campaign in Laos in 1876 as having been transformed into slave-hunting raids on a large scale.

• 3. Under The French

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  The Chinese Black Flag Army ransacked Luang Prabang in the 19th century, and France stepped in to rescue King Oun Kham. France added Luang Phrabang, the Kingdom of Champasak, and the territory of Vientiane to the protectorate of French Indochina. King Sisavangvong of Luang Phrabang became ruler of a unified Laos, and Vientiane once again became the capital. Tin, rubber, and coffee came out of Laos, yet the country never accounted for more than 1% of French Indochina's exports. By 1940, around 600 French citizens lived there. The French encouraged Vietnamese migration into Laos, treating it as a rational answer to a labour shortage across their Indochina-wide colonial space. By 1943 the Vietnamese population stood at nearly 40,000 and formed the majority in some cities. The Vietnamese made up 53% of the population of Vientiane, 85% of Thakhek, and 62% of Pakse. Luang Prabang was the exception, remaining predominantly Lao. As late as 1945 the French drew up a plan to move more Vietnamese into the Vientiane Plain, the Savannakhet region, and the Bolaven Plateau. The Japanese invasion of Indochina derailed it. According to Martin Stuart-Fox, the Lao might otherwise have lost control over their own country. During World War II, Vichy France, Thailand, Imperial Japan, and Free France all occupied Laos. On the 9th of March 1945 a nationalist group declared Laos independent with Luang Prabang as its capital. Two battalions of Japanese troops occupied the city on the 7th of April 1945. The Japanese pressed Sisavang Vong, the king of Luang Prabang, to declare independence. On the 8th of April he instead declared an end to Laos's status as a French protectorate. He then secretly sent Prince Kindavong to the Allied forces and Prince Sisavang to the Japanese. When Japan surrendered, some Lao nationalists, including Prince Phetsarath, declared independence. By 1946 French troops had reoccupied the country and granted it autonomy. The Indochinese Communist Party formed the Pathet Lao independence organization, which began a war against French colonial forces with help from the Viet Minh. In 1950 France gave Laos semi-autonomy as an associated state within the French Union. France held de facto control until the 22nd of October 1953, when Laos gained full independence as a constitutional monarchy.

• 4. Civil War And The Secret Bombing

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  The Geneva Conference of 1954 produced a peace accord for Laos after the French defeat in the First Indochina War. In 1960, amid a series of rebellions in the Kingdom of Laos, fighting broke out between the Royal Lao Army and the communist Pathet Lao, a group allied with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. A second Provisional Government of National Unity, formed by Prince Souvanna Phouma in 1962, failed, and the situation turned into civil war. The People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong backed the Pathet Lao guerillas. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied parts of Laos since 1958 to use them as a supply route against South Vietnam. The United States answered with an aerial bombing campaign, supported anti-communist forces in Laos, and backed incursions by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The bombing aimed to prevent the collapse of the Kingdom of Laos central government and to deny the enemy use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The scale of the campaign left Laos an advocate against such weapons. The country championed the Convention on Cluster Munitions and hosted the First Meeting of States Parties to the convention in November 2010. In 1975 the Pathet Lao overthrew the royalist government and forced King Savang Vatthana to abdicate on the 2nd of December 1975. He later died in a re-education camp. Between 20,000 and 62,000 Laotians died during the civil war. On that same day, the Pathet Lao government under Kaysone Phomvihane renamed the country the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The new government signed agreements giving Vietnam the right to station armed forces and to appoint advisers. A treaty signed in 1977 formalised the ties between Laos and Vietnam and still guides Laotian foreign policy. In 1979 Vietnam requested that Laos end relations with the People's Republic of China, which led to trade isolation from China, the United States, and other countries. That same year 50,000 PAVN troops were stationed in Laos, along with as many as 6,000 civilian Vietnamese officials, 1,000 of them attached directly to the ministries in Vientiane. The conflict between Hmong rebels and Laos continued in closed military zones near Vientiane Province and in Xiangkhouang Province. In 1977 a communist newspaper promised the party would hunt down the American collaborators and their families to the last root. As many as 200,000 Hmong went into exile in Thailand, with some reaching the US. Other Hmong fighters hid in the mountains of Xiangkhouang Province for years. A remnant emerged from the jungle in 2003.

• 5. The Party And The State

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  The Lao People's Revolutionary Party is the founding and ruling party, and its leading role is written into the constitution. The text declares that the rights of the multi-ethnic people to be the masters of the country are exercised through a political system with the Lao People's Revolutionary Party as its leading nucleus. Every state organ operates under the party's leadership. Because of the organizing principle of democratic centralism, all party members in state organs must implement the decisions of the Central Committee. The party congress, the highest organ of the LPRP, meets at least every fifth year. It elects the Central Committee, which in turn elects the Politburo, the Secretariat, the Inspection Commission, and the Defence and Public Security Commission. The Central Committee also elects the general secretary, who leads the work of the Politburo and serves as chairman of the Defence and Public Security Commission. The Politburo is the party's highest decision-making organ when the Central Committee, the Conference, and the Congress are not in session. According to scholar Martin Stuart-Fox, the party's control is reinforced by placing party members in every state organ, bureaucracy, mass organization, and the Lao People's Armed Forces. The National Assembly is the supreme state organ of power and formally holds the unified powers of the state. It is the only organ that can adopt or amend the constitution, which was adopted on the 14th of August 1991. Candidates for the Assembly are vetted by the National Election Committee. Between sessions, the Assembly is led by its Standing Committee. The constitution sets a hierarchy of state organs below it: the president, the government, the people's councils and their governments, the People's Supreme Court, the People's Supreme Procuratorate, the State Inspection Authority, the State Audit Organisation, and the National Election Committee. The president is the head of state and concurrently serves as the LPRP general secretary, bound by a limit of two consecutive electoral terms. The government is the supreme executive organ, headed by the prime minister, who is elected by the National Assembly on the president's recommendation. Neither the prime minister nor any member of the government may serve more than two electoral terms. Two judicial organs complete the structure: the People's Supreme Court, focused on adjudication, and the People's Supreme Procuratorate, which monitors the implementation of the constitution and can initiate investigations. In The Economist's Democracy Index 2016, Laos was classified as an authoritarian regime, ranking lowest of the 9 ASEAN nations in the study. For the 2026 elections, the National Election Committee set a target that at least 30% of elected members were to be female.

• 6. Rivers, Forests, And The Golden Triangle

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  Phou Bia rises to 2818 m, the highest point in a forested landscape made mostly of mountains, with some plains and plateaus. Laos lies mostly between latitudes 14 and 23 degrees north and longitudes 100 and 108 degrees east. The Mekong River forms part of the western boundary with Thailand. The Annamite Range marks most of the eastern border with Vietnam, and the Luang Prabang Range the northwestern border. Two plateaus shape the terrain, the Xiangkhoang in the north and the Bolaven Plateau in the south. In its 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index, Laos scored a mean of 5.59 out of 10, ranking 98th globally out of 172 countries. In 1993 the government set aside 21% of the nation's land area for habitat conservation. The country is one of four nations in the opium poppy growing region known as the Golden Triangle. An October 2007 UNODC fact book recorded the poppy cultivation area at 15 square kilometres, down from 18 square kilometres in 2006. The climate is mostly tropical savanna shaped by the monsoon, with a rainy season from May to October and a dry season from November to April. Local tradition counts three seasons: rainy, cool, and hot. National parks such as Nam Et-Phou Louey shelter endangered species including the northern white-cheeked gibbon and the saola. These forests support more than 50 mammal species and nearly 300 bird species, along with reptiles and amphibians. The water resources and mountainous terrain let the country produce and export hydroelectric energy. Of a potential capacity of roughly 18,000 megawatts, around 8,000 megawatts have been committed for export to Thailand and Vietnam. As of 2021, Laos still relies on fossil fuels, coal in particular, for domestic electricity.

• 7. Rice, Mines, And Visitors

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  Subsistence agriculture accounts for half of the GDP and provides 80% of employment, yet only 4% of the country is arable land and 0.3% is permanent crop land, the lowest percentage in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Rice dominates, taking about 80% of the arable land, and roughly 77% of Laotian farm households are self-sufficient in rice. In 2018 the country ranked 139th on the Human Development Index, and the Global Hunger Index that year ranked it the 36th hungriest nation out of 52 with the worst hunger situations. China was the biggest foreign investor in 2016, having put in US$5.395 billion since 1989, according to the Laos Ministry of Planning and Investment. Thailand had invested US$4.489 billion and Vietnam US$3.108 billion. More than 540 mineral deposits of gold, copper, zinc, lead, and other minerals have been identified, explored, and mined. In 2009 the Obama administration declared that Laos was no longer a communist state and lifted bans on Laotian companies receiving financing from the US Export-Import Bank. Beerlao, produced by the Lao Brewery Company, was exported in 2017 to more than 20 countries. The tourism sector grew from 80,000 international visitors in 1990 to 1.876 million in 2010. By 2010, 1 in every 11 jobs was in tourism. The European Council on Trade and Tourism named the country World Best Tourist Destination for 2013 for architecture and history. In 2024 tourist numbers topped 5 million and contributed over US$1 billion to the economy. The country's first railway line, a 3-kilometre metre-gauge link connecting southern Vientiane to Thailand, opened in 2009. In December 2021 the 422-kilometre Boten-Vientiane railway opened, running from the capital to Boten at the northern border with China as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative.

• 8. People, Faith, And A First Oscar Bid

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  More than half the population is ethnic Lao, the principal lowland inhabitants, who belong to the Tai linguistic group and began migrating south from China in the first millennium AD. Together with other lowland groups they form the Lao Loum. In the central and southern mountains, Mon-Khmer-speaking groups known as Lao Theung make up about 30% of the population. Hill peoples such as the Hmong and the Yao, collectively the Lao Soung, account for about 10%. The population of Laos in 2024 is estimated at 7,769,819, making it the 103rd most populous country, with 49.8% female. The official language is Lao, of the Tai-Kadai family, written in an alphabet derived from the Khmer script that evolved between the 13th and 14th centuries. French is used in government and commerce, and La Francophonie estimated 173,800 French speakers in Laos in 2010. In 2010-66% of Laotians were Theravada Buddhist, with smaller shares Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and 32.3% other or traditional. Sticky rice is a staple food. Khammu farmers in Luang Prabang plant the rice variety khao kam near the farm house in memory of dead parents. Larb blends chopped meat with toasted rice, then seasons it with herbs, fish sauce, and lime. The first feature-length film made after the monarchy was abolished was Gun Voice from the Plain of Jars, directed by Somchith Pholsena in 1983, and a censorship board blocked its release. A commercial feature, Sabaidee Luang Prabang, followed in 2008. The 2017 documentary Blood Road, shot largely in Laos, won a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2018. Mattie Do directed Chanthaly, screened at the 2013 Fantastic Fest. In September 2017 Laos submitted her second feature, Dearest Sister, to the 90th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, the country's first ever Oscar submission.