Laos - 2000
Meditation on a quiet land
At the turn of the year, at the turn of the century and of the millennium, I escaped the epochal hubbub and spent two and a half weeks travelling in Laos.
It was a trip that violated my principles for responsible, even respectable travel. I spoke not a word of Lao; and while I bought a phrase book, never used it, and never bothered to learn more than three or four phrases – hello/goodbye, thank you, a couple of other practical utterances. Since Lao has a phonemic structure and orthography impenetrable to a Westerner, no incidental language learning occurs; and you remain as illiterate when you leave as when you came.
I knew virtually nothing about the culture and history of Laos.[1] The mental associations I had to the country involved the IndoChinese and the Vietnam wars, which, for me as for many Americans, remain a topic for denial and repression. I knew that the United States and its allies had bombed the country more heavily than any other country in the history of warfare.[2] I had a good British guidebook, with, it turned out, an excellent chapter on Lao history and customs, and I had found a couple of journalistic pieces. But I chose to do no more than glance at any of these before setting out.
I also knew nothing of Theravada Buddhism, which is the predominant, though not exclusive, religion of the country.[3] In general, Asian religions and philosophies have only a muffled resonance for me; the excuse I have made to myself is that to understand them in any depth would be a lifetime’s labor.
Finally, Ken and I had made few plans in advance for our time in the country. We had decided to enter from Thailand near Vientiane, the capital of Laos, at a crossing over the Mekong, and then use one of the truck-taxis that take you bumpily into the capital.[4] Most brief visitors fly into Vientiane, and then head either north, toward the mountains and Burma and China, or south, toward the huge Mekong fan that forms the border with Cambodia. We hoped to do a bit in both directions. We knew that travelling in the interior was difficult and time-consuming, so were not sure how far we would get or what we would see.
This nescience on my part was partly laziness, but partly deliberate. It wasn’t clear to me that one could learn very much that was reliable in advance, or that there was anything absolutely crucial to learn. Laos has no canonical set of ‘attractions’, where it would be perverse not to study up first. I also believed, at some level, that there might even be advantages in being uninformed. It is for me greatly liberating not to feel the need to master even a bit of a foreign language: psychologically freeing, not to suffer the humiliation I always experience, when abroad, of speaking no language other than English well.
Beyond that, knowing nothing, reading nothing, and being insensible to linguistic input -- other than from rudimentary tourist signs or the overheard remarks of other travellers -- leaves one in an interesting state: actually having to rely on what one sees, hears, smells, feels. It concentrates and stimulates the mind. One does not, of course, trust that the tabula rasa approach yields accurate, meaningful, or balanced impressions of the there that is there. But it is impossible for those of us familiar with Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, or the Mediterranean world not to have one’s experience there shaped by what one knows, or thinks one knows. Laos, for me, was different: each day I felt like a child in a world fresh-made. Perhaps it is easier to notice, to absorb, to become curious about something, to form some generalizations and entertain hypotheses[5] -- and decide to find out more -- than to attempt to set aside what one has read and been told. It is restorative discipline, to be passive and open; and it can lead to a state of heightened sensitivity. There is no on-time, off-time; no taking-in and reading-out; no switching between accessing one’s knowledge and attending to one’s impressions. One responds to sententiae --all of which remain ambiguous.[6]
Were we tourists or travellers in Laos? It is a less meaningful distinction here than in most other places. Except for some diplomats and NGO personnel, Laos was closed to Westerners from about 1975 until about 1990. Travellers without business to transact have come only since about 1997. Only last year could one follow, uninterrupted, the chain of paved two-lane north-south roads that now lead from Burma or China down to Cambodia[7]. In addition to this main pathway, there are a few paved roads leading off east into the Plain of Jars, toward Vietnam, and into the coffee-growing plateau southeast of the capital. Malaria is a problem in much of the country. And as yet there is, outside the two principal cities, only a makeshift armature of services: guesthouses; family-run foodgardens or ‘eating houses’; modified truck-buses and rickshaw bicycles or motorbikes for local transport.
Yes, it is possible to do a quick tour -- by flying into the capital, using small planes to get to three or four towns spread around the country, and, from these points, hiring a car with driver to see whatever might be reachable and said to be worth seeing. But few who would do this, would do this. There are no museums, no famous spectacles, no famous sites like Angkor Wat in Cambodia.[8] Any travel, even if expensive, would necessarily be arduous and slow. There are few oases of ease where one could take on a reserve of comfort, as one puts on fat for the winter. So in Laos, tourism feels like travel, because it takes time and effort, with constant map-reading and enquiry about local conditions: the weather, the state of the river, the transport available that day. Conversely, all travel in Laos is but tourism, since only a small portion of the country is accessible. A truly intrepid traveller could head for regions where foreigners are seldom or never seen. To do so means trekking with Lao guides, takes enormous physical resolve, and involves considerable risk.
The very concept of ‘tourist infrastructure’ is rather ambiguous. There is, to be sure, a vertical strip of the country of Laos where foreigners go -- using boats on the Mekong when the water is high enough, or using route 13, which lies sometimes close to the river, sometimes a few kilometers to the east of it on the riverine plain. At salient points within this strip, there will be taxis or tuk-tuks to get you out to a particular temple, a waterfall, a crafts village.[9] These constitute not so much a structure as a set of local adaptations. The guesthouse you stay in was, two or three years ago, the home of the family who may still live in the back. The open-air foodgarden you eat at is the cooking area, somewhat enlarged and decorated with a poster or two, where villagers ate -- now patronized mostly, but by no means exclusively, by foreigners. When the long- distance bus stops for squat toilets and a bite of food, it is those same villagers who come forward to offer quick food and something cold to drink. The point is that nothing qualitatively new has evolved: except at a few locales, no tourist hotels, no ‘Western’ restaurants, few professional entrepreneurs. The apparatus for tourism expands in rough synchrony with the growth in tourism.
You travel together with Lao people – using the same foodgardens, the same vehicles. There are no special buses for foreigners or the well-off, no guided temple tours for non-natives. In most large towns, there are hotels that travelling Laos would normally not afford; but these cater to Thais and Chinese as much as to Westerners. Elsewhere, you stay in the same four-dollar guesthouses, and eat the same two-dollar meals.
As yet, except in the few cities, there is little concerted investment in tourism. In part this is the choice of Lao authorities, in part the tendency of practical people who are used to responding as needed, but not beyond that, to whatever new that comes along.[10] The Lao sense that the foreigners who come, even though in increasing numbers, do not want to find Cancun. While foreign investment is now legal (with elaborate restrictions), and while expatriates have long operated shops and inns in Vientiane and Luang Prabang, it is not possible for international tour companies to organize and operate a tourist industry. The authorities want the Lao themselves to become the guides and concessionaires, insofar as these will be needed.
Some observers fear that the fine old provincial and theocratic capital of the northern province, Luang Prabang, now much visited, could become a sort of religious Miami Beach -- with a strip of temples on one side of the strand, a gallimaufry of foodstands and souvenir shops on the other, and flocks of humans wheeling back and forth, from culture to commerce. The city is a UNESCO world monuments site, and even tourists from China are beginning to appear. But this prospect seems presently remote, since it would require the entrepreneurial commitment of the Lao themselves, presumably in joint venture with foreigners, and this is not yet feasible.
Why should Laos still be partially buffered from what is happening almost everywhere? As stated, until a few years ago Laos was, like Bhutan or Burma or some Central Asia republics, closed to outsiders. It is still hard to move around in, even for the Lao. The currency, kip, is worthless outside the country, and lost value by 50 percent against the dollar in 1998 alone. There is little appeal to outsiders to begin joint ventures involving the local currency, since any profits in kip would be useless outside, and little incentive for hard-currency investment within the country, since the government protects against profit removal.[11] The economic situation (not only in Laos but in Southeast Asia generally) is such that get-rich-quick schemes are implausible. On a deeper level, despite some liberalization away from a centrally commanded economy, the government is anxious about foreign influence, about losing political control. Thus there are still strict limits on how long tourists can stay, and even on the number of foreign-owned vehicles that can cross the Friendship Bridge or land at the airport in a day.[12]
Anticipating the pressures of 21st-century tourism, when and if they arrive, there are incremental improvements that ought to be feasible, without causing invasive change. Foreigners need bottled water, but it does not have to be refrigerated. Additional gas stations will be needed, but only in pace with a slowing ramifying road system. Westerners may prefer sit-down to squat toilets, but they need not be connected to a piped-water flush system -- the time-honored bucket of water nearby serves the purpose. The bicycles that are provided for tourists to move out into the countryside, to view a mountain range or get to a stream or a cascade, are of good quality – they just happen to be made for people five feet tall. To be sure, some decisions about modernization are all-or-none: for example, there is grave doubt whether Lao Airways planes are safe to fly in; if they are to be made so, some minimal level of technological competence is implied, and this has implications about technical education. But even here, gradualism can work. It is not clear that the number of planes and airports must increase, just that their functional status improve. As for communications, Laos is not ‘wired’ except around Vientiane and a few other small cities. That implies the use of cell phones, which means transmission towers. But a few at a time, located sensitively, would do, while most of the population continues to use telegraphy and mail by truck.
The most obvious aspect, currently, of developmental activity or planful change is the presence in Laos of many international aid agencies: UN-related organizations, European-Laos friendship societies, Médicins sans Frontières, and the like. Generally speaking, when you see a modern van in a village or a group of Lao and foreign people working on something together, it will be one of these agencies at work. Indeed, Laos appears to be a favorite arena for such activities, for which I suggest several reasons.
The sense that Laos is part of a larger unit, call it SE Asia or Indochina, goes back more than a century. There have been various multinational plans for it -- sometimes involving the French and Thais, sometimes the French and Americans; more recently, the Australians and the Japanese, environmental groups, and the World Bank. In the post-Cold War era, NGO and international helping agencies want to be seen to be active in all major regions, and to be cooperating with all forms of political economy -- and Laos still qualifies as a tolerably socialist state, a People’s Democratic Republic.
On a more pragmatic basis, such agencies and groups do not encounter in Laos a cadre of corrupt officials, entrenched entrepreneurs, or a class of functionaries with nothing to do. Thus the agencies can set to work without paying off the authorities, and without the need to coordinate everything through a set of intermediaries or fixers. This makes life not only procedurally, but morally easier for them. Most important, the political economy of Laos, and the stalled economic situation in the region, mean that large-scale official plans for longterm development, into which the agencies’ efforts would have to fit, are from their viewpoint blessedly absent.
To be sure, the helping agencies, like foreign firms that may wish to do
business in the country, are limited in the scope and pace of their efforts by circumstances. But they may welcome this limitation. True, you cannot launch grand schemes for change without transport, a productive base, a technologically current workforce, or a modern communications system. On the other hand, aid agencies can work directly with villagers to improve public health in quite simple and direct terms -- a pump, a filter, a well, some neonatal disease prevention at a rural clinic -- without having to articulate such efforts with larger schemes for hospital construction, expensive medical technology, or comprehensive care. Since diseases of civilization are by and large absent, much of what health agencies do elsewhere -- inoculate, promote dietary change or contraception, deal with industrial accidents and massive pollution -- are not the issue. An agricultural agency can work with a local network of farmers to suggest alternatives to a slash-and-burn pattern, to urge crop rotation or the use of already available improved seeds. It can design a way to get wood from felled trees to a regional wood products market, or model a regional barter and exchange system for natural or handmade goods. Such things can be started without having to introduce miracle grains, heavy fertilization, or an electric grid for supplying mechanical power.[13] An educational agency can improve primary schools, perhaps simply with some up-to-date materials or curriculum guides, the goal being to bring the current cohort of children to a basic literacy level -- without having to consider policy decisions about national universities or how to use highly educated manpower in the economy. In principle it should be possible to persuade the Lao that capturing rare animals for export is ultimately improvident. And since Laos is largely mountainous, with many rivers, it might be feasible to construct small-scale, gravity-aided power-generating installations without massive dam construction and all the environmental risk that comes in train.
All that has been described or conjectured in the foregoing rests on conceiving of Laos today as a basically static society. In support of that view, we I simply cite some pertinent descriptive terms: agrarian, pre-industrial, non-growth-oriented, noncapitalist, egalitarian.
In terms of standard criteria, Laos is one of the most backward and poor nations on earth (with an average per capita income of about US $300). The GDP is very low, as is average life expectancy and the literacy rate. Case closed, one might say: Laos is a disaster. Yet as far as I can determine, from casual research, this is stasis, not disaster. The indicators have been flat for a century and a half. Laos is endowed today with essentially the same level of raw materials and resources, and the same population size, low birthrate, age structure, and price patterns (for a standard set of commodities and basic transactions), that it had when the French showed up in the late 19th c. The number of calories used and expended per person has probably not changed much over this period.[14] There is ample water and useable land, and a time-tested technology for grain and vegetable cultivation, largely in family or village units. Chickens and pigs are healthy, and reproduce reliably. Grasses, sedges, reeds, and bamboo provide, without much effort, the material for housing and for clothes. Water buffaloes continue to do much of the heavy work. Without the need for large buildings, tough roads, or strong bridges, mud and simple concrete do the job for the built environment. By such measures, Laos is not ‘poor’ but simply undeveloped.
An assessment of sustainability, perhaps a better concept than ‘stasis’, must go deeper than this. It also involves value judgments, which any commentator had better make explicit. Mean life expectancy is only 50 years or so, owing in part to endemic disease such as malaria or parasites; and there is a relatively high level of early childhood mortality and morbidity. And yet, and yet: in their adult lives, short as they may be, the Lao are healthy in many respects: no heart disease, little cancer, and no post-childhood malnutrition. Adult Lao eat well, and they eat enough. In this largely egalitarian society, house sizes are roughly uniform (outside of Vientiane); clothing styles everywhere the same; and there is no evident class division as regards the possession of electricity, TV, or cars. There seem to be virtually no beggars, no unusual proportion of crippled persons or the obviously ill or urgently needy. [15]
To be in a society that is not modernizing or quickly developing is now a rare experience. There are some fundamental aspects of Laos that explain the absence of a sense of impending or onrushing change. These are geographical, historic, and cultural in nature. The ‘timelessness’ of Laos, which all visitors experience, is not only due to population and resource stability, but to a distinctive set of geographical, cultural, and historical circumstances.
Laos is a medium-size country[16], in a largely beneficent climate, with a pervasive Buddhist ethic that is surely a fundamental basis for its egalitarianism. It is not a fastness, kept separate from the rest of the world; quite the contrary, owing to its location and putative geopolitical strategic importance, it has been trampled over and penetrated time and again -- and yet it abides. A greatly simplified sketch of its history follows.
Looked at from the West, and using the present boundaries of the country as a framework, there was a brief period of Spanish, Portugese, and Dutch exploration in the 1600s. They found a set of three petty kingdoms, one in the north (the ‘hill Lao’ around Luang Prabang), one in the center (the ‘lowland Lao’ around Vientiane), and one in the south (around Savannakhet or Pakse), with significant ethnic and cultural differences among them. Vientiane was then a major capital, with a huge palace, much royal pomp, and many of the now-legendary white elephants. There is virtually no Western record of Laos at all in the 1700s, although it is now known that the Thais continually threatened or invaded the country all during that century and the first half of the next.[17] The Thais thoroughly sacked Vientiane in 1778 and 1828. In 1778 they removed the intensely sacred Emerald Buddha from the main temple, taking it to Bangkok where it remains today; with its removal, in a sense went the religious passion of the middle kingdom. In 1828, Vientiane was physically destroyed; there is today no trace of what the city had once been. During this period, various Lao forces resisted or fought back, but the kings of Laos seem not to have been warlords: passive resistance has been the typical pattern to killing and rapine on the part of its neighbors.
The French explorers came in the later 1800s, and became a resident influence from about 1890 to 1940. It was during this period that Luang Prabang became the home of the Buddhist king and the priestly theocracy, while Vientiane, owing largely to its more convenient location and its more secular spirit, became the administrative capital of the country. The French came to Laos for many reasons. Originally they sought, in the Mekong, a river pathway from Vietnam and the South China Sea into China, something that had been an almost mystical goal in the West since the days of Marco Polo. A little later, the French regarded Laos as a counter to British influence in Burma and, to a lesser extent, in Thailand; still later, as an obstacle to Japanese imperialism, which threatened all of IndoChina. Though the French liked to refer to ‘our Laos’, the fact is that there were never, at any time, more than a thousand or so French living in the country. For a good fifty years they set themselves the goal of opening up the Mekong around and past the Cambodian border, so as to effect the great transport and trade route they so desired; had the absolute barrier of the great Khone falls at that border not made this impossible, no doubt there would have been much more of an empire in Laos.
The crucial point is that the French never co-inhabited Laos, the way the British did India, or the Boers, South Africa. This means not only that the visible cultural impress was and is far less, but that the Lao do not have some cranny of fellow-feeling, some residue of jointly experienced history, that is forever French.
The constant pattern, over three or more centuries, of being conquered, subjugated, or controlled by its neighbors, together with the thus not-surprising failure of modernization, in part explains why Laos remains an countrified society, without major cities or even significant built sites. Not only were its incipient cities destroyed and temples and palaces levelled, but its people were shifted around as borders changed. The population of much of northeast Thailand is ethnically Lao, while many northeastern Lao are ethnically Chinese.
After World War Two, China became communist, and a communist liberation movement began throughout IndoChina. The French still maintained an interest, and the US was keenly interested in Laos, both largely on strategic grounds. In the late 1950s, the US embassy in Vientiane was a key post, but after Dienbienphu and throughout the 1960s, the American presence in Laos was mostly covert. By the 1960s, the US was trying to recruit guerilla fighters for its hidden war in IndoChina from among the Hmong people of northern Laos -- which was destabilizing to the Laos government, since the Hmong were an unassimilated group. By 1975, all the countries of IndoChina were under communist control, and Laos closed to the West.[18]
The recitation of so many incursions, voltes-faces, and successive periods of influence, together with my claim that somehow ‘Laos abides’, might suggest that all of this history, impelled from without, had little lasting effect on the country. By no means. The French influenced the royal family, hence the government, for many decades.[19] The Japanese treated Laos as a military labor source during WWII, and most of these persons died. The US inflicted hideous physical damage through its bombing. Most notably, in the post-Vietnam War era of communist control, hundreds of thousands of Lao disappeared into the forests, into re-education camps, and were never seen again. The last royal family put some faith in US promises of protection, and even under the Pathet Lao remained under a kind of house detention in Luang Prabang. But they too disappeared about 1977. For some years the Pathet Lao tried to stamp out Buddhism; for example, by forbidding citizens to feed the monks. It was a brutal regime; it was as if the Pathet Lao set out to prove that gentleness was not instinct in the Lao. But they were unsuccessful: Buddhism was stronger than the regime, and owing to it the people today still maintain a mild and reverend demeanor toward each other.
While it would be fatuous to say that Laos underwent no decisive changes during these centuries of foreign pressure and threat, there is a remarkably perduring cycle of adaptation to stress, with resumption of timeless patterns. I think it would be fair to say that the single most important vector of external influence, over the entire period, has resulted from the peripatetic nature of Buddhism, whose monks and believers and pilgrims have continually travelled throughout South and Southeast Asia. When one points out that neither the French nor the communist occupations went very deep, surely this says something about the absence of an identification with the more powerful, the lack of any neurotic blend of hatred and adoration.[20]
While acknowledging that Laos was never a place apart, I would argue that the other very important feature of Laos has been, simply, that it is a landlocked country. To the north lie major mountain ranges. To the west, a great river, unbridged (in modern times) until 1977. To the east, mountains separate Laos from VietNam. To the south, multiple sets of great rapids and a dense jungle separate it from Cambodia. Moreover, the parts of adjacent countries that touch on Laos are themselves the most remote, least developed regions of those countries.
Think back to the mid-19th century, for example, before the French came on the scene. Let us suppose that a bright young man from an economically advantaged village or family, somehow, inexplicably, decided to go to Paris for education at one of the Grandes-Écoles -- or to London or Peking to become an engineer or a doctor. Even to exit Laos and head toward ‘civilization’ meant arranging for a problematic laissez-passer and a long journey on foot through hostile adjoining countries before getting to a point of embarkation for the wider world. What then, when he came home, knowing how to build a bridge or a dam, or how to inoculate children or do surgery? How to get steel rail or heavy machinery across Thailand and the river, and then into the interior, without roads or rail and with the Mekong being unnavigable except in its middle reaches? How to import medicines or manuals or books? How keep in touch with technical or cultural developments, without foreign books and journals? One need not labor the point. Laos was not only landlocked, but isolated in ways that human ingenuity can change only through a most improbable confluence of independent invention and development. To be sure, things changed a bit with the coming of the French: now a bright young man could get to Paris more easily. But those same French would have not found it in their interest to help him use his knowledge, except for their own narrow purposes.[21]
So it is, for all these reasons, that today and in recent decades, Laos has been aware of the outside world but not much altered by it. It is today no other country’s major market or sphere of influence. There are, of course, Shell signs, and plastic packaging has come to Laos; and in Vientiane there is a foreign-language bookstore or two. Even though they watch Thai television, the Lao know that the Thais’ interest in them is largely exploitative. Despite the mutual intelligibility of the languages, the Thais think of the Lao as slow-witted country cousins, while the Lao view Thais as crude and arrogant.
Laos may now be nearing the end of its long epoch of quiescence, of being perpetually able to retreat into itself. Across the border, its most important trading partner, Thailand, has gone a good way toward completing a vast deforestation, which has resulted in massive floods, the reduction of arable land, and the need to import rice. It has to be assumed that the main impetus for the new Mekong bridge at Pakse has been to expedite the shipment of precious old-growth trees to Thailand, where rare woods will be made into ornamental boxes, lesser timber into houses for the rich.
But Laos still has some freedom of maneuver. Reports vary, in fact, as to whether the logs passing over that bridge originate in Laos itself or are trans-shipped overland from Cambodia, whose raptor-governors are desperate for foreign currency. If it is the latter, then some corruption of Lao officials has to be involved, but such a collusion may be protective, a good way to buy or bide time. If Laos is, alternatively, selling off its valuable hardwood forests, then the outlook is more dismal. Not only would this bring about ecological disaster for the forests, but it would imply heavier trucks, higher-capacity roads and bridges, and pollution. It is a sensitive topic, on which world opinion and the international advising agencies may conceivably be able to give some advice. One advantage to an egalitarian society, lacking a stratum of modernization-happy bureaucrats and baby capitalists, is that the Lao might be persuaded that if the economic profit from logging flows to the Thais, logging is not worth it.
Laos currently exports rice, of which it has enough, to adjacent countries when they experience shortfalls. Near the long Thai border there are business ventures and trade in hard goods and consumer conveniences, with profits mostly denominated in Thai baht and booked on that side of the border. The role of French and other European expatriates in Laos is especially curious. I have never been anywhere in the world, from Mexico to Tanzania, where there was not a foreigner-priced economy on top of one priced for natives. What interested me most in Vientiane and Luang Prabang was this. You enter the shop of a French expatriate, featuring very beautiful Lao silks and fine woodcrafts. The price for a beautiful five-meter-long finished silk might be US$250 (startling in Laos, but far cheaper than anything comparable in Thailand); for a teak box, maybe $40. Then, while exploring further off the beaten track, you encounter Lao-owned, family-run shops with goods of exactly the same quality -- and at virtually the same prices.[22] What this tells one is that the expats and the native shopkeepers have the same sources of supply, and roughly the same mark-up: which is to say, probably, that neither the expats nor the Lao shopkeepers are ripping off the makers in remote villages or exhausting their productive capacity.
Certainly, some large, possibly dangerous economic ideas are being bruited. It is obvious that Laos has the potential, with its swift-flowing rivers, to provide hydro-electric power to Thailand, which is already industrialized and energy-needy. The thinking is that this would be ‘clean’ development, that it would bring in foreign currency, and that it might provide a small number of jobs stimulating the inauguration of some advanced technical education within Laos. It tends to be assumed that this kind of development would do little environmental damage, so long as the Lao did not hook onto the construction of dams and turbines some additional heavy industry.
There is a history to dam-building in Laos. Some small-scale dams were built in the 1950s and 1960s, under prodding by the Americans and the French, in part to rationalize the supply of power within the country, in part to counter the appeal of Chinese and Vietnamese communist economic plans.[23] On the whole, these dams proved useful, without doing much damage to the land or causing much disruption to local peoples. Laos has little coal and no oil, so hydro-electric power seems promising. The construction now being advocated, however, would be aimed at the export market and would be immensely larger. Recent experience around the world, and nearby in Cambodia and Thailand, has shown that serious environmental consequences can result from such projects. Experts now warn that they would flood vast tracts of land, dislocate substantial numbers of people and disrupt their way of life, and permanently alter the timeless cycle of wet and dry seasons -- thus ending subsistence agriculture and wiping out the conditions for annual river fishing, which supplies most of the protein for the country.[24] Much will depend on the judgment of the World Bank, which has considerable influence among the countries most involved in these decisions. Perhaps the Bank is not immune to environmental advocacy.
Depending on one’s conception of the succession of stages in economic history, it might be supposed -- some do suppose -- that Laos, having missed the industrial age could -- by putting in place an electric power grid throughout the country -- begin to participate, without much societal disruption, in the electronic age and the information-based industrial sector. The assumption is that the market for such services and products would, first, be regional or even worldwide: thus Laos might become, in the near future, a sort of national data-entry and data-processing shop. Then, advocates claim, with time the Lao population would change into a literate and numerate society, eventually becoming a market for up-to-date industrial and consumer goods.
Much depends on one’s conception of a determinist essence at the core of large processes such as globalization, modernization, and transnational capitalism. If one believes that there is an inexorable secular trend -- universal, though proceeding nonsynchronously at different locales; if one believes in a fixed sequence by which modern technology spreads, education ensues, the demographic transition is achieved, the desire for goods and amenities follows; and if one believes that global economics continually finds the cheapest supply of labor: then the notion of a pure but happy backwater Laos -- content to practice Buddhism and to minimize consumption and the accumulation of wealth in favor of maintaining egalitarianism and classlessness -- seems nothing but fantasy, and a morally questionable one at that. On the basis of our experience in the West, most of us do believe, I suspect, that the scientific economy, the cultural economy, and the commercial economy are ineluctably linked. Opt for education and modernization, you get croissants, Disney, and Velcro. That is the positive take. The negative one: introduce industrialization and the division of labor, and get materialism and immiseration.
However, if one sees the efficient cause of such processes as expressing a more deliberately calculated capitalist plan, based on the profit motive and maximizing at each juncture the accumulation of a deployable surplus, then it is just conceivable that Laos might still take another path. Engels was wrong, I daresay, in regarding the pre-machine world as Edenic, but limited modernization may still be a viable alternative where geography and climate permit. Conceivably the Lao might opt selectively for certain modern goods -- e.g., a somewhat more modern medical system, or an improved internal air transport system -- without changing into a society with classes and cultural elites: capitalists versus labor, entrepreneurs versus traditionalists, those who invent themselves versus those who stay the same. Taking such a path would imply a degree of allegiance to distributive justice, participatory social choice, or egalitarian religious and cultural norms. In other words, social democracy in Asia, circa 2050. Perhaps more to the point: a genuinely Buddhist belief system may not find humanly or naturally destructive ‘development’ enticing, or even comprehensible.
I do not think it is absurd to entertain the possibility of this second path, simply because I do not see, in the medium-term future, a convincing scenario in which Laos becomes an important exploitable source of natural resources or a significant market for industrial products and finished goods. There is not, today, a situation to justify capital investment and thus build capitalism; nor is there a promising basis for socialism following the classical Marxian pattern of class struggle and dialectical change. The Thais and the Chinese have more promising loci for heavy investment or economic colonization -- which is not to say it will never happen. [I introduce one particular threat from China later in this discussion.] We have not seen agrarian socialism work well in contemporary times, though perhaps Kerala is an approximation of it. But most of the world where we have looked for it has been under the joint pressures of population expansion and depletion of natural resources, factors which make a sustainable egalitarian economy unlikely.
One may construct a parallel argument for there being some freedom of choice, by the Lao, as regards tourism. While travel by foreigners to Laos is increasing at an accelerating pace, this is partly a statistical anomaly: ten years ago, the number of foreigners entering the country was close to zero. The process may level off at some carrying capacity. Put bluntly: Laos is very beautiful, the people are lovely in body and spirit, the food is delicious, the pace of life relaxing, the quiet entrancing. Yet it is a backwater, at a moment when most travellers from the developed world seem to be vying to get to ‘the best’ places quickest. Laos today is a locus of life, a proof of possibility, that some may deeply value, but that most travellers do not yet seek out. It has no singular kind of attraction, like the wildlife of East Africa or the coral reefs of the Pacific, that are on the brink of extinction. One day, perhaps, the resort hotels on the beaches of south Thailand and the Yucatan will be totally built out, and occupied jowl to jowl; all the cathedrals and temples and museums of the world will have to close, like the Lascaux caves; and tours will perpetually circle China and equatorial Africa like planes unable to land at O’Hare. Then, perhaps, tourism will ‘take off’ in Laos. But to assume this is to ignore the possibility that, by then, massive ecological and economic shifts will have occurred that may have stopped the expansion, even the continuation, of tourism dead in its tracks. There is some real limit, after all, to the number of planes that can take off without destroying the ozone, or to the degree to which oceans can rise without causing the meccas of tourism to disappear. Laos might just escape once more.
Here, at last, are some impressions, unmediated, unframed insofar as the mind allows, that return unbidden some weeks later.
Two o’clock in the morning in a room in a pleasant hotel in Vientiane. The hotel is next door to an important ministry; two short blocks from the rond-point that defines the center of old downtown; three blocks from the presidential palace. I wake, startled, because it is absolutely quiet. No traffic moving, no TV, no generator humming. There is not even the low muttering and moving-about that one hears at night in India or East Africa or other societies where people without interior spaces talk softly to pass the night away. Such an effect is very unusual anywhere in the world … and it is hard to give it up and go back to sleep. I look around the nicely appointed bedroom, with its neat raffia furniture and its colored cotton hangings, and think: it’s worth coming halfway around the world just for this.
Evening on a deck over the Mekong, in Champassak, in the South, drinking beer and looking at an absolutely dark river where only a slight movement of the water can be dimly seen, almost inferred, from the shimmer of the moon’s light. Whatever boats are moving on the river carry no lanterns, and the shores show no lights. By now I recognize that the gentle paddling sound I hear as made by one boy in a skiff, who is using his sandals as oars. No thunk of wood against the gunwales of the boat, no splash as an oar or pole is drawn up from the water and repositioned. The boy has been out to check a net. He could as well be using his hands, but his flip-flops work better.
It comes to me often in Laos that one of the pleasantest sights in the world is that of a small boat (as on the lower Mekong) with one or two people in it, moving softly along the great river as night comes on. They are heading for home, but not with any urgency. The boat sits so low in the water that, in the dim light, you can’t perceive anything but the bow or the stern; the gunwales are practically submerged, so it seems as if the fishermen are standing or sitting directly on the water, a thoroughly surreal effect. They talk softly, and as darkness falls completely a few lights come on in the wat on the further bank. The fishermen light a lantern of their own, so that now one tiny spot of light moves gradually, while the others stay fixed. There is something sempiternal about the scene, comparable to a caravan of camels moving across the desert.
Another day, in the village of Don Khong, sitting on a simple but elegant wooden deck and watching the river. The road is lined with large stands of bougainvillea, flowering both white and magenta from the same branches. The deck belongs to a guest house, we think, but in the course of several hours no one comes to peddle a drink or suggest we move on. Below us, a small boat passes with three young men, coming back from checking their nets. They are gently sounding chimes and touching drums. I don’t know why.
At dawn on the edge of the river, small bonfires spring up: villagers or fishermen preparing breakfast. It makes it seem that the water meeting the land is producing a vapor, a veil for morning before the hot sun rises. In Champassak, in the morning, waiting for a ferry that may or may not come … a woman brings her infant, sets her down on a dock, picks some beans from her riverside plot, washes the child, washes herself, and leaves.
Watching the Lao intently, I see no instance of anger, irritation, impatience; no vocal or bodily expression of deliberate domination of one human over another. Nothing between man and woman; nothing directed at a child. No spanking, no yanking. No voices raised. Facial expressions range from ordinary interest to faint smiles of toleration at the strange ways of foreigners. The tenders at temples correct the crude mistakes of foreigners gently. When a Westerner points feet at the Buddha, the correction is mild, gestural, unlike the fierce, sometimes directly physical, repositioning effected at the temples in Bangkok. Now it is a cliché that Asians are gentle, poised, calm, and I suppose it is well to be skeptical. But there is an equanimity in the Lao that seems to rest beyond the natural range.
I see no sign, ever, of cruelty toward animals. Dogs and cats are scruffy and not fat, but not emaciated either, or damaged. Most are intact, with a normal complement of limbs and eyes and ears. They are not swarming with flies. They meander in the roadway, and bicyclists and tuk-tuk drivers avoid them, as naturally as one steps around another pedestrian on a sidewalk. When a water buffalo or pig wanders out, one stops until it finishes its journey.[25] I find all this significant, because in many very poor countries in the world, this is not the case: one knows from the treatment of animals and children that human beings there have a deep lifelong grudge against the basic conditions of life, and so cannot do otherwise than degrade those even less favored. Oddly enough, most of the cats have lopped-off tails, with a little knot at the end. This is not an evolutionary oddity, but represents some cultural form. I would rather not know more, but do notice that the shortened ends of the tails are well healed, even rather dapper in their way. From behind, the cats look like furred piglets.
On long-distance buses and trucks, foreigners and Lao are mixed together, in conditions of equality. The drivers do sometimes point foreigners to seats, which is not resented by the Lao, but in other ways there is equal treatment. When a Lao at the front of the crowded bus needs to exit, in the rear, everyone shifts around cheerfully and waits until the procedure is completed. The Lao, old and young, sit crowded together, often on short wooden chairs in the aisle, which requires them to keep a hand on someone or something nearby when the bus swerves. They are quiet, quieter than the tourists, and seem not to be juiced up or made querulous by travel, the way Indians on buses can be.
On the long bus trip south from Luang Prabang to the capital, over a smooth but very winding road through and around magnificent mountains, all the young Lao women near me are constantly motion-sick. They spend the entire six or eight hour journey feeling dreadful, and spitting or spewing out the window whenever possible. There is no particular notice taken, no self-dramatization, no mimed expressions of empathy on the part of other Lao travellers. I conjecture something very simple. Young females in Laos have little experience on truck beds or in buses: they do not ride substantial distances to take goods to market; and it is the young men who ride out over curving and bumpy roads to work in the fields or fetch a piece of equipment from some other village. The older women, presumably with more motional experience, are fine. It could, I suppose, be some sort of age-specific custom, expressing the notion that young females are delicate. But I doubt it. I think they are simply proprioceptively naïve.
On the trucks and buses and elsewhere in public, babes in arms are exceedingly calm and quiet. The complement is that adults do not slap, yank, or fuss at their babies. Occasionally an infant will whimper or wriggle, enough to reassure one that their normal quietude is not the result of forcible restraint. But in general babies sleep, nurse, sleep some more. Now this remains true of toddlers, who are also mostly motionless and make little sound. They no longer nurse, but they enjoy the lap -- and looking around. They show no signs of being traumatized or over-disciplined. When the bus stops for more than a moment, the mothers descend with their children, and the babies are changed or cleaned: exactly how, I was unable to determine. But with toddlers, a most interesting set of events occurs. With the female child, the mother lifts the skirt and either pulls down the underpants or, more commonly, unwraps a cloth that has been between the child’s legs; the little girl lowers herself, and a brisk downward stream results. With the male child, the mother sits and pulls the small boy into a half-reclining position, his head on her chest, his torso sloped downward, his buttocks on her knees. The child faces outward, away from the mother’s body, in a kind of pietà pose. The mother then unwraps the child’s midsection, freeing whatever fabric is between the legs, and with her finger flicks the penis with a light tap. After a moment the child recalls the code, and the stream arcs up and out. The child is then rewrapped.
What finally dawned on me is that, other than perhaps with infants, diapers and the like are not used; during the long bus rides, no urinous or fecal smells arise; and, in fact, children in the last part of the first year of life seem, in effect, to be toilet trained. This appears to be a culture in which the control of children’s bodily fluids is not problemmatic[26]. So now we speculate: what does this mean in terms of the bodily shaming and the association of body byproducts with adult-child power struggles, humiliating accidents, bad behavior, threats and promises, and all the rest of the disciplining of the will that we in the West, as regards elimination, have so cathected? The early 20th c. anthropologists, of course, reported on Asian and Pacific cultures where the body-elimination-subservience-sex nexus seemed absent, and extrapolated to what they thought were healthier lives, where the body and sexual behavior was less freighted with prohibitions and repressions than in the West. I have no evidence to offer, but will remark on some aspects of modesty.
Whatever the full story about infant elimination, sex play, anxieties about dirt, and all their implications may be,[27] it is clear the Lao, once grown, are modest. Watching them bathe and wash and swim, for example, one sees that the body as a whole or in its major divisions is not bared; instead, the Lao step into a stream and expose one small portion at a time, rewrapping as they go. Grown women and children of both sexes do this together. Teenage and young adult boys, and girls and young women go to bathe in same-sexed groups. I have the strong impression that nudity is avoided: for example, I doubt that young men or young women, segregated by gender, are normally naked together. I do not think that young men go off to urinate together, or that young women have slumber parties. Same-sex handholding is common enough; cross-sex, unusual. Nursing mothers do not avoid showing their breasts, but they do turn away or go into some corner or quiet space to nurse. Old men in remote small villages go around bare-chested; young men in larger villages do not. Foreigners are advised to wear loose bathing suits, and respect temple sites by eschewing shorts and tank tops. More than this, I cannot tell. It does appear that this society is short on the kind of flirting and giggling and bodily display of one kind or another that is common among young adults in European cultures. One does not see boys showing off for girls, or vice versa. My tentative interpretation, over-all, is that this is likely a society where the experiences of early life do not result in the ganglion of repression and shame and dared display with which we are familiar. It seems to me that the nursing mother and the bathing adults are not modest out of fear or shame, but for some reason like this: that nursing a baby and washing the body are meaningful, sensually significant, bodily experiences, one special strand in the fabric of life. A sensible individual seeks a degree of privacy in order to appreciate them fully.[28]
I did see one flagrant example of sexual misbehavior in Laos, but on the part of an American young woman. It stood out in part because most travellers in Laos seem to adjust to local norms, and not insist on calling attention to themselves. In the grounds of the most beautiful wat in Luang Prabang -- Xhieng Thong -- a group of 12 or so young monks were gathered around an American woman who was having a sustained conversation with them, in English. ‘Conversation’ is not the exact term: in fact, she was showing a lot of chest and a lot of thigh, and her body language and facial expressions were distinctly seductive. It reminded me how much male-female behavior in the West alludes indirectly to sexual forcing by males of females, or to sexual challenge put to males by females. One hardly deplores this, in the West; to do so would devalue not only a great deal of pleasant behavior, but a considerable portion of literature and art. The incident at Xhieng Thong shocked me, however, because of the setting and circumstances, and my own fantasy, stirred in heaven knows what dark ways, involved slapping or chiding her for doing something dehumanizing to others. But my reaction is off the mark.
It is true, I think, that cross-cultural sexual games do not belong in the wat. But that her interactants were young monks is of little significance. In Lao culture, teenage and young adult males who are economically able to be freed for a while of family work duties, and who belong to families where Buddhism is an actively followed, become monks for some period of time, typically a few years. During this time, they study their religion, they deepen their contemplative powers as they live in the wats, they aid old monks who are becoming feeble, and they are kept apart, though not absolutely, from their families.[29] Those who become monks for a few years accept poverty -- they possess very few personal effects, and are given the food they eat; and they accept chastity and a separation from the earthly diversions their age-mates may enjoy. In other words, they become monks the way some young males in the West become students, and for similar reasons. If one is to have time to learn and think deeply about existence, it is the stage of life when that can happen.
The sociality of young monks varies: their family and friends can visit them; they may interact with foreigners with smiles and brief conversation, or they may keep to themselves. Some seem animated, bright; some seem dour. Monks seem not to be regarded as vulnerable or violable beings, nor do they seem to consider themselves so. Thus, I did not fear for the monks clustered around the American woman; they knew, or will know, as much about the sexual area of life as those who do not hear a religious call.
It is altogether pleasing to see young monks strolling through the wat, each carrying his black umbrella against the hot sun; or to see them sitting in a group, crosslegged, eating rice; to hear them chanting in the temple at dusk; or to see young and old monks filing down a path in the very early morning, each with his food bowl, receiving food from the villagers. Like groups of young priests in Rome, they appear from a distance like flocks of birds, wheeling, scattering, regrouping – though these are orange-colored birds, carrying parasols, and often smoking.[30]
Providing evidence for the notion that the Laos are poor but not needy, the children and teenagers seem not to be worked hard, or used as raw labor. I saw no young person doing obviously brutal work. Children aged perhaps six to twelve go to school in the villages in the morning. In the afternoon or early evening, you may see a quite young girl, maybe six or eight, watering the family vegetable plot. Or a boy, the same age or older, out checking on fishing nets in the river. A woman with a foodstand or a fabric shop may have a ten-year-old helping her, refolding the cloth or bringing food to the table. A young man gives his water buffaloes a push; you would hardly call it herding.[31] There is clearly some gender division, with girls tending to work around the home or the shop, boys tending to be out in the fields or doing errands on bicycles and tuk-tuks. But it does not seem a rigid distinction. So I gather that how hard children work, when, and at what tasks is not a function of diacritical cultural norms so much as the particulars of the family oikonomia. Among adults, I saw both women and men in the kitchen; and both sexes may greet and serve a customer. The stalls at municipal markets are operated primarily by women. Men steer the river boats; as they angle in to the bank, to pick up or drop passengers, the women wade out in the water with baskets around their necks, offering gum and cool drinks or pieces of fruit. Those who come to the temple during the day to pray or meditate are primarily women, I assume because men are working further afield.[32]
It is always fascinating in a strange society to see how particular work is accomplished. In Luang Prabang a foodstand opened at 5 in the morning, for early coffee and tea.[33] Water for coffee and other cooking was being heated in a huge vat, holding many gallons of water, by a small wood fire on a simple hearth. Coffee was just barely available by 5, and the owner and his son must have started making the fire a good hour earlier, to heat so much water to near boiling. Why, one wondered, could they not start with a small pot of water for the early risers, and heat the main supply gradually?
All the rivers that run through villages and towns are edged with family plots of vegetables and greens. It makes a lovely manmade margin for flowing water, a sort of perpetual restatement of how turbid water, full of silt, continually breeds life -- not only vegetables and grasses, but fish. The gardens slope gently upwards, and are typically four or five rows deep. Along the river edge there will be a holding pond or a kind of weir. The gardener walks down to the water, fills a watering can large enough to be really heavy, carries it up to the rows of growing things, and methodologically waters one plant at a time. Of course this means returning to the river, and carrying the filled can, repeatedly. Why, one wonders, is there not a ditch above the garden, into which a small pump would bring a water supply, to be then distributed by some sort of simple irrigation system making use of gravity.[34]
Physically, the Lao are small, pretty, and somehow finished, with no loose hair, awkward elbows, or bizarre expressions. The most memorable are the elderly, where time has worked mostly pleasant changes. Among young and middle-aged adults, one does not get the sense of a struggle for individuation, as we see it in the West[35]: no sense of striving for self-realization, or assuming an identity for a time, as one tries a new outfit. No one seems to seek to stand out; no one seems sullen because he or she cannot achieve the right persona. There is none of the meeching rudeness one can encounter in India. It seems to me that this absence of personal turn-out or assertion may be typical of a society where egalitarianism is the rule, where education (which can suggest a variety of paths to ‘self-actualization’) is brief, where there is little discretionary cash to play with, and where contact with the outside world is remote.[36] Of course, by definition, in no society are peasants individualized. In addition, the Buddhist way to truth does not call for a long period of discovery and working-out of self, which in the West is common to religious and agnostics alike. But I am far beyond my competence here.
One could also maintain that in Laos there are no individual structures in the built world that are worth the voyage, in guidebook terms -- except for the wats. They are, of course, the temple complexes, and they are many and varied. Even the small village will have two or three; Vientiane has dozens. Most are not very old, the oldest existing structures dating back to the 1700s, and most being heavily restored.[37] Ken, however, points out that it is inappropriate to measure historical longevity in south Asia by the same benchmarks that we use in thinking about time in the classical and European worlds. The wats were made of wood, not stone; and, from the Western viewpoint, the written record begins only with the colonial era, so that ‘history’ starts later.
Be that as it may, wats are never less than remarkable, and are often amazing. The wat is the temple complex and grounds; the sim is the central place of worship containing the principal Buddha; there will also be tombs, of which the largest and most important are the stupas, housing the remains, actual or supposed, of religious leaders and kings. There are long galleried houses for monks; decorated sheds for sacred artifacts; and revered trees such as the bodhi, where spirits have dwelt or where the Buddha rested.[38]. Many wats are dilapidated, many buildings need repair, but all are peaceful and green, and even in most forlorn wats the dirt is raked and swept.
As a generality, the wats of Laos, with their shabby patinas, seem lovelier than those of Thailand. I am not sure whether this is inherent in their design and execution, or reflects their having been less well endowed and restored. The famous wats in Thailand[39] have a coruscating brilliance: they are larger, more lavishly decorated, in better repair, far more visited, and framed by long approaches and processional gates. It may be that the wats of Laos are more beautiful for their neglect, their solitude, their lesser proportions, their peacefulness -- as an overgrown old parish church may be more beautiful than Notre Dame.
In some locales, the main stupa is the focus of interest, while the sims are off to the side and have a subsidiary significance.[40] Some stupas are very tall, and very garish indeed -- at least at first viewing. An unbroken funnel, without appendages or reliefs, looking like the business end of a lumpy oilcan, points upward as insistently as a space tower at a world’s fair site. The stupa is made of stone or brick, then covered with gilt: it glisters, it shouts, it hums with reflected light, and it altogether looks like some weird construction of Velveeta cheese. You cannot go inside it, it is just there: an assertion of the religious importance of singlemindedness. And yet, and yet … as clouds scud along, momentarily shading the blankness of it all, or as you walk away from it, leaving the site, as green trees interpose, you see that it does the job: it makes the statement, and the statement is simple enough: here are the remains of someone who lived importantly in the world, who was not just a beast of the field. The assertion is most effective at night, when floodlights or ambient illumination cause the stupa to float luminously against a dark velvet sky, with perhaps a huge moon smiling benignly down on a human construction that strains to, but will never reach it,
However, most stupas, lesser tombs, are far smaller, and are placed around the perimeter of the wat. They may be long since sprouted with grass and flowers, unpainted or with the paint now gone, darkened with age, missing individual stones or bricks, rubbed and irregular now like very ancient trees.
The sims make a very different effect, in part because they carry a variety of colors and decorative patterns, but primarily because of the extraordinary force of their roofs. The sim is tall, relative to its footprint on the ground, as it has to be to permit such roofs to fly over the chamber and porches beneath. The pitch and flare of the roofs vary from culture to culture in Asia, with slightly different topolgies for each culture. But the basic idea is the same. Imagine taking a handkerchief, supporting it with a rod held parallel to the ground. Then, from this ridgepole, the cloth falls downward, but is caught and raised at each of the four corners, well away from the ground. The shape of the fall of the cloth is concave in the middle of its descent, relative to the edges as they are tautened and held out. A simpler metaphor: a fully spread tarpaulin, but with the four corners not staked down but tied up. The roofs are made of shingles or wooden slats; how these are bent so as to end in raised corners is mysterious. Along the center of the serrated ridgepole is always mounted a substantial finial -- neither too large or too small, made of copper or a painted metal. This is a staircase-shaped crown-like element, with lightly worked rods climbing up on one side to the apex and then stepping down again, reminding one of a rather more delicate menorah.
The visual excitement, however, is in the fact that there are multiple roofs, and thus multiple arcs and multiple cornerstops. For the roofs are overlapped, stepped, scalloped over the long axis of the worship chamber beneath them. Some distance below the main ridgeline, there is another ridgeline, and then some distance below that, another; and each of these lets downward its own sheltering arc. It is a spatial equivalent of musical sequences in Bruckner’s symphonies, with the identical contour or figure repeated through time. Only the last, lowest, roof can be seen in its entirety, from top to edge. There are always at least three stages to the roofs, sometimes as many as seven. Only the highest ridgetop carries the finial, which seems like a golden comb for the winds to play.
There are, moreover, further dimensions of plastic complexity. The roofs may be tightly overlaid, one on the other; or each successive roof may be raised a bit above the one below. If the latter obtains, then at the top of slope you glimpse a low arcade of clerestoried windows or solid decorated panels, a small vertical support for the roof directly above it. At the short ends of the entire structure, there can be seen a narrow vertical area, bearing painted figures or abstract encrustations above the principal doors. But this surface extends not rectilinearly between a lintel and a single arch or roof, like a tympanum, but is draped by edges of the roofs, like swags narrowing to the very top.
But there is even more to amaze a geometer’s eye. In large sims, there is not just one set of scalloped roofs, but one or two subsidiary ensembles telescoped into the narrow ends of the main structure. That is, the principal roof line will not extend over the entire longitudinal extent of the chamber, but only its central portion, with extensions to east and west, each with its own lesser roof set. Or the lesser, inserted roof sets will cover a wide porch surrounding the central chamber.[41] Now, you no longer have one gabled front and rear, but a receding set of pediments. In either case, the extreme verticality of the structure as a whole, the repeated arcing up of its roof elements, the brazen finial atop, and the elaborate decorations at all the corners make one think of Viking structures, of impossibly tall ships with figureheads at corners rather than at the prow.
The pulled-out, pulled-up tips of the ridgeline and down-plunging corners of the roof end in exuberant carved gargoyles, taking the shape of a great serpent or perhaps a swan’s neck, in any case ending in an open mouth. But once you comprehend the fundamental sinuous trope, complexity ensues. For the terminating figures are curved in several dimensions at once, with a lavish addition of minute carvings, bumps and knobs, and scrofulous excrescences, themselves shaped in several planes. The closest resemblance I can find is the neck and head of a fantastic creature like an iguana, or possibly a griffin with a fulminating affliction of the skin.
The same snake- or swan-neck motif, simplified and linearly extended, is commonly used at the corners of the low porches of the sim, and at the ends of the banisters that line the steps leading up to the platform. Thus, as you ascend the stair, you walk between two serpents of great length, whose tails begin in the balustrade along the platform above and flow down to the heads, arched fiercely just before meeting the ground. Unlike the surfaces of the central sim chamber, the corner figureheads and the monitory serpents along the staircase may be lavishly colored and bejewlled. At first one is then taken aback by the clashing colors of these terminal elements, especially in contrast to the textural, though not the geometric, simplicity of the roofs. At That Luang, in Vientiane, the terminating figures on the main balustrades display sharply beaked noses and avian spiked chins, green skin, yellow armbands and bracelets, yellow sashes and aprons, acid green and coral wings and leggings, three yellow toes with claws, and terra-cotta-colored feathers on the wings. It is a chaos, hardly a spectrum, of colors.[42].
But to all this efflorescence and lavishness, there is always, nearby, a tiny decorative counterpoint, a little murmuring figure just audible against the swooping polyphony of roofs and the long sinuous themes of the figureheads. There is another prevalent shape, equally common and more endearing. It is, of course, the lotus, which is the normal motif of urns, gates, small tombs, arches. As a flower, intact, the lotus looks something like an artichoke, or an elongated radish or garlic head -- something essentially round, but pulled out of globe shape into something turned into the arabesque. You can see precisely this volute form, three-dimensionally, as the cap on a small pillar. But when you look at a single lotus leaf, laying it down against a flat surface, it assumes a most lovely outline, like the gentle reverse-curve Turkish arch. You also see this gesture, which always seems to have been traced by forefinger, on flattish surfaces, like cartouches and basrelief, even on shields and signs. Whatever the material and whatever the size, the lotus shape is not a field for further decoration. The outline, the shape is the point.
Given the exuberance of colors and forms outside you almost hesitate to enter the devotional space. What will be there inside, a funhouse of mirrors and hangings and carvings?
As you enter the sim, what you experience is a vacancy, a negative setting for the Buddha opposite the door, or for the large Buddha sitting or standing above a platform of smaller Buddhas ranged below. The floor of the sim is simple wood or stone. The walls are relatively undecorated: there are no scriptural narratives, as in the West, no repetitive forms that induce ecstasy, as in the Middle East. The columns of the sim are similarly plain, sometimes lightly carved; they taper slightly as they rise. The ceiling is a matter of boards and beams, with nothing that might suggest a complement to the exuberance of the roofs above.[43] There are specks of floating dust in the air that drift by as one sits and contemplates the Buddha. Who contemplates back, but is always absorbed in his own journey and the journeys of the world’s souls, and never looks directly at you. The Buddha is always ‘away’, like the Virgin in Catholic structures of worship, and unlike Christ or the Saints who command your attention.
Monks and laypeople mix together, but there is seldom anything like a group or crowd. Depending on the time of day, monks may be chanting, using a three or four note figure that we would call a turn: the keytone, then a whole step up, then the keytone, then a half-step down, again the keytone. I have no special reverence for the Buddha, but somehow he is good to be with: sometimes fat, sometimes thin, sometimes old, sometimes young, sometimes smiling, sometimes severe. Always golden, smoothly so, sometimes with a simple relief representing his robe drawn obliquely across his chest, sometimes with a bit of bodily definition on his chest.[44] In Thailand, the Buddhas are more differentiated: in their attitudes and postures, they will be calling for rain, or subduing an evil spirit, or engaged in a long journey. In Laos, all the principal Buddhas seem simply to be contemplating.[45]
Now one realizes, suddenly, what the sim is all about: darkness, darkness flecked with motes of dust, darkness blanketing the religious image, but before all else a cube of nonlight into which you enter. You see now why the mad swooping roofs are as they are: they are holding down this cube of darkness, they are covering and protecting it. The Buddha sits in darkness, and he is heavy: he sits definitely down. The sim itself is all about darkness and downness. It is exactly the opposite of what one feels in a Gothic church or cathedral. There you enter from the chaos and clutter of daily life, and once inside you are exalted, your spirit is drawn up. The columns of a cathedral broaden as they rise, leading up to some higher plane. The altar is raised up. The cross points up. Angels and saints hover, but they are there to lead believers up. God is up. Heaven is above. A shaft of light from a rondel falling on a carved believing figure shows that soon or late this figure will ascend. The sim is quite the reverse. What is sacred is earth, and its fructifying force. The sacred trees are rooted in this earth, and last incredibly long times. The life of other green things may be brief, but they flourish over and over, born from from the same earth. The Buddha journeys on the earth, and rests there too. So it is natural for the human visitor here to sit down, not to stand and gaze upward. For the visitor’s ontological goal is, not to be lifted out of the world into an empyrean realm, but to return to earth. The best Christian may levitate; in Buddhism he sinks back into earth.[46]
It is hard to emerge out of this sacred contained darkness. But the peaceful, raked grounds of the wat, vacant of trivial life, permit a transition: not what one experiences when one steps out of a great Hindu temple into swarms of humanity, or out of a church in Rome into the bustle of commercial life. What one has been thinking, in some subvocal, noniconic way, inside can be continued without. One senses that the essence of Buddhism is not the individualized struggle for redemption, modelled by Christ, nor the eternal clash of good and evil, dark and light, embodied by the Hindu gods. It is one-ness. One does not achieve atonement; one is in one-ness. I begin to see why the Lao seem to be completed in their persons. They are not moving through a life whose meaning is achieved after a course of living, after tracing-out an Augustinian trajectory where one only understands where one has been by going further and repudiating what one was, by getting knowledge and mastering philosophy. Unlike Hinduism, there is not a premium on altered states, on exaltation: just the mediative heightening that comes with boundness to the earth. If the end result of Christianity is ecstasy, if the goal in Hinduism is the altered state, the end of Buddhism is the aurora of the spirit that comes from being earthbound and serene.[47]
Among the other manmade things worth a special trip is one very different sort of temple, a Khmer temple, in the south, near Champassak -- Wat Phou (‘the mountain temple’).[48] It is in a way insignificant compared to Angkor Wat, yet a memorable site nonetheless. You reach it the Lao way: it is eight kilometers or so out of town, so you walk, you take a tuk-tuk, or you bike there. There are likely to be very few other visitors. I suspect that this is one site where relatively few Lao go, because it is from a former culture and is religiously mixed: Hindu now overlaid with Buddhist. The guidebooks describe it well, and I shall not do so except to say that, though less than Angkor Wat, it occupies a more eloquent site. As you approach, you see a small rectangular structure, obviously concrete, and your heart sinks. But this is merely a pavilion where the last kings came to overlook two large ponds where at certain times religiously specific observances, having to do with purification, take place in the water. Then a long allée begins, lined with the remains of religious stonework, levelled by the Cambodians. Then the ground rises a bit, and there are two palaces, facing each other, the large stone facades finely incised, all being overgrown by plant matter. You climb a bit more, up a beautifully shaped stone stairway, and come to some shrines and a Buddha draped with flowers and protected, as all outdoor Buddhas are, by a sort of permanent parasol. More stairs now, more walls, and less decay. The structures are more densely spaced. In front of the culminating great temple, at the top, you turn and see, stretched out below, a virescent carpet of rice fields and, beyond, the bend of the great Mekong. The great temple itself, dating from about the 8th c., is largely intact, and beautiful, though it is iconographically confusing, with Shiva and temple goddesses next to Buddhas. Beyond the temple, still climbing, you reach a natural spring -- a sacred grottoed spring. The historical process, of course, goes in the reverse from what the visitor experiences : first came the mysterious sacred water, gushing out of rock; hence a fine place for a temple; then a grand stairway leading down toward a village; then royalty’s decision to live in such a special place; then the roadways and stairs that were needed to bring food and goods to the court; and finally, the 20th century king’s shy footprint, saying that he wanted to be here too.
In Vientiane, the handsomest structure is not the presidential (formerly, royal) palace, but the French ambassador’s house, set in a block-long park. The French influence is seen in the layout of wide symmetrical boulevards, with central grassy strips, and in the provision of a rond-point with fountain.[49] Little else, except for baguettes at a café and hand-held showers at a mid-priced hotel. There is one ‘French restaurant’, but then there is also an Italian restaurant and a Swiss bakery. Otherwise, old Vientiane is a traditional Lao town, happening to be considerably the largest: there must be twenty or more wats and a great stupa toward the eastern end. It is a pleasant, faded town to walk in. You always know where the river is, and there are more trees than you might expect. One of the wats in particular, Si Saket, is exceptionally beautiful, though markedly shabby. It is one of the wats where strolling monks and visitors seem to be continually crossing paths. The streets are clean but dusty, the wooden structures tend to sag, the storefront shops nestle into larger buildings in a charming, adventitious fashion. Young men in Western clothes bicycle politely around older women wearing long smocks over trousers and plaited straw hats. [50] Most adults, if they carry things, use a sack placed on the back or over the shoulder. Young women do not seem to carry purses.[51] Children play with puppies, safely, in the street.
The northern end of the city is definitively post-World War Two, and since it was all built cheaply, for an obscure capital, it is crumbling fast. The ugliest structures we have the Soviets to thank for: multistory ferroconcrete blocks of apartments, now without window glass and with the humid rot of a semi-tropical climate distempering the walls. There is one other, unexplained remnant of the Soviet era. In a little triangular park outside one of the most important wats, at the southeastern end of town, stands a very large statue of some definitely secular person, some municipal dignitary, several times lifesize. The USSR donated this figure, and, even more curious, a virtually identical figure in Luang Prabang. It was odd, to begin with, to commemorate some functionary with a statue in a country that is filled with eloquent statues from the nontemporal realm. Even odder is that the body type represented, and the facial features, are not Lao, not even Asian. It was only when I saw the second statue, in Luang Prabang, that I realized that the model must have been Marshal Voroshilov, persuaded on some quiet day in Moscow to do his bit for art and historical memory in southeast Asia.[52]
The Lao do their representational statues better: not just the Buddhas, but secular folks as well. In front of the main gate at That Louang sits a figure of the founder, made in greystone. He is less than lifesize, and his body and face are the opposite of imposing: his demeanor is endearing, like that of a fond elderly uncle. He is wearing just a simple stole, not even a robe, he carries a short stick and wears a small conical hat, like a pith helmet with a tiny spike on top. He looks for all the world like a dapper character created by H.G. Wells or J. B. Priestly, having his picture taken on a daytrip to the most outsized stupa in Laos. At the Khmer site of Wat Phou in the south, there is also a commemoration of the donor, but this one is getting more fun out of his giving. Someone has wrapped him in new golden silk, and he looks quite elegant -- except for the multicolored parasol he holds, which an aunt who was a bit ‘funny’ would carry to a garden party in Suffolk.
The royal palace in Luang Prabang is a child’s conception of a palace. It is made of very simple materials, mostly wood, very simply laid out, nicely but not grandly proportioned, with large French windows that opened for the breeze off the river. One small room has some fine, Douanier-Rousseauvian French murals. Another is the royal library, which consisted, it seems, of multivolume sets of the history of China -- in Chinese. There is a room of Lao treasures in cabinets, some of the artifacts quite beautiful. The room where the official gifts of foreign kings and presidents are displayed is larger, but the artifacts are, to put it cautiously, of mixed quality. Foreign rulers apparently did not send their very best to Luang Prabang.[53] In the center of the one-storey palace is a very large royal reception room, and this has a certain grandeur, in its proportions and because of its unrelieved redness. Every inch of wall space is set with bits of Japanese red glass, which does make an effect. I could not help but hope that no ambassador’s wife ever showed up for a state occasion wearing a sequined, or a red, dress.
What is most touching about the palace are the king’s and queen’s bedrooms. They are large and bare. In each, there is a large bed, a small armoire, a table and chair. On the walls are hand-colored photographs of other members of the royal family. These rooms would seem barren and depressing in a second-class Balkan hotel. It comports with what an acquaintance told me: that the last royals were plain, pleasant people of whom their subjects were quite fond, and who ceded such power as they had politely, when it was time, without fuss or furore. [Despite that, they were sent to their deaths by the Pathet Lao regime, but I doubt that they foresaw that fate with any sense of high political drama, as Louis Seize and Marie Antoinette went forward to their beheading.]
Both of the main cities are pleasant at night, for the simple reason that the internal combustion engine has not ruined them.[54] Some motored vehicles move in the streets, but slowly and at seemly intervals and spacing. Bicyclists weave placidly in and out, holding onto the handlebars with one hand, carrying something in the other. They are not, you understand, in a hurry, and they have nothing to fear from cars and trucks.
The nicest feature of the roadways is that the tuk-tuks moving merrily along. Tuk-tuks are lightly motorized bicycles, sometimes merely leg-powered, with a seat installed over the rear tire that is wide enough for three, side by side (three Lao, that is to say). Again, it is a child’s version of traffic. Some have pedal-powered generators and, thus, sport dim bobbing lights in front. They are winsome. One watches and hears them with fondness, as one regards a group of guests making their way down a pathway holding flashlights and calling goodnights to each other. There is something about the quiet sounds they emit -- on the order of a considerate lawnmower -- and the skein of nonimportunate lightbeams that they create, that put me in mind of summer evenings in childhood, sitting on a screened porch and watching the fireflies dance in the cooling drafts of scented night air. It is so simply pleasant that one is willing to reconsider the notion that a place of habitation must be best when stillest. A bit of demure activity is sometimes preferable.
There are other blended natural and human scenes that are pleasant on a far greater scale. In the gorgeous mountain and river town of Van Vieng, there is a floating bridge made of lashed-together bamboo, secured at the ends on the firm ground, which you must cross to reach the fields beyond which the mountains rise. The bridge itself is fragile, and must need constant repair. It has a bit of swaying height to it: that is, the walkway itself is not directly on the water. Instead, at intervals, there are gaps in the structure that permit a longboat with paddler (a very short paddler) to pass underneath, since in the scheme of things river traffic up and down the river is more important than foot traffic across it. These interstices create a sort of water-combing effect: just upstream, the river flows smoothly, from bank to bank; just downstream, the water is braided and laps over itself with a sweet susurrus.
As you sit on a deck at a restaurant on the bank, what you look at is a continuous chain, three elements deep, of accordion-folded mountains rising directly from the river flat to considerable heights, perhaps 2000 feet. These astounding mountains, which are heavily vegetated, are ranged along the river south and north as far as the eye can see. As you move your gaze along this scene, with the river and the mountains and the boats and the people moving in the landscape … it is as if a magnificent Chinese scroll painting were being unrolled for your delight. The scroll is infinite: you can look upriver, downriver, crossriver, you can move your eyes or turn your head, you can push your chair away from the railing and then peek back over the rail -- and it is always fresh, as if the retina in the back of your eye had been replaced by a film on an endless spool.
As for the human elements of the scene: on the bridge, and at several waystations thereafter on land, as you make your way into this vast greenness on water buffalo paths that lead closer to the magical mountains, there are toll stations. When you pass through them, you pay a few cents; if you have a bicycle with you, another few cents. This seemed odd for the non-entrepreneurial Lao: some Westerner must have put them up to it, I decided. But it is normal enough. It is the way roads and bridges were managed in late medieval England or France, where a right-of-way was where freemen could accumulate a penny or two. After thinking about Chaucer and Rabelais a bit, a thought-game comes to you. These Lao are pre-modern, able to feed themselves; possessed of levers and carts and bricks and barns and hayracks and livestock; ethnically and linguistically grouped; short-lived, nonliterate, residing and trading where they were born; accommodating themselves to the lords of whatever locales they found themselves in, paying tribute where necessary and accumulating money when possible. Just like the peasants of Europe in 1100. Then why do we think of the Laos as ‘primitive’?
In Laos, most landscapes have humans moving in them, and so impart a painterly quality of incident and experience, depicted against natural constancy, that is Giotto-like in its lambency. This human scale, so continually re-established, renders scenes of sheer natural beauty even more piquant. The tumulus-shaped mountains that rise steeply out of the plain and the river are crowded together and snaggled and broken-topped, promising waterfalls and spirits in forest glens. Most of all, they are vegetated: their effect is not that of masses of rock, but of green. The sheer uberousness of Laos is so nearly a constant that sometimes it fades from notice. But there is variety to it, if one pays attention. The yellow- or emerald-green of the rice fields is almost fluorescent in intensity; a clearing in the forest is an umbrageous deep green, striated with light; the color of the reeds along the river is glaucous, as if the banks are underwater. There are tan-green savannahs to the south, with low bushes and thorn trees; amazingly virescent cloud-forest to the north. Even at the great waterfalls, which are properly thunderous and satisfyingly awesome the way waterfalls should be, there is a synesthesia of forms and greenness. It is not just water that flings itself over the edges, but trees and vines as well; and at the base of the tumult, green bushes crowd up to the edge where the water finally pools.
At the border near Cambodia, the magnificent Khone Falls -- actually cascades and falls jostled together -- spreads through a great arc, a half-circle some 13 kilometers in length, so gradual that you cannot see both ends at once. It is said to spill a greater volume of water than Niagara. Close-up, the noise and froth have a stupefying effect, like entering a sea of crashing ocean waves that sweep you off your feet and toss you about. That the French struggled for over half a century to tame this force cannot have been due to mere persistence, but to a sensory brainstorm recurring each time they faced this cataclysmic sight.
To travel on a great brown river in its natural channel, to see no embankments, no villas, and no floating trash, is today a rare experience. Especially toward the south, randomly rooted stands of reeds form hundreds of tiny islets in the Mekong, around which eddies play and boats ply, and from which egrets rise. One wants to step just lightly on each of them in turn. The banks are lavish with sedges and stands of feathery bamboo and acacia, and a great plenitude of muck. It is not only plants that are born out of the lovely silty mix, but birds and fish and, ultimately, human souls. Looked at long enough, the motion of the river reaches near to a pure state of timelessness, as a word becomes meaningless when it is spoken over and over.
But every part of the world has sights to see. Ultimately, it is the people that fascinate one most. Most Lao give the impression of being turned inward, bent to some consequential task. Theirs is an assiduity born out of being at home in the world, not a striving that leads to competition and excess. They are shy, careful, not exactly grave -- in fact cheerful, but not insouciant the way some other Asians seem. There is, for me, an absence of guile or chicane, seen in people who cannot better themselves except by overleaping others. Indeed, they seem inured against rapine and domination directed against them.[55]
I can hear my readers remonstrating that I am a well-off Westerner wanting Laos to stay as it is so that I, and people like me, can go there and feel calmed, charmed, and hopeful about the human future. To be sure, one must tread carefully in assigning value to ways of life, or enter into moral peril. Only the most morally obtuse among us find poverty quaint or picturesque. But there is a difference between poverty that shows itself in human suffering, and the absence of wealth. I am not saying that the Lao do not deserve to be better off, or that they are, or should be, content to be poor and marginal in the world. I am saying, again, that this is not as of now a society trapped in the dire triad of a burgeoning population pressure, an irreversible depletion of natural resources, and the exploitative economic rapacity of other nations of the world.
Morally sensitive Westerners might wish for Laos to stay as it is, while being aware that this could doom its people to illiteracy, parochial stasis, technological ignorance, and to being debarred from the enrichment that we ourselves find in high culture and the arts. But here we enter the realm of the incommensurable. How much is a life of serenity and peacefulness, of warmth and a ubiquity of greenness, of a diet of fish and rice and vegetables, worth? What would we give up for it? Plastic trash and sodium vapor lights, of course; but what else? Would we even want to be free from the striving for material gain? Well, this is an idle and mind-wanking game. It is not for us in the West, or for the Lao, to set these balances. Yet we all, in our own societies, do exercise choice and do seek to maximize certain values; and either people can, just possibly, alter its own destiny to some slight degree.
And the destiny of another people? All of us like to think of ourselves as forceful in the world. But is there not something arrogant about those, themselves accustomed to rapid social and environmental change, simply assuming that, now that they are penetrating Laos, Laos must surely change?[56]
Two and a half weeks in Laos: all these words. Obviously, I found myself moved and fascinated. Travelling within the country in a caul of ignorance meant that I came to it without pre-conceived, perhaps ill-examined ideas. On my last day in Laos, as we travelled on the great river toward an entry-point into Thailand, I fell quietly ill with fever, and spent the next two days in a hotel room in Bangkok with a mind as blank as the back of a spoon. So the entire experience of the country is buffered for me, preserved in a fresh unedited form, like a filmstrip I can run in my head. I am happy about this, because there may be a meaning to Laos that departs from what we are used to when we travel.
It is fair to say that Laos has a slow metabolism for change. Its value, for an increasing number of Westerners, is that it retains something quite unusual, and quite precious, in the world. The Lao know something, express something, about human existence that much of the rest of the world has lost. I am skeptical, now, about the syllogism that one hears so often: Laos is changing fast, so get there soon. My revision, my advice to my own kind, is: Laos is slow to change, so go there soon.
- David Jenness
February 2001
Addenda / Corrigenda
An acquaintance who worked for the Peace Corps in Laos in the 1960s makes the following points about my essay.
1. The US presence in Laos in the late 1950s through the early 1970s was not, as I said (p. 8), mostly covert. Many US personnel were undercover in one way or another, but more were involved with the Peace Corps, US AID, USIS, and other such agencies.
2. He finds it difficult to believe that the prices for fine silk or wood products are the same in Lao shops as in shops owned by expatriates. Nominally they are, or nearly so, by my observation (p. 11). It is possible that the Lao merchants pay the craftspeople an amount less than what the expats do, and then charge more or less the same retail price: this would render them greedy, expropriative of their own people, which I doubt. Conversely, the expats might pay the makers more for their goods than Lao merchants do, and then mark them up no more than the Lao; which I have to doubt, also. Perhaps the answer is that Lao merchants will bargain prices down more than expat shop-owners will, since they have a far lesser overhead. I don’t know: it would be interesting to find out.
3. He points out that high-level officials in Laos are known to enjoy perquisites comparable to those enjoyed in other communist states, and that considerable corruption exists. On the latter point, I suggest (p. 10) that some corruption may be inevitable, although I doubt that it is as flagrant in Laos as in China, for example.
My point is that the broad range of the population, in the villages and the countryside, seem to show something approaching classlessness. Both elements may co-exist, of course.
[1] A word about usage in this report. The people of the country call it Lao; they call themselves Lao; and they call their culture and language Lao. I shall refer to the political entity as Laos, and use Lao as an adjective and the Lao to refer to persons in the plural. The context should make it clear.
[2] Yet a New York Times travel piece had assured me that the Lao people ‘liked Americans’, apparently because they smile, which tells one something about the Lao temperament.
[3] The peoples of Laos are not culturally or ethnically homogeneous. Some of those in outlying mountainous regions are said to be ‘animist’, one of those unhelpful terms used when nothing much is known.
[4] Across the entire Mekong, as it forms the 200-kilometer border between Laos and Burma and Laos and Thailand, there are only three modern fixed bridges, the southernmost of them finished just within the year.
[5] Unlike Newton, I entertain them cheerfully.
[6] Being wilfully naïve, I may have made some serious mistakes. To be sure, I have done a bit of research and reading post hoc, but Laos experts and specialists in various disciplines are encouraged to correct what is wrong or misleading. To guide the general reader: in the first pages of this report, I try to understand the political, social, and economic aspects. Beginning about page 13, I indulge in more impressionistic description.
[7] For much of its length, the old Colonial Route 13.
[8] Paradoxically, Angkor Wat is about the only place in Cambodia that Westerners visit, since the country as a whole remains a dangerous and corrupt society.
[9] Tuk-tuks are the exact phonemic equivalent of ‘put-puts’, on land – lightly motorized vehicles that seat two or three persons.
[10] Such as the French in the late 19th and early 20th c., and American operatives in the 1950s and early 1960s.
[11] An indicator of how precious hard currency is to Laos is that, until very recently, the largest source were the over-flight fees imposed on foreign airlines.
[12] This alone limits the number of, for example, Japanese tour buses; one sees a few, but not many. On the other hand, the policy seems ultimately unworkable. The Lao are afraid of spiritual and cultural pollution from Thailand, and yet Thai television is widely, if rather passively, viewed. (There is no Lao television.)
[13]One of the most immediately effective reforms is to persuade villagers that slash-and-burn techniques ultimately ruin the soil; and, moreover, that it is irrational to clear an acre of land, discarding wood worth hundreds of dollars at its first market, in order to grow a few more vegetables that might increase a family’s annual income by ten or twenty dollars.
[14] Of course there have been periods of geopolitical perturbation or foreign exploitation, and periodic natural disasters such as flood or drought. But these have not caused fractal alteration, at least in sociopolitical and socioeconomic terms.
[15] I am not sure that these observations hold for the most remote regions of the country.
[16] Two-thirds the size of Texas.
[17] They were not the only aggressors; there were also the Burmese, the Cambodians, the southern Chinese, in shifting alliances and face-offs.
[18] Around 1958, the US embassy in Vientiane had about 2000 employees; in the mid-70s, three; today, perhaps a couple of hundred. At some point after Laos closed, there must have been a Soviet–Chinese struggle for influence, but I do not know the details.
[19] When the French settled in at Luang Prabang about 1890, they found the king a weak ruler, simultaneously paying tribute, material and diplomatic, to Bangkok, Peking, and Mandalay. Certain French, without official diplomatic status, served the king as counselors or court chamberlains.
[20] Again, in contrast to India. It is perhaps significant that Buddhism, born in India, died out there, finding more fructuous soil elsewhere in Asia.
[21] This would not have been the case in Saigon, where the French instituted and administered a more elaborate and more truly colonial society.
[22] There are in addition, of course, shops offering less expensive and less fine cottons or carvings, as well as a variety of brummagem.
[23] Real or supposed. This was also the era of Aswan, and other brave new hydro-electric schemes conceived without much ecological knowledge.
[24] And, incidentally, rendering impossible the growth of tourism in the beautiful north of the country, where most of the dams would be constructed.
[25] The roads and streets, of course, are not crowded, and the traffic, such as it is, proceeds slowly, so crises involving animals or small children are rare.
[26] In fact, it is physiologically possible for children aged about 9 to 12 months to accomplish this naturally, without much adult intervention
[27] One has learned to be skeptical about the culture-and-personality research, since one’s man’s Mead turns out to be another man’s poison.
[28] I do not want to seem to suggest that the Lao are in some way nonsexual as a people. There is, as always, variation. During the 1950s, the French and Americans in Laos made Vientiane famous as a place where one went for warm beer and oral sex. And currently, in Savannakhet, there is a former royal palace that is a large brothel. But the women are Vietnamese, and the customers are Thais. I think all this proves the point that demand not only creates, but shapes the nature of, supply.
[29] There are, I gather, grades and levels of monkhood; young boys, for example, tend not to have shaved heads, and may wear chocolate-colored rather than saffron robes
[30] Luang Prabang is no longer a theocratic ShangriLa, as it was described by Westerners in the 19th c. But the beautiful great wats there are still religiously active and important. In Vientiane, one sees monks only on the temple grounds; in Luang Prabang, one sees them everywhere in the town.
[31] Water-buffalo calves are sweetly gracile, with improbably slender legs.
[32] As far as I know, there is no female status that would correspond to being a monk.
[33] In Laos, which produces excellent coffee, it is dripped through a fabric filter, then sweetened with canned condensed milk. And coffee is always followed by a cup of green tea, the combination being quite delicious.
[34] The river does flood each year, which would presumably wipe out the plot and collapse any ditch. But so what? You would dig a new upper ditch when you prepared the ground for the next growing season.
[35] Easy for a Westerner to say this, who ‘sees’ no individuals!
[36] For whatever reason, the jeans and nose-rings and dyed hair that the Lao must see on Thai television do not become cynosures.
[37] That is because most were ransacked or broken up by invading warlords, in the characteristic fashion of conquerors, surely one of the nastiest aspects of human nature. One thing you have to say about Islam is that, normally, it appropriated churches and temples to its own purposes, rather than obliterating them.
[38] At Wat Sen in Luang Prabang, near the river, there is shed containing a wooden longboat, used for religious procession on the river, which is 95 feet long, has seats for some 60 rowers, a snake-prow, and a jaunty yellow stripe painted under the gunwales.
[39] We saw only a few of the most famous ones, in Bangkok and Ayutthaya, the old royal city.
[40] The sim, to be sure, contains the representation of the Buddha, but this representation is not itself imbued with sacredness, it is only an object of, an occasion for, contemplation. The stupa contains, legendarily, a bit of the remains of a buddha or high priest, and as such is sanctified. The most venerated is the huge stupa at That Luang in Vientiane, so much so that even during the anti-Buddhist Pathet Lao regime a picture of the stupa appeared on paper money.
[41] The sim itself, and its porches and steps, are relatively plain, with little important decoration: it is the roofs that matter.
[42] But why should the Lao regard as cardinal those color values that we recognize as ‘pure’ because we find them in Botticelli, Poussin, or Zurburan?
[43] Ken remarks that the interior of the sim is no different in kind from the interior of a house.
[44] The nipples of Buddha are curious. They are generally shown, but very small and distinct, like the nipples of a young boy or even like tiny Christmas bulbs.
[45] Nearby there may be lesser Buddhas or secular figures engaged in various acts, which may constitute a narrative to those who know it.
[46] More subtly, the earth, like all the universe, is made of atoms that inhere, sequentially and repetitively, in earth, the atmosphere, human and animal bodies, and indeed in every other physical aspect of existence. Nothing like this applies to the Christian pantheon.
[47] There are some deviations from what one comes to expect. There is a sim in Luang Prabang that holds a king’s funeral boat. And there is one in Vientiane, one of the most historically important, where what is inside is actually a museum of small treasures -- pottery, goldwork, and the like -- secular or religious, found in places around the country and brought together here in the capital. But something is quite wrong there. The simple cube that is the inner chamber is not a setting for display, and does not work well for that purpose.
[48] Scholars believe that the Khmer people originated near Champassak or Savannakhet, and migrated south. Wat Phou predates Angkor Wat by a couple of hundred years.
[49] The fountain only runs at night, reasonably enough.
[50] In the hill villages in the north, the women wear split skirts and embroidered bibs front and back, and have short wrapped turbans on their heads.
[51] It would almost have to be thus, because you cannot execute the traditional greeting -- the slight bow with the fingertips of the two hands joined just under the chin -- with anything in your hand.
[52] The statues are so ugly, however, that perhaps some rival faction in the Kremlin was up to mischief.
[53] The U.S. gifts are particularly peculiar; with the exception of a very small shard of moon rock, they might have been purchased in the tourist shops of Pennsylvania Avenue, and yet they tend to be elaborately inscribed with personal names of the donors who after all were not giving personal, but national, presents. Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, especially, seem to have felt that the inscribing of their own names would confer inestimable value to the gift.
[54] In general, Laos delights for its lack of pollution of air, water, or land. Even the motors on longtail boats on the rivers are in the form of single eggbeaters, not the big churning blades that one sees and hears on even the smallest lakes in the United States. In the larger towns and on the roadway, there is little trash, and what there is, is paper, not plastic. Townspeople sweep it into small piles toward dusk, and a truck comes around to take it away.
[55] There may have been a change recently in the expressivity characteristic of the Lao. Ten years ago, Stephen Greenblatt, at that time a Berkeley English professor making a then-rare visit to Laos, remarked that the people were so quiet and blank that they reminded him of visiting mental hospitals after chlorpromazine came in. I suppose this to have been protective, a way of avoiding confrontation with a noncongenial government. I saw only one example of this kind of blank nonbehavior, at a foodstand near a river landing where the family knew the boat would not be coming that day, but did not want to let us know.
[56] There is perhaps a greater, as yet unpublicized, danger to Laos than that of tourism or the temptations of capitalist investment. According to a recent book by M. Osborne, the PRC has for several years been talking about constructing a navigation canal from Yunan to near Luang Prabang, which would bypass the bends and rapids of the Mekong and permit rapid water transport for industrial and touristic uses. A large canal would force Chinese imports on Laos, not the least of them Chinese tourists. In addition, China threatens to build a huge dam near its border, in Yunan, on the Mekong to ‘regularize’ the river. As far south as Vientiane, about 60 percent of the Mekong’s water volume originates in China. A dam of this size would have all the serious effects mentioned in the foregoing (p 11ff), greatly amplified. The World Bank and Western governments have little influence on China -- which has, it appears, already ruined much of Yunan by opening it to industry and internal tourism, and by razing and rebuilding a number of beautiful old Buddhist towns. These are menaces Laos will not be able to resist, if they materialize, in which case change will come in a rapid and tragic fashion.