Take a cruise in South-East Asia

History of Laos

Luang PrabangAnders Overgaard
Luang Prabang


The former inhabitants however didn't sit around all day listening to Benny Goodman records. Twentieth-century Laotian history reads like the War of the Roses. Politics were a family quarrel with two royal princes leading the main factions: Prince Souvanna Phouma, an urbane Francophone and a neutralist, and his half-brother Souphanouvong, the Red Prince and leader of the Pathet Lao Marxist guerrillas. The two men shared a taste for claret and cigars. Left to their own devices, they would probably have come to some accommodation. But various sinister generals, backed by the CIA, kept staging coups and things went from bad to worse. By the late 1950s a three-way civil war was simmering. By that time the principal characters were Phouma, Phoui and Phoumi, prompting a US analyst, looking through the intelligence reports, to confess that he was never sure if there had been a significant development or merely a typographical error.

Pictured: the Luang Say boat