Luang Prabang

One June morning in 1887, a column of armed raiders from the north walked into the old royal town on the Mekong and began to burn it. Temples went up first, then the palace was stripped, then anyone who had not reached the river. King Oun Kham was in his seventies and could barely walk. The person who got him out was a French official who had arrived only weeks earlier, Auguste Pavie; he put the king in a boat and slipped downstream while the town smoked behind them. One of the few temples left standing was Wat Xieng Thong. Within a few years of that boat ride, Laos was a French protectorate. But the town had already been old for five centuries.

A Town Named After A Statue

The settlement sits on a tongue of land where the Nam Khan river meets the Mekong, and it is where the kingdom of Lan Xang began. Fa Ngum founded that kingdom in the middle of the fourteenth century; the name means "a million elephants", and modern Laos treats it as its ancestor. The town was then called Xieng Dong Xieng Thong. Its later name comes from an object rather than a person. The Phra Bang is a standing gold Buddha with both palms turned outward, said in tradition to have come from the Khmer court as a gift, and regarded as the protector of the kingdom. The town took the statue's name: Luang Prabang, roughly "the royal city of the Phra Bang".

The hill called Phousi rises in the middle of the peninsula, and a climb up its stairs explains the choice of site: the strip between two rivers is defensible and visible in every direction. Temples lined the riverbank, wooden houses filled the gaps, and that plan hardly changed for centuries.

Losing The Capital, Keeping The Name

In 1560 King Setthathirath moved the capital south to Vientiane. Just before leaving he built Wat Xieng Thong, whose layered roofs sweep almost to the ground and became the signature of the Luang Prabang style. The royal family went; the Phra Bang stayed. Its temples and monks kept it the religious centre of the country.

In the early eighteenth century Lan Xang split into three, and Luang Prabang became the capital of its own small kingdom. Small meant exposed: at different times it paid tribute to Siam, Burma and Vietnam, and the sack of 1887 was what that looked like in practice. French rule added a new layer on top of the old one, shuttered villas with balconies along the river. The image that defines Luang Prabang today is precisely these two layers side by side, temple roofs and colonial houses on the same street.

A new palace for the king went up by the river in 1904, mixing Lao and French ideas, and the Phra Bang moved in. In 1975 the monarchy was abolished; the last king, Sisavang Vatthana, was sent with his family to a camp in the north-east of the country and died there, and for years no date or explanation was given. The palace became the national museum. The Phra Bang is still displayed there, although whether the statue in the case is the original is one of the town's favourite arguments. Some say the real one is in a vault, others that it left the country long ago.

A Town That Starts Over Every Morning

The moment most visitors remember happens before sunrise. Monks in orange robes leave their temples in silence and walk the main street in single file, and people kneeling on the pavement place a handful of sticky rice in each bowl. This is tak bat, and it has happened every morning for centuries. With dozens of temples and hundreds of monks, the procession fills several streets at once. It is quiet by design.

The famous "tree of life" mosaic on the back wall of Wat Xieng Thong, the most photographed surface in town, is four hundred years younger than the temple. The panel of coloured glass was made in the 1960s. Part of what looks ancient about Luang Prabang is in fact a living tradition adding layers, one decade at a time.

Today

The town has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1995, and the listing covers the whole historic centre, temples, wooden houses and colonial villas together, rather than a single building. Listing saved the place and also changed it: old houses became boutique hotels and cafés, some residents moved out, and the alms procession now comes with signs asking visitors to keep their distance.

Two newer pressures have arrived. The railway linking China and Vientiane opened in 2021 with a station at Luang Prabang, and visitor numbers jumped. Upstream on the Mekong, not far from town, a large hydroelectric dam is under construction, and UNESCO has raised concerns about what it will do to the river and the banks the town was built on. The monks walk at the same hour regardless. Whoever arrives, the day begins the same way.